Adventures of a Waterboy (5 page)

As I’d intended, Z became our manager and quickly succeeded at his first job, finding us a rehearsal room. Well, it was a cave really – a rectangular cube hewn from damp stone in the maze of medieval catacombs under Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The place was run by an owl-faced entrepreneur called Ian McCain who lived, unbelievably, in a flat in the catacombs with his wife and kids. To get to our cave we had to haul our gear along numberless fetid tunnels, past the sounds of a dozen other bands rehearsing in the same subterranean purgatory as ourselves. It was Dickensian, unhealthy and probably illegal, but we didn’t care. It was where our music lived.

Then Z started booking us shows. He was good at it from the start, finding it easy to be business-like with agents and promoters, securing us support slots at the Edinburgh venues of the day like Tiffany’s Ballroom or sending us further afield on jaunts to Glasgow and Aberdeen. Next he formed a record company for our first single, a piece of spunky doggerel called ‘All The Boys Love Carrie’. He named the label after a Richard Hell song, ‘New Pleasures’ (reparations, perhaps, for his
Marquee Moon
gaffe), and by the spring of 1979 our little record was being played regularly on the John Peel radio show and was Single of the Week in the
NME
. We were off!

The next six months were exciting. Doors opened and obstacles crumbled, local audiences grew and the world, it seemed, was ours for the taking. In the wake of the ‘Carrie’ single we were wooed by several record companies, and after our first show in London that September a number of A&R men sidled up to us and spoke sweet nothings in our ears. My tendency to be argumentative with these guys, especially when they got our song titles wrong, was compensated by Z’s diplomatic skills and soon he’d sewn up a tidy eight-album contract for us with Virgin Records, at the time an edgy, hip and newly chart-successful label.

And then he walked out on us. On me. The ink on our contract was still glistening when Z announced out of the blue that he was giving up managing to spend a year going round the world with his girlfriend, with no promise that he would come back to the job after that. I was shocked and could do nothing to change his mind, but I’d found the Achilles heel of Z’s managerial skill set. He got bored quickly. Eager to keep our momentum going, we hired a fellow traveller on the Edinburgh music scene, Johnny Waller, as a replacement. Johnny was a great character and a good friend but a terrible manager. He specialised in unpredictable, shit-stirring wind-up antics, such as getting a skinhead haircut with the band initials APF shaved into the side of his skull the night before we left for a tour. In the 1979 Britain, a couple of decades before a number-one crop became the norm for footballers and businessmen, this was a seriously anti-social statement. A shaved head meant only one thing:
bovver
, and Johnny’s fashion statement resulted in us being instantly banned from hotel after hotel by terrified staff.

Added to this was the band members’ not inconsiderable youthful arrogance, with myself the prime offender. Always convinced of the rightness of our actions, and without Z’s ameliorating influence, we led our genial and decent Virgin A&R man, Arnold, a merry dance, ganging up on him and generally reacting to his perplexed ministrations as if he worked for an evil empire. Our attitude was based on the absurd premise that despite giving us money, wanting to release our records and trying to make us successful, the record company was our enemy. We played silly psychological games with Arnold, for example ensuring a different band member or my punkette girlfriend Mairi answered the phone every time he called so he could never progress in whatever the argument of the day was. We were a regular group of horrors and unsurprisingly we fell out with Virgin and were kicked off the label, one not-quite-finished and not-very-good album later. This taught us tough lessons about the consequences of our actions as well as the capricious nature of success – having lost our record deal, no one was interested in us anymore. I returned to Edinburgh to contemplate my follies, lick my wounds and, soon enough, make another more effective and sustained assault on the mountain of stardom. Meanwhile Z was in East Africa. Our paths didn’t cross again until two years later.

In the autumn of 1982 I’d moved to London and was living in a basement flat off the Portobello Road. The area that had seemed so exotic to me six years earlier, when I’d mistakenly turned up at Island Studios for my recording session, was now my neighbourhood. It was the freest I’d ever been; living on my own, writing songs all day. Another Pretty Face had split that spring and with no bandmates to compromise or argue with I could follow my muses wherever they led. Thus I found myself in the middle of a writing explosion that yielded most of the first two Waterboys albums, and in September I went to New York, for the first time, to record some of my new songs with Lenny Kaye, my friend from the Patti Smith adventure.

I’d just checked into the Chelsea Hotel (my only night there on account of cockroaches in my room) when I got a call from Z. To my amazement he’d arrived in the city that day, also for the first time, and was preparing to hitchhike across America on his way to a teaching job in Mexico. We spent a couple of days together rekindling our friendship and found that all the things we’d liked and enjoyed about each other were still the same. We spent hours in the Grass Roots Tavern on St Mark’s Place, a funky basement bar and perfect venue for soulful conversation, then went exploring in Coney Island, remapping the broad spaces of our shared brotherhood as we walked along ocean highways and across green parklands, never quite finding the fabled Coney Island fairgrounds. At night, back on Manhattan, we re-enacted the punk wars, cheekily heckling intellectual art-prog guitarist Arto Lindsay at the Irving Plaza Theatre by calling for the kind of songs Arto was least likely to play: dumb-ass numbers like ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Hang On Sloopy’. Our friendship was intact, the same as it ever was.

Even so, it was another eighteen months before we met up again in London in 1984. By this time I’d formed The Waterboys and we were beginning to make a name for ourselves on the London scene, though I felt like a musical alien. The popular sound of the day was all synthesizers, clicky bass drums and mechanical pomp played by angular-haired people with tablecloths round their necks who sang in portentously deep faux-Germanic voices; the purgatorial heyday of the New Romantics. With my dreams of acoustic-guitar walls of sound I was a thousand miles out of step with the times. The nearest kindred spirits were Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths, but they were in other towns, other dimensions, far from London pop city. No, I was deep behind enemy lines in the domain of Spandau Ballet, Modern Romance and Bananarama, none of whose manifestations appeared to admit of what I considered the foundation stones of modern music: Dylan, The Beatles, the Stones, punk, soul, Chuck Berry and the counterculture. Either they were all insane or I was.

The only people who seemed to share my ideas of how rock’n’roll should look and sound were the Johnny Thunders clones who hung out on a retro glam/punk scene that festered round some of the city’s music pubs, and for a while I was so lonesome I even took comfort there. Thunders himself, the Italian-American guitarist and ex-New York Doll who I’d seen at the Patti Smith bash years before, was the god of this scene despite being a notorious junkie who played only one good gig in every six or seven. My first sighting of him on stage was at Dingwall’s in Camden Town. The act playing that night was Sylvain Sylvain, another ex-Doll, and a rumour spread that Thunders was in town and would make an appearance. I was eager to see him so when the doors opened I got down the front and stayed there all evening. After the support act, Sylvain and his band entered by the main door, pushed through the crowd and trooped across the stage into the tiny dressing room at its rear (there was no other artists’ entrance) and I resigned myself to a Johnny Thunders non-appearance. I’d been there all night and he hadn’t come in.

Sylvain’s set was a master class in dumb rock’n’roll. During the encore he started strumming a Bo Diddley riff, leaned into the microphone and introduced a ‘friend’. The dressing room door opened and rock’n’roll walked out.

Clad in black cloak, scarlet waistcoat, white dress shirt, flat black Spanish matador’s hat tilted insolently, his lips curled in a sneer that made Elvis look like a pretender and Billy Idol like a gnat, Johnny Thunders strutted to the microphone, no guitar, and started to sing in a cartoonish, sleazy voice like Bob Dylan, had he been born in Little Italy instead of Hibbing, Minnesota: ‘Ah said ah was layin’ in a hospital BEDDDDD …’ with a ridiculously exaggerated lift on the ‘bed’. It was the greatest stage entrance I’d ever seen, and I realised that to ensure its impact Thunders must have gone into the tiny dressing room before the audience arrived and waited there all night, an incarceration of over five hours. That was dedication.

A couple of nights later he did his own show at the Hope & Anchor, a basement club in Islington I’d played myself a few times. I got close to the front again so I could study Johnny’s moves. Fortunately this was another night when Thunders was ‘on’. I’ve never witnessed a sharper guitar player. He’d deal out a lazy blues riff, one hand contemptuously fingering the guitar neck while with the other he pulled a steel comb from his jeans pocket and fixed his hair, preening for the girls in the front row. Then he’d swing full circle on one boot heel and as he came face-on to the crowd again crack out a machine-gun riff in perfect sync with a drum fill before swinging into another beatifically brilliant dumb chorus. He was
outrageously
great and no other flash rock guitarist, not Keith Richards, not Jimmy Page, not Jack White, has ever come close. But the next time I saw him a week later he was so out of it on heroin he had to be carried into the venue flaked out between two roadies, belly distended, eyes rolling and legs like Plasticine. When they propped him up on stage he couldn’t even play in time. He’d morphed from the sharpest man in the universe to the saddest, and I didn’t have time to stick around and watch his decline.

Another junkie, the rock journalist Nick Kent, lived a few doors up from me and I’d often see him standing in his garden, slightly dazed as if he’d just woken up, watching the world pass him by like a horse looking over a hedge. Further down the street a gang of truants sniffed glue every afternoon, holding plastic bags to their noses and staggering around cross-eyed. Each summer, as August Bank Holiday weekend approached and brought with it the Notting Hill Carnival, massive sound systems appeared on every street. Monolithic speakers emblazoned with the names of Brixtonian or Jamaican DJs blocked the roads, and the neighbourhood would shake to loud, feral Rasta music, its supersonic bass tones rattling the foundations of the Victorian houses.

Most days I’d step out wearing a cowboy hat I’d bought in New York with a couple of feathers in the brim, a pair of striped trousers, a black jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and jingly boots from Johnston’s on the King’s Road. As often as not I’d have my acoustic guitar with me, slung over-shoulder or carried under-arm ready for action. I’d stroll down Portobello Road digging the bustle of the market, buy bootleg albums and second-hand books, then go to Mike’s Cafe on Blenheim Crescent for lunch. Lots of musicians ate in this semi-legendary greasy spoon; I’d bumped into Mick Jones of The Clash here several times and the luckless A Flock Of Seagulls, whose notoriously over-the-top haircuts were just as mad close up. And once, the gay punk rocker Gene October, leader of perennially unsuccessful punk band Chelsea. I’d actually bought one of Gene’s records in 1977, a thug-like dole queue rant called ‘The Right To Work’. He sat down opposite me in Mike’s one day while I was eating my lunch, leaned across the table and in a conspiratorial cockney voice said, ‘You look like a muso. Wanna be in moi band?’ I was being invited to join Chelsea! It took me about one and a half nanoseconds to inform Gene I was already gainfully employed, thanks mate.

Then Z walked back into my life, turning up at my flat one March morning in 1984. He’d heard my Waterboys records on the radio and fancied working with me again for a while. Not as manager – he had no intentions in that regard anymore, but as an assistant, and strictly temporarily. I needed a road manager to organise and drive the band on our first tour, which started in a couple of weeks, so I had a word with my financial backer, Nigel Grainge, in his office on nearby Westbourne Grove. Nigel was a London music biz man, something of a maverick, and he’d taken a shot in the dark by signing me to his Ensign label in 1981 when no one else was interested. He’d funded my musical explorations and encouraged me in what he felt were the right directions for me to go. And sometimes they even were. Happily, he agreed to bankroll Z for a hundred quid a week. We were off again.

Z moved into a flat on the same street as me and I introduced him to the four other Waterboys. Saxman Anthony Thistlethwaite was a beatnik character and former Paris busker. He’d been in my last combo, an outfit called The Red And The Black that had gigged round London a couple of years earlier. When Anthony played he turned into a human saxophone, and the mighty Promethean wail of his horn provided most of our solos. He also played mandolin with the exquisite tenderness of a lover. Our drummer was an unusual player called Kevin Wilkinson, a mate of Anthony’s with a pointed chin, a craving for Frank Zappa music, and a penchant for rearranging hotel furniture upside down. Keyboard player Karl Wallinger was a gifted, complex Welsh Beatles fanatic who’d answered my musician-seeking ad in the
NME
nine months earlier. And the bassist, a quiet cerebral fellow called Martyn Swain, was a friend of Karl’s.

Another Pretty Face had been like a gang, with a group mentality, and Z was one of that gang. But now there was a different dynamic. The Waterboys was indisputably my band, and the others, at least at this early stage, were hired guns with different degrees of empathy and involvement. I half-expected therefore that as soon as Z stepped in, the fact of our history would mean we’d reprise the two-man force-of-nature mentality we’d had in the past. I was wrong. Perhaps because our lives had been on different paths for so long, or because Z wanted to keep his options open, this didn’t happen. Nevertheless, it was good to work and travel with my old friend again, to feel a familiar hand at the wheel and once more witness his ability to deal well with business people. This came in particularly useful with one of our booking agents, a smooth young persuader named Steve, with short, smart hair and alarmingly blue Teutonic eyes.