Adventures of a Waterboy (7 page)

There was another surprise to come. Three weeks later I sat in the recording studio, Black Book open on the mixing desk, as the newly recorded song crashed out of the speakers. My piano and a drum loop grooved beneath a carnival of trumpets, candy-flavoured ‘la-la’ backing vocals and Karl Wallinger’s masterful synths. I was leaning back listening, eyes closed, when as the last chorus rocketed by I got the itch in my soul again. Every time the words ‘like a comet’ jumped out of the speakers it seemed some final touch, some coup de grace, wanted to happen. When the idea dropped into my mind it was beautifully simple:
add the sound of the comet
. I found a firework sample on a BBC sound effects record, had my engineer Felix send it through a super-powered echo unit, then inserted it one beat after the word ‘comet’. No sooner was it in place than the final unforeseen part of the whole puzzle was revealed:
have a sax solo explode out of the comet
. I’d been wondering how to get Thistlethwaite onto this song. Now I knew!

Chapter 6: Don’t Forget To Get On The Bus

A quiet London pub on an autumn afternoon. I’m standing at the bar with two men, one of whom is The Waterboys’ booking agent, a silver-haired, silver-tongued trickster called Ian Flooks. Flooks likes to introduce me to other musicians and today he’s brought me to meet Jackie Leven, the singer with a band called Doll By Doll, a gently spoken long-haired fellow eight or nine years my senior. When Flooks goes to make a phone call Jackie asks how I’m doing. Because he’s older than me and a fellow Scotsman, I find it easy to confide in him. There’s always been something about older Scottish men I find comforting, as if they’re the big brothers I never had.

I tell Jackie I’m OK but under a lot of pressure. The new Waterboys record has just come out and I need to find and rehearse two new band members for a tour starting next week. Meanwhile there are demands on me to sign contracts that will commit my future five, six years down the line, to make this or that video, do interviews, go to meetings, agree merchandise and publishing deals. It’s good to be wanted but I feel pulled every which way. Managers, agents, record company men, even band members and my forceful American girlfriend all want me to do what they think I should do – and they all want me to do different things. The clamour is driving me nuts and it seems like ages since I had the space to just hang out and have some uncomplicated fun. ‘What I’d like,’ I tell my patient listener, ‘is to be on the top deck of a bus in Edinburgh, looking out the window, just taking it all in.’ Flooks comes back and the conversation turns to other things. When I get up to leave forty minutes later, Jackie walks me to the door. As I shake his hand he leans forwards with a glint in his eye and says, ‘Don’t forget to get on that bus.’

In the summer of 1985, with The Waterboys’ third album
This Is The Sea
set for release, word was we were the next band likely to explode out of rock’n’roll and break America.

America! Its music had cast a spell on me since I was a child. I dreamed and breathed its sound, its energy. I wanted to plug my soul into its motherlode and send my records crackling across its sweet airwaves. And so did my record company bosses, Nigel and Chris. At the thought of breaking The Waterboys in America they’d come over all intense; their voices would get louder as if someone had pumped gas into them, they’d slap their knees, talk in big numbers, quote the names of US promo men like they were holy talismans, and break into impromptu hollerings of the
Dallas
theme music as if to affirm ‘Yes! We’re coming to the party!’

Meanwhile the music press was talking, though I had mixed feelings about what they said. When
Rolling Stone
headlined me as ‘rock and roll’s poet laureate’ or
NME
called me the latest ‘god-like genius’ I appreciated the enthusiasm but mistrusted the hyperbole. It wasn’t so much that they were likely to knock me down six months later, it was that the blunt sloganising of the headlines made me cringe. Why couldn’t they just say what they felt about the music without hanging weights around me? But they couldn’t or wouldn’t and the dramatic press coverage, fusing with the publicity machinations of the record company and the organic word of mouth that surrounded Waterboys shows and records, created a powerful sense of expectation and presumption.

I could feel this power collecting round me like a breeze that blew when I walked, a beam of light that shifted direction when I turned, an edge that entered a room when I did. It was a powerful, almost hallucinatory stimulant, and for the moment I was comfortable within its gravity. I’d been dreaming and working towards this breakthrough since I was a teenager, and to feel the wind of momentum at my heels was part of the script I’d planned. I believed in myself, and though I had an uncertain relationship with my new American manager, a tough, gruff man called Gary Kurfirst, who managed several top bands I admired, and though there were fault lines in the personnel of my band, still my feet were steady on the rock of the music itself.

I’d hired Kurfirst to make The Waterboys a success in America, and to stop Nigel and Chris interfering while I completed
This Is The Sea
. My two backers had championed and nurtured me as an artist for four years but we’d begun to disagree more than we agreed. Nigel had lobbied me to drop several of what I felt were my best songs, ‘Red Army Blues’ and ‘Old England’ among them, and putting my music through the filter of his judgment, which usually resulted in one of two pronouncements, ‘It’s genius’ or ‘It’s shit’, had become confounding. I got a sore head trying to figure out why some of my songs were shit while others were genius, and knew that if I wanted to make the records that were in my heart I needed to forestall Nigel’s influence. Kurfirst had achieved that for me. As for his effectiveness in America, that remained to be seen.

Against this backdrop, and in perfect timing for the coming campaign, I found the final element of The Waterboys’ sound: The Fellow Who Fiddles. One night in his flat, Karl Wallinger played me a demo he’d just recorded for a new singer called Sinead O’Connor. Sinead was sixteen and Irish, a discovery of Nigel’s, and she had a great voice, but what caught my ear was the violin player behind her. I’d toyed with adding fiddle to our sound for ages and had already tried three fiddlers: a Polish session guy, a Liverpudlian squaddie, and a Marble Arch busker called Frank, but none of them provided the alchemy I was looking for. The player backing Sinead was rootsy and edgy, passionate and exciting; here was the sound I wanted. His name was Steve Wickham and I tracked him down through the Dublin recording studio Windmill Lane. He accepted my invitation to add fiddle to a song on
This Is The Sea
and two days later, on a hot July afternoon, he flew to London and came straight to my Ladbroke Grove flat. When I opened the door I found a cheerful gypsy-eyed ragamuffin looking back at me. He came in, lay on the living room floor with his head propped on an elbow and proceeded to tell me his life story with endless diversions, ruminations and meanderings, all in the most charming Dublin accent. After a few hours of tales populated by charismatic characters with names like Clancy, Cooney and O’Kelly, I made Steve some ham sandwiches and tomato soup. Then we picked up a couple of guitars and bashed out the Waterboys song ‘Savage Earth Heart’. By the way Steve played it, and though he hadn’t even picked up his fiddle yet, I knew we were going to be musical brothers.

Next day we went to a studio where he played on ‘The Pan Within’, giving a masterful performance that exceeded my expectations; bright, gossamer-thin shards of melody that curled around my voice like a spell. I knew then that if I had Steve in The Waterboys we’d be the best band in the world. Steve was already in a Dublin group called In Tua Nua but I invited him to guest on the Waterboys tour due to start in six weeks’ time, and foolishly they allowed him to do it. Once ensconced in our rehearsal room with his electric violins to hand, a bank of effect pedals at his feet, and the sound of The Waterboys blasting around his ears, The Fellow Who Fiddles never fiddled with In Tua Nua again. Now I had a killer album, a tough manager and a new star instrumentalist. The only thing missing from the mix was that most dangerous of rock accoutrements, the manipulative girlfriend. And lo and behold, along she came.

In late July I went to New York to meet with Kurfirst and the American record company. Someone had the idea of doing a TV film about The Waterboys and so I was introduced to a director called Kate Lovecraft. I knew Kate by reputation: she’d worked with artists I admired, including Dylan and Patti Smith, and she understood rock’n’roll. I’d also read she had a deep interest in Eastern spirituality, and this intrigued me. But nothing prepared me for the reality of Kate. Within minutes of our meeting she was flitting around her bright studio, sassy, lithe, petite and pointing a video camera at me while exclaiming in an adorable cartoony little girl voice: ‘Oh my
God
, you should see how
great
you
look
in this
camera
!’ Ten years older than me, she’d been a young adult in the cultural explosions of the sixties and seventies, and the mark of those fateful days was upon her. She burst on my consciousness like a love grenade and seemed to my impressionable eyes to be everything I looked for in a woman.

Next day we met at her studios again. This time she was wearing a sweet, lacy white dress. She took me on the roof and as I stood being filmed, the Manhattan skyline shimmering behind me in the summer heat, a profound feeling descended on me. I suddenly felt heavy and awestruck as if my soul had received some great news. I looked at Kate pointing her camera at me, white-clad, her reddish-gold hair blowing in the rooftop breeze, and I began to fall in love. There was an old upright piano in a room of her studio and when we came in from the roof I sat down at it and poured out my feelings in deep, long rolling chords. Kate came into the room without a word, placed one delicate kiss on my cheek, and stepped out again. Filming finished, we walked up Sixth Avenue together in the early evening light, she still in white, wheeling a bicycle, me floating by her side, aching to get close to her. Outside a deli store, watched by a hard-eyed Chinaman on a stool, Kate turned to face me and we kissed properly for the first time. A few blocks later I left to catch my plane and we said goodbye, promising to get together on my next trip to New York.

Back in London, ecstatic and excited, I booked plane tickets for a week hence and four nights in a New York hotel. I called Kate to tell her, expecting her to be thrilled. ‘A hotel?’ she exclaimed in an outraged voice, startlingly different from the sweet tones I’d heard in New York. ‘Are you crazy? Don’t you know how short life is? Why aren’t you coming to stay with me in my apartment?’ In these few words were contained impatient summons, spiritual rank-pulling and offended generosity. Quite a cocktail. But all I knew was that I had got it spectacularly wrong. I found myself spluttering, backtracking and agreeing to stay with her, apologising for my thoughtlessness and thanking her profusely for her gracious invitation. I was falling all right, not just in love but into Kate Lovecraft’s power.

Four days in her own domain with Kate turned out to be a white-knuckle ride. We weren’t in a studio now, no longer potential client and director; we were would-be lovers, with distance and privacy removed and any prospect of our love affair progressing in a gentle or cautious manner utterly gone. And in the quiet studious atmosphere of Kate’s living room, with its African art and ceiling-high bookshelves, I realised something shocking: the gulf in power between us. Quite apart from our age difference and her confidence as an established world-class artist, Kate was like no other woman I’d known. She was supremely wilful: dramatic, intense and unpredictable. She changed moods from baby-voiced bunny to drama queen to frosty critic faster than the weather on a Scottish holiday. She coined a term, ‘Dreamboy’, an ideal she required me to live up to, and to which she consistently referred, as in ‘Dreamboy wouldn’t say that’ or ‘Dreamboy wouldn’t do that to me’. I was expected to upgrade my behaviour to ‘Dreamboy’ standards. This made me feel constantly inadequate, but so in thrall was I to the force of Kate’s personality and so glamoured by being her boyfriend that I kept trying to please her. What she probably needed was an older man with ice in his veins, a thick hide and bottomless wells of patience, and that wasn’t me. Still, it was exciting to wake with Kate in her wood-panelled bedroom, thrilling to walk with her late at night through the heady swirl of the East Village with its hipsters and hustlers and all the debris of the counterculture strewn across its Babylonian pavements. In such moments I imagined us as golden – destiny-crossed lovers from another world on our travels through this one.

When I flew back to London we continued our affair by transatlantic phone calls. The safety of distance afforded me the illusion that the relationship could work and with renewed vigour I stepped back into the fast-moving river of Waterboys business: press interviews, record company meetings and auditions for new band members.

I was becoming one of the world’s great audition experts, hosting a stream of bassists and drummers in our rehearsal room in North London. It had got so I knew within the first ten seconds of the first song whether a player was right or wrong. I’d welcome the guy, give him a minute to adjust the drums or amplifier, then crash into a Waterboys or Dylan number with a simple chord sequence so we could play without having to stop for instructions. ‘Be My Enemy’, with its recurring blues pattern, was a favourite and its breakneck tempo soon sorted out the contenders from the pretenders. If I wanted to really put a player through his paces, we’d play ‘Enemy’ for ten or fifteen relentless minutes, a serious test for drummers. One afternoon a cocky skin-basher showed up and commented that I looked worn out. This injudicious remark condemned him to a rip-snorting twenty-minute blast through ‘Be My Enemy’ till his arms and legs were bursting and his breath came in shuddering gasps. Despite all the effort expended, and all the faces that passed through the portals of our rehearsal room, a new rhythm section proved elusive, and all the time the clock was ticking and the first dates of our tour drew closer.

Then like a gathering storm Kate came to London in the last days of August to stay with me for ten days. And her schemes left me standing. She’d decided we’d buy an apartment in London’s Docklands; she wanted us live together in New York; we were going to have children in a few years; I was to stop being friends with a top rock manager who’d supposedly snubbed her. She took over my little flat with her papers covering every surface and the ever-changing weather of her moods filling every space. I began to feel like an extra in the all-encompassing drama of Kate Lovecraft’s life and when I finally saw her back onto the New York plane at Heathrow, I felt as if I’d been dragged cross-country by a wild horse, one of my feet caught in its stirrups. After she left I wondered why she was with me. Was it my youth, or for the energy of potential rockstar glory? And why was I with her? I no longer knew. The attraction had given way to a weird defensive desperation: being with Kate made me feel deeply insufficient but only by her approval could I transcend this condition and feel good about myself.