Adventures of a Waterboy (12 page)

Chapter 8: The Power Of The Music Gives Everybody Wings

It’s midnight on International Aids Day, the second of April 1987, and Edinburgh is hosting a series of concerts. Two hours ago The Waterboys came off stage at The Usher Hall and now Wickham and I are in the Assembly Rooms on George Street where the rest of the night’s shows are taking place. We’re in the backstage artists’ hangout, a long grand hall with ornate wallpaper and dark velvet curtains. Half the bands in Edinburgh seem to be here, sitting round drink-filled tables in their own little camps, looking warily and competitively at each other, trying to be cool. Most of them have already played, a few are awaiting their stage calls. Billy Mackenzie of The Associates lounges on a sofa wearing a sailor’s cap, a couple of dolly birds on his arm. The frosty atmosphere between the Edinburgh bands hasn’t changed much since I lived here in the late seventies. How different it is from London where bands want to be cool but at least appear to wish each other well, or friendly Dublin where the inter-band philosophy can be summed up in six words as, ‘sure, we’re all in it together!’

I’m musing on why this might be, when a familiar sound brushes my ears. It’s The Fellow Who Fiddles easing into a slithery Irish jig with no respect whatsoever for the cold-war conventions of the Edinburgh music scene. After a few beats he’s joined by Aidan, the suedeheaded mandolin player from We Free Kings, and the two of them jig merrily away in a rough but passionate approximation of Irish traditional music. Their little corner of cheerfulness is a lone flame in an arctic snowfield. The Edinburgh bands either ignore this outlandish development or watch it stony-faced. But wait, another fiddler is joining in; a thin-faced character with a pompadour haircut and a cagoule. And here’s Geoff Pagan, the splendidly named We Free Kings violin player, grabbing himself a seat and lashing into the tune with them. The two have become four and the flame is now a fire.

Another couple of Kings pick up their instruments – a mandolin, a tin whistle – and feeling the impulse too I pull my guitar from its case and join in. The music is flying now, a heartily-roaring blaze of sound, and the Edinburgh bands are presented with a conundrum: do they attempt to stay cool in the face of an overwhelming and superior counter-attack by the forces of merriment, or do they surrender and join in the fun? While they’re wrestling with this philosophical issue we’re joined by yet another fiddler – a chap with a gold-painted violin no less – and Wickham propels us into a shit-kicking set of reels, the temperature rising by several degrees. This is too much temptation for a couple of Edinburgh bandsters who grab their guitars, join the expanding circle and start blasting away. Now we are ten, or eleven, and our booted feet are stomping in rhythm on the wooden floor like jackhammers. Non-musicians are beginning to gather round, clapping and yelling as indeed they should, and the next time I look up there are several new musicians in the circle: a bequiffed gent with banjo and tartan cape, and a couple of the formerly stoniest-faced coolest-of-the-cool Edinburgh dudes, strumming along on guitars self-consciously but thawing fast.

We sound like a cross between a Scottish fiddlers rally and several rockabilly bands all playing at the same time, and the music is now a rip-roaring furnace of sound, a mighty and communal explosion reaching every corner of the great room. The Fellow Who Fiddles has pulled it off: he has brought joy and brotherhood down from the realm of dreams and made them hard reality. With no greater weapons than a wooden fiddle, a horsehair bow and the spark of his good nature, he’s triggered a chain of events that has united a room full of strangers, turning thousand-yard stares into whoops of excitement and celebration. Verily, the power of the music gives everybody wings!

We’d arrived in Edinburgh the night before and checked into the Carlton Highland Hotel, a rambling Victorian eyrie perched on the North Bridge where, in what now seemed a previous life, Z and I had once tracked down the American punk rocker Richard Hell. But now I was the star flying in from another land and it was sweet and strange to arrive in the city of my birth accompanied by my Irish entourage and see the old town through their eyes: a dark northern fastness, impossibly atmospheric and romantic, like something from a book by George MacDonald or Edgar Allen Poe.

Steve and Anto were there and Trevor the bassist looking like the handsomest man in Ireland, and Trevor’s drumming mate Pete McKinney with his blade-sharp Belfast accent. There was B.P. Fallon in his teddy boy finery along for the ride in the exalted role of ‘viber’, and our Irish road crew: Jimmy Hickey, John Dunford and Steve Meany, three dark warrior gods from some ancient Celtic myth who’d been shot forwards and transplanted into the twentieth century. Wickham had introduced me to them a year earlier, regaling me with tales of Jimmy Hickey – ‘the world’s greatest roadie, man!’ – who could re-string a bouzouki while Donal Lunny of Moving Hearts was still playing it. We called them the Brown Brothers because they all wore the brown distressed leather bomber jackets popular at the time, and Dunford, the canny, bristle-jawed soundman, was their unofficial leader.

We’d been recording in Windmill Lane for two months and hadn’t played a concert since the previous July. So we were excited, almost demob-happy, to be out on the road, even for a one-off. Or a two-off – for on the night of our arrival we were invited to play unadvertised at a place called Calton Studios, halfway down the Royal Mile in the heart of old Edinburgh.

The gig was with We Free Kings, a Scottish band formed by a friend of mine called Joe Kingman. Joe was a tousle-headed punk rock barker and he’d gathered round him a ragtag band of misfits, seven in all, with a weird but brilliant sonic mix of cello, fiddle, flute, accordion, guitar and drums. They played Woody Guthrie numbers at breakneck pace, wrote their own urchin anthems and gleefully deconstructed old folk songs, putting everything through a punk thresher. The result was fantastic: seven characters in search of a comic strip, playing mad swirling music with a righteous intensity and a sense of mischief. They’d toured Ireland the autumn before, camping in tents, and Wickham and I had tagged along with them.

Calton Studios turned out to be a dingy but funky little cinema hidden down an alley. Word of mouth had produced a big crowd and the place was hopping. We threw in songs we’d never played before, like the ancient ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy’, with its fateful tale of the bride who leaves wealth and status for the charms of the ‘yellow gypsy’s lips’, and gospel oldie ‘I’m On My Way To Heaven’, transformed into a bloodthirsty hoedown. We played for thirty minutes and afterwards everyone in the place wanted to talk to us, a barrage of bright, enthusiastic, sweat-glistening Edinburgh faces crowding round. I recognised one guy from my early days, a shop assistant from Phoenix Records, a tiny prog-rock cave on the Royal Mile which Z and I had often sneered at during the punk wars. In fact when they’d declined to stock my first record back in ’79 I’d indulged my jilted feelings by anonymously letting off a stink bomb on their floor.

Next evening we played our main concert at the Usher Hall, a domed orchestral palace shaped like a jelly mould in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, where, aged twelve, I’d sung in the school choir at a Christmas concert. I remembered thrilling sense of imminent event as the audience gathered, the hubbub of their voices merging with the sound of the orchestra tuning up, a sense of awe sparked by the plush grandeur of the Hall. I felt the same now, except instead of an orchestra it was The Fellow Who Fiddles and the Human Saxophone tuning up as we stood in the dark corridor, hearts beating, waiting to go on. We were part of a four-band bill and played a forty-five minute set. Most of it was from our unfinished new album and despite the absence of familiar songs the show was a success. Yet as I sat on the plane back to Dublin the following day, it was the Calton Studios performance and the post-gig bash in the Assembly Rooms that reverberated in my memory. I felt as if something new was trying to be born; that a promise had been vouchsafed in those unscripted moments of what The Waterboys could become.

By stepping out of the music business machinery at the end of 1985 we’d established our independence, but I’d felt for some time The Waterboys should evolve into something more organic than just another rock band putting out albums and touring in the prescribed way. Now suddenly I knew how it would look. I leaned back in my seat high above the Irish Sea and imagined The Waterboys recast as a colourful travelling musical explosion, rooted in the magical folklore of the British Isles and Ireland and expressing a holistic non-dogmatic spirituality, becoming legendary not through studio trickery or the artifice of promo videos but through what we wrote and played and by connecting directly with the audience. And all this while having a damn good time.

Back in Dublin the events of our Edinburgh jaunt receded into the background as we re-immersed ourselves in recording. The first opportunities to develop this new vision came soon enough. Six weeks later the Greenpeace boat
Sirius
docked on the Liffey, a few hundred yards from Windmill Lane. All the band were Greenpeace members or supporters and Robert Hunter’s book
The Greenpeace Chronicle
had been a Waterboys bible, passed around on tour from bandmate to bandmate till it was falling apart. The idea struck several of us at once – why not play a free gig on the ship’s deck to an audience on the quayside? We could drum up a crowd by word of mouth and create some Irish publicity for Greenpeace. We sent a diplomatic delegation to the ship. Anto, frock-coated and skinny-legged like the footman in Tenniel’s illustrations for
Alice In Wonderland
, and Jimmy Hickey, as red bearded and broad-chested as a Viking chieftain, presented our compliments and the offer of a free gig to the captain. This was a gaunt Dutchman, with a face out of a Rubens painting, called Willem, who accepted the offer and proposed to repay us with a meal in the ship’s cabin after the concert. The next afternoon our crew drove to where the ship was anchored on the quays and hauled the band’s gear on board.

Someone phoned the national radio station and a DJ announced the show. By five o’clock a crowd of several hundred had converged on the docks, including every busker in Dublin and the ever-alert Bono. What they found was a gaily-coloured ship resplendent in the late afternoon sun, a black-and-silver whale painted on the forecastle, and amps, microphone stands and drum kit set up on deck. From the PA system Hank Williams music floated sweetly across the quays, warm and rustic, a startling sound in those dog days of drum machines and arena rock.

At five-thirty we walked up the rear gangway, plugged in and blasted into an hour’s worth of songs, including nautical-themed numbers like ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and ‘Strange Boat’. The band was augmented by two new Waterboys: a Dublin drummer called Fran Breen with a Yosser Hughes moustache and a habit of jerking his head side to side with every beat like a robot, and a young Irish piper called Vinnie Kilduff, a friend of Wickham’s. Vinnie was that rare beast, a trad musician who could play rock’n’roll. And when the wild bluesy howl of his pipes, with all their evocation of the Irish soul, merged with the swoop and staccato of Steve’s fiddle, the music hit a whole new level.

And there was a mighty thrill to playing on the ship. Partly this was the novelty of discovering that its deck, raised in the water a few feet higher than the audience on the quayside, provided an ideal stage. And partly it was the pleasure of playing on sloping wood among the capstans and hatches, the smell of the river in our nostrils, teenage fans sitting crowded on the quay’s edge, legs dangling over the water. But the biggest thrill was that we were playing for Greenpeace, connected to a world-spanning cause we felt was a wave of the future, and this put fire in our bellies. It put helium in our dreaming too; for weeks afterwards we mused on the possibilities of a Waterboys and Greenpeace tour of Ireland, sailing the circumference of the country, playing shows in all the harbours; Belfast, Derry, Galway, Cork, Waterford. And if we could do it in Ireland, why not Britain? But we didn’t have the resources to realise this dream, and the crew of the Sirius had more pressing matters than jollying round Irish ports in search of good vibes. Still, the concert achieved what we wanted; as we’d hoped, the press were lured to the scene and next morning we saw photos of ourselves and the boat on the cover of the
Irish Independent
. We’d done it – Greenpeace was front-page news in Ireland.

A few days later the ship sailed off to keep appointments with whalers in the North Atlantic. And we were travelling too, by plane to Scotland to play at something called The Pictish Festival. This was run by a friend of We Free Kings called Robbie The Pict, a tall sandy-haired Scotsman, a principled activist and scurrilous hustler with a dash of wizard thrown in. He’d founded a ‘Pictish Free State’ on an acre of land he owned, and spent his time campaigning for independence from the British crown. I liked Robbie and loved how he always responded to the question ‘How are you?’ with the reply ‘Brand new!’ The Festival was his annual hoolie, held on the anniversary of an obscure seventh-century battle between Picts and Teutons.

We arrived at our hotel, an ancient commercial travellers’ stopover in Forfar called The Salutation, to be greeted in the foyer by a grinning Robbie and sidekick in homespun Scottish revolutionary kit: ‘Pictish Free State’ t-shirts, leather flying jackets, paratroop boots and kilts. They piled us into a Land Rover festooned with Pict logos and whisked us off to the venue, five miles away. Letham Village Hall was a lonesome-looking redbrick building on a hill overlooking a tiny hamlet, not much more than a crossroads. A gaggle of rural punk rockers festered round the entrance while inside was a spartan auditorium, like a school gym, filled with feral highlanders out of their skulls on a homebrew administered by Robbie and his minions, plus a smattering of intrepid Waterboys fans who’d made the trek from Edinburgh or Aberdeen. At one end was a stage, and for a backdrop someone had improvised a Scottish flag out of a wodge of blue cloth with strips of white gaffer tape stuck diagonally across it.