Adventures of a Waterboy (19 page)

Guessing that if we worked on multi-track Cooney would use the subsequent mixing sessions as an opportunity for perpetual delaying tactics, I decided to record the music direct to stereo, which meant it went down on tape exactly as the punter would hear it. The recordings were to be made in the largest room of Cooney’s basement, so I set out to dispose of the thousands of horseflies that inhabited his feral bachelor pad. I got a dozen old copies of
The Kerryman
newspaper from Begley’s wife Mary, which I rolled into swatting shapes, and spent a morning and afternoon killing them one by one.

That night John Dunford arrived from Dublin with the recording gear, and Begley, his cold shaken off and voice restored, now rallied to the project. But Cooney continued to erect obstructions, complaining bitterly about the choice of recording space, challenging the selection of equipment and questioning my and Dunford’s qualifications. And once even these assaults had been parried and it was clear he could no longer delay the onset of actual recordings, the villain cunningly shifted mode. Instead of an attitude of
I don’t want this to happen and I’m going to do all I can to obstruct it
, he switched to
OK, you want to produce me? I’m going to make you work harder than you’ve ever worked in your fucking life
.

And he did. I had to wake Cooney each morning, tenderly easing him out of the deep funk of his sleep, roll him a reefer while he lay in bed muttering and fussing over himself and the trials that were visited upon him, light the reefer and hand it to him (not, mercifully, having to place it between his lips). When he eventually picked up his guitar and pointed it towards a microphone, he would demand I tell him whether it was in tune, though he could tell full well himself. Variations on these processes, all along the lines of producer-as-servant, continued throughout the day as Dunford and I torturously, painfully, produced the bugger’s album for him, despite his every sabotaging effort.

Why was it like this? Perhaps Cooney was afraid of being tested in the world, of standing up and saying ‘this is me, this is my music.’ I could understand that one. Making
Fisherman’s Blues
I’d been confounded by which ‘me’ or which Waterboys to represent in the form of the finished product. I’d bought into the illusion that the record would define us. Cooney seemed to have a similar difficulty. Deep down he wanted his music to be heard and loved, which was why he’d agreed to make the album in the first place, but now it seemed he was frozen in the headlights lest it actually come out and sum him up with all its, and his, imperfections.

But we persevered, and day by day the tally of completed songs and sets of tunes grew until we had almost enough for an album. Then, because Kerry music is dance music, Cooney & Begley requested we record the last tracks with live dancers, so for the final night Dunford and I recorded them in the local pub. It was like a re-run of Sharon’s Winkles Hotel scene, but with punters who came out in numbers to support the two local heroes. Restored to their natural habitat and spurred by the crowd, the duo played to the height of their brilliance, firing out explosive polkas while four rustic couples step-danced on the floor, their stamping adding organic percussion to the music.

The guys from Cooking Vinyl arrived with a journalist from the
NME
called Stuart Bailie. Wickham and Blakey, holidaying nearby, also turned up, and when the pub closed we had the inevitable after-hours session. Cooking Vinyl boss Pete Lawrence was eager for Stuart to get an interview with Cooney but hadn’t reckoned on Cooney’s resistance. There followed a wonderfully farcical game of hide and seek throughout the bar as Cooney strove to escape Pete’s clutches, slipping out this door or that, ducking into the men’s room or secreting himself in the kitchen. Pete, at the limits of his endurance, finally caught up with his prey at the bar and hastily pleaded with a distraught Cooney, now doing his best persecuted genius impression, to do the interview. ‘John,’ Cooney cried petulantly to the ever-patient Dunford, ‘can you get this guy
off my back
?’ Underneath his tortured artist hippie act, what Cooney really wanted more than anything was to be interviewed, as the gifted artist he was, by the man from the
NME
. And shortly afterwards I noticed him sitting happily in rapt discussion with a tape recorder-toting Stuart, all persecutions forgotten.

But the villain had the last laugh – he didn’t let the album come out. Though we’d got it finished against all the odds, Cooney never signed the contract, and the music he and Begley recorded that September – as raw, majestic and magnificent as the landscape in which it was made, remains unheard.

Chapter 12: Like A House Of Cards Collapsing

San Diego, the last night of our American tour, and we’re performing an odd new song called ‘Room To Roam’. Wickham plays slithering fairground arpeggios while the band lays down a Bavarian waltz groove with baritone sax parps and a militaristic drum beat. We’re midway through the first verse when I notice three of our crew members at the side of the stage bending their knees in time to the music, going comedically up and down like pantomime policemen. Well, these things happen on the last nights of tours. I’m chuckling to myself between vocal lines when I see a few people in the middle of the front row of the audience pointing at the crew members and laughing. Then they start copying the dance, bobbing up and down themselves. As the second verse starts the people on either side of them start doing it too, and soon the move is spreading along the whole front row. I’m still singing and trying with diminishing success to keep a straight face when the second row starts copying them, and then the third, until soon, as the dance spreads organically, the whole audience from front row to back of the hall is doing an up and down knee-bendy dance like a silly policemen’s convention in a Monty Python sketch. And some of the audience are bending on the beat while the rest are off the beat, so that when half the crowd are going down the other half are going up. They’re all laughing at themselves too, and as the realisation spreads from the rear of the audience forwards that everyone’s doing the same thing, a giddy delight fills the hall. We’re all one, band and crowd united in a gorgeous, golden silliness.

Semi-traumatised by my ‘holiday’ in Kerry, and with Seamus Begley’s box melodies hurtling like wild horses around my head, I returned to Dublin for Waterboys rehearsals and a week later we embarked on a tour of the USA and Canada.

We hadn’t played North America for four years and our music and the group had changed so utterly since our last visit that it was like a different band. But
Fisherman’s Blues
had preceded us so the punters knew something of what to expect, and our twenty-two shows in thirteen cities had sold out fast. I felt confident as I boarded the flight to Toronto. I was queasy though that Kate Lovecraft might still be sitting in a Manhattan loft with a crystal ball, eavesdropping on the contents of my mind or planning a dramatic entrance. But when we rolled into New York a week later Kate didn’t show, and several very welcome old friends did. Jay Dee Daugherty brought his kit and for our encore at the Beacon Theatre we executed the old ‘Keltner and Ringo at the Concert For Bangladesh’ manoeuvre with two drummers kicking up a storm. Marco Sin, who’d survived his near-death experience in 1985 and was now straight as an arrow and healthy as a redwood tree, stepped up to strum guitar, and Donal Lunny and Philip King, in town on their own musical business, added bouzouki, mouth organ and moustaches to an all-hands-on-deck finale of ‘This Land Is Your Land’. The set was drawn mostly from
Fisherman’s Blues
, with the addition of folk stompers like ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ and new numbers slated for the next album. But we also played several from
This Is The Sea
. Some, like ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ and ‘Old England’, were rearranged to include Sharon’s box, while for rockers like ‘Be My Enemy’ we morphed into an electric blues band while Sharon took a break.

I got to know Sharon a lot better during our month in America. She may have been the most driven musician in Ireland, but she was still a young girl on her first long tour, and the only girl in a band with six men at that. As bandleader I felt a responsibility to pal up with her and make sure she was OK. Every morning I’d arrange to meet her for breakfast and in a nearby diner we’d chat over bacon and home fries while she told me about her life: the farm she grew up on in County Clare, her horses, the local school where she’d been affectionately nicknamed ‘the dreaded S.S.’ and how as a child she practised in the kitchen with her two musician sisters and brother all at the same time, each playing a different tune oblivious to the others in a mad cacophony. Sharon was great company and sharp as a whip, and with her natural authority I could tell she’d make a good bandleader one day. Late one night I came upon her, John Dunford and Jimmy Hickey in a hotel corridor. They hadn’t noticed me and I watched amused as Sharon, five foot tall in her dungarees, clapped her hands like a bossy playmate to summon John and Jimmy to attention, while the two grizzled road warriors rallied to her like a pair of big soft dogs. The instant she saw me she dropped her hands and reverted to the unassuming Sharon I knew, without missing a beat.

We continued to play anywhere at anytime, unerringly locating in each city the best Irish or Scottish music bar for an after-hours stramash: the Plough & Stars in San Francisco, the Cat & Fiddle in Hollywood, Glocca Morra in New York. And musical pals, sometimes met for the first time the night before, guested with us on stages across the continent. This practice reached its climax in L.A. where we were joined by The Scottish Fiddlers Of Los Angeles, a wonderfully rag-tag collection of exiled Scots and assorted misfits in a riot of tartan outfits. I’d learned the slow air ‘Carolan’s Welcome’, which we’d recorded in Spiddal, from one of their albums and I invited them to perform it with us at the Wiltern Theatre as our opening number.

I took the stage on my own, sat down at the piano, and played the first line of the courtly melody. Colin Blakey emerged from the shadows to accompany me with whistle for the next two lines. Then as we played the fourth and final line of the round, Steve and Sharon walked on holding their fiddles followed by Anto with his sax. But if the audience thought this was the band they had a surprise coming, for another fiddler appeared, then another, then another in a long procession until twenty costumed fiddlers had taken their places in a line along the front of the stage. Bang on cue they struck bow for the second round of the melody, sounding like a ragged Celtic orchestra from the seventeenth century.

Our guests spent the rest of the concert lurking colourfully round the wings before rejoining us for another bash in the encore, during which I noticed one of their number, a dapper little man called Hank who wasn’t Scottish at all, playing along with a set of bones, making a loud
clackerty-clack
that stuck out over the music. Spurred by some mysterious instinct I laid down my guitar, picked up a bodhrán and started beating out a Bo Diddley beat. All the instruments dropped out leaving Hank and me centre stage duelling on bodhrán and bones. Hank started soft-shoe shuffling in his white shirt and baggy black pants, turning little pirouettes and mugging furiously in the spotlight as the crowd roared him on. I knew I was beaten and took a few steps back, ceding the stage to him as he spun in triumph, a pint-sized toreador, bones held high, snapping and clackerty-clacking in the air. If anyone in the theatre was still waiting for Waterboys rock numbers like ‘The Pan Within’ or ‘Red Army Blues’, they must have thought they’d stumbled into a different space/time continuum.

On New Year’s Eve we played the best venue in the world: Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow. Barrowlands, as everyone called it, had one of those old sprung floors which made the audience bounce up and down, and its ceiling was so low that the crowd’s energy was reflected back at them, setting up a perpetual flow of power till the place was almost exploding. And on Hogmanay of all nights the atmosphere was
mental
. The band and crew wore kilts, with Sharon Shannon cute in a feathered toorie hat, and as midnight approached, Wickham and I stood in the eye of the inferno and played Robert Burns’s immortal ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That’. When 1990 struck it was as if a bomb of joy went off; we strummed the opening chords to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the broad-shouldered bouncers in the safety pit below burst into life, reaching across the barriers to grab audience members and link arms in a spontaneous and urgent expression of brotherhood. Every voice in Barrowlands rose in song, all those mad ecstatic Glaswegians
gieing it laldy
. Then as the last chord of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ rang out a platoon of the Glasgow Police Pipe Band marched onstage in full costume, seven feet tall in their busbies, playing a massive skirling reel as the place went mental all over again.

We flew back to Ireland on New Year’s Day and began preparations for our new album. I had high dreams for this one – nothing less than the merging of pop and trad, the reunion of British and Irish rock music with its own indigenous culture: a roots
Sgt Pepper
. The blending had already taken place in the band; all we had to do now, I figured, was capture it on a magical record. And if the ethnic music of Scotland and Ireland got shoehorned back into the popular mainstream as a side effect, that would be the icing on the cake. I wasn’t asking for much. And to make the record that would effect this musical revolution we needed the right setting. The Spiddal House recordings had taken place in Connacht, the western of Ireland’s four provinces, and I’d got it into my head that this time I wanted to record in the southern province of Munster, Sharon and Begley’s land, the ancient seat of Irish poetry and music. So Irene and I spent a week visiting castles and stately homes across the region, and even a house on the West Cork coast in a place with the tantalising name of Seven Heads, one for each member of the band. But nothing we saw beat Spiddal House, so Munster was forgotten and John Dunford did another deal with Mavis.

Returning to Spiddal after two years was a different experience. We weren’t explorers heading into the unknown anymore: we were part of the scenery ourselves. And it was a bigger operation this time, with a security team, carpenters, maintenance men and assistant engineers. The effect was like returning to the frontier after settlers have moved in and civilised it; the scenery was the same but the excitement and edge were gone.

We had a new producer too. After
Fisherman’s Blues
I didn’t want the responsibility again, so we hired Barry Beckett, an American who’d made his name with the Muscle Shoals studio band of the late sixties and co-produced Dylan’s
Slow Train Coming
ten years later. I loved the sound of that album and figured Barry was simply a guy who understood music and musicians, and that would do for us. He flew into Ireland, a thickset man, genial and slow, with a walrus moustache, a cool Southern air and about as little idea of what he was getting into as I’d had on my way to produce Cooney & Begley. After rehearsing our new songs under Barry’s watchful eye in Dublin we headed westward, but the West was another world, one without the creature comforts Nashville record producers were used to, and poor Barry, like Jay Dee Daugherty before him, found himself in a phone-less bungalow up a rustic country lane overlooking sea, fields and bog-land.

Barry took this stoically though his patience was strained by the time it took our crew to install the studio, which had to be done from scratch. While hammers banged and saws whistled Barry wandered the house and gardens for several days muttering, ‘When are we gonna start cutting?’ Finally the great day came and we began ‘cutting’, but to the band’s alarm we discovered Barry had very different ideas from us. We expected to play all together, live and easy, like we always did, a raggle-taggle orchestra, but after listening to our rehearsals Barry declared he wanted us to lay down bass, drums and my rhythm guitar first, then overdub the other instruments afterwards.

This spoilt our fun because part of the magic was what happened when we played all together, but as he was the producer we swung with it. But soon there was another pill to swallow. Barry had an electronic metronome, a palm-sized box that emitted a nasty high-pitched ‘beep’. He’d tap it as we played and it would log the song’s speed or
tempo
. Before each subsequent performance he’d switch on the beeper, playing back a ‘beep-beep-beep’ at the logged tempo to which we’d then start playing, so ensuring we’d always start the song at an identical speed. The problem with this was twofold: we hated the unmusical sound of the beeper; and we didn’t always
want
to play a song at the same speed. Barry’s distant predecessor Bob Johnston had encouraged me to set the groove and tempo of a song according to my mood in the moment, start playing, and have the band take the feel from me. That was still the model we used, and conforming to the rigid tempo of Barry’s ‘beeper’ took some more of the fun out of playing.

After several days Noel Bridgeman and I took action. We snuck into Spiddal House in the middle of the night and found the beeper where Barry had left it on the mixing desk. There it lay, the little bastard, gleaming satanically in the moonlight ready for the next day’s persecution of the band. Noel pocketed it and we buried it deep in the Spiddal House grounds where for all I know it beeps to this day, heard by no human ear.

Next morning Barry was perplexed not to find the beeper and went hunting room to room till at last he realised foul play had been employed. He sat us down in a big circle and said in his slow Alabama accent, ‘Now I know someone has hidden my beeper. I’m not angry but I want to know who it was.’ Seven faces held seven deadpan expressions. No confession was made. Barry accepted the inevitable and from then on we played the songs at our own chosen speeds.

Each night after work we went down to the village for a late drink and often after the pub closed we’d go back to one of the band’s houses for a session. One night we were joined by Charlie Lennon and some friends. They started playing in the kitchen, always the best-sounding room in a house, and knowing Barry would appreciate the music I ran and fetched him from his bungalow. Barry loved it all right but mistakenly thought the presence of the big-time record producer would intimidate the musicians. Even if they’d known Barry’s history, the boys wouldn’t have been perturbed. Their view was that the Yank was welcome to listen, whoever he was. But Barry, deliciously misreading the situation, made the classic trad music faux pas of clapping loudly at the end of each tune then saying things like, ‘Don’t you worry about the ol’ record producer sittin’ here. Haw-haw! Just you keep right on playing and don’t mind a thing. You’re doin’ great, haw haw!’ A silent mirth was transmitted eye to eye around the room.