Adventures of a Waterboy (27 page)

Halfway through making the album we received a visit from Jim Powers, my friend from the Chicago gospel church trip, who’d become an A&R man at Geffen Records. Poor Jim was despatched by the Geffen bosses to come and talk some sense into their wayward star and impress upon him the importance of delivering a commercial record with ‘three hit tracks that can get played on American FM radio’. This meant modern rock drums, lead guitar hooks and all the sonic paraphernalia of the grunge-centric mid nineties. Niko and I listened to Jim dutifully deliver his script in a café overlooking Findhorn Bay on a gorgeous Indian summer’s day, while clouds sailed regally across the blue northern skies and the mystery school of Cluny Hill brooded in the distance, and it was like hearing a bulletin from some old, half-forgotten nonsensical world.

Though I received Jim’s entreaties with some sympathy for his position, I ignored them completely and kept right on making the music that was in my heart. When I delivered the finished album to Geffen in late 1994, it didn’t feature a single drumbeat. It was an almost wholly acoustic record: a despatch from my soul, yes, but a concoction with which the lumbering promotional machine of an American record company could seemingly do nothing. And to compound matters, I insisted on going solo in name. As there was only one person on the album, and all my current concert ambitions were based on the one-man show I’d tested at Universal Hall, I wanted to put out the record as Mike Scott. My Geffen contract stipulated I had to release all my work as The Waterboys, so I conferred with John Kennedy, still my trusty solicitor, and he suggested that if we spoke to Geffen in a language they understood they might let me have my way.

Geffen were due to pay me a huge advance so Kennedy contacted them and offered to take a million-dollar cut if they’d let me release the album as Mike Scott. This was the right language indeed, for the change was promptly agreed and papers authorising it soon dropped through my cottage letterbox. The album was added to Geffen’s release schedule (they were bound by my water-tight deal to release whatever I gave them) but it was clear from the absence of communication coming across the time zones that they’d rather be rid of the whole thing. And me. I could understand this – my actions hadn’t made any sense to them for a couple of years now, if indeed they ever had. Kennedy’s canny advice was to wait till I received the balance of my recording advance and then negotiate to buy my way out of the contract: another million dollars. Once my freedom was secured we’d find a new record company who understood the acoustic Findhorn album and were willing to properly support it.

With a record in the bag and Kennedy engaged in the delicate process of finessing my Geffen exit, I was ready to explore the prospect of touring from my base in Findhorn. In November 1994 I embarked on several short concert trips round Britain, my first anywhere in four years. I travelled bandless, accompanied only by Janette and a road crew from Glasgow, and on bare stages in small theatres I replicated the sound and atmosphere of my Universal Hall show, rediscovering my performance mojo along the way. Playing live night after night again was like breathing the fire of life. How could I have functioned without this for so long? Yes, I still wanted the life of the performer. Yes, I still wanted greatness. And I loved the freedom of being solo; I could take the music in any direction and throw in songs spontaneously without having to wonder if the band could play them. Perhaps best of all was the rekindling of my connection with the audience. The last time I’d met them, in the dimly remembered warzone of the
Room To Roam
tour, my back had been against the wall and the wind again me. Now, in calmer circumstances, we shared an intimate musical conversation.

As the concerts progressed I noticed another desire rumbling inside, one I thought I’d lost somewhere back along the line – the yen for commercial success, as if now that I’d fulfilled a spiritual quest it was time to return and claim the things of the world. Soon I knew I’d want to make a band album, compete again with my peers and re-engage with the circus of publicity and stardom, but this time on my own terms and from my new perspective. And because in Findhorn there was none of the apparatus of my trade – managers, musicians, rehearsal studios, record companies – I’d have to move back to the city. After eighteen months the time in the mystery school was over and London beckoned. But London, rock’n’roll and Mike Scott had all changed in the ten years since I’d lived on Ladbroke Grove and made
This Is The Sea
. I would need my sense of humour, as well as all I’d learned in Findhorn, for I was about to embark on a mad rollercoaster ride through a depraved new world.

Chapter 17: My Wanderings In The Weary Land

I walk up the ramp of the Pyramid Stage as Ian McNabb calls out my name over the P.A. and the Glastonbury Festival crowd cheers. Ian’s backing band, unbelievably, is Neil Young’s Crazy Horse, with whom I shake hands with for the first time as I take the stage. Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot are grizzled Americans with the mark of the sixties on their faces, and there’s a younger dude too, Mikey, whose impossibly low-slung spare guitar I’m borrowing. I plug in, glance at the sea of faces, register the presence of the TV cameras, and await the count for the first number.

Because I’ve just flown down from Scotland and couldn’t get to rehearsals I asked Ian to prepare ‘Glastonbury Song’ at a stately, slow-burning tempo, and to rock up the second number, ‘Preparing To Fly’. But as Ralph Molina counts in ‘Glastonbury’ I realise to my horror that Ian must have got the message mixed up and flipped the tempos. The groove is seriously fast. The intro melody sounds like The Pogues playing a jolly Irish reel and, fucking hell, I’m having to sing so speedily I can’t get all the words out. Somehow I make it to the end and catch my breath as Ian orchestrates one of those endless Crazy Horse outros, everyone gathered in a centre-stage huddle playing crash chords for what seems like forever.

Then Molina leads us into ‘Preparing To Fly’, which, miraculously, is the right tempo. And with the full ragged power of the Crazy Horse rhythm machine we sounds immense; a steamrolling golden tumbleweed churning into infinity underpinned by the earth-shuddering
thoom
of Billy Talbot’s bass. In the midst of the sonic mayhem I look around me. The West Country hills are green, the punters are grooving, there’s an electric guitar in my hands and I’m back!

Or so I think.

I’d handled my own affairs since the demise of Dick Lackaday, and while I was in Findhorn there hadn’t been much for a manager to do, but with the move to London there soon would be. John Kennedy faxed me a list of possible candidates and I met several of them at the end of 1994. One was a chap called Dave Jaymes. His name stood out on the list because he spelt ‘Jaymes’ the same way as David Jaymes, bassist in the early eighties pop band Modern Romance. Back then, my punk rock prejudices had been severely challenged by this geezer, a preening, cheek-sucking, blonde-bobbed poseur at whom, every time he appeared on
Top Of The Pops
, my mate Joe Kingman and I would gleefully yell ‘BASTARD!’. But Kennedy didn’t think it wasn’t the same guy. And sure enough, when I met Dave and his business partner Diane in their office in Notting Hill he was nothing like the Modern Romance bassist. He was a dapper, dark-haired chap, sincere and enthusiastic, with a golly-gosh cockney accent and a firm, winning handshake. Janette accompanied me, Yoko-like, to all my meetings, and at this one something magical happened: we fell in love with Dave and Diane. As we talked, some alchemy, a kind of shared empathy, filled the room. Dave and Diane were a relatively inexperienced team but, moved by the encounter, I asked them to manage me.

Kennedy meanwhile had extricated me from my Geffen contract, so Dave and Diane started touting my Findhorn album, titled
Bring ’Em All In
, to British record companies. In the spring of 1995 the field narrowed to Alan McGee’s Creation and my old label Chrysalis, now part of EMI. McGee told Dave and Diane the album was a work of ‘beautiful genius’ and they arranged for him to fly up to Glasgow, where Niko Bolas and I were doing final mixes. But McGee pulled out of the trip at the last minute, which my managers read as a portent of future flakiness. I’d only met McGee once, at a party seven years earlier where the sum total of our conversation consisted of him leaning into my ear and yelling above the sound system, ‘One day ah’m goan tae sign yew tae mah label, man! Fuckin’ brilliant!’, so I didn’t have an opinion about the guy other than a dim recall of Caledonian enthusiasm. But I was as perplexed as Dave and Diane when, a few days after cancelling his trip, McGee submitted a modest financial offer for
Bring ’Em All In
, which indicated that he expected sales to be low. Chrysalis on the other hand made a handsome offer, turned up for their meetings, and convinced Dave, at least, that they were the right home for me.

I wasn’t so sure. When I walked into their offices the first thing I saw was a huge framed photo of Karl Wallinger, whose band World Party had been assigned to Chrysalis along with the rest of the Ensign acts in 1986 when Chris Blackwell had given me power of veto over Ensign’s sale. ‘Uh-oh,’ said my guts, ‘this is your old life. Steer clear.’ But I hadn’t yet learned to fully trust these inner promptings and I was swayed by the enthusiasm of the Chrysalis bosses, a convivial old music biz cove named Roy Eldridge and his intense label manager, Mike Andrews, who loved
Bring ’Em All In
and expected it to sell by the truckload. So I re-signed to Chrysalis in July 1995, and that month Janette and I left our Findhorn cottage and rented a pale pink four-storey house on Lansdowne Road in my old Notting Hill stomping ground. These were happy, optimistic days – new record company, new management, and a powerful sense of purpose. But forty tons of karmic rain were about to come crashing down on my parade.

For if it was one thing finding my inner groove in Findhorn’s conducive, meditative atmosphere, it was quite another doing it in the belly of the metropolis. Swept up in London’s juggernaut momentum I could hardly hear myself think, let alone discern the still small voice of my intuition. And it wasn’t just that I was beaming down from a pastoral mystery school; it was that London itself had changed. Everything seemed several degrees cruder, brasher and more … what would be the word? …
loveless
than I remembered. To my 1995 eyes London looked insane
.
In the ten years since I’d left the city had morphed into a playground of beer-bellied men with shirts hanging out and dyed blonde cropped hair in the style of troubled footballer Gazza, drinking in the open air and spilling across the streets like tribes of boorish overgrown babies. The cultural wars of the fifties and sixties were lost and the youth of the nation strode forth as identikit-clad, money-hungry business bastards. When I took my first look at British TV in a decade I saw a new generation of comedians who farted, swore and wove cruelty into their acts, using humiliation and vindictiveness to get their laughs and kicks like bullies I remembered from school. A plague of gossip and celebrity rags befouled the shelves of newsagents, the bastard spawn of
Hello!
magazine, all face-lifts, private hells and diet freaks packaged as superficial entertainment. And everywhere I looked huge billboards had materialised, bright-lit and cliché-ridden, dominating skylines and street views, for London had sold its soul and its civic spaces to the marketing industry. Living in the heart of the metropolis was like walking through a giant promo display.

To escape from horror, the saying goes, bury yourself in it, and there was nothing to do but dig in and get on with the job of promoting my record. But how to explain where I’d been and what I’d done to a sceptical media to whom the esoterics of somewhere like Findhorn were beyond any comprehension? I accepted the challenge gamely, struggling for the language that would express my experiences in a manner intelligible to hard-boiled
NME
journalists or speed-talking DJs without my sounding like a lunatic. And sometimes I even managed it. Running parallel was the realisation that my status was diminished without the charisma of the Waterboys name.
Mike Scott
meant little by comparison, and I recognised how successful I’d been throughout my career in camouflaging myself behind the Waterboys brand. I was in a position the opposite of the ‘star gravity’ I remembered from the days of
This Is The Sea
, when I was a music business supernova about to burst into flame and my entrance to a room would change its atmosphere; or the era of
Fisherman’s Blues
when my arrival on any Dublin scene would magnetise all attention in my direction. Now I was just some dimly remembered guy, an impression confirmed by the number of entry-level interviews I found myself doing with obscure cable TV channels, and from the shrunken coverage I got in newspapers and music magazines.

Rock’n’roll was a changed landscape too. I was deposited as if from a spacecraft into a world I hardly recognised. Most of our contemporary bands of the eighties were gone, including all the best ones – The Clash, the Bunnymen, The Smiths – while Mick Hucknall and Geordie Michael were global superstars. How had
that
happened? Only the renewed success of Paul Weller seemed logical, as if the world was still spinning on its right axis. Even the music I’d picked up on during my still-recent spell in New York was looking old: grunge was passé and Kurt Cobain, as they say in Glasgow, was deid
as the day is long. And a pantheon of new, dark-browed musical godlings was on the rise: the thuggish-but-melodic brothers Gallagher, intellectual barrow-boy Damon Albarn, and Richard Ashcroft, a cadaverous stick insect bringing back speed-freak chic with his band The Verve. The scene struck me as a warped twist on the mid sixties just before psychedelia hit; the days of ‘Paint It Black’, mods, greasers and the pomp of Tamla Motown. If I’d been twenty I’d have known where to pitch myself and my music in relation to this retro-hedonistic topography, preferably in a position to rip it down. But I was a name and face from a recent past that was itself busy being ripped down. And more than that: having parachuted in from a mystery school with a headful of songs about inner experiences and mysticism I was hopelessly out of step with the times. Cosmic drug explorers apart, there was no archetype in rock’n’roll for ‘seeker returning with news from the unknown’ for me to play with. I couldn’t work out where to insert myself into the picture.

Nor could I figure out my sartorial style. Confounded as to whether I should look like a star or a regular person, I would overdress to compensate for my confusion, walking round London rehearsal rooms in flash clothes while everyone else was in trainers and t-shirts. It’s easy to dress down when the world wants to know you. I’d spent 1987 dressing like a scarecrow while a huge audience wondered what my next move would be. Now, with diminished status and a wardrobe of Versace gear, I couldn’t seem to stop dressing up. This tendency reached its apogee at a show in Edinburgh where I wore the nightmare rig-out of spotted jacket, striped trousers, hooped socks and a checked shirt. I was finally cured when I turned up at BBC radio in a pair of plush velvet trousers with a glittery spangle. DJ Mark Radcliffe, amused that I should wear such luxurious pants for a radio show where no one could see me, roasted me on air, commenting in his withering Lancashire brogue, ‘I bet you don’t do the gardening in those.’

Meanwhile, as if in a weird dream, I found myself invited to perform on Christian youth TV programmes. The producers of these breezy Sunday morning shows knew I was singing about spirituality from a perspective other than theirs and extended the hand of brotherhood across the metaphysical divide, which was admirable, and I agreed to appear because I liked the idea of infiltrating mainstream religious broadcasting with my heretical, gnostic songs about
The Mysteries
. But my fifth-columnist efforts had an undesired result: most people tuning in just thought I’d become some kind of Christian rocker.

Things weren’t going at all as I’d envisaged when I’d left my Findhorn eyrie, and when the single of ‘Bring ’Em All In’ got hardly any radio play and didn’t chart, a doom threatened to descend on my team. But it dropped big-time the day the album was released. I was in New York, getting ready to perform a show, when I got a phone call in my hotel room telling me Roy Eldridge and Mike Andrews had been fired. My mental picture of working with these guys for years of campaigns, tours and follow-up albums burst into smithereens as I stood with the receiver to my ear. I knew such things happened to artists: your allies at the label get the boot and you have to work for the rest of your contract with new people who may have no feeling for your music. Now it was happening to me, which was tough enough, but coming on the day of my album’s release it was a catastrophe. And a
creepy
catastrophe: the EMI bosses behind the firing must have monitored the situation for a while – these guys don’t just piss in the wind – and would have known the axe was set to fall when they authorised my contract eight weeks earlier.

On our return to London, Dave, Diane, Janette and I went, like a confused, bereaved family, for an audience with the EMI division chief. J.F. Cecillon was a lewd Frenchman with crafty eyes and a sharp line in the kind of frothy repartee the music business loves (‘I will not zleep till I ’ave a number one’). J.F. was detailed to steer Chrysalis till a new label boss was chosen, and sat purring in his office like a great fat cat, receiving the parade of shell-shocked managers anxiously wondering what future their artists had under the new regime. He said all the right things – ‘You are a priority at zee label’, ‘We will make your next seengle a heet’ – and maybe even meant a few of them, but here was no chemistry between us and I found myself stuck for the next several years with a record company man I hadn’t signed to, nor would have.

Creeping out against this unhappy backdrop, the
Bring ’Em All In
album snuck into the charts at a lowly 22 and disappeared the following week. This was confirmation of my diminished status and of Alan McGee’s sober estimation of the album’s hit potential. And most of all it told me I’d missed the target. I’d sought to make a record about my Findhorn experiences that would resonate with a mass audience, and I’d called it wrong. An unadorned acoustic record, it seemed, wasn’t a persuasive enough medium, and I made a mental note to give my next album, which would have similar lyrical themes, a robust, commercial band sound.