It is quite remarkable that he never really crumbled or
compromised his music at any stage. Yes, this wonderful autobiography reveals a
certain frustration at how records such as ‘Dream Harder’ didn’t realise the
sound imagined in his minds ear, but it’s never for a lack of searching for the
key. It was just that, like a good deal of Dylan concerts, the magic wasn’t
unlocked at that time because Mike couldn’t find the right combination. But his
integrity remained a constant despite repeatedly leaving himself in the wrong
place, wrong time, with the wrong band line up and even sometimes the wrong
music for anything like a conventional career arc to take place. So instead of
standing shoulder to shoulder with U2 in the late 80s as the only credible
challengers to their big rock crown, the Waterboys would relocate to Ireland
and immerse themselves for half the decade in traditional Folk sounds. Then in
1990, as the second of the Folk albums solicits knee-jerk negative reactions
from the music press because Mike had travelled too far into the tradition, his
harcore-trad having pushed tunnel-visioned writers into a head spin of folksy
prejudice, a large scale raggle-taggle rolling thunder revue style tour in a
big-top was booked and promoted for The Waterboys to take the music to the
people and turn the tide in their favour. But it doesn’t happen that way
because immediately prior to the tour commencing, all the key traditional style
players in the band leave and instead they have to play a compromised Rock set,
thus excluding most of the tracks from the new album but playing mostly to
crowds expecting jigs, reels and fiddles. Then in 1991, as ‘The Whole Of The
Moon’ becomes a belated top 10 hit in the UK and ‘The Best Of The Waterboys’
compilation raises their profile to its highest ever status, Mike has moved to
the US and not yet begun the process of putting together a new Waterboys line
up; Anto Thistlethwaite now being the only other permanent member left (and
even he soon slipped out of the picture). Next it’s 1993 and newly signed to
Geffen, with the most straight ahead Rock record of his career to promote, Mike
has pointedly failed to put together a new line up of the band to tour with.
Reading between the lines it’s clear Mike’s head had been turned by the call of
a spiritual community on Scotland’s North East coast and sure enough he’s
living there by the start of 1994, leaving behind both the demands of a major
US record label and his first marriage too.
Often the purity of his ideals leads to comical moments. The
look of horror on his face in the mid-1990s when waking up to the reality that
he was being managed by a former member of Modern Romance must have been
priceless; sure enough the former early 80s New Romantic Popster is quickly
fired. But you have to admire the man’s resolve too, service to his music
didn’t always target those deemed guilty of crimes against pop in an earlier
lifetime. What musician when invited to not only jam with an idol at the age of
25, but throw a tune or two of his own into the mix too wouldn’t have pitched one
of his best efforts? Not Mike that’s for sure; so when he had Bob Dylan’s ear
and perhaps limitless potential future collaboration on the table, he holds on
to every killer song he must have had up his sleeve at that point (all the
early ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ era stuff) and instead offers one of his weakest
tunes, mindful of giving away too much too soon even then. The irrefutable
response the song earns from Dylan is priceless. Over ten years later Mike is
just a production decision away from the chance to work with George Harrison,
surely a Mike Scott musical soul mate in waiting? All he had to do was take
former George Harrison backing musician Jim Keltner’s advice on which track to
offer the ex-Beatle, but that involved scrubbing a guitar solo of his own that
Mike felt strongly about and so, as Keltner warned, the track Mike sent over
didn’t capture the quiet ones imagination and the meet up didn’t happen.
It has to be said that many a music industry ‘name’ come out
of this book without too much credit. Not Alan McGhee of Creation, the
impression Mike gives of this now legendary name of 1990s Indie is that of a
man who walks it like he talks it. However, shouldn’t David Geffen really have
learned something about handling a wayward, creative talent a little better
after his awkward Neil Young situation in 1980s? It shouldn’t have taken a
British rival record label manager, who really had no business being involved
at all, to recognise what an astonishing piece of work 1994’s ‘Bring ‘Em All
In’ actually was. So while Alan McGhee went on to be that ill fated record’s
biggest champion, Mike’s real label boss was sending messengers to the studio to ensure an album
with three hit singles that would be played on FM Rock radio would be
delivered. And I find it hard to countenance how, in early 1990 after the
‘Fisherman’s Blues’ album and after the mind blowing Waterboys live shows of 1989,
the producer Barry Beckett would immediately ditch the key winning formula of
recording and capturing the band live in the studio, feeding and bouncing off
each other. A man who cut his teeth with the Muscle Shoals studio band should
surely have got to the essence of the Waterboys Folk-Rock groove without
alienating the band to the extent that his beeping electronic metronome had to
be stolen by Mike and Noel Bridgman in the middle of the night and buried deep
in the gardens of Spiddal House?
‘The Adventures Of A Waterboy’ comes to a close around 2000
and the ‘A Rock In The Weary Land’ album. By this time a lot of the debris from
his difficult 1990s period had been tidied up. Recognition that his music is
better received under the all-encompassing Waterboys banner arrives and it’s a
nice touch that he sees his fellow musicians as having a better stature as
members of the band rather than mere back up players, that’s true. He details
how in 1998 he located and reconnected with the father he lost touch with as a
young boy and best of all, for the music, repairs the relationship with fiddle
player Steve Wickham that fell apart in 1990. Probably the only thing that you
sense Mike steers clear of in this book are his real feelings about early
keyboard player and future World Party leader Karl Wallinger. Mike keeps the
comments about Karl fairly neutral throughout although there’s a barely
disguised smirk when he recalls an early road manager punching Karl
‘poetically’ into a rack of Europop cassettes in a Swiss service station. At a
London book launch a few weeks ago it was pointed out to Mike that the music
press advert Wallinger responded to when joining the band requested the
applicant must not be a “jack of all trades” or a “pop fan”. “Well he shouldn’t
have bloody answered the advert then” Mike snapped in response, sounding
momentarily venomous in a way we didn’t see for the rest of the evening. The
1988 track ‘World Party’ was a direct poke at somebody (and who honestly
believes it isn’t Karl?) and the pair have been more than a little spiky with
each other in the music press in recent times; definitely some unfinished
business there that’s not dealt with in this autobiography I think.
All in all though the book ends in the right place. As
Mike rightly attests, you need a bit of a distance from events to write about
them with any clarity of thought. In the last twelve years he’s really settled
with the band and band name, striking a good balance between the Folk and Rock
elements of his sound and, with the collapse of the music industry and the rise
of the internet as a communication tool working to his advantage, he’s turned
the Waterboys into the evolving platform within which he can move in any
direction he feels necessary; the platform it was always meant to be
essentially. The new releases have been punctuated with eagerly awaited archive
trawls as Mike has finally felt ready to sort out the massively potent
avalanche of creation that arrived in those early Ireland years. That kind of
adventure probably couldn’t occur again, at least to an artist who’d already
stepped into the mainstream arena. In travelling to Ireland then gradually
moving to more remote areas further west, in that period before mobile phones
and the internet, was a serious disappearing act. There are quaint tales in
this book of record label representatives having to send messages to pubs Mike
might be known to drink in just to keep some level of communication going with
him. All the while he immersed himself in his music without diversion or
distraction, in the process bringing alive worlds and cultures seemingly from
another age; that couldn’t be done now. I’ve noticed too in the last couple of
years, that Mike is slowly enjoying a newfound seniority within the music world
and the respect too afforded a survivor with a strong back catalogue that comes
with that; not quite a living legend yet but well on the way.
So, once you've been over to www.amazon.co.uk and bought your copy of the book, check out the Waterboys on film playlist below for some great Mike Scott music alongside some of the rare and fascinating moments exquisitely described by Mike Scott in the book.
