Fisherman’s Views

One sunny summer’s afternoon in the west of Ireland in 1988, a crazed Peter Lorre lookalike named Bandy Donovan went after The Waterboys with a loaded shotgun. The band had hired this tragic ‘only gay in the village’ typecast to cook and help around Spiddal House while they recorded their now-classic Fisherman’s Blues album.

While the arrangement worked well at first, things soon went sour. Having paid Bandy much bemused attention in the early days, once they got down to serious work the musicians had a lot less time for any inane banter. Suddenly ignored, their hapless hired-hand felt jilted. So much so that, on receiving his first paycheque, he loaded up on booze, pills and shotgun cartridges, and went looking for revenge.
Thankfully, he was blotto enough to be easily disarmed by two of the crew. Not quite grasping the seriousness of what had just occurred, the chastened Bandy asked, “Will I go and make the dinner now?” Not unreasonably, the response was a screamed, “Just fuck off!!”
Waterboy-in-chief Mike Scott was wearing headphones while the incident happened. “I missed most of it,” the silver-haired 53-year-old admits. “I was in the studio recording ‘Spring Comes To Spiddal’, cheerfully oblivious. All I knew was, when I came out, there had been this big fracas. There was [producer John] Dunford and your man with the rubber face, squirming.”
The Spiddal shotgun incident is just one of numerous amusing anecdotes peppering the pages of Scott’s brilliantly written memoir Adventures Of A Waterboy. Like a full-length version of one of his better songs, it tells the tale of the Edinburgh-born singer-songwriter’s single-minded devotion to his artistic muse, from his teenage years in Ayrshire, editing fanzines and fronting garage bands, to his long peripatetic career as shamanic leader of The Waterboys.
We’re sitting in the comfortably faded grandeur of a reception room in Borris House, a large and impressive country pile outside Carlow, having just finished a public interview as part of the Éigse Arts Festival. While he’s enjoying the experience of being a published author on a book tour, reading onstage rather than singing is proving strange. “I would’ve brought my guitar tonight, but I thought there was gonna be a piano.”
Fresh out of the madness of his most commercially successfully period, Scott first considered a memoir more than 20 years ago but only got around to it in recent times. He first started writing four years ago in Findhorn, the spiritual community in northeast Scotland that has been his on-off home for many years.
“I wrote about two-thirds of it in Findhorn in 2008,” he explains. “I would get up at 5.30am and write for many hours before the rest of the world woke up. I was very disciplined. Then I finished it when I moved back to Dublin in 2009. Publication was slow because I was doing other things.”
The teenaged Mike Scott was a likeable chancer. As an enthusiastic fanzine editor, he once managed to swing an invite from Patti Smith to attend one of her London shows. His memoir describes how obnoxious he found the American rock diva’s superior attitude towards her band and travelling companions. While not totally immune to such behaviour himself, he tries to keep his ego in check.
“I’ve had a few monstrous moments but, partly because of that experience with her, any time I’d catch myself manifesting any of those signs I’d be horrified. Occasionally I’m around other artists who behave a bit like that, and I’ve always found it the most distasteful thing. In fact, I’ve never felt the same way about Patti Smith since.
“There are two things that happen very rarely in The Waterboys. One is egos getting out of order - and the other is groupies.”
Seriously? Surely many fans wanted to play in your Waterbed over the years?
“Didn’t appear to!” he laughs. “I’ve only ever had one one-night-stand after a gig, which was in 1984, and she became my girlfriend.”
While that particular old flame is totally doused in the book, various musicians, producers, journalists and record label executives probably won’t enjoy the read either. In fairness, honest to a fault, Scott is equally harsh on himself.
“Writing about anyone authentically is a challenge,” he states. “Even when I’m writing about people where whatever it was is not controversial, I had to separate myself from writing what I thought they would like me to write, and make sure that I wrote authentically. I think that’s a clear discipline for a writer. And I had to apply the same to myself. When I fucked-up, or made mistakes, or did daft things, it had to be in there; otherwise why would anybody take it seriously?”
Throughout his career, Scott has always listened to what the music was telling him to do, whatever the commercial consequences. However, he now accepts that returning $2m of a Geffen advance in order to be allowed release an album under his own name was possibly not his best business move ever. “Well, those were the days,” he laughs, shrugging off the millions. “But I was committed to being ‘Mike Scott’ at the time.”
The lowest point of his professional career came in 1997. “I lost so much money on a tour, and then my record stiffed. That was the lowest point professionally – but not personally. I was fine in myself. But that was the lowest of my fortunes. I came off tour and found that we’d lost something like £100,000. Still Burning, my second solo album, had done nothing. I was dropped by my record label. And then Alan McGee didn’t sign me.”
McGee was a Waterboys fan, and had mentored Scott for a while. But ultimately the Creation Records founder didn’t put his money where his mouth was. Despite some hurt feelings, he’s still friendly with his fellow Scotsman. “I think Alan probably just thought that there wasn’t much mileage in whatever I did next. He probably didn’t think it was gonna sell. He’s a businessman as well as a rock and roller.”
Adventures also deals with Scott’s absent father, who walked out when he was just eight, and their eventual reunion 28 years later. “It was always underneath. They say John Lennon was abrasive with people because his father had left. That wasn’t the case with me. I didn’t wear it on the outside. I wasn’t even aware of it myself most of the time.”
Having tracked his dad down, and shown up unannounced at his front door in the late ‘90s, they now enjoy a great relationship. “My dad and I get along so well. We can be in a room together and not say anything. We’re so cool with each other, and I’m so grateful for it because some people can’t have a son-father relationship like that even when they’ve known each other all their lives.”
Although Scott has enjoyed a busy time in recent years, releasing three Waterboys albums (the most recent, last year’s acclaimed An Appointment With Mr. Yeats), his memoir ends in 2000.
“I actually wrote it up to 2002 at first,” he says. “And that version ended with a very long blow-by-blow account of a session that happened at a music festival. But I just thought that it wasn’t the right note to end it on. I thought the Glastonbury Festival, bringing The Waterboys name back, was the right place to end. The last few years of my life are too recent to seem very interesting. Give me another decade, and they’ll come into perspective.”

Adventures Of A Waterboy is published by Lilliput.