Great things come to those who wait

I’m not trying to stalk Seasick Steve. It just keeps happening. The universe keeps throwing him in my path. I bumped into him – literally – on the way to buy a drink at the Cois Fharraige festival. A while later, I passed him on the street in Dublin. Then Hot Press asked me if I’d like to meet him. It would have seemed rude to the universe to say no.

We meet in his dressing-room at the back of the National Stadium. It isn’t the most luxurious of spaces, but Seasick Steve (aka Steve Wold) doesn’t appear to mind – you can’t imagine him throwing diva strops demanding Jo Malone candles, white lilies and a brand new toilet for his exclusive use. The room is dark but cosy, an electric bar heater casting a warm orange glow in the gloom, plus there’s fruit, Jack Daniel’s and a bottle of red wine that Wold is struggling to open with a cheap corkscrew as I walk in. But he’s a gentleman first and a musician second, so he sets the bottle down, shakes my hand and pulls me up a chair by the fire and offers me a drink.
Having left home at the tender age of thirteen to escape an abusive stepfather and uncaring mother, Wold rode the rails as a hobo searching for seasonal jobs, working, among other things, as a cowboy and a carny. Much has been made of this part of Wold’s life, and in fairness, it does read a bit like a film script. It’s an unlikely rags-to-riches story; even Hollywood would baulk at the idea of a sixty-something bluesman finding fame.
“I don’t romanticise it too much,” he says. “But I guess I’m a little guilty of that in my songs because I don’t look at it too hard. I try to make it a bit light. It was tough, but it wasn’t horrible either.”
If you discount the fact that he’s lived in 59 houses in 27 years, Wold is more conventional than his colourful past would suggest. He’s been married for a long time, raised five children and was your average hard-working class hero for most of his adult life. His later years included a stint near Seattle where he produced music during the grunge years, working with the likes of Modest Mouse.
As the old cliché goes, behind every great man is a great woman, and in Wold’s case, this is certainly true, especially since his missus appears to be a bit on the psychic side.
“I bought a piece of junk guitar. I wasn’t gonna play it, I bought it as a joke but I was playing it one day and my wife heard me, and she goes, ‘That guitar’s gonna make you famous’ which at that moment was the most nonsense thing to say in the universe because I didn’t have nothing going on.”
This three-stringed guitar affectionately named the Three-String Trance Wonder, and Wold’s other personalised instruments, such as the One-Stringed Diddley Bow and the Mississippi Drum Machine (a wooden box) eventually made it onto a CD Wold was recording in his kitchen, and have since become his trademarks.
“When I started recording the Dog House songs she said, ‘You should play that wretched guitar’, and she said I should put the diddley bow song on it. I wasn’t making a record. I was just recording some songs with no purpose to them.”
This record led to an invitation to play a gig in Belfast, and from that point on, Wold’s life changed.
“It was very strange, I tell ya. And even she’s surprised, but kinda not, because she’s like ‘I told you!’”
The organisers were keen to have Wold play in Belfast, but he was less than enthusiastic. Eventually his wife persuaded him to go – she thought it would cheer him up.
“I’d had a heart attack, and was feeling not so good, but my wife was basically like, ‘If you’re gonna die, you may as well die over there’ so I went over and played. The funny thing is, if I hadn’t gone over there, I wouldn’t be here now; and I was at that stage where I didn’t care no more and if it had been anything but what it was, I just wouldn’t be here.”
They say if you wait long enough everything comes back into fashion, and perhaps it’s something in the zeitgeist, but Seasick Steve’s music seems to have struck a chord. After the Belfast gig, he got invited onto Later… With Jools Holland Annual Hootenany 2006. From here, Wold received invitations to perform at a number of festivals around the UK and in Ireland. After years of believing no-one was much interested in his music, he was surprised at the crowd’s reaction.
“I played the main stage at Glastonbury. I know when I played huge places most people, certainly in the past, didn’t know nothing about me, but for the most part people just started to have a good time.”
Wold believes his latter-day popularity is a response to a technological, status-driven society.
“Things got so fancy, I think people just wanted something a little simple. People like all the other stuff too, but there was a reaction and that made a little niche for me. The thing I figured out is, because my music is kinda simple, primitive a little bit, it’s ringing a bell that I didn’t even know needed to be rung. People are responding whether they know about me or not, so I just feel a bit lucky. I know a lot of people say, ‘He ain’t that special’ but that’s all right, I’ve been the lucky one.”
But as he’ll cheerfully admit, that’s just a theory. “I’ve thought about it a lot, because I don’t understand it.”
For now though, Steve’s enjoying the benefits of his latter day fame, although both he and his family have found the idea a little hard to comprehend.
“I thought the only audience I would ever have was my dog, and my wife who can’t help listening to me. My kids think it’s really strange. My younger boy is only 19 and all his friends are fans of mine, so that’s very strange. If your dad is someone like Robert Plant, who’s been famous the whole time, you get used to it. But I ain’t ever been nothing except their dad. They knew I played music, but I was kinda like a lava lamp over in the corner of the living room.”
At the end of our allotted time, Wold shakes my hand, wishes me luck and says goodbye. But the universe has other ideas.
A few weeks later on a cold and wet November day, I see Seasick Steve and his wife stroll across Notre Dame’s courtyard. During his wandering days, Wold ended up in Paris playing tunes for change in this very spot. This time, things are somewhat different as he attracts excited whispers as he walks by.
A middle-aged couple stop him, shake his hand and the inevitable digital camera comes out. While Wold gracefully poses for photos with the star-struck pair, his wife looks on with a bemused indulgence. I give him a small wave and he smiles back.
The next day he walks into the restaurant where I’m eating. It looks like I’ve got it the wrong way around – Seasick Steve is stalking me! That’s all right then. Weird, but all right. I appear to have wandered into the strange movie that is Seasick Steve’s life. This time it’s a French farce.