Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott Page B

between me and my music. I heard her once-devastating voice fall away like a murmur. I saw her face, pinched and sun-shrunken, and it held no more power over me. My authority over my music was one boundary she would not cross and in a moment of clear, crystalline certainty my mind and heart were made up. At last I had found the bedrock of my self-worth. There would be no scene – a phone call or letter from the removed calm of London would suffice – but Kate Lovecraft and I were indisputably over.
    I’d seen Gary Kurfirst in New York too but by now we were strangers to each other. He hadn’t been able to shift the business impasse between the record companies, and the promotion of This Is The Sea was still gridlocked. Though word of mouth would turn it into a gold record over the next few years, its campaign was stillborn. So, it seemed, was Kurfirst’s management of The Waterboys. I couldn’t figure out what the guy did for me at all. His dismal prognostications – ‘You have no touring prospects’ – offered no sign of light at the end of the chaotic tunnel, and when I boarded the British Airways flight out of JFK I knew that this relationship, too, was in terminal decline. I wanted out. Squeezed into seat 31F next to The Fellow Who Fiddles, I wrote down my feelings in verse on the back of my boarding pass, the beginnings of a new song called ‘Fisherman’s Blues’.
    In London I checked into a hotel in Bayswater – my landlord had sold my flat six weeks earlier – and began to get ready for the next round of auditions and our subsequent European tour. Then I got a call from an American lady I knew called Rovena Cardiel, a tenacious and pretty hustler who ran the London office of Geffen Records. She was buddies with Bob Dylan’s girlfriend and rang to tell me Bob was in town and that having heard and liked ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ he was inviting me to come and join in a recording session. I asked Rovena if I could bring Steve and Anto. She checked this out and the answer came back yes. So on a bleak November afternoon as the wind raced through the streets like a league of phantoms, the three of us jumped in a black cab with our instruments and headed up to north London.
    The studio was a converted church in Crouch End. We buzzed the doorbell and climbed a flight of stairs, emerging into what was once the vaulted nave of the church, now the studio’s live room. At the far end was a row of soundproofing screens and sticking up above one of them was a tousled head of curly hair. Yup, it was Bob, and as I crossed the floor this time there were no bouncers or Harvey Goldsmiths to block the way. We walked round the screens into an enclosure filled with enough instruments for a large band, and in the middle Bob was sitting on his own. His face, so familiar from film and photograph, looked more Eastern in real life, as if he were an inscrutable Chinaman or a Zen Master. He was dressed in jeans and red shirt with a blue scarf, and having shaken our hands (he seemed genuinely pleased to see us) he reverted to his afternoon’s pursuit, playing ceaseless lead guitar, coaxing burbling, bluesy sounds from a Fender Stratocaster.
    The rest of the band came out of a nearby control room and introduced themselves. The only ones I recognised were Clem Burke, the drummer from Blondie, and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, a gangly, nervous chap who functioned as ringmaster, cajoling everyone along and suggesting each next musical activity. We found spaces to sit and joined in on what turned out to be a slow, sexy instrumental. To our disappointment Bob didn’t sing, just kept playing that burbling guitar, even in the breaks between takes. In one such break Bob had a short word with each of us. He’d met Steve when In Tua Nua had played support to him in Ireland a year earlier and so he genially, if tactlessly, asked Steve, ‘How’s your band doing?’ For me he had some kind things to say about ‘The Whole Of The