MIKE SCOTT

His spiritual visions of The Big Music set The Waterboys on their epic voyage, though there would be storms, doldrums and men overboard. Through it all, a siren call has led him on. “Pan is my boss,” insists Mike Scott.

The Waterboys’ Arcadian visionary unravels the tangled skein of his career, in uncanny detail. “I remember scenes like photographs,” he tells John Mulvey.

It was Patti smith and John Cale who introduced Velvet lanier to the Portobello hotel in west london. a fanzine-writing edinburgh student, lanier soon enough reverted to his real name, mike scott, to steer the waterboys through a series of rousing musical epiphanies. First, though, he would turn up in late-’70s london on dauntless missions to meet his heroes. John Cale was stirred from his hotel room, drunk, in a rugby shirt, and in the company of notorious rock manager tony secunda, who laughed at scott’s flares. an opportunistic call from scott’s mother’s house in ayr brought an invite from Patti smith to come and stay with her entourage at the Portobello. “easter 1978,” remembers scott. “i got the midnight train down to euston. i got here about eight o’clock in the morning and, if i’d known then what i know now, i would never have disturbed a rock musician at that time. But she came down in a sort of long white lacey night garment, held my hand and thanked me for coming. ‘You’ll be oK,’ she said. ‘i’m going back to bed.’”

today, scott books a room for himself at the Portobello hotel, a genteel hangover from a previous age, whenever he is in london. the 60-year-old’s current home is dublin, where some of his wildest musical adventures in the

1980s were staged, but he also lived for a time here in ladbroke Grove, an area he romantically

describes as having “an eternal sunday afternoon quality”. these days he wears tortoiseshell glasses and the attire of the rock’n’roll dandy: cowboy hat, psychedelic blue shirt, black cowboy boots with gold pinstripes. a spare cowboy hat lies on his bed.

“it was the punk rock era,” he says now of his early interactions with Cale and smith. “everybody was fearless and everybody would try and blag their way into where the band was.” But a certain reckless confidence and spirit of enquiry have been trademarks of scott’s 40-year career, mostly at the helm of the waterboys: a series of musical and spiritual quests in search of the Big music and what lies beyond. in that time, he has played with Bob dylan, Van morrison and Crazy horse, and “made the mistake of addressing david Bowie as dave, which with hindsight i wish i had not done.” he has also jousted at length with Bono, and can reconstruct his life in astonishing detail. “i remember scenes like photographs,” he says – beginning with his family home in 1960s edinburgh…

What kind of music was played in your house when you were growing up?

We’d always have Radio 1 on in those days. Tony Blackburn and all that. My mum and dad had Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, and Swan Lake and the Elizabethan Serenade on a 78, and a lot of singles: All You Need Is Love, She Loves You… I loved The Beatles.

What was the first music that you bought? I started buying singles in the summer of ’68.

I bought so many records quickly – I must’ve got good pocket money. I had Last Night In Soho by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick And Tich, Mony Mony by Tommy James, Fire by Arthur Brown, Day Without Love by The Love Affair. They were all in the charts at the same time.

I discovered Dylan when I was about 12. I loved soul music as well. Tamla Motown. Up ’til I was 18 I probably knew everything in the charts every week. There wasn’t much I didn’t like, although like most Scottish people I can be very extreme in my tastes. I can be very unkind about things I don’t like. The Bay City Rollers, for example.

Your first proper band, Another Pretty Face, weren’t completely obscure, were they? You were signed to a major label.

Very briefly. We were single of the week in NME with our first record. We did a John Peel session. We signed to Virgin, ’round the corner from here in the Earl Of Lonsdale. November 1, 1979. But we didn’t last long at Virgin; we were brats. We thought it was our solemn duty to fight with the record label – we were very influenced by The Clash. We recorded an album. They didn’t like it. It wasn’t as good as we could have done, I think with hindsight, and when they wouldn’t put it out, we wouldn’t cooperate with them and got kicked off the label. A mutual agreement.

Were you 100 per cent committed to Another Pretty Face, even though it wasn’t entirely your own band?

Of course. I was committed to making music with the guitar player John Caldwell. We were pals from school.

There wasn’t a feeling that you were compromising your own art by collaborating?

I didn’t see it that way until later. I’d done some demos for Another Pretty Face in a studio in Islington in late ’81. I recorded two songs that were on the first Waterboys album, December and The Three Day Man, and a few others. I brought them to the band, but John wasn’t so keen on them. I began to think, “If I can make these songwriting demos on my own, maybe I should just keep doing that.” So I left the band.

December was the start of what was eventually called The Big Music?

It really was, yes. It was the double-tracking. A 12-string Danelectro in one speaker, a piano in the other speaker mimicking it. The two together sounded so big. And then I had two lead guitars, one in each speaker, which increased the scale. It was an accident in the studio – that’s how all the best ideas start. You could backdate it to my taste: I loved Bruce Springsteen’s epic records like Backstreets, Jungleland.

Were you worried you might undermine what you’d achieved on your own by having a proper band again?

No, but I really didn’t have a clue how to do it. I was going to get two lead guitarists and I’d be the rhythm in the middle. But I’d never met any guitar players I wanted to work with. I even put an ad in the NME for a guitar player and the only person that replied was Karl Wallinger, and he was a keyboard player. He came down to Nomis Studios where we were rehearsing. I already knew Anthony Thistlethwaite; he’d played sax on a Nikki Sudden album and Nikki was a mate of mine.

So can you remember the first time that you played live together as The Waterboys?

The first thing we did was The Old Grey Whistle Test, the week the first album came out in ’83. We didn’t have a bass player, so I had to get a mate of mine from Scotland to come down, and the drummer Kevin Wilkinson was away with China Crisis – a perennial problem for the first few years. So we got another chap in, and I remember Mark Ellen introducing us in his avuncular tones, and I wore a pink shirt. My first time on TV.

Our first real gig was in Frankfurt, February 18, 1984. Eight-piece band, Eddi Reader sang backing vocals. There was the brass section, and John Caldwell from Another Pretty Face came back to play all the lead guitar parts that I’d done on the demos, that he hadn’t played on, that broke up Another Pretty Face.

People soon started comparing you with U2. How did that feel?

Bemusing, because I’d never listened to U2. I was quite sceptical about it. I remember going to New York and this agent sat me down and said, “You’re going to be a big star.” I just couldn’t take that seriously. I’d come through the punk rock days, we all thought we were past being fooled like that.

I wanted to make great records and I wanted the maximum number of people to love them. But there was too much of a gulf between the support slots we were doing with U2 in places like Wembley, and the gigs we were doing ourselves. I was thinking about how to hold the audience in the Town & Country Club. That was difficult enough.

Do you think you were congenitally predisposed to writing anthems?

No. I don’t even think of The Whole Of The Moon as an anthem – it’s too angular, it’s got too many parts. All You Need Is Love is anthemic. I don’t think I write anthems. I learned from The Velvet Underground the glory of the two-chord song; it never gets quiet, it just keeps going. An absence of dynamics. They never stop, they just keep going bigger and bigger. It’s an elemental thing.

Your third album This Is The Sea, featuring The Whole Of The Moon, was a success in 1985, but then the band imploded on the tour supporting it. Why did that happen?

Wallinger had his own music to make [as World

Party] and was preoccupied with his own recordings. Nigel Grainge from Ensign, the guy to whom I was signed, spotted Karl playing with me and gave Karl a deal, and that helped take him away from The Waterboys. If Nigel wanted to keep me and Karl together, he probably made the wrong move.

Did Wallinger really refer to you on-stage as ‘Bruce Fucking Springsteen’?

Yes. “You think you’re Bruce Fucking Springsteen And The E Street Band.” But not in front of an audience, it was at a soundcheck. He wouldn’t have stayed standing up if it’d been in front of an audience.

And what’s your relationship like these days?

We don’t talk. We last talked 20 years ago, 25 years ago.

Around this time, the fiddler Steve Wickham became your most important musical collaborator. What has made that connection so enduring?

A combination of musical and personal compatibility. He came over from Dublin to play with me on The

Pan Within [on This Is The Sea]. I’d heard him on a Sinéad O’Connor demo tape that Karl had recorded. And Karl said to me, “This girl’s pretty good.” And she was, but what really got my ear was the fiddler behind her. I could tell this guy was my musical brother. I’d always loved the Rolling Thunder Revue, with Scarlet Rivera’s fiddle-playing behind Dylan. And I thought I’d found my equivalent of that. Soon he was playing on every track on stage, and soon the songs would be written for the easy organic interplay between a single guitar and a single fiddle, more than a massive layered rock sound.

We did three or four months touring This Is The Sea with Karl in the band, playing the album as it sounded. And then the change came and we continued to tour. A new door opened, at a time when people were saying we were going to be so big. The music changed by its own organic timescale and I wasn’t about to stop that happening – it was far too exciting.

From 1986 to 1988, you worked through a huge amount of songs, studios, producers and musicians during the making of [fourth album] Fisherman’s Blues, mostly in Ireland. Was the journey of making that music almost more important than what it ended up as?

It really was. It had its difficulties, too. I knew how to record a band playing live in the studio. But I didn’t have the knowledge and the technical ability to then process what we’d recorded. What I’d call ‘Neil Young skills’. He knows that you put it out because it feels good, even if it’s not perfect. If my guitar was out of tune for a verse, or the drummer played too loud, I’d stop. I’d say, “I’ve got to redo it, but let’s do it with someone else.” And then suddenly we would have five versions with different people of the same song. I didn’t have the skill to close. On the Fisherman’s Blues reunion tour in 2013, you made a speech about how the ’80s were “rubbish”, against synths and drum machines and “gestural stadium rock”. Did you feel like rebels?

God, yes. We felt we were out on a limb on our own. We did a gig on the Greenpeace ship, and we got the soundman to play Hank Williams as the pre-gig tape – that’s what we wanted to sound like.

How were you fitting in with the rock cognoscenti in Dublin? You describe Bono in your autobiography as having “a mannered humbleness that’s at least 70 per cent genuine”.

We had a jostling relationship with U2. At that time I thought we were doing things they couldn’t possibly do, and I’d notice funny things. We’d play acoustic live on an Irish TV show and two weeks later they’d be doing it on the same show. We couldn’t steal their thunder because they were so competitive. We toured with them and they’d be listening to us every night. I used to share tapes with them; I remember giving Bono a tape of our first day at Windmill Lane [a studio in Dublin] when we did Meet Me At The Station. It’s got the line, “If you see God’s country”, and then he’s got a song called In God’s Country. I didn’t invent that phrase, but this is the way things go.

But then you moved the recording to the village of Spiddal in County Galway, and suddenly The Waterboys started to investigate Irish folk music?

I was hanging out in the west of Ireland, which was a world I remembered from my childhood holidays. And then the trad music of the west of Ireland began to have its spell on me. My grandmother was a native Gaelic speaker. I remember her listening to Gaelic music

“We had a jostling relationship with U2. I thought we were doing things they couldn’t possibly do.”

on the radio and it seemed like a lost world. When I went to the west of Ireland, I found that world was still intact.

Was it annoying when people said you were appropriating Irishness?

Oh, very annoying. I felt it was my own culture that I was getting back in touch with. And I felt it was OK for me to work with Irish musicians. Why the hell not? I wasn’t dabbling – I hadn’t gone in for a weekend and got one of The Chieftains to play on my record or something. And I hadn’t gone there as a tax exile; all that period I was still a British citizen paying my taxes here. I wasn’t like Spandau Ballet, availing of the lenient Irish tax laws. I was there for the music.

Fisherman’s Blues eventually became your most successful album, but were you satisfied with it at the time?

No, not at all. I had lost my perspective. The 10 tracks as constituted on the record were just the best I could do in terms of finding some coherent picture to present to the listening public. But if I’d had the distance and the awareness I had five years later, it would have been a double album. It would’ve come out much earlier. It would’ve been three different albums.

After Fisherman’s Blues, you doubled down on the folk sound with your next album, 1990’s Room To Roam.

“I don’t think I write anthems. I learned from The Velvet Underground the glory of the two-chord song.Ó

Not deliberately, and in my mind Room To Roam was moving away from that, with a big Beatles influence: the sound effects; the gentle return of the electric guitar. But I’d been smoking for years and my voice was weak. When it was good, it was great, but when we recorded the album and [Dylan producer] Barry Beckett began to make us look at how everything was interacting, we found things weren’t adding up to make a great record. But it was wonderful live.

But once the record came out you decided to sack the drummer, Noel Bridgeman. Didn’t that precipitate the split of that line-up?

That’s why Steve [Wickham] left. Anthony [Thistlethwaite] and I took the decision to replace Noel without consulting Steve, which was a mistake. It was very difficult, going out on tour all around the world with Room To Roam without him.

…With just a four-piece electric band.

Tough. Back to punk. Bracing. It got better as the tour went on. We did about 70 or 80 shows. First we played in a big top in the Highlands and Islands, God help us. Once the brass section came in, things settled because we had a wide sound. But it was very tough without them.

That split in 1990 precipitated a long period of questing. And whereas in the past the questing seemed a satisfying process for you, was it more frustrating in the ‘90s?

So much happened. A lot of personal things. My marriage didn’t work out. I learned how to meditate. I discovered Findhorn [a religious community in Scotland], which was very exciting. It was more exciting than any of the musical things that were happening to me at the time.

After Steve left, I was lost musically. He was my great collaborator, and with him gone the various parts didn’t fit together any more. I moved to New York, but I was burned out after five years of leading the band, heavy tours, the heavy burden of producing the records. And my confidence was a little off. I made the Dream Harder record [1993] and I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I was all there mentally, but I didn’t have the energy. I was burned out. I stopped drinking and smoking pot, and the stimulants that had been part of my life for a long time were gone. As anyone who’s gone through that change can confirm, it takes a lot of energy to get back to normal. And I was meeting musicians in New York who were great, but I just couldn’t find a new Waterboys.

When you moved to live at Findhorn in 1992 did it provide a structure for all the spiritual thinking you’d done over the years?

Definitely, a system. Findhorn was a fantastic experience. It’s definitely not a Christian community. The roots of the community would be more Rosicrucian. Esoteric. One of the founding figures of Findhorn was a man called Ogilvie Crombie from Edinburgh, who’d had encounters with Pan that he had written about. There was a big tradition at the community of Pannish thought.

I was very at home.

You’ve written a lot about Pan over the years. Do you still align yourself with him?

Oh yes, he’s my boss. I’ve encountered him, but not in the sense that I’ve met a chap in a field with cloven hooves and horns. Not any more than encountering a bloke in the clouds with a big beard saying, “Do this, do that.” But I have encountered the spirit of Pan. Absolutely. And I’ve seen Pan in my own face.

It’s a connection with the energy that humans would name Pan. It’s a personal freedom, personal sovereignty. That’s a great word, sovereignty. The right of the individual to define his or herself, and sovereignty over one’s body, over one’s thought, over one’s belief system. All of that I think is Pannish. Bohemian too, although Bohemianism also involves surrender to other influences like alcoholism and drugs. Those are surrendering personal sovereignty; the drug addict has surrendered the sovereignty to the substance.

So do you think that the Pannish imperative is the purest possible manifestation of the rock’n’roll ethos, if you take away those kinds of subversive Bohemian influences?

Well those subversive influences were great. In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s it was incredibly necessary to shock society out of its rut. I think there’s a real Pannishness to the Stones.

While you were at Findhorn, you ended up on the front pages of the News Of The World and the Sunday Mail in Scotland.

They’d heard there was some kind of rock star staying up at this weirdo community, and they’d read some interview where I’d said I’d given up drinking. I was never that heavy a drinker. It’s not that big a story. They sort of put two and two together and made 11 and doorstepped me. I remember the very funny headline: Cult Saves Rock Star From Drink Hell. A few weeks later I was doing a turn at one of the community concerts and I said, “I’m here to do my act: Drunk Saves Cult From Rock Star.”

In 2000, after a couple of solo albums, you relaunched The Waterboys with A Rock In The Weary Land, a psychedelic rock record using loops and contemporary production techniques. Was that the start of your musical direction for the past two decades?

Yes, I think so. I’d been very out of touch and when I made the second solo album, Still Burning, I wasn’t really doing anything with production. The songs were OK, but the end result was too plain, as generic as a record I’m involved with could ever be. After that, I decided I had to refind my way into the exploratory universe. I noticed in a newsagents an issue of Select magazine: The Hundred Most Important People In The World. I listened to every single person on that list, making sure I understood where music had gone and what I’d missed. I was like Rip Van Winkle. I’d been really out of that stream since I’d left London in 1985.

2017’s Out Of All This Blue seemed to be of the moment, a very spontaneous reaction to the new romantic situation that you found yourself in [Scott married the Japanese artist, Megumi ‘Rokudenashiko’ Igarashi, that year]. But this year’s Where The Action Is – specifically the songs Ladbroke Grove Symphony and London Mick, about Mick Jones – seems very nostalgic, telling stories from your past.

Yes, but it’s not deliberate. The passage of time has something to do with that. The amount of time between those events gives me a different perspective. I’m not sure “historical” is quite the right word, but they’re culturally significant times that are seen in a different light now.

What’s next?

Probably a mash-up album under a different name, maybe The Water People Versus Puck Fingers. It’s mostly finished. I’ve got a lot of tracks where I put on a funny voice, and if I put them on a Waterboys record people would be very upset. And I’m looking at a This Is The Sea box set, but there’s no hurry. There’s a beautiful 13-minute long version of This Is The Sea, Karl Wallinger’s playing a drum machine by hand, beautifully, and I’m playing guitar and singing loads of different verses that no one’s ever heard. There’s talk of doing an album of pre-Waterboys stuff as well, a double album, but that requires a lot of archaeology and I’d have to go to Findhorn and get my old cassettes.

Do you think you’ve always been a solo artist, one way or another?

It’s a funny thing. I don’t think of myself as a solo artist and yet in some ways I am. I made my solo records the same way [as my Waterboys records], just following my own path. I’m smart. I don’t think my first response is the necessary arbiter of whether an idea is good or not. When Wickham played on Fisherman’s Blues, I never said a word. But if someone’s playing something that doesn’t work, I can tell. It’s just part of my musical skill set. I know when to say nothing and say it well.