Adventures of a Waterboy (Remastered) , livre ebook

Jawbone Press - Mike Scott

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97 pages

English

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I was six or seven when I noticed the music in my head. It was there in the classroom, on the football pitch, at the dinner table, when I went to sleep and when I woke up. And it’s continued ever since.

As a teenager in Scotland, Mike Scott played in punk and garage bands, hitchhiked to see Bob Dylan play, and scammed his way into Patti Smith’s inner circle during an eyeopening weekend in London. In 1983 he formed The Waterboys with an ever-rotating cast of collaborators including The Fellow Who Fiddles (Steve Wickham) and The Human Saxophone (Anthony Thistlethwaite) and soon found international success with the "big music" sound of songs like 'Don’t Bang The Drum' and 'The Whole Of The Moon'.

In 1986 Scott travelled to Ireland to spend a week with Wickham and ended up staying for six years. During that time he developed a deep interest in roots and folk music, resulting in The Waterboys’ bestselling album, Fisherman’s Blues. After scaling the heights of success and moving the band to New York, he followed another fascination and went to live in the Findhorn spiritual community in Northern Scotland.

Adventures Of A Waterboy is an evocative memoir by one of the great British songwriters of the past four decades. It is an honest and revealing work, by turns heartfelt and funny, that tells the story of a cocky Scot with a sound in his head and his lifelong efforts to reproduce that sound a story that runs from teenage fandom to international stardom, from Scotland to New York City and beyond. This remastered edition adds ten "extra scenes" written and handpicked by Scott, plus a selection of rare images not included in the original book.

Sujets

Musique

Histoire de la musique

Music

Musician

Individual Composer

Informations

Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	11 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911036364
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	6 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ADVENTURES OF A WATERBOY
REMASTERED
MIKE SCOTT

A Jawbone ebook
Second edition 2017
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court
20–22 Union Road
London SW4 6JP
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2017 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Mike Scott. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

CONTENTS
Chapter 1: MUSIC IN THE HEAD
Chapter 2: THE REALM OF THE TEENAGE BAND
Chapter 3: WHERE’S THAT SCOTTISH BOY?
Chapter 4: A FRIEND CALLED Z
Chapter 5: THE BLACK BOOK AND THE MOON
Chapter 6: DON’T FORGET TO GET ON THE BUS
Chapter 7: YOU GUYS ARE THE WHIZZ!
Chapter 8: THE POWER OF THE MUSIC GIVES EVERYBODY WINGS
Chapter 9: GO SLOWLY AND YOU MIGHT SEE SOMETHING
Chapter 10: MANSION OF MUSIC
Chapter 11: SHARON HAS A TUNE FOR EVERY BEAT OF HER HEART
Chapter 12: LIKE A HOUSE OF CARDS COLLAPSING
Chapter 13: A WALK IN THE LAKE SHRINE
Chapter 14: LOCKDOWN IN THE BIG APPLE
Chapter 15: THE PHILOSOPHY ROOM
Chapter 16: SOME KIND OF POP STAR LIVING UP AT CLUNY
Chapter 17: MY WANDERINGS IN THE WEARY LAND
Chapter 18: A MAN WITH A FIDDLE AND A DOG AT NUMBER 12A
Chapter 19: HOOP DANCING
Appendix 1: OTHER SCENES
Appendix 2: VISIONS OF STRAWBERRY FIELDS
Appendix 3: NOTES
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter 1
MUSIC IN THE HEAD
On a late afternoon in autumn 1968 an Edinburgh bus rumbles down cobbled streets. On its upstairs front seat, wearing a blue school uniform and dreaming through the window over the spires and rooftops, is a nine-year-old me. Music is running through my head, as always, a mighty stramash of pop melodies learned from the radio, only grander and louder and longer because in my head the music does whatever I want it to. And for accompaniment my feet are beating rhythm on the steel floor of the bus. The sound is bright and metallic and it has a depth, too, a reverberating blurred quality that delights my ear.
Then something unusual happens. I take this bus home every day and there’s no stop on this stretch of the route, but we’re slowing to a halt. I hear the muted sound of a door slamming, then heavy feet clambering noisily up the stairs – which, I note, are also metal, with the same pleasing reverberating sound.
Suddenly a huge man in a black blazer is towering over me, his face flushed and the skin of his cheeks quivering with anger. Glaring at me as if I’ve done him some terrible ill, he roars, ‘Stop that bloody banging!’ With a pang of horror I realise this is the bus driver and his head has been directly under the floor I’ve been drumming my feet on for the last fifteen minutes.
I splutter an apology and the driver turns and descends the stairs. I hear his cabin door slamming shut again and a few seconds later the bus starts moving. My heart’s beating fast; being accosted by a furious stranger is shocking enough for a nine-year-old, and I was scared for a few moments there. But even more shocking is the realisation that the driver couldn’t hear the accompanying music in my head, otherwise he’d have known it wasn’t ‘banging’ at all, but a sophisticated rhythm to a magnificent soundtrack!
For it’s a rude awakening to learn that the sound in my imagination is only in my imagination, and that its outward manifestations – foot-stomping, whistling or rhythmic beating with fingers on a schoolroom desktop – don’t transmit the inner content. And though I don’t yet know it, figuring out ways to let other people hear this music will become the occupation of my adult life.
I was six or seven when I first noticed the music in my head. It was there in the classroom, on the football pitch, at the dinner table, when I went to sleep and when I woke up. There was never a moment when it wasn’t running in some form or other, whether melodies or rhythms, pop singles from start to finish or instrumental extravaganzas that spun perpetually for a day. And it’s continued ever since. Sometimes I wonder if when I die I’ll hear the whole however-many-years-long inner soundtrack of my life flashing by in one great mad cacophonous moment.
The fateful incident with the bus driver was only one of several that told me if I wanted to express this music in a way that other people could perceive it, I had to somehow process it and give it objective reality. Two solutions presented themselves: making music out loud with an instrument or recording myself on tape. I couldn’t play an instrument so I tried the latter, getting together with my school friend Mike Graham and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. We did a version of The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, singing and clapping the ‘nah nah’ outro together into the microphone. Just like on the bus, the whole soundtrack was running in my head, and as I mimicked McCartney’s Beatle-ific ‘Jude-ah, Jude-ah, Jude-ah!’ ad libs they sounded fantastic. But when we played the tape back and heard a child’s tinny voice making silly exclamations, sounding as if he had a head cold, it was another shock. Tape recorders couldn’t hear the music in my head either!
Another revelation came when I discovered that everyone saw different pictures in their imagination when they heard the psychedelic outro of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. I assumed the images I ‘saw’ when I listened to any piece of music were somehow encoded in the record. Surely everybody knew the outro of ‘Strawberry Fields’ represented a procession of brightly clothed Beatles jigging in and out of traffic during rush hour in an Asian city, pursued by water buffaloes and snake charmers? But when I asked my friends, they imagined nothing at all or saw totally different images.
This was disappointing because it meant that what I perceived wasn’t an absolute reality and humans weren’t all connected in one big communal imagination. Yet it was exciting at the same time, for not only did it mean the images I saw were unique to me, and that everyone’s else’s were unique to them , but one day, when I came to make records myself, my own music could spark people’s imaginations in ways I couldn’t dream of.
Making records became my sole ambition during a sweet summer towards the end of the sixties when I started falling in love with pop singles; the same explosion of feelings that happened again a few years later when I became interested in girls. I’d get a crush on a top twenty hit – The Hollies’ ‘Listen To Me’, for example, or The Turtles’ ‘Elenore’ – and wouldn’t be able to breathe till I heard it again. Its melodies would hang tantalisingly beyond the call of my memory in the same way a newly loved girl’s face would later elude my mind’s eye.
Pop records assailed my emotions, filling me with inexplicable longings. When I heard Jane Birkin’s sexy ‘Je T’Aime’ at the age of ten I felt teetering towers of fire in my chest. And black music: Motown, The Elgins singing ‘Heaven Must Have Sent You’, The Four Tops ripping through ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’: their urgent voices seemed to make shapes in the air, dark-flashing and tangible, full of a flavour I later recognised as a cocktail of pain and desire, which awoke me as an adult ahead of my time.
So did the split-up of my parents. One of the last times I saw my father was on my tenth birthday when he came to the house and gave me an acoustic guitar and a Rolling Stones album. The guitar leaned against my bedroom wall, a sacred mystery, for a year, until one day the same school friend, Mike Graham, useful fellow, showed me some things he’d just learned called chords. I copied him and could soon play a rudimentary twelve-bar blues.
One of my mother’s students, a twenty-year-old Dylan-mad piano player called Leonard, used to come round and make up songs on my guitar to entertain me. I realised I could make up songs too. Soon I had sheaves of papers covered with lyrical attempts influenced by writers like Hermann Hesse, who I found on my mother’s bookshelves. And while my mum was teaching at night school I’d perform concerts in front of the living-room mirror to enthusiastic audiences that applauded wildly in the auditorium of my imagination. Just like the inner music, they did whatever I wanted.
My songwriting world was a private universe inhabited by one and its gods were Dylan, Lennon and George Harrison who lent their riffs to my creations and watched my progress from posters on the wall. Then another of my mother’s students, a man called John Milroy, gave me an old upright piano, which I taught myself to play. Every day I’d get home from school, shut myself in my bedroom and bash away for hours. When I discovered the octave-hopping riff from Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, I took to improvising twenty-minute opuses around it. Then I bought the songbook for The Who’s Tommy and would play the entire double album from start to finish, the whole bleeding rock opera, which I hardly even understood.
I couldn’t read music; I just followed the chord symbols and played everything my own way, using one finger for the bass and three fingers for chords and melodies. This created odd, lopsided rhythms, which years later resulted in the style of Waterboys songs like ‘A Girl Called Johnny’ and ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. When several notes on the piano broke, their strings snapped through constant hammering, it never occurred to me to get them replaced. I just learned how to play using the black notes: consequently every song I wrote for several years in the late seventies was in D flat.
At sixteen I entered another world: the realm of the teenage band, a perilous domain from which my personal songwriting universe remained a secret. Subjecting my songs to the criticism of my bandmates, the rhythm-guitar-playing Caldwell brothers and lead guitarist Davy Flynn,