Adventures of a Waterboy By Mike Scott Lilliput,€25:In the mid-1980s pop fans fell under the spell of The Waterboys and discos shook to the stomping beat of The Whole of the Moon. The band's singer-shaman-poet, Mike Scott, became a folk-rock guru for a generation of floppy-haired strummers, and buskers everywhere who bashed out their own versions of Fisherman's Blues and This Is the Sea.
For Scott, The Waterboys were the culmination of years spent trying to re-create the “big music” that had been playing in his head since childhood. In his autobiography, Scott introduces us to his nine-year-old self, travelling to school in Edinburgh on the bus, stamping his feet on the upstairs floor in time to the music only he can hear. “Sometimes I wonder if when I die I’ll hear the whole inner soundtrack of my life flashing by in one great mad cacophonous moment.”
This is the story of a man who is given to casting powerful spells on his listeners but who is also quick to fall under spells – and not always good ones.
As a student he became enthralled with the punk poet Patti Smith, and when she came to Britain to perform he took a train to London to interview her for a fanzine he and his friends were publishing. He ended up staying with the band at their hotel and got an insight into the alchemy of being a working musician.
Swimming against the tide of angular-haired New Romantics, The Waterboys made their first splash with the single A Boy Called Johnny, then parted the waters with the seminal albums A Pagan Place and This Is the Sea. The Whole of the Moon was Scott’s tour de force, a riot of sounds and lyrical images that retains its urgent power to this day.
By the time the band played the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 1986, Scott had become a wizard, a true star. That same year he made a fateful visit to Ireland, and was suddenly away with the fairies. Critics said he had lost the plot, but Scott was under a new, benevolent spell. In Yeats he discovered a poet worthy of his devotion, in the west of Ireland he found his spiritual home, and in swapping the big, portentous sound for a simpler traditional style he developed a new dimension to his creativity. He threw himself into trad sessions and found himself comfortable among a new set of compadres, including “the fellow who fiddles”, Steve Wickham, and the box player Sharon Shannon. He also married an Irish woman, Irene.
Fisherman’s Blues was the first fruit of his Irish adventure, and it sold almost as well as This Is the Sea, but its follow-up, Room to Roam, revealed a man too caught up in his bucolic idyll to see the wood for the trees. The album, as he admits, “cost us our hip quotient”.
Eventually he’d learn to balance his two disparate muses and create big music with a simple, honest heart.
This Waterboy’s adventures are far from over, but the ones so far are worth reading not only for his evident passion for the music but also for his poetic writing style. It conjures up vivid images of such places as Aran Mór, Spiddal, Findhorn, Edinburgh, London, New York and Dublin and paints a picture of a man who is not merely roaming but is on a true spiritual journey.
Kevin Courtney
Selected Prose
By Derek Mahon
Gallery Press, €15.95
This collection takes in subjects as diverse as sheds and JG Farrell, the BBC and JP Donleavy, but they are prisms through which to view the complexities and richness of writing’s possibilities.
Mahon’s essays betray a fascination with the usefulness of things, with acquiring a greater understanding of practical, as well as poetic, living, something his essay on Philip Larkin (Paws) ably explores.
Pieces on John Betjeman and Elizabeth Bowen take on questions about identity and politics, as well as providing colourful evocations of the writers’ relationships to Ireland, where the poetic life is deftly linked to the practical.
There are personal recollections, such as Dublin in the Sixties, in which Mahon humorously recalls some of the undergraduate population of Trinity College, “most of them the chinless-wonder variety, much given to shouting, vomiting and whimsical affectations like the false beard”. This piece, however, evolves into an affectionate remembrance of his friend Jeremy Lewis and a review of Lewis’s novel Playing for Time, which could easily be partnered with his essay on JP Donleavy, The Sadness Lurks So Deep. Both are thoughtful pieces that consider whether a sense of remove from a community can affect understanding of it: with Donleavy “a subtle music escapes him”; with Lewis “his obvious Englishness might have been against him”. But Mahon praises aspects of their writing, asking, “can a poet not invent his own language? Yes, but he mustn’t pretend it’s the real one.”
An essay on Raymond Chandler resuscitates less obvious aspects of his work: “obsessed with evil”, it possesses both “cultural nostalgia” and “lyrical plangency”. Meanwhile, the beautiful piece on Patrick MacDonogh – a contemporary of MacNeice and Kavanagh “but, unlike them, out of print for a generation” – is a radiant, instructive elegy.
The “saturnine” MacNeice looms large, and Mahon’s explorations of his poetry and impulse refract back to his own. Mahon writes that MacNeice’s philosophy was one “of shining surfaces, ‘the sunlight on the garden’, the ‘dazzle on the sea’. The Irish light in his head was a metaphor for the variety of human experience and personality”.
Similarly, light is everywhere in Mahon’s essays, in titles (Ghosts in the Sunlight, Yeats and the Lights of Dublin) and content. He shares Bowen’s fascination with the “mysterious white light” she writes about in The Death of the Heart, the light that unlocks a subtler, more emotional world. Because although Mahon’s prose contains words such as “mystery” and “lurks”, it is the unlocking of the mystery that is the real gift.
Siobhán Kane
Granta 119: Britain
Granta, £12.99
The UK is a political term and England is, well, England. But what, or whose, is the amorphous entity known as Britain? That’s the question the spring 2012 edition of Granta sets out to examine, using literary, poetic and visual-arts sources.
For an Irish reader, the Union Jack on the spine may be a bit of a turn-off, but as the pages go by it turns out Britain is just a little bit Irish too. Or maybe it’s the other way around. A chunk from Mario Vargas Llosa’s fictionalised biography of Roger Casement, The Dream of the Celt, and an extract from a novel in progress by Rachel Seiffert, Hands Across the Water – a piquant portrait of an Orange marching band in Glasgow – certainly defy us to deny our shared and tangled heritages.
There’s much about contemporary British life that is depressing, of course, and some of it is eyeballed here: the violence of badger-baiting in Cynan Jones’s The Dig, the consequences of gun crime in Mark Haddon’s The Gun, the sadness of casual sex in Sam Byers’s Some Other Katherine. But there’s also surprising tenderness in Mishka Henner’s visual spread The Gleaners – a composite image made up of a sequence of male faces caught on CCTV cameras – and in Simon Armitage’s poem The Making of the English Landscape, with its striking reconstruction of a satellite image of England at dusk: “the land /like a shipwreck’s carcass raised on a sea-crane’s hook, /nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones.”
The contributor’s list is a who’s who of the big names in contemporary British writing – Robert Macfarlane, John Burnside, Don Paterson, Jon McGregor, Adam Foulds – and the variety of styles and points of view ensures that by the end of the volume the question of British identity is muddier than ever. Which, of course, is as it should be.
Arminta Wallace
