Mike Scott - Adventures of a Waterboy

Mike Scott

Adventures Of A Waterboy

A Jawbone Book

First Edition 2012

Published in the UK and the USA by

Jawbone Press

2a Union Court

2022 Union Road

London Sw4 6JP

England

www.jawbonepress.com

This edition published by permission of The Lilliput Press, Dublin, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Jacket Photograph: Sean OBrady

Editor: Tom Seabrook

Volume copyright 2012 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

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 theres no stop on this stretch of the route, but were 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 Ive 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 Ive 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 hearts 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 couldnt hear the accompanying music in my head, otherwise hed have known it wasnt banging at all, but a sophisticated rhythm to a magnificent soundtrack!

For its 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 dont transmit the inner content. And though I dont 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 wasnt 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 its continued ever since. Sometimes I wonder if when I die Ill 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 couldnt 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 McCartneys Beatle-ific Jude-ah, Jude-ah, Jude-ah! ad libs. They sounded fantastic. But when we played the tape back and heard a childs tinny voice making silly exclamations, sounding as if he had a head cold, it was another shock. Tape recorders couldnt 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 wasnt an absolute reality and humans werent 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 everyones elses were unique to them , but one day, when I came to make records myself, my own music could spark peoples imaginations in ways I couldnt 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. Id get a crush on a top twenty hit The Hollies Listen To Me, for example, or The Turtles Elenore and wouldnt 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 girls face would later elude my minds eye.

Pop records assailed my emotions, filling me with inexplicable longings. When I heard Jane Birkins sexy Je TAime 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 Ill 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 hed just learned called chords. I copied him and could soon play a rudimentary twelve-bar blues.

One of my mothers 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 mothers bookshelves. And while my mum was teaching at night school Id 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 mothers students, a man called John Milroy, gave me an old upright piano, which I taught myself to play. Every day Id get home from school, shut myself in my bedroom and bash away for hours. When I discovered the octave-hopping riff from Pink Floyds Careful With That Axe, Eugene, I took to improvising twenty-minute opuses around it. Then I bought the songbook for The Whos Tommy and would play the entire double album from start to finish, the whole bleeding rock opera, which I hardly even understood.