Book review: Adventures Of A Waterboy by Mike Scott

By Alastair McKay
Published on 05/08/2012 00:00

SOME years ago – around 1995, towards the end of the period covered by this autobiography – I interviewed Mike Scott.

Adventures Of A Waterboy

Mike Scott

Jawbone, £14.95

The Waterboys’ frontman had a reputation for being difficult, though “taciturn” might have been a better way of putting it. To warm him up, I took a copy of Jungleland, the fanzine he published while living in Edinburgh in the late 1970s. Yet he observed this relic with absolute dispassion. His past, it seemed, was a foreign country.

Happily – and this may be a question of happiness – Scott now seems reconciled to the value of looking back, albeit in a way which desaturates the torment. Possibly he was encouraged by the memoirs of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, artists who shaped his aesthetic vision, though Scott’s story is more rooted in detail than the sketchy parables in Dylan’s Chronicles or Smith’s Just Kids.

Fans seeking the meaning of songs may be disappointed. Scott is not really in the business of providing subtitles to this work, and seems to hold it almost as a matter of faith that nothing should interfere with the process of inhaling the mystery of a song, and dreaming. But he does ­offer clues to his restlessness, an urge which saw him split his punk-era group Another Pretty Face and form The Waterboys.

Mostly, it comes down to a mystical quest, which ­oscillates between something spiritual and something poetic. Quite boldly, he details the epiphany he experienced on moving to Findhorn, the spiritual community in Moray. He also describes his first gig in the community when he was upstaged by “a motley parade of men in drag, g-strings and feather strewn crash helmets”. Humility, it seems, was a key lesson.

But, just as significant, is a meeting, around Scott’s 40th birthday, with his estranged father. They get on, but Scott’s dad is not as he imagined he would be. “All those years I’d believed I was cast in the image of my father, I’d actually been casting him in the image of me.

The free spirit shifting from scene to scene was myself.”