Read Online Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott - Free Book Online

band, though not as yet the ability to articulate it in a way that an agent or anyone else could understand. Consequently I always felt Steve to be impatient with me, and all the band perceived his presence at our shows as a pressure. Yet Z remained aloof from this feeling and he and Steve developed an understanding which allowed our train to keep rolling.
    These were rough beginnings for The Waterboys. Though we’d been on radio and TV and were getting known in London, we were a long way from being established nationally. Many of our early concerts were poorly attended. We stiffed in Bournemouth and Folkestone, battled with the potted plants and disco lights of Busby’s nightclub in Redhill, and finally met our nemesis at the New Ocean Club in Cardiff, a vast hangar of a place populated at show time by all of six fans. By some miracle this event turned into that rare but blessed phenomenon that every up-and-coming band experiences once: the scantily attended gig that turns into the greatest night of everyone’s life. Those six guys came down the front and danced unselfconsciously to our rough but enthusiastic set like we were the best band in the world. And for those sixty minutes, I guess we were. They were certainly the greatest audience.
    Things revved up when we were booked as support act on a twenty-date European tour with The Pretenders, then at the peak of their popularity. But when I turned up to meet everyone at the Westbourne Grove cafe that served as our touring departure point, the others had all got themselves variations of the dreaded then-fashionable angular haircuts, rendering me a long-haired stranger in my own band. Kevin had a new-romantic wedge with a fringe that jutted several inches from his brow, curly-locked Karl looked like a pruned bush, while Anthony had been to a trendy Kensington salon called Antenna where apparently a trainee had gone experimental on him, resulting in a look halfway between Billy The Whiz and a Mohawk. All my ideals of what a rock’n’roll band should look like were severely challenged. But at least Z was still his usual scruffy self and with my mate reassuringly at the controls we drove off, angular haircuts and all, on our greatest adventure thus far.
    Touring as a support band is a fantastic way to see the world. We played nineteen towns in nine countries in a month and only had to play forty minutes at each show, leaving plenty time to hang out and explore the great cities of Europe. And because we drove everywhere the journey had an epic, real-time quality. Then there was the onstage education: as the tour moved across the continent I began to understand the differences between the audiences, and therefore the national characters of the various countries. Nordic punters were earnestly soulful, signifying appreciation by applauding in slow communal handclaps (a phenomenon deeply unnerving at first, for the same thing means impatience and contempt in Britain); the French were hard to please but passionate once roused; Italians were combustible, like dry tinder ready to be sparked.
    In these pre-euro times, we had to change money every few days – lira to kroner to marks and so on – and generally had no idea of the value of what we were spending. It quickly became confusing, and in a fateful motorway service station on the Swiss border, hungry but with no usable cash, Karl Wallinger pushed it too far. He complained bitterly to Z that he had no Swiss francs, with the whinging implication that it was all Z’s fault as usual. Z, stretched beyond all reasonable limits after three weeks in foreign countries with Karl, blew his Scottish gasket and in one athletic movement spun round and landed a wild haymaker of a punch on Karl’s protruding jaw, knocking him, poetically enough, into a rack of Europop cassettes.
    From Switzerland, and despite Karl’s punctured but soon restored dignity, we continued to Berlin, where Thistlethwaite smoked so much reefer his head changed