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shape, clockwise through Italy and France, and finally to Ireland. After our performance in Dublin, during the intermission before The Pretenders’ set, I was ushered by a red-haired roadie into a dark and cordoned-off projection room. There U2’s Bono awaited me, wishing to proclaim himself a Waterboys fan and talk with me about C.S. Lewis. Seemingly too famous already to stand among his home crowd, secreted in a hidden corner with a man to do his fetching, Bono struck me as a kind of benign rock emperor – a mixture of fervour, self-import, curiosity and a mannered humbleness that felt about seventy per cent genuine. We hung out with each other for half an hour and shared a bottle of champagne, beginning an occasional friendship which flourished for six or seven years. And in the dim room, with the hubbub of the waiting audience roaring like a restless sea in the background, I sensed Bono was sizing me up, measuring my energy and intensity, my charisma and desire, like a tiger sniffing out territory, to see if I was a dangerous competitor with my eye on the same prize as him. And at that moment, before I discerned other more distant and mysterious mountain peaks to shoot for, I was. What’s more, I was measuring him up too.
    A week later the second Waterboys album, A Pagan Place , came out and we played the Glastonbury Festival for the first time. On our way there Z stopped to give me the gift of looking on Stonehenge with pristine eyes, and a few miles further on came another striking vision, our first glimpse of the fabled Glastonbury Tor, which rose ship-like on the horizon, its tower-crested profile Calvaryesque against the morning sky. I already knew the spiritual tradition of Glastonbury, of how it was said to be ‘the holiest earth in England’, and I couldn’t wait to play the festival that bore its name.
    The gig was a shock. We were the first band of the festival, a thirty-minute performance on Friday lunchtime. When we walked up the slippery earth-encrusted ramp to the rear of the Pyramid stage and stepped out into the light, there before me was the biggest audience I’d ever seen; fifteen or twenty thousand punters arrayed from skyline to skyline, most of whom hadn’t the foggiest idea who The Waterboys were. With no containing roof or walls, how was I to project my voice and songs into such a vast space and to so many faces? How could our presence fill this stage, this spectacle? By the time we returned to Glastonbury two years later, with the wind at our heels and victory in our grasp, I’d have solved these problems, but for now we were neophytes, dwarfed by the occasion, and played a blustery set that left the audience unmoved. Crowning our disappointment, half an hour after we came off stage an impatient Z, with some pressing but undisclosed London business of his own, announced he was leaving immediately in our van. For the band this meant leave now or stay and be stranded, but this was my first-ever rock festival and I wanted to soak it up. So drummer Kev and myself stayed and embarked on a sleepless twenty-four hour marathon of high jinks, reefer smoking and general wide-eyed and ecstatic exploration of the festival’s parallel universe. We also witnessed the greatest show I’ve ever seen at Glastonbury.
    It was late at night and all scheduled performances had finished. Six lads who’d brought their instruments to the festival were playing an impromptu set at the side of one of the rough thoroughfares. A small crowd had gathered around them as they played a homespun mix of dixieland-cum-swing with guitars, sax, trombone, percussion and a stand up bass. Their name, The Forest Hill Bums, was proclaimed on a piece of cardboard propped up in front of them and their songs were catchy, good-natured and innocent. I don’t know whether they intended to be humorous, but the little crowd found them so, especially the exertions of the hard-puffing trombone man whose eyeballs swung from side to side as