Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott Read Free Book Online

moved, Ed and I were there. By the time we were blagging our way into Joe Strummer’s hotel or Bob Geldof’s dressing room, however, I’d given Ed a punk name, Z, pronounced like the letter ‘Zed’. He reciprocated – amused by the pseudonym I’d assumed for my fanzine writing, Velvet Lanier, he unfailingly referred to me as ‘Lainay-er’.
    Thus appellated we went on our myriad expeditions. We hitchhiked to concerts in Glasgow and St Andrews and expanded our operations to include lightning trips to London, where we learned how to get into the press offices of record companies by brandishing copies of our fanzine and saying we wanted to write articles about their acts. Rich pickings awaited: places on concert guest lists, snippets of privileged information, glossy photos, free singles and albums. Through all of this Z was the main instigator, the canny operator with a eye on the main chance, for the way in, behind, or through. No surprise then that when it came time for me to become a professional musician myself, I knew who had to be my manager.
    And Z had other talents that qualified him as a rock Svengali. He was incredibly tight with money. In that first year at university he once took it upon himself, as a kind of ideological challenge, to live for a week on eighteen pence. I don’t know why specifically eighteen pence but I kept tabs on him through the seven days, and he really did it. He bought some cheap fruit and made it last all week, walked everywhere, contrived to get in free to any concerts that were happening, didn’t drink (or at least didn’t pay for his own) and ate only the meals that were provided free at the university halls of residence. And not only was he canny with money, he had willpower of iron. Indeed, he had to be my manager. What’s more, he was forthright and fearless. Some might have classified this as rudeness, for example the American punk rocker Richard Hell, who’d been famously fired from the band Television by his ex-friend, now sworn enemy, Tom Verlaine. But this didn’t perturb Z who sat in Richard’s hotel bedroom the night we interviewed him, vehemently pronouncing Verlaine’s album Marquee Moon ‘a great masterpiece’.
    Others might have thought him aggressive, like the queue jumpers in the overnight line to buy Bob Dylan concert tickets in Glasgow in the summer of 1978, at whom he snarled, ‘Oi! Cut the crap!’ Yes he had to be my manager! And soon he was.
    We went to see Dylan play at Earls Court in London. Bob transcended all the Old or New Wave stuff just like David Bowie, and nothing would have kept Z and me from attending his first British concerts in twelve years. And somehow, despite having been way back in the queue for tickets, we’d scored front-row seats for the first night. Only we didn’t know it. The tickets said ‘Row A’, which we took to mean something like the first row of the third upper circle in some dim distant balcony of the arena. But when we arrived at the vast barn of Earls Court, Bob already on stage and into his first number, the steward walked us to our seats not up the metal stairs or round the cavernous flanks of the venue but straight down a wide walkway through the middle. We followed him, getting ever closer and closer to the front, our disbelief and delight growing with every step. Finally he indicated our seats in the first row, right in front of Bob.
    To two young sprogs from Scotland, being so close to Dylan performing on stage was like being in a beautiful, impossible dream. We copped every grin and gurn Bob pulled, hung on his every tattered poetic word, dug his band, grumbled to each other about his backing singers, got the goose bumps when he sang ‘Just Like A Woman’, and looked in mystification on the cabaret-style lightning flashes embroidered down the sides of his out-of-fashion flares. The show was slick, good rather than great, and a long way short of the brilliant Rolling Thunder shows he’d played in America