Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

drummer).
    As I’d intended, Z became our manager and quickly succeeded at his first job, finding us a rehearsal room. Well, it was a cave really – a rectangular cube hewn from damp stone in the maze of medieval catacombs under Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The place was run by an owl-faced entrepreneur called Ian McCain who lived, unbelievably, in a flat in the catacombs with his wife and kids. To get to our cave we had to haul our gear along numberless fetid tunnels, past the sounds of a dozen other bands rehearsing in the same subterranean purgatory as ourselves. It was Dickensian, unhealthy and probably illegal, but we didn’t care. It was where our music lived.
    Then Z started booking us shows. He was good at it from the start, finding it easy to be business-like with agents and promoters, securing us support slots at the Edinburgh venues of the day like Tiffany’s Ballroom or sending us further afield on jaunts to Glasgow and Aberdeen. Next he formed a record company for our first single, a piece of spunky doggerel called ‘All The Boys Love Carrie’. He named the label after a Richard Hell song, ‘New Pleasures’ (reparations, perhaps, for his Marquee Moon gaffe), and by the spring of 1979 our little record was being played regularly on the John Peel radio show and was Single of the Week in the NME . We were off!
    The next six months were exciting. Doors opened and obstacles crumbled, local audiences grew and the world, it seemed, was ours for the taking. In the wake of the ‘Carrie’ single we were wooed by several record companies, and after our first show in London that September a number of A&R men sidled up to us and spoke sweet nothings in our ears. My tendency to be argumentative with these guys, especially when they got our song titles wrong, was compensated by Z’s diplomatic skills and soon he’d sewn up a tidy eight-album contract for us with Virgin Records, at the time an edgy, hip and newly chart-successful label.
    And then he walked out on us. On me. The ink on our contract was still glistening when Z announced out of the blue that he was giving up managing to spend a year going round the world with his girlfriend, with no promise that he would come back to the job after that. I was shocked and could do nothing to change his mind, but I’d found the Achilles heel of Z’s managerial skill set. He got bored quickly. Eager to keep our momentum going, we hired a fellow traveller on the Edinburgh music scene, Johnny Waller, as a replacement. Johnny was a great character and a good friend but a terrible manager. He specialised in unpredictable, shit-stirring wind-up antics, such as getting a skinhead haircut with the band initials APF shaved into the side of his skull the night before we left for a tour. In the 1979 Britain, a couple of decades before a number-one crop became the norm for footballers and businessmen, this was a seriously anti-social statement. A shaved head meant only one thing: bovver , and Johnny’s fashion statement resulted in us being instantly banned from hotel after hotel by terrified staff.
    Added to this was the band members’ not inconsiderable youthful arrogance, with myself the prime offender. Always convinced of the rightness of our actions, and without Z’s ameliorating influence, we led our genial and decent Virgin A&R man, Arnold, a merry dance, ganging up on him and generally reacting to his perplexed ministrations as if he worked for an evil empire. Our attitude was based on the absurd premise that despite giving us money, wanting to release our records and trying to make us successful, the record company was our enemy. We played silly psychological games with Arnold, for example ensuring a different band member or my punkette girlfriend Mairi answered the phone every time he called so he could never progress in whatever the argument of the day was. We were a regular group of horrors and unsurprisingly we fell out with Virgin and were kicked off the label, one