A long strange golden road

Mike Scott/The Waterboys in Leicester, 1985

In the pictures above and right Mike Scott of The Waterboys looks out from the stage at Leicester Polytechnic, in the English Midlands. I took these photos one freezing night in November 1985. I was still a teenager and this was the first time I'd seen The Waterboys live.

Energy and passion emanated from the stage and contagiously filled the concert hall and I, like Dennis Hopper's hyper-active photographer in the movie Apocalypse Now, stood in the swirling, moving sea of the audience, sporadically lifting my second-hand Minolta camera above head height hoping to capture some of the magic.
In those pre-digital days there was a finite number of pictures that could be taken. The roll of film in the camera had 24 exposures and no more. Every click of the shutter had to count.

There was exceptionally fast film in the camera - 1600asa - allowing pictures to be taken without a flash in order to capture the ambient illumination of the stage lights, and fast enough to avoid too much blurring. It was an experiment that resulted in an interesting set of photos of The Waterboys on the cusp of becoming a recognised name in the music world. They had just released the single The Whole of The Moon, a beautiful career-defining anthem. However, it stalled at a lowly No.25 in the charts that month. It would be another six years before the song was re-released and hit the top three.

Emerging from the concert I was faced with a chilly winter's night and no prospect of getting home, which was 17 miles away, until early the next morning when the bus service resumed. With my camera stowed away under my coat I found shelter for the night, escaping from the biting wind chill by huddling inside a telephone box - the old red ones made from iron.

It seems crazy now, but back then sleeping rough all night in a telephone box in the middle of winter was, for me, part of the adventure of being young and carefree.

During the past three decades it has been a delight to follow the progress of Mike Scott and The Waterboys as he, and they, have created songs that have stood the test of time even as the band has remained largely out of the mainstream. Fisherman's Blues, another of their songs to barely dent the charts, is now almost as equally famed as The Whole Of The Moon. And a generation after it was written, a version of the band's ballad How Long Will I Love You featured in the film About Time and became a major hit for Ellie Goulding.

'Roughing it' to see The Waterboys is not confined to the dim and distant past. For as recently as 2009, Heather and I nodded off in a rental car near a field where the band were due to headline in a big top tent at the end of a one-day music festival. It was on the outskirts of Skibbereen, in southern Ireland. As night fell we made our way to the big top and were rewarded with the band finally taking to the stage, much delayed, at around the midnight hour (or just after). It was a memorable show, and it was a starry summer's night that greeted us as we wandered back from the tent at 2.30am.
In the bright moonlight some folk departing the big top still had energy to spare and headed for the children's playground to have a go on the swings.

It was at Skibbereen that I first heard The Waterboys perform a song about a "long strange golden road". I was familiar with almost everything they had recorded, but I'd never heard this song before. Its catchy chorus stayed with me for many months.

I wanted to hear the song again, but I would have to wait. For the next few years The Waterboys devoted their time to creating and promoting An Appointment With Mr Yeats, a mesmorising album of WB Yeats' poems turned into songs.

So it was a delight to discover that Long Strange Golden Road features on the band's just released album Modern Blues. And the vibrant, energetic song is one of their best. I look forward to catching the band live again, some 30 years after that freezing night in Leicester - but this time I intend to give the night out in the telephone box a miss!

Here is Long Strange Golden Road, as uploaded by the band.

A 50-year gap between books

The revised version of Dolphin Girl is now in the home stretch, and I anticipate a mid-March date for a final read-through before publishing.

It is at least 12 years since I started writing the novel. It first appeared in print in 2008 as an anchor to the Lulu edition of Eating Clouds. Revisiting the story, re-ordering some sections and adding a few additional scenes has taken longer than anticipated. As that process nears completion the novel now carries a ‘decade-plus’ gestation tag.

So it was with a smile a few days ago that I read a newspaper article about Harper Lee. The author of To Kill A Mockingbird is to become a two-book author. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer will release her second book, Go Set A Watchman, this summer. It will mean there has been a gap of more than 50 years between the publishing of her first and second books. Against that timescale the delay in the arrival of the complete version of Dolphin Girl does not appear quite so tardy.

Of course, any comparison is merely cosmetic. Lee has not spent the past half century writing Go Set A Watchman, which is essentially a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird. The new novel was actually written in the 1950s before Mockingbird. Lee’s editor at the time persuaded her to go back and write another novel based on the flashbacks of the character Scout in Watchman. She did, and the result was the renowned To Kill A Mockingbird.

The unpublished manuscript for Go Set A Watchman was put aside and only rediscovered last autumn. Lee, now 88, allowed a few trusted friends to read the story, and encouraged by the feedback she has signed a publishing deal. The book is due to go on sale in July.

As for Dolphin Girl, while I feel at times that 50 years have passed since the first lines were written, the complete version of the novel is on the horizon for a spring 2015 release.