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.

Sailing on the boat Lennon sailed

One of my most treasured memories of 2014 was a sailing trip in late September, aboard the Jubilee. This 43ft sloop was once known as the Megan Jaye - the sailing boat on which John Lennon voyaged to Bermuda in 1980.

The boat is still in immaculate condition 34 years later, and it is regularly sailed off the East Coast of the United States by its owners Stephen Fuller, a university professor, and his wife Susan.

The story of Lennon’s sailing adventure is told in the Lennon Bermuda book, which includes a chapter on what became of the boat. The Fullers subsequently invited Heather and I to come and see the Jubilee and take a short trip. That kind invite was fulfilled in the last few days of September when we joined the couple for a short excursion along the coast of Maine.

Given the time of year, we had been warned to expect possibly chilly weather. Instead we were greeted by horizon-to-horizon blue skies and the calmest ocean imaginable. The benign conditions meant there would be no unfurling of the sails, because there wasn’t a breath of wind to be caught. The Jubilee’s small engine was put into action and we motored at a steady six knots, initially weaving through tranquil waterways, where a seal would occasionally raise its head out of curiosity. Forests fringed the craggy coastline, and before long we were heading out into the ocean, charting a course southwards, staying about a mile or two from shore.

Out on the ocean all we had to do was steer a course to avoid the lobster pot buoys, feel a rush of excitement at spotting a passing dolphin or two, enjoy the perfect late summer weather, and reflect on what it must have been like for Lennon when he helped sail the boat 700 miles across the ocean to Bermuda.

Steve and Susan spoke about the pleasure they get from sailing the Jubilee and knowing that the famed musician also enjoyed an open-ocean experience on the boat. Every summer the couple sail between the Washington, DC area and Maine, and in the winter the boat is hauled out of the water and stored in a heated shed for protection.

A plaque on board commemorates the journey Lennon took in June 1980 when he, together with a crew of four, sailed from Newport, Rhode Island to St George, Bermuda. The boat encountered a fierce storm and the former Beatle steered alone for a number of hours as the captain, Hank Halsted, rested and the other crew members recovered from sea sickness. One of the songs Lennon later completed in Bermuda was the lullaby Beautiful Boy, which features the line “out on the ocean, sailing away”. The plaque inside the Jubilee mentions that of all the songs that were influenced by the voyage, Beautiful Boy perhaps best reflects Lennon’s “blue water sailing experience”.

Steve bought the Jubilee in 1997 and estimates he has sailed her 20,000 miles, going as far north as Cape Breton and also enjoying trips to the Caribbean. The boat was built by the Hinckley company in 1977 and was originally named Megan Jaye.

The Jubilee has had only a handful of owners, with the Fullers owning the sloop the longest. It was a year after he had purchased the boat that Steve discovered Lennon had once chartered her.
He feels a connection with the late musician through the shared sailing experience. Coincidently, he was born in 1940, the same year as Lennon, and sailed to St George in June 1980, on a different boat, arriving one week after the former Beatle. Like most people at the time, he had no idea the singer was on the island.

Lennon stayed in Bermuda until the end of July that year, working on songs that appeared on his final album Double Fantasy and the posthumous Milk and Honey. His sailing experience is credited, in part, with reawakening his creativity after a five-year period when he did not release any music.

“It gives me some psychic release and pleasure to know that he enjoyed and met some of his musical ambitions through his sailing journey,” said Steve.

“When I am sailing I experience the pleasure that he got. It gives me a better sense of who he was than if you only knew him through reading about his music or his causes. It shows me that those guys [The Beatles] wanted to enjoy a regular life. He got lucky to be away and to test himself. He grew. It was a reaffirmation of sailing and connectedness with the sea.

“I think about the pictures I've seen of him sitting on the boat. I've sailed with people who are famous, but they are not famous when they are sailing. We are all the same people out here.”

This summer, the boat's former captain, Hank Halsted, returned to Bermuda and visited the John Lennon sculpture in the Botanical Gardens, which commemorates his stay in Bermuda. Hank has been back on board the Jubilee in recent years and gave the Fullers an insight into what it was like during the trip to Bermuda with Lennon.

During our journey I wandered below deck, into the galley and the bed spaces beyond. I rested on the bed which has been identified as the berth Lennon took during his journey. I wanted to get a sense of what it would have been like on that 1980 voyage. On the wood panelling beside the berth is the plaque commemorating that trip. The only sound I was aware of was the quiet whisper of the boat gliding through the ocean. Turning, I looked around at the semi-darkness of the interior, the polished wood panels and a storm lantern gently rocking in a cradle on the opposite side of the cabin. It was hard to imagine a more peaceful spot to be.

The Fullers take great care of the sloop, and say they enjoy their own magical moments when sailing.

Susan said: “I miss it when we are not out on it. I feel 'transported' when we sail. I do not think about work or about family. I feel the wind, the waves and the night.

“It's sleek and beautiful. It embraces the water, especially when you have the sails up and the wind.

“The conversations you have on the boat are not day-to-day conversations. We have conversations that we never have any other time. I sleep better on the Jubilee than when I'm on land. There is a rhythm, you slow down, you don't rush around and every move is measured. You pay attention to more of the things around you. It becomes your world.”

Steve said: “It's about the journey. Getting from A to B is half the pleasure. You don't complain about things when you are out here.”

It felt as though the journey was over all too soon, yet we had been sailing for many hours, and had enjoyed an alfresco lunch on deck. Now we had reached our destination. The Jubilee would shortly be hauled from the water and stored safely indoors for the winter. It had been a magical experience, and we thanked the Fullers as we said our goodbyes.

There was an unexpected coda to our day a few hours later. Heather and I caught a bus service to Boston’s Logan International Airport from where we would connect with a hotel shuttle. We arrived and entered the terminal building to hear music playing on the public address system. The song being played was Lennon’s Beautiful Boy, and the line being sung … out on the ocean, sailing away.

Our day was complete.


Photos from the trip (a few of Lennon in 1980). Music: An instrumental version of Beautiful Boy

An update on Dolphin Girl

A new cover will be revealed soon

I haven't said anything about Dolphin Girl for a while, so here is an update. The novel is currently undergoing a second draft run-through. I've been making small changes, re-ordering chapters and scenes to achieve a more chronologically linear story, and generally ironing out typos and clunky grammar.

This has been progressing step-by-step for some time, although not as quickly as I had hoped. The reason for that is due to the demands of my day job, which at times have been daunting. As a consequence there has been little time or energy left some weeks to work through more than a page or two of Dolphin Girl.

The good news is a brighter dawn appears to have arrived and I'm now getting more opportunity to sit down and give the novel the focus and attention it deserves.

As part of the drafting process I’m fleshing out parts of the narrative that were previously on the fringe, but which I now recognise as a worthy part of the overall story arc. Doing so creates its own challenges as scenes are either expanded, or new ones added.

Presently, the second draft process is somewhere just beyond the halfway point, and Dolphin Girl is now likely to appear early in 2015.

A cover has been designed by a professional artist, which will be unveiled in the near future. For the moment my own basic working cover, created many moons ago, remains on show.

Stay tuned for news on Dolphin Girl in the coming months.

Pink Floyd's final spark of brightness

The cover art from Pink Floyd's The Endless River

Pink Floyd’s career trajectory resembles that of a comet blazing across the night sky and heading for a final encounter with the sun. It first gained luminance in the 1960s and glowed brightest in the 70s. In the same way that those enigmatic cosmic snowballs lose layers of material and shrink as they move ever nearer to the sun, so too have Pink Floyd gradually diminished in structure; first with the departure of Roger Waters in 1985, and then the death of Richard Wright in 2008.

The Endless River probably represents the final spark of brightness as Pink Floyd’s comet nears its terminal rendezvous. Shorn of Waters, devoid of lyrics (bar the final track Louder than Words), the double album must be viewed as the band’s swan song, albeit an accidental one.

At the heart of The Endless River are unused recordings made 21 years ago during rehearsal sessions by David Gilmour, Nick Mason and the late Wright as they worked on the band’s last studio album, 1994’s The Division Bell. In many ways the album is a tribute to the immense contribution keyboard player Wright made to the Pink Floyd sound. Gilmour and Mason revisited the instrumental recordings, a mixture of odds and ends, and have added to and enhanced them to create what Gilmour has referred to as a “21st Century Pink Floyd album”.

The instrumental music flows from track to track for 53 minutes. It is a concept album in an age where such things no longer exist. In a world of playlists and iPod shuffles, here is a record to be listened to from start to finish, designed as if the 33rpm vinyl LP had never fallen out of favour. An album designed to have the needle dropped on track one and left to play uninterrupted - preferably with the lights dimmed, or off, for maximum impact.

Across the four sides (yes, four) there are echoes of signature musical moments from the group’s extensive career. Tracks four on both side 2 and side 3, titled Anisina and Allons-y (1) are dreamily memorable, as is the album’s second track It’s What We Do, which most strongly carries Pink Floyd’s distinctive musical DNA.

On two tracks voice samples have been added; the intriguing opening track Things Left Unsaid, which could quite easily have been at home on any of Pink Floyd’s previous studio albums, and Talkin’ Hawkin’, a reprise of Keep Talking from The Division Bell complete with voice samples from physicist Stephen Hawking.

Whether The Endless River will be of interest to, or have any relevance for, today’s generation of young music consumers is debatable. There has been support for the record, which topped many countries’ charts in its opening week, likely due to older fans eager to hear anything ‘new’ from the band after two decades of silence - a silence broken only by the one-off reunion of Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright at Live8 in 2005.

When Gilmour gives voice to Louder Than Words, the floating, poignant last track on The Endless River, one is left to reflect on the crazy diamond musical journey Pink Floyd have taken us on, starting in 1967 with the now long departed co-founding member Syd Barrett, and onwards through the decades that followed. Listening to Pink Floyd’s back catalogue is to take a journey back through the last 40-odd years of your life.

As Louder than Words fades out the comet jettisons its final layer of ice and rock, and Pink Floyd are gone.

A salute to the man who swam with sharks

'Ocean Vet' Neil Burnie died as he free dived near one of the Bermuda's most popular beaches on Tuesday.

The veterinarian and musician touched many people's lives. His involvement with marine species was well documented in newspaper articles, lectures, and a major TV documentary series 'Ocean Vet' which had just wrapped up filming on the island.

Dr Burnie made Bermuda his home for more than 20 years. Here on the Island the loss of such a greatly respected and admired man has had an immense impact on the community, not only for those who knew him personally, but for the many others who read about his exploits or were fortunate enough to have seen the accomplished saxophonist and harmonica player perform on stage.

For many people it was his involvement with tiger sharks that will be the most abiding memory. Dr Burnie swam with the sharks, filmed them and carried out extensive research on their behaviour and migrations. He was their friend, their champion. He did much to increase people's understanding of the true nature of tiger sharks (see the video above of his TEDxBermuda talk).

His love of the sea extended far beyond sharks. He carried out research on a wide variety of marine species, he was also a fisherman and sailor.

On land he was a highly popular vet, and away from the world of animals he loved music and performed with his own blues band, Bones. He also often accompanied other musicians on stage where he added musical flourishes of harmonica, sax and occasionally vocals. It was in the musical arena that I came across Dr Burnie.

I can't remember if it was his prowess as a musician or his legend as a shark swimmer that I was made aware of first. However, I do recall being at the Bermuda Folk Club many years ago and being informed that I was in for a treat because Neil Burnie was due to perform. I wasn't disappointed. He was every bit as good as I'd been told - better even.

He played at the club once or twice each year, and I particularly remember two years ago when he accompanied American blues singer and guitarist Alice Stuart. I was impressed by the way he threaded his improvisations into her music without overpowering the songs.

During September's Peace Day concert in the Botanical Gardens he led his group Bones through a well received set of blues numbers in front of an estimated audience of 1,600.

His joy for life and his example of what it means to care for marine species and the animals around us is a legacy that will reverberate for a long time.

Out beyond the reef and across miles of ocean I wonder if the tiger sharks also sense that their great friend has gone and, in their own way, like many people in Bermuda, salute the man who swam among them.

For further reading here are links to a news article and a tribute article on Dr Burnie

Michael Cacy, Alice Stuart and Neil Burnie (right) perform at the Bermuda Folk Club in 2012

Storms wreck 'contemplation bench'

Above is the current state of the makeshift bench at Coney Island, the one I dubbed 'the secret bench' back in the summer of 2008 when I wrote about it in a Microdot Island newsletter.

Back then it was one of my favourite spots to go for some quiet time to sit and watch the ocean and contemplate ideas and life in general. It was there that I did a lot of my planning for Eating Clouds - including taking a photograph as I lay on my back on the bench (which is an old railway sleeper). The photograph was of clouds drifting across the blue sky directly above.
At that point I'd already decided on Eating Clouds as the title for the book and I needed an image for the cover. The photo I took that day was used on one early proof-only copy of the book, but was later replaced by Lucy Hollis' stunning panorama shot from John Smith's Bay.

I can still remember the wonderful, whispering sound of the breeze through the thin needle-like leaves of the tall casuarina tree that overlooked the bench, and to which the bench was secured by a rope.

In July 2008, this is how I described the spot: Living on a compact little island of 21 square miles means it isn’t the easiest thing to find some peace and quiet away from it all….unless you know the secret of Coney Island. This little dead-end hideaway, linked to the main island by a small bridge, is little more than a nature reserve in all but name. Here, tucked away behind some trees, is an old railway sleeper that doubles up as a bench on which a morning coffee, banana bread and the newspaper can be savoured while stretching out and gazing at unbroken views of the blue ocean, or lying on my back on the sleeper to watch clouds float by high above the branches of the casaurina tree that whistle softly against the breeze.

A picture of the bench as it looked in 2008, with my take-away coffee, banana bread and morning newspaper resting on top, can be seen at the bottom of this blog post.

For many years it was my place of choice to go for my morning coffee and relaxation, but I frequented it less in recent years in favour of another spot - a hillock that overlooked the ocean - closer to where I used to stay. Nevertheless, I still paid occasional visits to 'contemplation bench' when I wanted a little change of scenery, or to reconnect with the place.

Sadly, the storms that struck Bermuda this month have all but destroyed the bench. Tropical Storm Fay, which was a direct hit on the island (and many believe was as destructive as a fully-formed hurricane), toppled the casaurina tree to which the bench was attached. The bench looked pretty much finished at that point, but a few days later Hurricane Gonzalo also made a direct hit on the island and threw the toppled tree back up and over so it now faces the opposite direction. That additional damage further wrenched the earth from around the bench.

What will become of the bench? Nature may take its course and claw it back into the undergrowth; a parks department crew may tidy up and remove the fallen casaurina, or the toppled tree may be left where it fell and possibly become a new, natural bench over time.

Yesterday I visited the bench. As I sat there on the wreckage I hoped that the secret spot would recover and, in some shape or form, continue to be a secluded place where curious wanderers might stumble upon it and find they can comfortably sit and contemplate the world, as I did so many years ago.

Below: The bench in July 2008 (with coffee, banana bread and newspaper)