Long Way to the Light

In Search of Mike Scott

Most adventures have a beginning and an end; this one has neither. Or so I hope that it is not the end. The hilarity of events leading up to the present are too strange to hit a cul-de-sac here; we shall see how things turn out. But if this adventure has a background I think it must start in my sophomore year of high school, the first day of Mr. Markwart’s Geometry Class. The teacher was a bit late and two oddly-dressed girls were up at the blackboard scrawling poems in the most immaculately florid handwriting I had ever seen. One had titled her contribution Spirit, the other The Whole of the Moon. As most West Bloomfield High students were not prone to sudden outbursts of blackboard poetry, I had assumed that they were not the authors, and most likely these were song lyrics for which each had a particular affinity. At 16, I had certainly fancied myself an expert on pop music with a particular emphasis on the out-of-the-way stuff my radio-brainwashed peers had never heard of. What bothered me was that I didn’t know who authored the lines scrawled there in yellow and pink chalk. I thought I knew everything. Who was behind the indelible words at the bottom, “What Spirit is Man can be?” Who were the girls? Timid though I was, I asked.

She said her name was Julie and sat opposite me. “Mike Scott, y’know, of the Waterboys.”

I didn’t know. Though I had heard of the band, I had never heard their music. That day, Julie took me to lunch in her messy white Mustang. I was knee-deep in fast food wrappers when I was first bowled over by the opening chord of “Don’t Bang The Drum”.

That album, This Is The Sea, the 80s paean to arena rock, was a revelation. Firstly, because the Waterboys were not an arena rock band – few in the States really knew who they were - but they crafted an album bolder and more confident - a work that exudes bigness - than their sorry, aging rock contemporaries. From its reverberant beginning, This Is The Sea explodes like thunder. Secondly, the songs themselves were like nothing I had ever heard. In the middle of the cold and detached new wave 80s, American commercial radio riddled with the same dozen or so Top 40 songs of rehashed material and inane and befuddled sentiment, here was a rock and roll band melding powerfully emotive music with a poetry sublime. Whoever the The Waterboys were, they were truly, I thought, men out of time.

And so my introduction began there, and the Waterboys, and the man behind the name, Mike Scott, have remained with me since. Though their breakup passed with scant notice from the music press, their memory lives on in the form of some fantastic albums, each a thorough departure from the last. Scott, perhaps more than any rock musician, has found a successful marriage of pop and folk - in this case mainly (but by no means exclusively) a folk music of Celtic derivation and instrumentation - to create a unified whole devoid of pastiche or pretense.



The meat of this story comes when we forward to the present, or the near-present at least - on summer holiday in Scotland with my friend Alex. No less a Mike Scott junkie than myself, on more than one night I fell asleep to the sound of Learning To Love Him blaring from his headphones still tight to his ears. Our trip itinerary was largely unplanned, save for a couple of sights we had hoped to see and some friends we had hoped to meet up with along the way. On the song Long Way To The Light, Scott sings, “I’m standing in my living room, overlooking Findhorn Bay”. Months before we departed, I picked up a trusty Michelin road map of Scotland that we would put to good use and located the small body of water on the east coast. Scott’s songs have always been filled with a multitude of geographical references - mostly of Ireland and Scotland - so many that it would be hard to believe that all could be autobiographical. Even so, I was intrigued if the composer lived on this small North Sea inlet, and if he was indeed standing in his own living room. Though the area is far away from the northwest Highlands where we were planning on spending much of our time, a detour was certainly possible. We were on vacation after all. It begins in Durness.

Durness, a one-horse town minus the horse, is the primary settlement on the coast of the far northwest of Scotland, near to the appropriately-named Cape Wrath. Little more than a collection of homes and sheep farms strewn across a ruggedly beautiful and rocky coast, it was from here one morning that Alex and I decided we would drive down out of the Highlands, across the country and into Moray in the hopes of finding Mike Scott. It is for this reason that I mention Durness, the northern terminus of our trip. Only a detailed map can give the reader an appreciation for the distance. Perhaps we could knock on the fellow’s door. Again, we were banking on one obscure line in one obscure song, from a song catalog littered with geography that could likely lead us on a wild goose chase were we to take this further.

I think we were beginning to find each other’s company a bit wearisome, so that when we saw a young hitchhiker thumbing on the side of the road near the lonely Highland outpost of Tongue, we figured it would do us no harm to offer him a lift. Driving south to Lairg through abandoned glens and desolate moors, I wonder what he would have done had we not stopped. There was no traffic here - not even any houses or farms. It was like driving through the apocalypse. Our passenger, a young Frenchman hitching through Europe, provided some good respite and I think he was as enthralled as we at the sheep auction we stopped for in Lairg. It was all I could do to bury my hands in my pockets and resist the temptation to scratch my temple. Even at £17 a head, I wasn’t going to lug a sheep along with us, despite the auctioneer’s patter that these fine animals were quite a bargain.

Parting company with our new friend in Inverness, we journeyed east as the Highlands gave way to gentle hills, a late afternoon sun illuminating a particularly photo-worthy field of pigs, each creature belly up to a feed trough. The village of Findhorn, several hundred miles from Durness - where we set off that morning - is a quaint and charming village of whitewashed homes beside a sheltered bay of the same name. If one sought anonymity this might be a place to do it. If Mike lived here, he probably blended in with the no-more-than-a-couple-hundred townsfolk, most of them likely fishermen or retired Scots. By chance, we happened to find the local convenience store, which also served as the gas station, grocer and post office. A woman overheard us asking the proprietor if he could tell us where Mike Scott lived.

“Oh, he was my flatmate. Great guy, Mike. I’m afraid you missed him, though. He moved down to London two months ago.”

Our dash before darkness to the other side of the country no longer seemed worth it. Except for the fact that this kind woman told us the location of the house and Scott’s flat, an unassuming house in a row of the same. It was overlooking Findhorn Bay.

Located just a mile or so outside of town is the Findhorn Community, a self-contained town of marvelously tidy eco-houses in a web of streets, the center of the Findhorn Foundation, founded by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean in 1962. The Foundation touts itself as being “a major international centre of spiritual education and personal transformation offering many ways for people to visit, live or work here”. Looking around, it’s not difficult to believe that a communal way of life based on creating a sustainable future can work well. It was probably this that attracted Scott. The warm acoustic of Bring ‘Em All In was thanks to the studio here. The kind folks at the coffee house had several nice things to say about Scott and treated Alex and I to a brief tour of the studio that can be seen on the album. All in all, quite an adventurous day.

Epilogue

That was the summer of 1999. I’d wish I could close by saying that we tracked Scott down in London, had some pints and stayed up strumming guitars in his flat. No, we didn’t meet the guy, though Alex came quite close a few months after our trip and it’s worth mentioning. Through that glorious medium of modern communication – e-mail – Alex was able to contact Scott’s manager and even speak to him on the phone. My persuasive friend was able to send Scott a copy of some of his latest work, a collection of songs on disc. He was pleased to find a note in his in box from the man we motored all over Scotland to find. Mike was complimentary; he wanted to know who played that solo; he praised the instrumentation and thanked Alex for the disc. Both Alex and I no longer expect some fateful meeting with the guy we pursued with groupie fervor one summer, but if it happens, I’m sure he would laugh at our following the strangest star.

Sean Hickey