Here's another blast from the past, an interview with former Waterboys saxophonist Anthony 'Anto' Thistlethwaite that I compiled for R2/RnR magazine back in 2013 when Anto was preparing to rejoin The Waterboys for a tour celebrating the Fisherman's Blues album, around then, I guess, the time of the expanded Fisherman's Box album release.
I've met Anthony a few times, firstly when I was researching for my Strange Boat book on The Waterboys, and later at various Saw Doctors gigs. I note, with some sadness, my mention in the interview about the 'temporary' hiatus of the Saw Doctors, which largely, despite a few ad-hoc get together shows, still goes on to this day. I really miss them. Haven't talked to, or seen, Anto in a few years now - I think the last time we talked was on the telephone for a piece I was writing for Vive Le Rock about the great Nikki Sudden, who Anto had played with on various of Nikki's LPs - but I always found him to be one of the nicest, most genuine, people that I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing.
I'm always amazed how often he turns up on records that I love, such as those by Nikki Sudden, including ones that I've been discovering for the first time, as was the case with Nikki's 'lost' album with Simon Carmody and Johnny Fean, The Last Bandits In The World, for last year's RSD, which came expanded with recordings featuring Anthony and fellow Mike Scott comrades Steve Wickham and Max 'Lizard' Edie, or tunes that I remember from way back when... Bruce Foxton's first solo records, Robyn Hitchcock's Groovy Decay. He's on The Psychedelic Furs Book of Days album and Working With Fire & Steel by China Crisis... among many others.
Looking back at this piece, actually it's rather unfocused (my fault entirely) but I think it does at least describe some of the mercurial adventures that Anto has enjoyed along his way. He'd kindly allowed me to reprint a piece of his own in Strange Boat which described his year busking the streets of Paris in the early 80s, pre-Waterboys, and I guess if you've read that, this interview is at least a bit of a companion piece, even if I didn't quite manage to do this gently understated but fascinating and hugely talented musician the proper justice his wide-ranging work deserves.
A stalwart of the original Waterboys, Anthony Thistlethwaite was Mike Scott’s constant collaborator from The Red & The Black, their pre-Waterboys band, through to the Celtic summer of Room To Roam. Twice-over he’s been Davy Carton and Leo Moran’s staunchest ally in The Saw Doctors, including an almost unbroken fourteen-year run as their bassist, though he’s best known for being the man who Mike Scott describes in his autobiography as ‘The Human Saxophone’.
With the ‘Docs on temporary hiatus and ‘Anto’ about to re-join The Waterboys for series of shows to follow a seven-disc anthology of the legendary Fisherman’s Blues sessions, he’s a number of exciting projects developing. I phone him at his Irish home to chat about these, and about his solo albums, which he’s made digitally available via Facebook. Knowing him as I do, though, I’m not surprised the first thing he wants to talk about is his unabashed delight at someone else’s good fortune.
“Mick Taylor has been playing with The Rolling Stones recently and I find that very heartening,” he tells me. He’s a huge admirer of their former guitarist. “He played on my solo albums and was very good to me. I always loved the Stones when he was with them. I look on YouTube and see the numbers he’s played on in the last few weeks and it’s great to see him enjoying himself. In his youth he was very demure on stage. These days he seems full of beans, playing very well. I’m delighted for him.”
I’d already planned to ask about their work together. “In 1982 I’d just started playing with Mike, but I thought I’d do some recording on my own in a studio down by Westbourne Grove. The studio engineer said, ‘You know, we had Mick Taylor in here a couple of weeks back’. We found the invoice for Mick’s session… with his address on it. I plucked up courage and knocked on his door, explaining I was recording in the studio that he’d been using and wondered if he’d play guitar for me. I was really chancing my arm. He was very nice but said that he’d have to hear what I was working on. Some kind of quality control, I’d guess! But I went back a few days later with a cassette, played him the track, and he came down and it was brilliant! I went around a few times, took my sax and he’d have a go on it, and we made friends, in a small way. Then he got a call from Dylan’s manager to work on what became Infidels and I didn’t see him for a few years.
“Things may not have worked out as he might have hoped, but he’s always had an amazing talent. I’d have some tracks for him to play on, and it was like he wouldn’t have to learn the chords… there was one song where he played the whole thing on the first pass and he’d never heard it before, it was just innate.”
Mick’s contribution to Anthony’s solo records includes his 1997 Crawfish & Caviar album, noted as being principally recorded in St Petersburg and Louisiana and being by turn Russian folk and Cajun-tinged. Before encountering Mike Scott, Thistlethwaite had spent a weekend that became a year busking Parisian streets; at the Café Mazet on the Rue St. André des Arts you contacted him by telephoning for ‘Tony-Le-saxo’. But these further-flung recordings were intriguing.
“I’d been on the road with The Saw Doctors for three years and felt like a break. I intended going to Prague and disappearing in some mysterious way, but when I got there it didn’t really fit the bill! So I caught this train that went up through the Ukraine and ended-up in St Petersburg. There I met the bassist from a group called DDT, the Russian equivalent of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, a big band with an intelligent and charismatic vocalist. I was telling him what I’d been doing in the West and he said ‘You’ll have to rehearse with us’. I went down with my sax and mandolin and ended-up travelling around darkest Russia with this bunch of lunatics, visiting places I’d never imagined and flying in aeroplanes with chickens in the cabins! Just what the doctor ordered.”
While in St Petersburg he received contact from Boris Grebenshchikov, “a sort of Russian Bob Dylan who heard I was in town. Apprehensively I arranged to meet him, someone of such stature. He was sitting in his flat and in the middle was a coffee table with a bottle of single malt Scotch and two glasses. ‘Welcome, Anthony. We will drink the whisky. We will talk’. I didn’t normally drink whisky… but we finished the bottle and by then were quite good friends! So I ended up playing with his band Aquarium. It meant I was playing with two of the biggest bands in Russia, so I thought I’d better do some recording. I got the rhythm section from one, some players from the other and went and recorded.”
If that explained the album’s Russian element, the Louisiana part came from happy coincidences that led Anto into finding a hitherto unknown family branch. Back in ’87 he’d played on ‘Ship Of Fools’, the first World Party record. “There’s a town called Opelousas, near Lafayette in the Cajun country, with a large contingent of Thistlethwaites. Now, ‘Ship Of Fools’ was a hit in the States and one of the Thistlethwaites there saw my name on the sleeve and sent a message. ‘Hello, I live in Louisiana, I’m a musician, and we have the same name’. A couple of years later I was on a US tour with The Waterboys, so he came down and we got talking. He said, ‘Have you heard of this book by Bernard Thistlethwaite?’ That was my grandfather who’d spent years researching the family, wrote a book and gave copies to his relatives. I’ve a copy here. The fact that he had a copy in Opelousas meant that we absolutely were related! Sharon [Shannon] was with The Waterboys at the time and she wrote this instrumental track, which is on her first album, called ‘Anto’s Cajun Cousins’ with a Cajun lilt to it! They seemed to know everybody around the heart of Cajun and Zydeco music, its black music equivalent. They’d known Clifton Chenier, who was a Zydeco accordion player. His wife was their nanny when they were kids. I was really thrilled to meet these people, such as Christine Balfa, from Balfa Toujours. After my adventure in Russia I had half an album and what I needed to do was to go to Louisiana and make the other half. I spent three months in Opelousas, inviting everyone I could down to the studio and just had a great time, however ridiculous it sounds now!”
Current endeavours are closer to home, with Leo Moran and others of the Irish music scene in The Cabin Collective, who’ve already had their first television appearance, on Ireland’s The Late Late Show, performing their debut single, ‘Lines Are Fading’, again with Leo on an acoustic tour of America in September, and then from late November through December with Mike Scott and Waterboys mainstay Steve Wickham where they’ll not just be playing songs from Fisherman’s Blues, but generally rekindling their three-way magic.
Talking about The Cabin Collective first – their single is a totally infectious romp – Anto explains: “Outside of Tuam, where Leo lives, there’s this fellow called Larry, and his lady, who live in this Scandinavian log house. He’s had a scene going on there with a recording set-up, and people have made albums in the cabin. Keith Mullins’ band, who supported The Saw Doctors, recorded there. So we were friends with them, and with Noelie McDonald who’d also supported us. They’d been congregating at the cabin and, being less busy than normal this year, I got invited to go down there with Leo and Rickie [O’Neill, Saw Doctors drummer], so we joined forces. Now there’s a band with two drummers, three singer-songwriters, or four if you want to count me, I play sax and a bit of mandolin, and there are nine of us involved. We got a chance to play on national Irish TV before we’d even played a gig!”
That musical comradeship which permeates through Ireland’s West Coast is also reflected in his re-embarking with The Waterboys. He’s played occasionally with Mike Scott since parting company when Scott moved to America in 1990, including a couple of shows with Scott and Wickham last year in Spiddal, home to later Fisherman’s Blues sessions. “We did a charity gig for a dear friend of ours there: Mike, Steve and myself. There was so much demand that we did two shows in one day. We do still have that wonderful chemistry.”
There’s real excitement in the three of them working together again. “We’ve also got Trevor Hutchinson [Fisherman’s Blues bassist] who plays in Lunasa, a great Irish trad band, and I’ll be playing sax and mandolin. The music from that era was very free-flowing. I think Mike wants to capture that spontaneity.”
Before then comes Anto and Leo’s American road trip. It’s different to the things they’ve done before, a stripped-down adventure, the two of them driving across the States in a hire car. “Leo will be singing songs familiar to Saw Doctors fans; I might sing a few of my songs, maybe a Dylan or something so obscure that I don’t know who wrote it. We’ll have fun. It’s quite refreshing, doing something without relying on pounding drums and 100 decibels. I’ll play mandolin, sax, harmonica, might play guitar… not really sure! It’s an unknown quantity. There’s something wonderfully delicate about playing acoustic music without a rhythm section because every note counts and you can have great effect with some tiny thing. I toured with Donovan once and that was a joy because you could hear everything and everything I did mattered.”
So while on a practical level the current halt to The Saw Doctors activity has left a gap, it’s clear that this versatile and engaging musician has good friends who’ll take him off on tangents, just as his Russian and Louisiana travels did way back when. Here’s to them all.
