Sail we must: How a Cork fisherman inspired Andrew Weatherall's tattoo

The second anniversary of the music legend's death has prompted two documentaries on the intriguing tale of a fateful drive from Cork Airport

Andrew Weatherall and his tattoos; right, West Cork fisherman Gerard Sheehy who inspired the tattoo.

The conversation lasted 90 minutes at most. Yet it would have a profound impact on the lives of both men. In the summer of 2008, Windsor-born producer and DJ Andrew Weatherall was travelling to West Cork for a music festival. His driver was a young fisherman, Gerard Sheehy, from Baltimore, on the wild edge of the Atlantic. 

Somewhere along the circuitous, often bumpy, journey from Cork Airport to the Showgrounds in Skibbereen, where Cork X Southwest was taking place, Sheehy imparted to Weatherall the maxim “Fail We May, Sail We Must”.

The words stayed with Weatherall in a very literal sense, as he later had them tattooed on his arms (Sheehy's own tattoo actually stated “Sail she may but go she must” – but the essence is the same). The late music legend also repurposed them as the title of a track on his 2009 solo album, A Pox on the Pioneers.

Weatherall passed away on February 17, 2020, at age 56, as the result of a pulmonary embolism. In the wake of his death, the provenance of the “Fail We May…” tattoo became a source of fascination. At the time, Sheehy’s identity was a mystery. The detective work that helped track him down, the wisdom of his words and their lasting effect on Weatherall have now inspired a radio documentary and a short film, both arriving on the second anniversary of his death.

“I heard Andrew recount it in interviews over the years, whenever he was asked about his famous tattoos,” says Cian Ó Cíobháin, presenter of An Taobh Tuathail on RTÉ RnaG.

 He’s a participant in both Paul McDemott’s Fail We May, Sail We Must, to be broadcast on UCC98.3FM on Thursday, and in the short film Sail We Must, screened at the Sugar Club, Dublin, on Wednesday.

“I always read his interviews and watched them online," says Cíobháin. "He was both hilarious erudite and a superb raconteur. I was very curious about this particular story, as nobody seemed to know who the fisherman who Andrew claimed to have heard the phrase from was. Not to mention that he was allegedly a Corkman. It was a mystery for over a decade. There were times when I thought perhaps it might be just a myth.” 

“When the fisherman was identified last year the news cycle moved on so quickly,” says Paul McDermott, head of Media and Arts at Rathmines College and a documentarian who has produced long-form radio pieces about Microdisney, Five Go Down to the Sea and other icons of Cork music.

“Literally, the following day everyone said, ‘Oh wow – that's a that's an amazing story. Now on to the next thing’. I was the person saying, ‘Cian [Ó Cíobháin], can I have his phone number? Because nobody has spoken to Gerard. What in the name of God is his story?’ 

 Andrew Weatherall showing his tattoos at Good Bits on Store Street in Dublin in 2010. Picture: Aidan Kelly 

“That seemed to me to be the key to this. ‘Yes, it's a lovely story the ‘Fail We May’, and that tattoos and the meeting. But what in the name of God did this fisherman say over the course of two 90 minutes journeys that left this impression on Weatherall? I drove back from Baltimore completely feeling he was one of the most impressive young men I have ever met.” 

 Sheehy radiates a sense of zen and calm as he shares his recollections about Weatherall and about the meaning behind the tattoo. He tells McDermott about a fellow crewmen on his trawler who fell down several flights of stairs and who had to be taken to hospital. The fisherman had seriously hurt his ankle – but responded to the injury in a matter-of-fact fashion. And that is the essence of what he conveyed to Weatherall. Life can buffet you and it can even break you. And yet, once you’ve set sail you have to reach your destination.

“When you’re out in that kind weather, everyone says, ‘are you not scared?,” Sheehy tells McDermott. “When you’re there in the moment you never do. Because you’re there in the moment and you’re just concentrating on what you’re doing. And you’re making sure that everyone else is okay… You have to get on with it.” 

 McDermott’s documentary is about Weatherall and about his journeys with Sheehy, who drove him to and from Skibbereen to Cork Airport in exchange for a ticket to the festival. However, it is also about the wisdom of “Fail We May, Sail We Must” aphorism – and how that the truth to which it speaks only obvious becomes once you’ve been knocked around by life a little.

And it is a pilgrimage of sorts, as McDermott travels to meet Sheehy in his home of Baltimore. Afterwards, the narrator stops off at the famous white-painted stone beacon overlooking the harbour. And he reflects on all that has happened in his life since he last visited it at age seven, with his parents.

“I know nothing of the fishing industry. I spent a day with him below in Baltimore. I met some of his crew members. They were preparing for a two-and-a-half month fishing voyage. And he was just incredible. I came away thinking, ‘yeah, I get it. I get why a conversation with that man had an effect on this DJ.’”

Cian Ó Cíobháin and Paul McDermott. 

 As McDermott says, the effort to track down the mysterious fisherman is only part of the story. But that amateur sleuthing was nonetheless fascinating – and it gave many Weatherall fans something to do with their shock and sadness on the anniversary of his death.

“I sent out a tweet in the lead-up to the anniversary of his death last year, wondering if anyone knew the identity of the fisherman,” says Cian Ó Cíobháin. 

The word went out, helped by a piece in this newspaper.  “There was huge speculation behind which of Weatherall’s shows in the county might have been responsible for hooking Andrew up with the elusive fisherman.

 “The Skipper, the leading journal of the Irish and UK fishing industries, became aware of the search through Twitter and enigmatically tweeted that they had a few leads,” he continues. “One of Gerard’s friends, Billy Cummings, read the story and was convinced that the fisherman was his friend Gerard Sheehy, who had driven Andrew from Cork airport to the Cork X Southwest in Skibbereen in 2008. He contacted me and gave me Gerard’s digits.

“When I looked up Gerard on WhatsApp, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was a smiling young fella, holding a very large fish in his profile pic. I contacted him. Within seconds of speaking to him, there was no doubt that we had finally found him, 11 years after first hearing Andrew Weatherall’s story. And – most poignantly – on the eve of the anniversary of his death."

 Weatherall was one of the most influential DJs of his era. He was also much more than that. In 1990, he revolutionised alternative music when he remixed a song by a deeply unfashionable Glasgow blues revival group called Primal Scream. With their track I’m Losing More Than They Ever Have as a foundation Weatherall created Loaded, an electronic tour de force and indie disco staple for the ages.

He would go on to work with the Happy Mondays and to produce the singular (and only) album by Glasgow three-piece One Dove. But he never took the glamorous or lucrative route. And while his contemporaries were embracing the era of the superstar DJ in the mid 1990s, he started the experimental outfit Sabres of Paradise, which applied a gothic makeover to Jamaican dance-hall music. Later, with his Two Lone Swordsmen project he would move between house music and Joy Division-style baroque rock.

Nor did Weatherall ever buy into his own mythology. When peers were travelling by private jet to mega-gigs in Ibiza, he was playing to small but passionate crowds in venues in Cork and Galway.

“His raison d’être was to spend weekends spinning life-affirming electronic music in basements, back-bars and spaces where people congregated to dance, seeking transcendental release,” says Ó Cíobháin. “Over the decades, he would have met ravers of all ages, from Baltimore to Bundoran and wowed them with his electric personality as much as his riveting tune selections.”

The late Andrew Weatherall. 

 Sheehy had forgotten all about his encounter with Weatherall and was astonished to discover the wisdom he had relayed about taking your blows and getting on with life had resonated so widely.

“He was utterly astounded. He had been aware of who Andrew Weatherall was from when they first met and he had followed with interest stories about him since first meeting him in 2008. He was aware that he had passed away the year before,” says Ó Cíobháin.

“But he had no idea that a chance phrase he had uttered to his on the N71 on a summer’s evening had captured the visiting DJ’s imagination, become a song, two beautiful tattoos etched on each arm and subsequently echoed out into the world, taking on its own inspirational life force. In fact, just before I spoke to Gerard for the first time, he had gone online and was utterly amazed to learn how the impact of the phrase he had uttered to Andrew had gone on to become so iconic.” 

 Weatherall wasn’t the only one to be struck by the idea of “failing” and then “sailing”. McDermott speaks to a woman who had the words tattooed on her wrist. She tells him the sentiments really only speak to you when you’re a little older.

 “All of this fed into it,” says McDermott. “I think it probably has to do with age. And this idea of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off and getting on with life.”

• Fail We May, Sail We Must is broadcast Thursday February 17 at 5pm on UCC98.3FM, and can be listened to as a podcast after that
• Sail We Must: The Sea Story of Andrew Weatherall and An Irish Fisherman will be screened at the Sugar Club Dublin, Wednesday February 16 and will be followed by a discussion between Cian Ó Cíobháin, Johnny Moy, and Billy Scurry about Andrew Weatherall and his connections to Ireland. The film will also air on the Mixmag website Thursday, February 17
• O Ciobháin will also host a special edition of his An Taobh Tuathail show on R na G on Thursday February 17 at 10pm, featuring selections from the DJ's stash of favourites