Culture That Made Me: Steve Wickham on Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and The Big Lebowski
Steve Wickham, musician.
Steve Wickham, 62, grew up in Sutton, Dublin. He was a founding member of In Tua Nua. In 1985, he joined the Waterboys. Over his career, his fiddle has adorned over 200 albums, including recordings by Sinéad O’Connor, Elvis Costello and U2’s track Sunday Bloody Sunday. He will be at Clonmel Junction Arts Festival appearing in the music play Breath, Thursday, 30 June – Saturday, 2 July. See: www.junctionfestival.com
The Big Lebowski is so funny. I love the laconic nature of the lead character. I know so many characters that are like the Dude – pot-smoking, chill-out characters who kind of find themselves in these situations. Life just trundles by while all the big trauma happens. He's reverent to people’s feelings because he’s thinking about his mate, the John Goodman character – who loses his temper all the time; who is so uptight while the Dude is so chilled, even if someone is pulling a gun on him. I love that vibe that he has. He's the ultimate hippie, but at the same time he sticks up for his carpet. If I could live like the Dude, I would be so happy.
As a teenager, there was a great disco where I lived in Raheny called the Grove. It was legendary in Dublin. At the end of the night, they used to play Walk on the Wild Side, which has this amazing saxophone solo at the end of it. I thought it was really cool. It resonated with my parents’ taste in music. My dad's records were all jazz and my mothers were all early rock’n’roll. I went out and bought a Lou Reed record with that song on it. Actually, the other songs on the record were not a bit like Walk on the Wild Side. They were much grungier with fantastic guitar playing from Mick Ronson. When I heard Mick Ronson’s guitar I just thought, Wow.
I didn't know what Lou Reed was singing about in his songs because I was a Dublin kid growing up in leafy suburbs and he was singing about gritty New York counterculture, but the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat album and his lyrics about putting something into his brain probably connected with all those adolescent chemical changes that were going on in my body. It touched the pulse for me.
Around 1979, I bought Van Morrison’s Into the Music album. Van was in his rapturous stage. It was this most beautiful, poetical record with an amazing violin player on it. I’d been playing fiddle since about three years of age so immediately I connected to the music, with this spooky violin sweeping and soaring. Fantastic playing by a woman called Toni Marcus. It just rang through. It had me hooked. Van Morrison is so intimate with the listener. Beautiful sax arrangements with Pee Wee Ellis as well. The musicianship on it was top class. I couldn’t believe an Irishman was making music like it.
Marcus's fiddle-playing was so lyrical. She had a wonderful way of playing around his voice and interplaying with it. It wasn't string line. It was just responding to the poetry of the song.
Robert Macfarlane’s Underworld: A Deep Time Journey is about everything that goes on underneath the earth. It's beautifully written. The prose is gorgeous. It's fruity and it's impassioned. Every chapter looks at different underground phenomena around the world. For example, there’s one chapter where he writes about the Paris catacombs. There’s another chapter where he writes about the mycelial network, the fungus that grows underneath the ground. Then he goes into huge deep mines in America where they're looking for these subatomic particles that they only reach from outer space. It's a fantastic book.
I saw Horslips play in a sweaty dance hall somewhere in Co Kerry, like Glenbeigh, when I was about 14 or 15. I was right in front of the stage at Charlie O'Connor’s shoe height, looking at his beautiful, well-polished brogues. He was playing a black electric fiddle. I got so much ribbing from my classmates as the kid that went off to learn violin, but he made it sexy and appealing to be in a rock ’n’ roll band with an electric fiddle. I thought: that’s what I want to be some day.
Someone completely different was Kevin Burke, a trad fiddle player. It was on the radio I first heard him. When I came home from school, there was a programme on RTÉ radio presented by Rodney Rice. The theme tune to it was Planxty playing Tabhair Dom Do Lámh. My ma said to me one day, I heard this fiddle player, an Irish fella called Kevin Burke. This lyrical groove that he has. There was a pulse in it that would make you want to dance. It was rhythmic. It was the whole orchestra in this one guy with a fiddle. When I first heard him, I thought he was a master.
Steve Cooney produced the first In Tua Nua record. I have never met anybody quite like Steve Cooney in a studio. Just his musical ear. I learned a lot from Steve. He has this ability to visualise music so the music is coming out of the speaker and he'll take a piece of music paper and he can write down the music that's coming out of the speaker. That was very impressive.
John Prine was a fantastic songwriter. I played with him one time. It was his ordinariness. He was super ordinary. Whatever way he was able to write a song, it was conversational. At the same time, it touched on a lovely aspect of humanity. He was very humane. He wrote relatable songs about tragedy and joy and love. Some songwriters like, say, Van Morrison is a great songwriter, but there's an element of mysticism; you have to work at some of Van’s earlier songs, but with John Prine, there's no poetic interpretation. It's an American thing – this conversational, country songwriting.
I did a gig with Patti Smith. The drummer in the Waterboys – Jay Dee Daugherty – was also Patti Smith’s drummer for years. About 10 years ago, he asked me if I’d get up and play with Patti Smith when she came to Dublin. I witnessed this elderly woman become a 17-year-old girl beside me. All the years fell off and she was this young woman again. It’s a lovely thing to see.
