The Waterbirth
I pressed my ear against the bathroom door, trying to listen to the beautiful voice that had stopped me in my tracks. There it was again, singing Minnie The Moocher. Ha di ha di ha di hi!
I tapped on the door. There was no answer, but the singing continued. I had to find out who had that amazing voice.
“I’m coming in,” I warned and flung the door open to see Marvin in the bath. He jostled in the water and sat up, grabbing a face washer to cover himself.
“That’s brilliant!” I said to him. “Do you know anymore?”
Marvin, still surprised by my impromptu visit, took a moment to answer. “Yes. Lots.” He then went into a rendition of Danny Boy. I could sense that I was in the midst of something special. I rushed out of the bathroom and came back with my guitar. I sat on the toilet and started strumming the chords to Everybody Hurts. Still in the bath, Marvin sang along, even more beautifully than before.
We stayed in the bathroom for two hours, playing music and singing together. I’m not sure how it happened, we were just in the right place at the right time, but after a while we both knew that magic was taking place.
“Do you feel it?” I asked Marvin. He nodded excitedly. “So, what now?”
“I think,” Marvin said, slowly, as though the idea was still forming in his mind. “It’s becoming clear to me that we have to form a band. There are no two ways about it. It’s something that we must do. We owe it to ourselves and, more importantly, we owe it to the world.”
For the next minute, neither of us said a word. We knew that this was an historical moment. People would be talking about this moment for decades to come. This was the exact moment that one of the top bands of the 21st Century was born. This was the formation of the musical duo, Scruples.
I broke the silence by playing a riff on my guitar. Marvin started tapping on the side of the bath and then burst into song with the most amazing melody that I have heard. I have never felt such synergy and as a result, we wrote the song, Sing For My Supper. It went on to become our first single and at concerts, even to this day, it is our most requested song.
That first session in the bathroom became known as The Waterbirth. Marvin and I have discussed it extensively in interviews and have gone on record to say that we didn’t actually do any sound recording in the bathroom that day, although I wished that we had. That hasn’t stopped fans and bootleggers making their own low-quality recordings of The Waterbirth, claiming to be Scruples, and attempting to sell them at auctions. To end these fraudulent recordings once and for all, we did a re-enactment performance of The Waterbirth on Jimmy Kimmel in 2016, which was well received.
At the end of that session, that magical session, I asked Marvin, “Where did you learn to sing like that?”
Marvin smiled, picked up a bar of soap and began scrubbing his arm. “Close the door on your way out, there’s a good fellow.”
