Mike Scott, who is today looking every inch the dapper rocker, in a natty leopard-print coat and enviable Stetson, is an honorary Irishman of long standing thanks to anthems such as The Whole of the Moon, And a Bang on the Ear, and Fisherman’s Blues, songs that are tattooed on the souls of many of this island’s inhabitants.
A mainstay of The Waterboys since the band’s formation, in 1983, he has also lived here full-time since 2008.
“My family’s here, my children were born here. It’s a place of freedom of the imagination. It’s also a liberal country recovering from a long, drawn-out trauma of church and colonisation, and still opening out in to a liberal future. I like that and feel very at home.”
The band’s new album, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, is a marvellously ambitious, and just plain marvellous, 25-song concept album based on the life and times of the Hollywood maverick, who died, at 74, in 2010.
Why Hopper? “I like him,” Scott says. “He’s a fascinating character: all the different worlds he inhabited, all the different artistic disciplines, all the different moments in cultural history he was a part of. An amazing life.”
Scott, who was born in Edinburgh in 1958, was perhaps a bit young to cotton on to Easy Rider, the landmark counterculture road movie from 1969 that was Hopper’s big breakthrough, the first time around. Although Scott was aware of the actor, it was another artistic endeavour, a decade or so ago, that got him hooked.
“I didn’t become deeply interested until I saw one of his photographic exhibitions. I was passing the Royal Academy in London, and they had a poster in the window for The Lost Album of Dennis Hopper. I couldn’t figure it out – ‘album’ suggested music – so I went in and my mind was blown by his photographs.
“The world they documented was fascinating: 1961 to 1967, mostly around Hollywood and Los Angeles but also Haight-Ashbury, civil rights, LA riots and new superstars like Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane. He had an eye. None of it felt staged.”
Hopper’s photographs also appeared on the covers of River Deep – Mountain High, the 1966 album by Ike &Tina Turner, and the Smiths compilations Best ... I and Best ... II, from 1992. The film director Wim Wenders said that if Hopper had “only been a photographer, he’d be one of the great photographers of the 20th century”.
Jump forward to 2020 and The Waterboys’ album Good Luck, Seeker featured a song called Dennis Hopper. Scott built it around rhymes with the actor’s surname. “There’s a sense of humour in that and yet it’s also a serious song. I’m relishing the challenge. ‘He’s sucking on a psychedelic pink gobstopper.‘”
That got the ball rolling.
“I fancied that as a single,” Scott says. “And I thought if I could get a couple of songs about other aspects of his life we could have a digital EP.”
So Scott and “Brother” Paul Brown, The Waterboys’ keyboard player, constructed two more tracks. Then three of the band’s other members sent Scott instrumentals that they’d recorded. “Suddenly all these Hopper lyrics started to come, and I realised this wasn’t an EP, it was an album.”
Scott’s lyrics covered Hopper’s early work alongside James Dean, the success of Easy Rider, the years lost to addiction before his comeback, in 1986, as the unforgettable Frank Booth in David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, and even late-in-life golf games with Willie Nelson.
Some tracks that “just broke up the narrative too much”, such as a Cannes film festival theme song and Western Roll Call, which lists the characters Hopper played in westerns – he was in True Grit the same year as Easy Rider – didn’t make the cut. (Scott says they’ll come out later for a Record Store Day release.)
The musical settings also fit the story: the first three songs alone go from country to 1950s swing to Bo Diddley. “It just worked out like that,” Scott says. “The dramatics of the events suggested the music.”
Everyone from John Wayne to Andy Warhol turned up in Hopper’s orbit. (There’s a great story about Hopper shooting bullets into a Warhol print of Mao Zedong, thereby increasing its value, which doesn’t even have to be true.) Their presence also allowed Scott to tell the story of the past three-quarters of a century of popular culture. “Absolutely,” he says. “Because he was there and was such a big part of it.”
The album, which isn’t afraid to tell a warts-and-all story, features some high-profile guests. Steve Earle’s is the first voice you hear as the young Hopper vowing to escape Kansas, the state where he was born.
“Steve came in because I’d written the lyric but my own music didn’t work: it wasn’t American enough. I needed someone who could evoke the prairies,” Scott says. “He got it absolutely right. The idea was I would sing, but his demo vocal was just so beautiful I asked him to do it.”
Fiona Apple gives an incredible performance on Letter from an Unknown Girlfriend, a song Hopper does not emerge well from. “I knew her music and her version of The Whole of the Moon, which was in a television show five or six years ago,” Scott says, referring to the Dominic West and Ruth Wilson drama The Affair, in 2019.
“She brought such an emotive edge to it. I wanted a female voice so we asked Fiona, the idea being we’d send her a Waterboys backing track, but she learned the song on piano and sent me this version. We were on tour in Spain, driving from the airport to the hotel, and the email came. I played it through the speaker on my phone for the band and we knew: ‘Let’s not do anything else.‘”
By far the biggest name on the album is Bruce Springsteen, who adds a voiceover to Ten Years Gone. “The idea with the guests was to broaden the picture. Wondering who could do that dramatic voice, I remembered my old Springsteen bootleg Flat Top and Pin Drop, from the LA Roxy in 1975. He does this long story at the start of Pretty Flamingo, so I thought Bruce should be the guy.”
Was Scott aware of Springsteen’s voiceover turn on Lou Reed’s song Street Hassle, from 1978? “I was aware of it when you were in short trousers,” he replies. “It’s a really good piece, but it wasn’t part of this inspiration process. I’d met Bruce before – he came to a Waterboys show in the Iveagh Gardens in 2012. He saw me playing a guitar solo on my back – so there was a little connection.”
Springsteen sent three takes, which allowed Scott, who was a “huge fan” of the singer in the 1970s (his two favourite albums are The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run), to edit together what he wanted.
Waterboys fans will be pleased to hear that Steve Wickham, the fiddle ace who was such a large part of the Fisherman’s Blues detour into Irish and roots music after the band’s first three albums, turns up on Live in the Moment, Baby. “He plays fuzz fiddle – sounds like electric guitar. He might come and guest on the tour if he’s in the same town. He played with us in Cork last year.”
The album also features fake cinema ads, news reports, sound effects and an old hippie recalling Monterey International Pop Festival, which Hopper attended. There’s even an instrumental piece for each of Hopper’s five wives, to give the record a suitably filmic quality.
It calls to mind The Who’s approach on Quadrophenia, their mod opera from 1973. The instrumentation on Transcendental Peruvian Blues, behind the news report of Hopper arriving in Peru to film The Last Movie in 1970, is very Who-ish. “The suspended chords and the guitar crunch is very Pete Townshend,” Scott says. “And the piano. Not deliberate, but I left it there.”
On the Who theme, Scott has said he might take a Tommy-style approach to the set lists for The Waterboys’ upcoming tour (which includes five Irish dates “at the moment – could be more”), in that they might open with a few hits, then play tracks from the Hopper album followed by a few more old favourites. Is that to sweeten the pill? He doesn’t like the phrase.
“I don’t expect people who pay money to see us to hear nothing but new music,” he says. “They’re going to hear their favourites: Whole of the Moon, Fisherman’s Blues – I love playing those songs. And they’re going to hear a good chunk of Dennis Hopper, enough to tell the story.
“The Who is a wonderful template, where they would come out and do half an hour of familiar songs – Substitute, I Can’t Explain – then do 40 minutes of Tommy, and then My Generation. So we’re going to do something like that.”
While Scott was recording his Hopper album he was also working on archive projects such as last year’s exhaustive (but not exhausting) 1985 box set, which documented the making of The Waterboys’ classic This Is the Sea. He’s not finished with the process, promising a further triple vinyl album in 2026 from the bottomless well that was the Fisherman’s Blues sessions, to go with the six-CD box set that came out in 2013.
And that’s not to mention the Magnificent Seven five-CD set released in 2021, which chronicled the band’s Room to Roam period.
When does he sleep? Scott grins. Life is good, he agrees as he picks up his bag to head for another appointment, probably dreaming up the next adventure as he dances down the street.
Life, Death and Dennis Hopper is released by Primary Wave on Friday, April 4th. The Waterboys play 3Arena, Dublin, on June 7th; Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on June 8th; Live at the Marquee, Cork, on July 10th; Breakwater festival, Wexford, on August 1st; and Live at the Docklands, Limerick, on August 17th
