The Waterboys were one of the biggest bands of the 80s but almost four decades on from their commercial heyday, leader Mike Scott remains a thrilling creative livewire. Over the past few years, the Celtic rock giants have released expansive deluxe editions of 80s classics This Is The Sea and Fisherman’s Blues but in between all the looking back, Scott has always kept an eye on the next step too. Since 2015, there has been five new Waterboys records, all taking in different sonic shapes and textures and all keeping up Scott’s gold standard songwriting. Another cracked arrived this week: an ambitious 25-song concept album about Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now star Dennis Hopper. It’s called Life, Death & Dennis Hopper and it’s exactly the sort of adventurous ride you imagine the late screen icon would approve of, taking in swaggering rock’n’roll, hazy country ballads, punky splutters and more. It’s released on the iconic Sun Records, which is a bonus, and features guest appearances from Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple and Steve Earle, which is a bonus bonus.
Sitting down with this writer in the taxidermy-heavy café/reception of his boutique hotel – there was a baboon’s arse hovering over his right shoulder for the duration of our conversation – Scott told this writer how the record came about.
“The songs came very quickly,” he said. “Some of my band members had gone into the studio without telling me. They did a day of instrumentals that they’d written themselves and they sent me the seven instrumentals and asked me, ‘Could I write lyrics for them’. It was a wonderful thing for band members to do.”
The music arrived, Scott explained, just when an idea about Hopper was rolling around his mind. He’d already written one song about the Speed and True Romance actor – the electronic-pop groove of Dennis Hopper, which featured on the 2020 Waterboys album Good Luck, Seeker – and now something bigger about Hopper began to unfurl.
“It was just when I was thinking about Dennis Hopper and I was working on what was going to be an EP, a Hopper-themed digital EP,” he continued. “Because I suddenly had all these instrumentals, all these new Hopper lyrics started coming real fast and I realised it was going to be an album that’s his life story. In terms of songwriting, once I hit on the idea of it, it was relatively easy to think, ‘Well, alright, what about a song about this period of his life whilst this was happening to him’, because it’s such an interesting life he led.”
In all the things he discovered about Hopper, who was also a talented painter, photographer and sculptor, one of Scott’s favourites was the tale he unearthed about Elvis. “Hopper was a friend of James Dean, you see, and he was in two movies with James before James died,” he recounts. “When Elvis first became a star and they put him in the movies, Elvis went to Hollywood and James Dean was his hero. He couldn't meet James because James had died, but the next best thing is he met Dennis, James's friend, and so Dennis and Elvis met up and Elvis was asking Dennis for advice because Dennis was an actor and Elvis was doing his first movie. He said to Dennis, ‘I've got to hit a woman in the movie, I’m really, really uncomfortable because I've never hit a woman.' And Dennis said to him, ‘You don't really hit her. You make it look like you hit her and they put on sound effects’. The way that Dennis tells it, Elvis didn't say, ‘Oh, thanks, mate, that's a great relief’. He looked at Dennis like Dennis had smashed his illusions because he thought the movies were real.”
There was a period of Hopper’s life, he said, that felt a little like a reflection of his own. “In 1970, he made a film called The Last Movie, just after his success with Easy Rider,” he explained. “He took so long finishing it, so long editing it, that the moment had passed.” It was an artistic slog, he said, that cast his mind back to the 80s. “He got bogged down and lost his perspective and it reminded me of me when I made Fisherman’s Blues. The first bit of Waterboys success happened with This Is The Sea and then I made Fisherman’s Blues. I don’t think the reasons for my delay were the same in my case as Dennis's case, we were very different personalities, but I had that experience of getting bogged down in something that I cannot finish, and then the moment's passed, time has changed.”
Fisherman’s Blues is now regarded as a classic, so much so that Scott said he had recently been working on a future release relating to more outtakes not featured on 2013’s extensive, seven-disc Fisherman’s Box. “There’s a lot of music that I’d forgotten that’s on unmarked reels, because we recorded so fast that a lot of the time the engineers didn’t know what things were called,” he said. “Lots of things were just marked “Untitled”. I’ve compiled a triple vinyl album and double CD of music that’s never come out. Some of it is really great.”
That constant swing between digging into the archives and working on new music, he explained, is what fills his days and keeps him on his toes. For now, though, it’s all about fresh sounds – Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is the sound of Scott and The Waterboys in full, brilliant flow.
