Mike Scott on The Waterboys' tribute to Dennis Hopper, and being visited by Springsteen

Irish Examiner

23-04-2025

In the mid-1980s, there seemed a more than decent possibility that The Waterboys might become as big as U2. Mike Scott's band had just achieved their most substantial hit to date with The Whole of the Moon, a cloud-capped power-ballad which, with its soaring chorus and stadium rock inclinations, was bang on trend in an era when rock music was shooting for the stars. After The Whole of the Moon, the sky appeared to be the limit. Or at least it did until Scott sketched out a different vision for the group's future when setting sail for unknown waters with 1988's folk-influenced Fisherman's Blues.
'I'm happy if more people are hearing Waterboys records. I could see in the 1980s that we had the same agents as U2, a company called Wasted Talent in London. They were pushing us in the same way,' says Scott. 'They thought we were the next big thing who would follow that path. It wouldn't work for us because I wanted the music to change. I wasn't happy making the same music. Now, I'm not saying U2 made the same music. But their changes were more incremental. My changes were sharp, 180-degree turns."
Scott has just taken another 180-degree turn with The Waterboys' gripping sprawl of a new album, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper – a record they bring to their Irish fanbase when they pay Dublin, Belfast and Cork in June and July. As the title makes plain, the theme of the LP is the late actor Dennis Hopper – an outlaw figure in Hollywood best known as the co-director and star of Easy Rider and for his villainous turns in David Lynch's Blue Velvet and in the 1994 Keanu Reeves blockbuster Speed.
At first glance, Scott and Hopper might appear to have little in common. Hopper was an agent of chaos who blazed a psychedelic streak through 1970s Hollywood, consuming gargantuan qualities of drugs and booze on the way. Scott, by contrast, is a thoughtful musician who shares little with Hopper beyond a penchant for cowboy hats: the closest he's come to a Hopper-esque moment of wild impudence was leaving behind the 'big music' sound of The Whole of the Moon to make Fisherman's Blues in Galway with a line up of traditional artists including Sharon Shannon. As as radical gestures go, it's not quite up there with shooting a tree after mistaking it for a grizzly bear during an LSD trip, as Hopper once did in.
Still, he has long been drawn to Hopper – not just because of the madness, but also due to the soulful qualities he recognised in an exhibition of Hopper's photography from the 1960s that he happened upon in London several years ago. The images had an almost haunting effect on Scott. How could an actor so associated with anarchy and outrageousness also be capable of such insight and beauty? The best way to explore that question, he decided, was through music.
'It started with a song called Dennis Hopper. It was going to be a digital EP. Myself and Brother Paul, who is one of our keyboard players, we took on the task of doing a mashup of that track and turning them into new pieces about different parts of Dennis' life. Then this amazing thing happened – the other band members went to a studio in London just before Covid. They recorded a series of instrumentals thinking, 'we'll send these to Mike and maybe he'll put lyrics on them and we'll make some new songs'.
"I got this zip folder of instrumentals just when I was thinking about Dennis Hopper. I suddenly found myself writing more lyrics about Dennis and realising it's not an EP. It's going to be an album about Dennis. Maybe it should be his life story – one thing led to another.'
Hopper was a renaissance figure – an actor, director, photographer and, above all, a cautionary tale about what happens when you spend your most creative years hoovering up drugs. But he was also an eyewitness to some of the great cultural forces shaping the 20th century.
One of his first roles was opposite James Dean in 1955's Rebel Without A Cause, while he finished his career in big Hollywood productions such as Speed, opposite Keanu, and Waterworld, where he was the villainous foil to Kevin Costner. In between, he befriended Andy Warhol, put the counter culture in the mainstream with Easy Rider and played a crazed photographer in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (freaking out cast and crew in the process). For a songwriter, there was lots to dig into – and Scott radiates an infectious glee as he traverses the fast lanes and unlikely detours of Hopper's life.
'What was so fascinating for me about Dennis was how he was present at all these moments,' says Scott. ' Rebel Without A Cause and the beginning of youth culture. The beginnings of pop art when he was championing the unknown Andy Warhol. All these amazing things that are now pillars of the world we live in.'
As Hopper might have observed, the album is a trip. It traces the actor's life, starting with his upbringing in Dodge City, Kansas and then moving on to his early years in Hollywood, his breakthrough with Easy Rider and his descent into egotism and drug-induced mania. Along the way, the project features some stellar cameos. The songwriter Fiona Apple performs the stark Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend, a ballad sung from the perspective of one of Hopper's five wives and which addresses reports that he was physically abusive (' I used to say. No man would ever strike me. And no man ever did 'Til I met you').
It's an astonishingly vulnerable turn from Apple – and it takes a lot to outshine it. But the record achieves just that when no less a figure than Bruce Springsteen delivers a strident spoken word about Hopper and his legacy on Ten Years Gone ('He's still moving, he's still able/ To lay some old magic on the table').
The Waterboys in concert at Musgrave Park, Cork, last year. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
Springsteen's charisma blazes on the track like a New Jersey wildlife. Scott correctly sensed that that the blue collar bard was just the person to deliver what is an essence a eulogy for Hopper after listening to old bootlegs of Springsteen bantering with an audience and holding them enraptured through the sheer force of his personality. It also helped the they had previously crossed paths – and that Springsteen was a Waterboys fan.
'I'd met him. He came backstage to say hello to me at a Waterboys show in the Iveagh Gardens in 2012. I didn't know he was there. He just walked up at the end: Bruce Springsteen in a baseball cap. He'd enjoyed the show, and he was really nice. So I thought, 'well, there's this small connection there'. And, of course, I was a huge fan of his – I had been since I was about 17 years old. Our manager knows Bruce's manager – all the managers know each other over there [in the US]. And so the contact was made and he said yes. He recorded three takes and sent them to me. He delivered it absolutely [perfectly] – everything I'd hoped when I remembered his old bootlegs of his stories, it was all that and more.
Scott has never made the same album twice (with the possible exception of the 1990 follow up to Fisherman's Blues, Room To Roam, after which he relocated to New York and changed course with the psychedelic Dream Harder). Still, in Ireland, it will be Fisherman's Blues for which he will always be loved – on its release it felt like a gift from afar to the country. In the late 1980s, Ireland had a large degree of self-consciousness around folk and traditional music – such feelings were by no means universal but they did exist. Then Scott made Fisherman's Blues and for some people there was sense of finally having permission to love traditional music. Not that Scott saw it this way, but an international rock star had given his seal of approval.
Raised in Edinburgh and Ayr, Scott had come late to traditional music – and name-checks Christy Moore as a vital figure in that journey.
'I once had a job in the HMV shop in Edinburgh. There was a Scottish bloke there who was a folkie. He used to play De Dannan and Christy Moore. I always remember he played the Christy Moore record with the song Saco and Vanzetti [about the execution of two Italian left-wing activists in 1926] because it had the words 'anarchist bastards'. I was about 19-years-old. It always gave me a giggle that it got played in this very strait-laced HMV. I had a little advance primer.
"When I came to live in Ireland, Steve Wickham [former Waterboys fiddle player] was in the band. He'd play tunes at rehearsals. We'd be playing This is the Sea or The Pan Within [staples from Scott's 'big music' period]. And Wickham would be over in the corner. At first it would all sound the same. But then I'd say, 'well that's what you're playing' And he would say, that's the Hunter's Purse [a traditional reel made famous by The Chieftains]. So once I moved here in 1986 I began to get drawn into it.'
It cheers him no end to see Irish folk back in the spotlight today courtesy of groups such as Lankum, who have applied a doomy, prog-rock aura to Ireland's ancient musical traditions. 'I like them– I like the darkness of Lankum. They bring a sort of skeletal darkness. It's great.'
Scott has lived all around the world: Spiddal in Galway, New York - and the spiritual community at Findhorn Scotland. He's been in Dublin for 17 years and finds that life here agrees with him – though it's on the road where he feels truly at home.
'I'm a dad, so a lot of the time I'm on dad duty. Getting up early in the morning, getting my daughter to school. A lot of my life is dadd-ing around. If I'm too long off a stage I miss it. Three months and I'm, 'hey hey – what's happening?''
Life, Death and Dennis Hopper is out now. The Waterboys play Live at the Marquee, Cork July 10. They also play 3Arena, Dublin June 7 and Waterfront Hall, Belfast, June 8