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Irish Examiner
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Mike Scott on The Waterboys' tribute to Dennis Hopper, and being visited by Springsteen
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
The Guardian
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Waterboys' Mike Scott: ‘I love Prince's version of The Whole of the Moon. And Graham Norton's'
Why did your new album, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, take four years? VerulamiumParkRangerI knew Dennis Hopper as the actor in Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now and Rebel Without a Cause, and that he stood for the counterculture, but I'd never done a deep dive. Ten years ago I saw his photos at the Royal Academy and realised he was also a brilliant photographer; I started reading biographies and checking out the movies I'd missed. Then I wrote a fun song about him, Hopper's on Top (Genius), where every line rhymed with Hopper. I thought it would be great to do an EP, because his life was so colourful, but after some of my band members secretly recorded some instrumentals and suggested I put lyrics to them, I realised it could be an album of his life. I started just before the pandemic but had all these other albums and box set projects, so I'd work intensely on Hopper then leave it and return with fresh ears. It has 25 songs. A friend of mine suggested I was doing too many voices myself – an American commentator, an old hippy and so on – and needed some guests. I used to love those Bruce Springsteen bootlegs where he'd do these incredible narratives at the end of the songs and thought, 'If we could only get Bruce … ' He came to a Waterboys gig in Dublin 10 years ago so there was a connection, and our manager asked his. Bruce did three takes for the song Ten Years Gone and sent all three. I got to pick between them. He did it so brilliantly and brought all the drama that I'd hoped he would. What did you think of Prince's cover of The Whole of the Moon – and Father Noel Furlong's cover in Father Ted? SmilinPeterPrince did it twice. He did a solo piano version at Ronnie Scott's in 2014, which I've never heard, and a version in Minneapolis in 2015 with 3rdEyeGirl. I love it when people change my songs and make them their own. He flipped the lyrics round to sing 'I saw the whole of the moon', using the song to make a Black Lives Matter statement, which I thought was very powerful. I love the Graham Norton version on Father Ted where he's playing the bonkers priest in the caravan who remembers the words wrong. There's a gay disco version as well, by Boys of a New Age, with a killer synth riff, which is storming. In the The Double Life of Bob Dylan biography I discovered that you got invited to one of Dylan's jamming sessions with Dave Stewart in London. How was it? Bibliophile63It was 1985. Bob had heard The Whole of the Moon and apparently liked it. He was really nice to us. He had a quiet word with each of us individually because he must realise that he's precious to people and it's nice to have a private moment with him. We played with them for a couple of hours. [Blondie's] Clem Burke was on drums. The weird thing was that Bob wasn't singing. They were creating instrumentals for which Bob would later write the lyrics, which wasn't his usual way with a sheet of paper. In a quiet moment I leaned over and asked, 'Do you still write songs the other way?' He leaned towards me with a sort of glint in his eye – as if he knew what I was implying – and said, 'Yes, I do.' What is the legacy of Hopper's generation? MachoPudCulturally we're still only coming to terms with what happened in the 1950s and 60s. There was the march of technology, mass production and the confluence of civilisations: the Black African American experience meeting the white experience and Hispanic experience. Then the evolution of consciousness: the pill, women's liberation. It was all in this melting pot of incredible musical and cultural progress. Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing is a good metaphor for how ahead of its time it all was and we're still catching up. Oddly enough, now we've got the backlash with Maga and all that. People are trying to turn back progress but it won't work because humanity has to move forward, and we will. When you released The Liar, did you think it possible that Trump would be elected president again? PaulWB1960It was written around the time of his second impeachment. When it came out in 2022 I always had this sneaking dread that Biden's presidency would turn out to be a moment between two Trump nightmares. So it has come to pass, unfortunately. Would you have actually liked to have been a fisherman? Or indeed a 'brakeman on a hurtlin' fevered train'? DeJongandtherestlessThere was a moment in my life where my personal circumstances were sufficiently confusing and confounding for me to wish exactly that. Unfortunately, I didn't go off and do it. I put it in a song instead. What are your memories of your teenage years in Ayr, and have you ever thought of doing an album inspired by Burns as you did with Yeats [An Appointment With Mr Yeats, 2011]? Chriswa29Burns has been done so many times and so well that there's not really much fresh ground for me. Yeats felt underdone. Ayr was very beautiful geographically, a great old town to be in as a teenager that taught me a lot of life lessons. My first band members were blokes from Ayr. My first girlfriends were the women of Ayr. I owe the town a lot. My first gig was your old band called Another Pretty Face. How do you look back on your Edinburgh punk days? M1keM5I was living in Edinburgh and in my first proper band. I had a job in the HMV shop to make money to buy instruments. The moment we got the sniff of a record deal I was off, but it was a golden time: great fun, uncomplicated. Me and the guitar player lived in a bedsit with an Iranian landlady and if you had any lingering guests after 10pm she would come storming up the stairs. Pity the poor interloper! I think of those times with a lot of fondness. 'Your coat is made of magic / And around your table angels play' is beautiful. Is When Ye Go Away about anyone in particular? IanJamesCameronIt grew out of another song, Killing My Heart, which is on The Best of the Waterboys and the Fisherman's Box box set. I didn't think we had the definitive version so I stole most of the lyrics and put new music to it. Killing My Heart was about my own relationship at the time with my partner who became my first wife, a relationship going wrong for a member of the band, and one going wrong for a member of my family. But When Ye Go Away is more reflective: all the pain was left in Killing My Heart. What does Spiddal mean to you and do you ever get back to it? Captain LFor anyone who doesn't know, Spiddal is a village on the north coast of Galway Bay in the Irish-language area [where some of Fisherman's Blues was recorded]. I was there last summer being interviewed for a documentary about a pub called Hughes' and everything came back to me. The charms of the place, the Atlantic light, the sense of freedom and the magic of the Gaelic-speaking world. We got a tour of a new studio there and I was smitten all over again, thinking: could we come back and make a record? It's otherworldly and an inspirational source, so maybe something will happen. When did you first hear the phrase 'a bang on the ear' and did you have to ask what it meant? strawwdogIt was a telephone conversation with a crew member of the Waterboys who had a little boy called Benji. We were joshing on the phone and as we were signing off I said: 'Oh, and give Benji a clout in the head from me.' It's not meant literally; it's code for an affectionate 'hello'. I thought, 'I like that phrase. I'm going to use that.' Red Army Blues is probably my favourite Waterboys song. You sing it with real conviction even though it's written from someone else's point of view. How did the song come about? wyngatecarpenterI was fascinated by the second world war and read two books that inspired that song. One was The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer, a Frenchman of German extraction who was drafted into the SS. The other was The Diary of Vikenty Angarov, a story of a Russian who had fought in the Red Army. Because he'd seen how people lived in the west, it was threatening to Stalin's control. So a lot of the soldiers who had fought for Russia and defeated fascism were sent to the gulags. I was very moved by both books so I put together the song from the Russian soldier's perspective, but using place names and incidents from The Forgotten Soldier. Wikipedia says that there have been more than 80 members of the Waterboys, either as contributors to albums or tours. What does it take to be a Waterboy? 69thAnteaterIt's a matter of pride to me that we've had more members than any other band ever! I think the nearest competitor is Santana. I'm looking for people with an attitude or a character, and they have to be versatile enough to play all the different kinds of music that factor into the Waterboys' sound. My skills as a bandleader have developed, so now I find it much easier to bring whatever I need out of the musician. Did you recognise early on that Karl Wallinger was a talent best-suited to front his own band, and did you remain friendly after he left to form World Party? takinarideI always knew he was a potential band leader. The first time I went to his flat in London he had a reel-to-reel recorder and played me some songs he'd been working on and was singing. I always knew he was going to go off and make his own albums. After he left the band I didn't see him for years. Then, when he was living in New York in the early 90s, we met up, had a meal and played each other our new records. But he had this bad habit of putting me down in interviews in a very personal way, and that didn't really foster a good relationship. Will Steve Wickham be in the Waterboys again? SharonProbably. He's on one song of the Dennis Hopper album, but the fiddle has a very particular sound and carries a very particular emotion. I spent 25 years singing with an incredibly talented and brilliant fiddle player who can mirror everything I do and go everywhere with me. At the moment, it's really a good experience for both of us to not have to work alongside each other. For me it's a bit like life after fiddle – or more likely life between fiddle eras. We're still best mates. Life, Death and Dennis Hopper will be released 4 April. The second single from the album, Andy (A Guy Like You), is released 7 February. The Waterboys tour the UK and Ireland in May and June
