Latest news with #Waterboys
Irish Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
WIN TICKETS TO SEE THE WATERBOYS LATM, CORK, THURSDAY JULY 10, 2025!
The Waterboys have been led by Scottish singer and guitarist Mike Scott since the 1980s and have evolved through countless line-ups, winning a fearsome concert reputation along the way. Their best-known songs include The Whole Of The Moon, How Long Will I Love You, This Is The Sea and Fisherman's Blues. Thanks to our friends at Live At The Marquee we have a pair of tickets to giveaway to one lucky winner to see The Waterboys Live at the Marquee, Thursday July 10, 2025 PLUS overnight B&B stay for two sharing at the 4* Clayton Hotel Cork! To be in with a chance of winning simply fill out the form below. If you can't see the form above, CLICK HERE Terms and Conditions apply, see entry form for details.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The concept album is dead – and it was never great to begin with
In German, there is a word, verschlimmbessern. It is used to describe an intended improvement that turns out to have the opposite effect. Airbags were invented to save lives, but they explode with such force that they sometimes kill. Cane toads were introduced into Queensland to cut down on harmful pesticides, and whoops, an irreversible ecological plague. There is no greater example of musical verschlimmbessern than that of the concept album – vaguely defined as a record designed around a central narrative, a unifying theme or a particular artistic device. The definition may be hazy, but the very whiff of it sends music critics into fits of schwärmerei (German for 'unbridled and excessive enthusiasm'). The intention is to elevate an LP into a literary work of art, and the artist into a mythical genius. Yet more often than not, the 'concept' serves only to confuse and complicate, resulting in a record that succeeds neither as a collection of songs nor a cohesive piece of storytelling – a half-built ship with a fancy paint job, lost in a desolate sea of compromised ideas. The concept album emerged in the 1960s, with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles and its like, and it endures to this day. The Waterboys just released Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, inspired by the Hollywood icon, and Car Seat Headrest will release The Scholars in early May, told from the perspective of various students at a fictional college. It's an exciting idea. Taking a listener on a sonic journey, immersing them in an experience that is both cinematic and enthralling. Occasionally, it works: Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city, for example, transports us to one particularly wild day in the Compton of Kendrick's childhood, explores characters with depth and provides narrative payoff to those who listen from start to finish. The result is the greatest album of the 21st century. But make no mistake: this is the exception, not the rule. Almost always, a concept album (no matter how good the concept might be on paper) quickly devolves into a conceited exercise in ego and forced-together puzzle pieces. Whether the artist is trying to tell an overarching story, write songs from different perspectives, or experiment with the form itself, it's nearly impossible to pull off. Some concept albums try to reinvent the wheel, and find themselves buried beneath their ambition, with the gimmick swamping the songs themselves. Commercial Album by the Residents consists of 40 songs, all one minute long. It's a fun idea, but it runs out of juice quickly, becoming tedious and distracting. The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands sees the Turtles pretend to be 12 bands across 12 songs of wildly different genres, including country, psychedelia, surf rock, pop and R&B – a baffling listening experience. Far worse is the narrative-driven concept album. If, when you look up a recipe online, your favourite part is the long, needlessly complicated story serving no purpose and obscuring the actual food, then concept albums are for you!
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The concept album is dead – and it was never great to begin with
In German, there is a word, verschlimmbessern. It is used to describe an intended improvement that turns out to have the opposite effect. Airbags were invented to save lives, but they explode with such force that they sometimes kill. Cane toads were introduced into Queensland to cut down on harmful pesticides, and whoops, an irreversible ecological plague. There is no greater example of musical verschlimmbessern than that of the concept album – vaguely defined as a record designed around a central narrative, a unifying theme or a particular artistic device. The definition may be hazy, but the very whiff of it sends music critics into fits of schwärmerei (German for 'unbridled and excessive enthusiasm'). The intention is to elevate an LP into a literary work of art, and the artist into a mythical genius. Yet more often than not, the 'concept' serves only to confuse and complicate, resulting in a record that succeeds neither as a collection of songs nor a cohesive piece of storytelling – a half-built ship with a fancy paint job, lost in a desolate sea of compromised ideas. The concept album emerged in the 1960s, with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles and its like, and it endures to this day. The Waterboys just released Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, inspired by the Hollywood icon, and Car Seat Headrest will release The Scholars in early May, told from the perspective of various students at a fictional college. It's an exciting idea. Taking a listener on a sonic journey, immersing them in an experience that is both cinematic and enthralling. Occasionally, it works: Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city, for example, transports us to one particularly wild day in the Compton of Kendrick's childhood, explores characters with depth and provides narrative payoff to those who listen from start to finish. The result is the greatest album of the 21st century. But make no mistake: this is the exception, not the rule. Almost always, a concept album (no matter how good the concept might be on paper) quickly devolves into a conceited exercise in ego and forced-together puzzle pieces. Whether the artist is trying to tell an overarching story, write songs from different perspectives, or experiment with the form itself, it's nearly impossible to pull off. Some concept albums try to reinvent the wheel, and find themselves buried beneath their ambition, with the gimmick swamping the songs themselves. Commercial Album by the Residents consists of 40 songs, all one minute long. It's a fun idea, but it runs out of juice quickly, becoming tedious and distracting. The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands sees the Turtles pretend to be 12 bands across 12 songs of wildly different genres, including country, psychedelia, surf rock, pop and R&B – a baffling listening experience. Far worse is the narrative-driven concept album. If, when you look up a recipe online, your favourite part is the long, needlessly complicated story serving no purpose and obscuring the actual food, then concept albums are for you!
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Waterboys: A Dennis Hopper rock opera? Weirdly, it works a treat
In front of 1,400 people in the relatively modest environs of the Anvil in Basingstoke, The Waterboys reminded us once again that they really deserve to be acknowledged as one of the great bands of our time. Leader Mike Scott strode out alone on stage to start up the stirring acoustic guitar rhythm of his 1984 song A Pagan Place, with current band members filing out one by one to add their own flavours to the building sound. Piano, organ, drums and bass introduced layer after layer of melody and texture until the room seemed to be consumed in a wild storm, everything weaving and crashing together as Scott howled through his epic of spiritual mystery. As the band tore on into the heavy stomp of The Glastonbury Song, the frontman strapped on an electric guitar, jiggling about the stage, tearing out frenetic solos and singing about finding God where he always was. The rich Hammond organ of 'Brother' Paul Hallawell intermingled with the dazzling piano runs of 'Famous' James Hallawell in a blazing stew of rock and soul. Honestly, The Waterboys have been so good for so long it baffles me why they are still treading the boards in relatively modest venues, rather than arenas or even stadiums – but I suspect Scott might prefer it this way. It is a space that allows the 66-year-old maverick creative freedom to keep introducing new work in new formats. After charging through four of their most beloved anthems, Scott did the thing that strikes dread into audiences everywhere: introduce a selection of new songs from his latest album, which only came out last month. What's more, it is a double concept album, a biographical song suite about a late American movie star, director and artist of quite marginal fame, entitled Life, Death and Dennis Hopper. Call it a Rock Hoppera, perhaps. Yet there was no sudden shift to the bar. The audience remained raptly intent as three backing singers joined the line-up, and Scott led us through 12 songs and instrumentals from his new opus. The accessibility of the material was helped by pithy introductions and a huge screen projecting judiciously chosen photos and footage; the elegance of the music and flamboyance of the band's playing did the rest. The album has slightly passed me by, but I found myself completely absorbed and eager to listen to it again. That is quite a win for a veteran band playing to old fans. We were rewarded with a final section of the Waterboys' most thrilling anthems, including a fierce Don't Bang the Drum, rousing The Whole of the Moon and absolutely wild The Pan Within that had Scott grinning in delight as his keyboard players went head-to-head like a pair of duelling musos. The Waterboys line-up has never been fixed in stone, and Scott likes to claim there have been more members than any other band, upwards of 80 over their 42-year career. Latest recruit, 27-year-old Barny Fletcher, considerably lowers the average age of the ensemble. He sang counterpoint and harmony vocals in a strange, ethereal high voice, and during encores took the lead on his own emotional ballad, Wasted Sunset, to huge applause. Again, the promotion of a new, young talent is just not the kind of thing you expect to see at a vintage rock show, and speaks volumes of Scott's sheer love of music, and his audience's willingness to go on a journey with him. An absolutely storming romp through Fisherman's Blues provided an enormously satisfying finale. The sound of people singing 'wooh-hoo-hoo' could still be heard as the crowd filed out into the Basingstoke night.
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
