HOLD on to your hats! Mike Scott of The Waterboys is taking us on a wild ride.
He has devised a 25-track album celebrating “one of the great American lives”, Dennis Hopper — actor, filmmaker, photographer, womaniser, firebrand, hellraiser.
The Waterboys’ Mike Scott opens up on their musical tribute to American icon Dennis Hopper[/caption]
Dennis Hopper and wife Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas, their marriage only lasted eight days[/caption]
It summons a blizzard of musical styles, incorporates atmospheric sound collages, tells myriad gripping tales and includes cameos from Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Fiona Apple.
Scott maintains that Life, Death And Dennis Hopper goes beyond the story of one extraordinary man and serves as a window into western popular culture from the Fifties onwards.
He says Hopper was first to admit that he “never played a leading man role for which he would be remembered”.
But he adds: “His own role as Dennis Hopper was his greatest role.
“He wasn’t just an actor, he wasn’t just a photographer, he lived a life dedicated to art.”
I’m meeting Dublin-based Scott at London’s Groucho Club to discuss his latest endeavours with his enduring band, The Waterboys, who first achieved fame in the Eighties with songs such as The Whole Of The Moon and Fisherman’s Blues.
As we settle in a quiet corner of an upstairs room, I notice that the cowboy hat, the enigmatic shades, the big coat, the slightly uncontrolled shoulder-length hair are all present and correct.
We’re here to discuss one of 2025’s most intriguing releases, appearing on legendary and rebooted Sun Records.
“It’s fantastic!” exclaims Scott. “Label mates with Elvis, Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis.”
But before we go any further, I’ll set the scene for Scott’s subject matter.
Born and raised in Dodge City, Kansas, Hopper dreamed from an early age of heading west to Hollywood.
Before he hit 20, he landed a small part in Rebel Without A Cause, starring his ill-fated hero James Dean.
He got to know Elvis, helped discover Andy Warhol, acted in Westerns with John Wayne and marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In 1969, he directed and starred in landmark counterculture movie Easy Rider alongside Peter Fonda and his lifelong friend Jack Nicholson.
After a spectacular drink and drug- fuelled fall from grace in the early Seventies, he returned to big screen prominence in Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now and subsequently took well-received parts in Rumble Fish, Hoosiers and True Romance.
Although Kyle MacLachlan is the male lead in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Hopper’s portrayal of Frank Booth, a violent drug dealer with a split personality, is truly unforgettable.
Hopper was also a gifted photographer, chronicling fast-changing times with a keen eye and noted for capturing unguarded portraits of leading actors and musicians.
He led a tempestuous private life, marrying five times, and he died aged 74 in 2010 amid acrimonious divorce proceedings against the last of his wives, Victoria Duffy.
As you can imagine, Mike Scott had a vast amount of material to work with as he set about telling Hopper’s life story through music.
I ask Scott when his fascination began. “About ten years ago, I was walking down Savile Row In London.
“I must have been looking for shirts,” he recalls.
“I turned a corner and there stood the Royal Academy. Beautiful old building. In the windows were big posters for The Lost Album by Dennis Hopper.
‘IT WENT TO HIS HEAD’
“I did a double take. I thought, ‘Dennis Hopper? He was an actor. What’s The Lost Album? Is it a record?
“I went in and discovered it was an exhibition of his photography — and I fell in love with his eye.”
After that lightbulb moment, Scott devoured Tom Folsom’s Hopper biography and searched for “whatever else I could find”.
“I already knew some of his movies and that he was seen as a counter- cultural icon but I went deeper.”
The first musical product of Scott’s new obsession was a track simply titled Dennis Hopper, to be found on The Waterboys’ 2020 album Good Luck, Seeker.
Next, he thought of doing a digital-only Hopper-based EP but when three members of the band surprised him with a “zip folder containing seven instrumentals”, the singer broadened his horizons.
He says: “The instrumentals arrived just as I was thinking about Dennis and, bang, all these songs started coming and I knew it would be an album.”
The record begins with the intimate Kansas, named after Hopper’s home state.
Acoustic guitar and harmonica frame searing vocals from alt-country maverick Steve Earle.
Scott says: “My lyric is about Dennis’s boyhood but the music I’d written for it didn’t work — it wasn’t American enough!
“I thought, ‘Who would write a really good Americana tune for this? Oh yes, Steve Earle.’
Dennis and first wife Brooke Hayward, alongside Groucho Marx[/caption]
Hopper and third wife Daria Halprin[/caption]
“It was supposed to be me singing but when Steve did the demo, it was a no-brainer to use his vocals.”
The song ends with the evocative sound of a steam train whistle because, says Scott, “Dennis would watch trains going west and would think, ‘They’re going where movies are made.’”
Next we hear the jazzy groove of Hollywood ’55 which refers to Hopper’s arrival in Tinseltown and him getting a minor role in Rebel Without A Cause alongside James Dean, who died in a road crash later that year.
“It was a juvenile delinquent flick,” explains Scott.
“As the song says, Dennis was cast because he was young, fresh-faced — it was a moment in history.”
The exuberant Live In The Moment Baby is carried by a Bo Diddley-style riff and is based on the advice Dean gave to Hopper.
While another of the album’s early highlights is Andy (A Guy Like You) which centres on Hopper’s friendship with pop art doyen Andy Warhol and has “a Burt Bacharach influence with maybe a nod to The Temptations’ My Girl”.
Scott says: “Andy’s first exhibition in Los Angeles came after Dennis recommended him to the gallery owner.
“Rumour has it that Dennis was the first person to buy a Campbell’s soup can painting. You’d like it to be true.”
A couple of tracks reflect Hopper’s momentous Easy Rider period at the end of the Sixties, the short Freaks On Wheels and Blues For Terry Southern, a shout out to one of film’s co-writers.
‘LOST YEARS’
Scott says: “As Dennis said himself many times, Easy Rider was a cowboy movie — with motorbikes instead of horses.
“For me, it was the first time the counterculture, or the pot-smoking freedom of expression of the Sixties, was represented in an authentic way by people who lived it and understood it. You were actually watching hippies.”
Two songs, Hopper’s On Top (Genius) and Transcendental Peruvian Blues, draw on the period after Easy Rider when, says Scott, “it all went to Dennis’s head.
“He thought he couldn’t put a foot wrong.”
In 1970, Hopper filmed his most wildly ambitious project, The Last Movie, in Peru “when everybody wanted to know him” but it was poorly received.
“He got bogged down with the editing,’ says Scott. “It’s beautifully shot and could have been such a great film.
“It has Kris Kristofferson singing Me And Bobby McGee. It would have been the first time anybody had ever heard that song if the film had come out sooner.”
Of course it became a posthumous No.1 hit in the States for Kristofferson’s muse Janis Joplin in 1971.
Scott picks up Hopper’s story again: “After The Last Movie, he crashed and burned.
“The film won an award at Venice Film Festival but it didn’t cut ice with studio bosses who pulled it after two weeks because he’d delivered something so uncommercial.
Peter Fonda stars with Dennis in Easy Rider[/caption]
Hopper’s fourth wife Katherine La Nasa[/caption]
“Dennis was very upset about that — very cynical, very angry. Although he was hired to play lead in Kid Blue, an OK film, he stopped getting big offers.”
This brings us to the song about Hopper’s lost years, Ten Years Gone, notable for squalling rock guitars and a white-knuckle spoken word passage courtesy of Bruce Springsteen.
Scott says: “Dennis was out of it at that time, lost in a maze of his own making, so I wanted something hard, dirty and hypnotic.”
On hiring the services of The Boss, he adds: “I thought, ‘Who’s got the voice, the drama, the gravitas?
“And I remembered listening to my Bruce Springsteen bootlegs as a teenager.
“He would do these talk-overs at the end of songs with his wonderfully dramatic voice. I knew he was the guy I needed.
“I’d met him after a Waterboys show in Ireland. He was really kind, really nice.
“So I asked my manager, who is based in New York and knows his manager, and Bruce said yes.
“He did three takes at his home studio. He sent them to me and let me choose — how wonderful is that?”
Scott was also thrilled to hire the services of Fiona Apple, who lends her expressive tones to the stately, piano-led Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend.
I tried to make them representative of their characters
Mike Scott
“She’s a fantastic, dramatic singer, so much pathos, so much pain,” he says. “Fiona’s demo was so great, we didn’t need to re-record it.
“Her The Whole Of The Moon is one of the most emotional covers of it I’ve ever heard. It’s in my top three with Prince and a great gay disco version.”
If her contribution to Life, Death And Dennis Hopper “is how his girlfriend would have sounded if she’d been a singer songwriter”, what about his five wives?
The album is interspersed with instrumentals for each of them. “I tried to make them representative of their characters,” says Scott.
“Dennis’ first wife Brooke, an actress and the daughter of a famous Hollywood agent, was elegant and beautiful.
“It seemed to me that a piece of classical music would represent her and how she touched Dennis’s life.”
After they divorced, Hopper wed singer Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas, but their marriage only lasted eight days.
“Nobody knows what happened and she hasn’t gone public,” reports Scott.
“Michelle was a hippie goddess and James, our keyboard player, developed a piece that sounded like Nicky Hopkins playing with the Rolling Stones.”
By the time Hopper married third wife Daria Halprin, an actress and dancer who starred in cult movie Zabriskie Point, “things were getting difficult”.
Hopper’s last wife Victoria Duffy, who he split with before his death in 2010[/caption]
But Scott says: “Daria was was another very elegant lady.
“She was involved in spiritual dancing and self-expression so I felt that southwestern music with flute was a good representation of her.
“The track was recorded by Brother Paul, our other keyboard player, and his late wife April.
“Before she died of cancer, April was an great practitioner of native American flute. Their piece is heart-stoppingly beautiful.”
For Hopper’s fourth wife Katherine, another dancer, Scott had a feeling his friend and Nashville musician Anana Kaye “would get her”.
But he applied a more cautious approach to Hopper’s fifth and final spouse.
He says: “I haven’t done an instrumental specifically for Victoria.
“She is a more private individual and I didn’t want to attempt guessing what happened in their marriage.”
“So I did an instrumental about the place where they lived — Venice, California (Victoria).
“The music represents Dennis’s spirit and the waves of the sea you hear are the cancer that overpowered him in the end.”
And there we have it. Life, Death And Dennis Hopper — and Mike Scott and The Waterboys.
The Waterboys’ Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is out now[/caption]
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