The Waterboys have form when it comes to associating with erratic outsiders. In 2011 Mike Scott’s shape-shifting rock project paid tribute to WB Yeats with the concept LP An Appointment with Mr Yeats, while Electric Picnic 2023 saw Scott share a festival stage with The Killers and their plastic-haired, unnervingly polite singer, Brandon Flowers.
But the quietly eccentric frontman of a stadium band is one thing, the LSD-fuelled human wrecking ball who directed Easy Rider and scared the bejaysus out of Martin Sheen on the set of Apocalypse Now something else entirely.
That individual is, of course, the late Dennis Hopper, the baddest of Hollywood bad boys and an agent of chaos in both his own life and the glory days of American cinema.
Scott, raised in Edinburgh and based in Dublin, has long been fascinated by the late actor, who inspired the song Dennis Hopper on The Waterboys’ 2020 release, Good Luck, Seeker. Yet far from exorcising his interest, Scott found that dipping a toe in the Hopper expanded universe fuelled his obsession.
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Which is how he has come to dedicate an entire double album to the cinematic wild card described by David Lynch (who cast him in Blue Velvet as the wicked Frank Booth) as a “rebel dream guy”.
Those same adjectives might apply to Scott, who with Life, Death and Dennis Hopper has crafted a sprawling, unpredictable and wholly delightful record that is in the tradition of the greatest Waterboys albums.
Fearless in its desire to forge a different path, it is also cheerily unconcerned about where it ranks in the hit parade of a group initially heralded as flag wavers for the genre known as “the big music”. (Think U2 without the sanctimony.)
This “big music” was the sound of The Waterboys catalysed with The Whole of the Moon. That was before Scott moved to Spiddal, in Co Galway, where, with Fisherman’s Blues, he essentially invented the Celtic-folk genre.
Life, Death and Dennis Hopper sounds nothing like either of those periods. Which is sort of the point. Through sheer unpredictability, it fits perfectly into the great ragged tapestry of The Waterboys’ career, its best moments up there with anything Scott has recorded.
It opens with Kansas, a portrait of Hopper rising like a human dervish from the wild open spaces of his native American Midwest. It features a dark and stormy lead vocal from Steve Earle, who has listed The Waterboys as one of the bands he’d give anything to be a member of. (The others are The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.)
Earle sets in motion a shaggy, spiky and freewheeling undertaking. Across its 25 tracks, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper swerves from the Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks-style 1960s orchestral pop of Brooke/1712 North Crescent Heights to the cocktail-hour lounge music of Andy (A Guy LikeYou), a celebration Hopper’s friendship with Andy Warhol.
Throughout there is a sense that Scott isn’t telling us the story of Hopper’s life so much as allowing us to experience it for ourselves. He proceeds from the downhill rush of Easy Rider (the film evoked in the breeze-in-its-hair ballad Blues for Terry Southern, named after its writer) to the pummelling noirish metal of Frank (Let’s F*ck) – which puts us in the head of the actor’s deranged, gas-mask-chugging monster in Blue Velvet.
Earle is merely the start of the cameos. The record also features the songwriter Fiona Apple, the great lost voice of late-1990s “sad girl” pop today reborn as a maverick outsider artist who refuses to be manipulated by the corporate music industry. Having previously given a chilling makeover to The Whole of the Moon, she here brings a mystical ache to the piano ballad Letter from an Unknown Girlfriend.
Blue Velvet revitalised Hopper’s career. With Speed and Waterworld he had great success riffing cartoonishly on the demonic mobster he had brought so distressingly to life for Lynch before dying, respectable at last, in 2010, at the age of 74.
Much like that unexpected final act to Hopper’s life, this Waterboys album has room for many more surprises. The most notable is the appearance of Bruce Springsteen on Ten Years Gone. Booming out his lines like a man with something to prove, his husky voice counterpoints wonderfully with that of Scott over a sleazy Britpop chug.
Just like Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, they accelerate into the horizon, a duo of rock’n’roll desperadoes fuelled by their love of the open road and its endless possibilities.
