The Waterboys
Life, Death And Dennis Hopper
★★★★
SUN RECORDS
Some years ago Mike Scott chanced upon an exhibition of the ’60s photo art of Dennis Hopper, best known as the radical, freewheeling actor/director. Seeing the era through Hopper’s eyes moved Scott to investigate the former’s story further and increasingly view Hopper (who died from prostate cancer aged 74 in 2010) as a cultural giant, but also to feel a growing appreciation for a man who’d lost his mind in the process of making 1971’s baffling rogue stuntman flop The Last Movie.
Scott could relate to the latter, having as he admits, “hit the rails making Fisherman’s Blues” in Ireland in the ’80s. Inspired, he wrote the simply named pop art rocker Dennis Hopper (which appears here in reprised form as closer Aftermath) for The Waterboys’ 2020 album, Good Luck, Seeker. Then, over four years, he spun the star’s tale into this 25-track-long conceptual album.
If recent years have seen Scott move further away from his image as an apparently solemn spiritual seeker, allowing the humour in The Waterboys’ music (see And A Bang On The Ear) to fully emerge, then here he runs riot with it. The result sounds like a fast-moving mixtape, with the eclecticism of Frank Zappa’s ’68 audio collage We’re Only In It For The Money. Comprising songs (some with key guest appearances), instrumentals, a fake movie trailer (for ‘Freaks On Wheels’: “Saddle up your hog, man, and get loaded”) and Scott playing the part of an ageing hippy recalling his memories of the Monterey Pop Festival, it’s quite a trip.
Opener Kansas throws the first curveball, in that it’s sung by Steve Earle, as the youthful Hopper pining to leave his home state. Then we quickly sweep through a first half that chronologically follows Hopper’s story and manages to encompass dreamy exotica in Brooke/1712 North Crescent Heights, retro futuristic bossa nova in Andy (A Guy Like You) and distinct Buffalo Springfield vibes with The Tourist.
None other than Bruce Springsteen pops up over the circular, trancey groove of Ten Years Gone, providing a husky spoken word cameo celebrating Hopper in his lost decade post-The Last Movie (“Somewhere out there beyond the limits, man, there’s a story being told”). Later, in piano ballad Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend, Fiona Apple takes the lead vocal for a song of love and hate that defiantly addresses domestic violence.
It doesn’t all work: Freakout At The Mud Palace sounds like a 1980s Euro house DJ trying to rock out, and Frank (Let’s Fuck) has Scott, casting himself in Hopper’s Blue Velvet role as the psychopathic Frank Booth, repeatedly howling the bracketed part of its title over a grinding groove. But otherwise, the hit rate is high, and Mike Scott is clearly having fun cutting himself free from The Waterboys’ past, and playing fast and loose, much like the mercurial subject of this album.
Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is out now on Sun Records
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