Mike Scott

The Waterboys, founded by Scottish songwriter, singer and guitarist Mike Scott in 1983, is an ever-changing band with a mercurial history. Their early albums of skyhigh alternative rock/pop include the classic This Is The Sea with its mighty hit The Whole Of the Moon. Since then The Waterboys have evolved through countless forms, playing a music of many genres yet always rooted in Scott's songwriting mastery and a sense of musical exploration. Highlights on the journey include the marriage of rock and folk on Fisherman's Blues and 2011's An Appointment With Mr Yeats, on which the poems of the Irish mage and master WB Yeats were powerfully set to contemporary music. And Scott has been honoured in his time: winner of an Ivor Novello Award for Whole Of the Moon; recipient of the Americana UK Award for lifetime achievement; his songs sung by Prince, U2, Rod Stewart, Ellie Goulding, Tom Jones, The War On Drugs, Killers, Bleachers and countless other artists.

Now comes the most audacious Waterboys album of all. Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is the epic story of the trailblazing American actor and rebel told through a song cycle that depicts not only Hopper's own saga but the sagas of our times and shared culture.

Joined by Waterboys colleagues Brother Paul (organ/keyboards), Famous James (piano/guitar), Aongus Ralston (bass) and Eamon "Rimshot" Ferris (drums), and by brilliant guest collaborators including Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple, Steve Earle and young English singer Barny Fletcher, Scott has created an album for the ages, a sonic movie for the mind and soul. Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is centred around a core of thirteen stunning songs and is enhanced by an instrumental for each of Hopper's five wives and several imaginative inserts and interludes. The effect is moving, thought-provoking and at times sharply funny.

Why Dennis Hopper? Scott says "I knew Dennis from movies like Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now. Then one day I passed an art gallery showing The Lost Album by Dennis Hopper, an exhibition of photos. I went in and was confronted with hundreds of beautiful black and white photographs Hopper shot in the 1960s and I fell in love with his eye, with his way of seeing - and that got me interested in Hopper the man. I discovered the arc of his life was the story of our times; he was at the big bang of youth culture, in Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean who mentored him. He was at the beginnings of Pop Art and championed the young Andy Warhol. He was in the counterculture, hippie and psychedelic scenes of the '60s; at the riots on Sunset Strip, civil rights marches, Monterey Pop. When he directed Easy Rider he showed the new culture on screen for real for the first time, and began the "New Hollywood" movement, the shift to realism in movies. Then he crashed with an epic folly, The Last Movie, that burned him out, reminding me of me when I hit the rails making Fisherman's Blues. In the '70s and '80s he went on a wild 10-year bacchanal, almost died, came back, got straight and became a five-movies-a-year character actor without losing the sparkle in his eye or the sense of danger or unpredictability that seems to have always gathered around him. He screwed up a hundred times yet he lived a life dedicated to art, and I love him for that.

"Soon my interest in Dennis turned itself into a song called Dennis Hopper that came out on a Waterboys album about five years ago and was under consideration as a single. I figured if I wrote another couple of tracks about Dennis, maybe pick a few episodes from his colourful life, we'd have a nice little Extended Play record. But fate intervened. Some of the other Waterboys did some secret recording without me then sent me seven beautiful instrumentals and an accompanying note saying "can you put lyrics to these?" Well yes, indeed I could and suddenly song lyrics about Dennis started coming in response to the instrumentals. I realised this ain't no E.P. man, this is an album; and the theme was Dennis Hopper's life story."

Scott worked on the album for four years, co-writing with band colleagues and composing opening track Kansas with Steve Earle, who also sings it. "I like that the first singer on a Waterboys album isn't me", laughs Scott. He assembled the music carefully between other projects and concert tours, solicited contributions from the other guests - Springsteen's poignant voiceover on Ten Years Gone; Fiona Apple's breathtaking Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend; and Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith's heartrending falsetto on I Don't Know How I Made It - finally mixing the results in his Dublin studio with longtime bandmate Brother Paul. "It's the longest time I ever spent on a record," he explains, "yet it was the easiest running order to figure of any album I've ever made. Hopper's life story dictated the chronology. It begins in his childhood, ends the morning after his death, and I get to say a whole lot along the way, not just about Dennis but about the whole strange adventure of being a human soul on planet earth."