'This Hopper bloke wasn't just an actor. He stood for the whole counterculture'

The Waterboys' Mike Scott, who has long found inspiration in other musicians, speaks with Jim Farber about the wild life and times of Dennis Hopper, the subject of his latest album

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More than four decades ago, when Mike Scott started The Waterboys, the very first song they released saluted the art of somebody else. “A Girl Named Johnny”, issued in 1983, swooned over the androgynous daring of Patti Smith. In the years since, Scott has written entranced odes to an entire constellation of maverick stars, including Hank Williams (“Has Anyone Here Seen Hank?”), Elvis Presley (“I Can See Elvis”), Hendrix (“The Return of Jimi Hendrix”) and Van Morrison (“The Soul Singer”).

“It’s just a quirk in my personality,” says Scott, 66, of his favoured motif as he sits in his home studio in Dublin for a video interview. “I like writing songs about people. And these just happen to be very interesting people.”

None of them interests him more, it seems, than Dennis Hopper, the first star to inspire from Scott a wall-to-wall album tribute. Titled Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, Scott’s latest album with The Waterboys features 25 tracks that bore into every aspect of Hopper’s work, influence, and meaning. That’s no small feat considering the subject’s impact in a wealth of disciplines, including acting (in pivotal films like Rebel Without a Cause and Blue Velvet), directing (Easy Rider, which introduced a whole new level of realism to Hollywood), photography (evidenced by scores of vaunted exhibitions of his work), and art collecting (he was one of the first to recognise the subversive vision of Andy Warhol).

During our interview, Scott reflects Hopper’s character in his very look. Sporting serious glasses and a cowboy hat, he strikes the perfect middle between intellectual and outlaw.