The Waterboys Bring Their Big Music Down Under as Dennis Hopper’s Story Rides Shotgun

THE WATERBOYS make their long-awaited return to Australia and New Zealand in May 2026 their first tour in over a decade! Led by the incomparable Mike Scott and critically acclaimed as one of the best live bands on the planet, the 2025 band also features double keyboard players Brother Paul from Memphis and James Hallawell from Cornwall and is grounded by killer Irish rhythm section Aongus Ralston (bass) and Eamon Ferris (drums).

THE WATERBOYS will be . From the early “big music” of The Whole Of The Moon and classic album This Is The Sea through to the roots-inspired Fisherman’s Blues era and music from their ambitious post-2015 output. Mike Scott talks to Hi Fi Way about returning to Australia.

Great to be talking to such a legendary musician like yourself, huge privilege for myself. You’ve got to be excited about coming back, it just feels like a long time between drinks.
Eleven years, I think, yeah. Too long.

Does it take quite a bit of work just to try and get the planets to line up and make something like this actually happen?
Well, we have to get past the pandemic first. COVID 2.0 with what’s going on in the Middle East. We’ve had to change all our flights, by the way. We were going to fly via Dubai. So we changed all our flights to get to Australia. They’re still working on it. We might be going through San Francisco, apparently. I don’t mind that, that’s alright.

We can’t wait to have you down here, but thank you. Did it just feel like the right time to get a tour up and going and reconnect with Australia again?
Yes, indeed.

In terms of the set list for this tour coming up, is that a bit of a tough challenge to balance the old with the new stuff?
Not really, we toured most of 2025 with our new album, which is Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, and so we’re used to presenting it in a mix of all the new, so it’s cool. We’ll just pick up where we left off last year.

How did the whole album come together, and what is it about Dennis Hopper that appealed to you?
Well, I’d written a song about Dennis Hopper, because he was such an interesting guy, and at first we thought we might release it as a single, and I thought, well, wouldn’t it be nice to have another couple of songs about Dennis make it a digital EP or an extended play. His life was so interesting that it was easy to pick a couple of episodes and write songs about them and so I got two more songs, and then I got four more songs, and then I got six more songs, and suddenly it was a very long digital EP. Then I realised, hang on a minute, this is an album about Dennis Hopper. Once I realised it could be long enough for an album, I thought, well, why not tell his life story in songs.

Did you find that the songs literally wrote themselves?
They had come quite easy. They really did, yeah. I would think, well, Dennis was active during the 50s and 60s, and those were fascinating times culturally. How about a song about when he was championing Andy Warhol at the beginning of pop art? And so I wrote this little song called Andy, A Guy Like You, from the perspective of one of Andy’s gang who drove to Los Angeles in 1963 to meet Dennis and have Andy’s first exhibition on the West Coast. Dead easy, suddenly, bang, it just kind of came together.

Was it hard stopping the creativity, given that the songs, as you’re saying, seem to come really quickly and easily?
Yeah, it was. I think I did about three dozen in the end, and that’s why there was a bonus album that came out six months later with the extras. I had too much for the album. I had to really pick and choose.

It almost seemed like you had too many good songs. Could you believe your luck in having such a purple patch with so many good songs to be able to try and whittle it down to a final album?
Well, it’s a wonderful thing when that happens. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s an occasional thing. I had a purple patch during 2015 to 2016. I had a wonderful, wonderful time there, and almost a song a day at that point. Then there’s a couple of years where there’s not so much. A song a month, a song every six months, and then bang! Hopper happens. It’s wonderful.

Did you have to do much research into Dennis Hopper?
Yeah, I read all the books about him, and there are a number, and I went through all his old interviews, magazine articles, oh yes, researched him very, very deeply. I’m friendly with some of his biographers, so we were exchanging information.

What did the people who did his biographies think of his life being transformed into song?
Well, I’ve been in touch with two of his biographers. Tom Folsom, who wrote the book Hopper. That’s a wonderful book about Dennis, and he and I have been mates for about ten years, and he helped me a lot in the project. He said, you should do a song where he does this, and you should cover this episode in his life, so that was really helpful. And there’s a guy called Mark Rossell, who wrote a wonderful book called Everybody Thought We Were Crazy about Dennis in the 60s. It’s come out about three years ago. I didn’t know him personally, but he sent me a message on Instagram saying, I couldn’t get you a New York show, but I loved the album. Very nice.

How was it in the studio? Did it all come together as you thought it would?
It was during COVID. It was 2020, 2021, when most of the work was done, and so I was working on my own in lock down. In this very room, in my studio, on my computer, I’ve got a recording studio on my computer and my collaborators, James, the piano player who wrote a lot of the songs for me, he was doing the same in London. Brother Paul, our other keyboard player, he was doing the same in Nashville, and so on. So it was all done remotely, with a few exceptions. There are three or four songs that were done in a room together at different times, but most of it done remotely. It’s actually a nice way of working, and the technology is so good these days that you can make it sound like we’re all playing in a room quite easily.

Was there anything from your research that you found out about Dennis Hopper that really surprised you when you read about it?
The thing that constantly surprised me was how present he was at so many crucial moments in pop culture. You know, he acted with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, which was the kind of big bang of teen culture. Then he hung out with Elvis in Hollywood in the late 50s. As I said, he was involved with Andy Warhol in the beginning of pop art. He was in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, he was at the Monterey Pop Festival, which was the first modern rock festival and so many other moments that he was present at, and influential in. He was like a rock and roll counter-cultural Forrest Gump.

How do you present it live? Do you have to put it together in chronological order, or add much story to the songs, or do you just play the songs and they connect as a story themselves?
We don’t do the whole record on stage, we do about forty minutes of it, and I do do a little bit of intros here and there. When we were in Europe and America, we had a projector with a screen behind us, and we could show little bits of films as a backdrop to the music, some films of Dennis, and so on. But we can’t afford to bring that to Australia and New Zealand, so it’ll just be the music. But we do do it chronologically. Enough to tell the arc of the story.

Did it get you thinking about other influential figures you might tell a similar story about in song?
I don’t think so. Once is enough. You know, we did an album of W. B. Yeats’s poems turned into songs about fifteen years ago, and people kept saying, well, will you do someone else next? And once is enough.

How long was the whole process? Did the idea start long before COVID?
No, just at the beginning of COVID. Five years from first idea to release. I did several other records during that time. We had another new album in 2022 called All Souls Hill, and we had two box sets that I did a lot of work on, presenting unreleased music from the 1980s. So I was busy, not just with Hopper, but five years from initial idea to release.

Do you still feel the creative pressure, or is it just pressure you put on yourself to keep being creative and pushing forward?
Well, I’m always busy creatively, so there’s always something going on, and over the last year or so, apart from touring this record, I’ve been working on lost music from the Fisherman’s Blues period. A lot of recordings that we did that were never documented, and actually, I thought I’d listened to them all. But the record company said, well, look, we’ve got a lot of reels here that have got no song titles on them, they just say “jam,” or “instrumental,” or “soundcheck.” Could you listen to them? And I did, and I found lots of recordings that I’d completely forgotten that were really magical, so we’ve put together… it’s a triple album. Three vinyl, three CD, that’s coming out in July called Atlantic Rain, with all this lost music. So that’s very exciting, I don’t know if I was driven doing it, but I was completely absorbed in it while working on it.

When making new records, do you feel the challenge?
When making new records, I do feel a challenge, and part of the challenge is to get people’s attention. Because being a band that’s been around for forty five years, or whatever it is, it’s very hard to get attention, because people think, oh, The Waterboys, yeah, yeah, I know what they were about, I don’t need to listen to them. Or if we do a lot of records in quick succession, people switch off. I do that a bit with Neil Young. However much I love Neil, when he does an album a year for five years, I can’t keep up with him, and I sort of lose interest. I don’t want that to happen with The Waterboys, so I’m trying to leave gaps between the records and frame them in such a way that people will take notice. Fortunately, a concept like the life of Dennis Hopper told in songs, that’s a good way to get people to take notice. So at the moment, I’m wondering, what can I do for the next record that’s going to catch people’s imagination, and I haven’t got the answer yet.

Does it also create pressure when you’ve had a massive hit like The Whole of the Moon, and people constantly compare everything to that benchmark?
No, not really, I don’t mind. I love The Whole of the Moon too, I like it as much as all the people that love it, so it’s not a problem for me, I feel I’ve already written songs that are as good as The Whole of the Moon anyway, I’m not competing with it.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Waterboys on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…