Live review: The Waterboys at the Gateshead Glasshouse

Waterboys frontman pictured in previous live action in France in 2012 (Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images)Waterboys frontman pictured in previous live action in France in 2012 (Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images)
Waterboys frontman pictured in previous live action in France in 2012 (Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images)
It’s surely a sign of the esteem Waterboys frontman Mike Scott is held in that not only was he not given the bum’s rush after pitching a concept album about late US actor Dennis Hopper as his first for new label Sun Records but he also managed to rope in big names including Bruce Springsteen to help out.

Its subject having been dead for a decade and a half, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, the band’s 16th album, isn’t even a contemporary concept album like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen six years ago but, rather, an out-and-out historical one akin to Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VII from 1973 or Fairport Convention’s ‘Babbacombe’ Lee from 1971.

Unfashionable as that might seem to some, it makes for an enjoyable listen even if you’re not as convinced as Scott evidently is of the Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now actor’s standing as a polymath and leading light of the western world’s 1960s and ’70s counterculture.

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Just as the 2020 album track it takes its cue from, called simply Dennis Hopper, managed to get closer than seemed likely to sounding uncontrived despite every line rhyming with Hopper – flat-toppers, name-dropper, flip-flopper, stop her and pill-popper, for example – so Scott’s new LP, a No 72 hit following its release last month, makes a more convincing case for its subject’s centrality to elements of late-20th-century history than you might think, however.

It’s been given an airing live at the moment via a tour that stopped off in Gateshead on Saturday and continues to venues including York Barbican tomorrow, May 15; Stockton Globe on Saturday, May 24; Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on Thursday, June 12, and Barrowland Ballroom on Saturday the 14th and Sunday the 16th; and Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Friday the 13th.

The band’s 26-song Gateshead setlist included no fewer than 13 of the 25 tracks, some of them instrumentals, making up the new album, so prior acquaintance with it would be advisable.

Highlights among that new material including Ten Years Gone, Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend and Golf, They Say.

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Those aside – and an incongruous encore of tour collaborator Barny Fletcher’s 2024 single Wasted Sunset – nothing more recent than an excellent rendition of 1990’s How Long Will I Love You? made an appearance unfortunately.

Though they’ll probably never play a show not featuring The Whole of the Moon and quite rightly, it being their only top-five single to date, half a dozen songs from its parent album, 1985’s This is the Sea, could be considered to be overdoing it if it’s at the expense of a 35-year stretch of an on-off career lasting only seven years longer than that.

A couple of tunes from, say, 2015’s Modern Blues, 2007's Book of Lightning or 2000’s A Rock in the Weary Land would have been welcome as a bridge between material from their 1980s heyday and their new LP.

That minor quibble aside, Edinburgh-born Scott, 66, and his ever-changing backing band – currently made up of James Hallawell, Paul Brown, Aongus Ralston, Eamon Ferris and Fletcher – remain as compelling a proposition live as they’ve ever been in their innumerable incarnations featuring a cast of more than 80, and the likes of Medicine Bow, Glastonbury Song, The Pan Within and A Girl Called Johnny continue to merit their status as fan favourites every bit as much as in years gone by.

For details of further tour dates, go to https://mikescottwaterboys.com/

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