A sprawling, lengthy, pseudo-beatnik rock-country release by the British band fronted by Mike Scott, here celebrating the life of the charismatic, often misunderstand hell-raising Hollywood icon, spanning multiple genres, particularly Americana, with a spread of guests including Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Fiona Apple. Scott himself is often in full-throated blues, folk and country Bob Dylan vocal mode, and the album intersperses a variety of film clips, background sounds and quotes to capture the life of the actor, photographer and director of cult films such as Easy Rider and Last Movie in a career that spanned an era of 1950s cowboy films to that wide-eyed war photojournalist in Apocalypse Now (1979), the unforgettably frightening psychopath Frank in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986 and beyond. It’s a mixed bag of highs and lows appropriately enough, but the ups include Steve Earle’s with Kansas, a country number bidding farewell to Hopper’s hometown of Dodge City, which then moves into Scott’s jazzy renditions on Hollywood ’55; Live in the Moment, Baby has a fast-gun rock’n’roll panache, about this “hot young buck’s” early career with a namecheck of another fast-living young star at the time, James Dean; references to Andy Warhol and Terry Southern also appear in the smooth Andy (A Guy Like You) and Blues For Terry Southern. After this comes a whole sequence of jazz, freak folk, psychedelia, glam rock, and orchestral pop as the hard-drinking drug years kick in with Ten Years Gone (with some low key spoken word by Bruce Springsteen), but the highlight is perhaps Fiona Apple’s smoky voice in Letter from an Unknown Girlfriend - it’s great to hear her voice with now four years since her last album. A marvellously varied, slightly messy album overall, filled with excerpts and romantic nostalgia, but a great subject, and certainly capturing some essence of Hopper (who died in 2010 aged 75) with some enjoyable songs along this wild and rocky road. Out on Sun Records.
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