Dennis Hopper Choppers

Dennis Hopper Choppers is Ben Nicholls, a one-man-band, simultaneously playing guitar, bass drum, high hat, organ bass pedals, vox-organ and a 1969 Fender Dual Showman amplifier originally designed for Dick Dale which he said is ‘probably the loudest thing I’d ever heard.’ This coming from a man who played bass in the Silverjets and Menlo Park.

His debut, self-released album, Chop is 13 tracks of high-plains-via-East-London fretboard wrangling and heartfelt rockabilly stomp while his rich and astonishingly versatile baritone gives the album it’s soaring range.

The story of Chop’s making reads like a great unwritten Hollywood screenplay. Ben holed-up to write the album in a deserted villa in Tabernas, Spain. A villa whose owner, in true Hitchcock style, was murdered out of the blue by her son. Tabernas was also the location for filming of Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Chop has soaked up the fights, the hangings, and the hint of confederate gold carried on the wind off the dusty mountainside.

This all percolates deep into the album’s landscape: ‘The Ballad of Fu Manchu and the Red Bride’ is a tale of murdering wives with a nod to Christopher Lee; the reverberating guitar-stabbed violent chaos of a heart gone off-road in ‘Lust’ to the jealousy seeped mellow-malevolence of ‘World Gone Green’.

Chop was recorded at Ben’s Bud Sticky Sounds studio in Hackney early this year, but, ever the Peckinpah-esque outsider, he was on the receiving end as society came knocking.