Echo & the bunnymen: Classic or Dud?

The Teardrop Explodes were, of course, superior in every way.

you know, yesterday I would have agreed w/this 100%. I mean the teardrops were great, cope solo as well, really, one of my favourite bands/artists ever, but to-day, right now, I've got to disagree. "Ocean Rain" beats anything the TDX recorded hands down. Really, it's knocked me flat. I remember "Silver", for example being not-that-good, but when I put it on yesterday, i was like FUCK, THIS = TEH BEST MUSIC EVER!!1 It fucking lifted me up.

i 2d everything norman said upthread about ocean rain. i would also add that it's the 1 eatb record where i can see the purported doors influence -- in that ocean rain is kinda what the soft parade should have sounded like.

Yes to both. (The reissues' bonus tracks are by and large not ones from the box set, though there's a small bit of overlap.)

I dunno `bout that. Cope isn't so "amiable" toward Mac through much of Head-On and Repossessed. Rivalry does that, i suppose.

That said, I just never though the two bands sounded very similar. I mean, the Bunnymen were much more of a guitar band than the Teardrops.

Thanks for the advice. I'll have to sell some stuff on ebay to pay for the reissues!

Utterly awful band, yr right. Back to EATB - I have just bought the grey 5th album in the reissue series. I like this one greatly, but I realise that no-one else in the world does. Original (non-LP)version of Bedbugs and Ballyhoo is the absolute bizness.

Norm - based on what you've said about Ocean Rain, I reckon you'd really like 'Flowers' the 2001 EATB album. It's not widescreen like OR, but Will's interested again and his guitar work is fantastic in the same way that it's great on Porcupine and Killing Moon. Little details chucked in that no-one else would think of.

Shine So Hard EP on Crocodiles.
Live tracks from Australia on Heaven Up Here including The Disease - worra knees-up.
Nothing on Porcupine.
Life at Brian's (albeit minus newly topical miners' strike chit-chat) on Ocean Rain, and the non-12" AKA LP versions of Silver and The Killing Moon.
12" version of Bring on the Dancing Horses on the grey one. I quite like Soul Kitchen too.

Also they make the box set look much better than it did before.

Very much so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEThL6WcgF4

FOREVER YOURS, NOCTURNAL ME

TAKE ME INTERNALL FOREVER YOURS,
NOCTURNAL ME

Best o f british music, folks, this is it.

CRYSTAL VIEWS

PURIFY OUR MISFIT WAYS AND MAGNIFY OUR CRYSTAL DAYS

you know heaven and hell collide there are no in betweens

This is all because Echo & The Bunnymen are...the link at the end of my willly nillly

"I'm the Yo YO Man always up and down /so take me to the end of your tether"

Forget it. Echo & The Bunnymen forever

CA CA CA CABBAGE

YOU THINK YOURE A VEGETABLE NEVER COME OUT OF THE FRIDGE

YOU SET MY TEETH ON EDGE
CCAAA CA AULIFLOWER MEMOIRS APRIL SHOWERS

YOU ARE A DYING BREED! ooooooo

cucumber cabBAGE CAULIFLOWER AAAAAAAAAAH@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

wait for me on a new horizon new horIzON FOR EVERYONE

o deCIDED TO WEAR MY THORN OF CROWNS

ALLTHE WAY ROUND....

insideout!

uPSIDE DOWN!

bACK TO FRONT!

aLL THE WAY ROUND!

dOWNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

fate up againST YOUR WILL THROUGH THE THICK AND THIN
HE WILL WAIT UNTIL YOU GIVE YOURSELF TO HIM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEThL6WcgF4

that tube video had my neck hairs standing up. can't help but think that the 10 minutes after the credits rolled would've been excellent.

That performance off the tube is incredible, so powerful!

Ian McC is definitely amongst my top five Liverpool fans (it's not a list that goes down much further than #5). From the stage at the Royal Court in '98..."I don't want Everton to go down - it would be bad for the city. Of, er, Wolverhampton."

The Mac/Will interviews on the BBC's Rock Family Trees (Liverpool post-punk episode) are absolutely priceless. "Nein Danke."

A few duff records aside, some days I think they're my favourite band ever.

I only ever saw them after their famous year off, so I think that means past their prime.

The Bunnymen have this strange ability to make me yearn for childhood Merseyside experiences I never actually had; I want to wander along Otterspool Prom with some befringed pals at dusk and talk drunken rubbish until the small hours on the steps of the Palm House in Sefton Park. I didn't do any of this in the '80s, I was playing tennis in New Brighton and then running home for me tea.

The grey album is the only remaster I have bothered with. I love that album, but of course I'm nuts. I have the boxset so the extra tracks on the remasters are less of a lure. They should have picked a gig from each era and put out a second live CD with each reissue.

What a fine idea!

https://www.thirdmanbooks.com/catalog/bunnyman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t620DfthImk

The first half of Will's book is not good.

Maybe I've read too many of these memoirs recently but I'm always impatient to get past:

What did the parents do?/who was musical in the family?/The Beatles/Bowie on TOTP/Sex Pistols/Ramones first album/older brother into Genesis and Henry Cow/OGWT/inadequate parent's stereo system/wasn't growing up in the suburbs during the 60s-70s shite?/school days (waaaaay much of this in Will's book)/crap clothes/first instrument/first girlfriend/college/university/dole/hash/cheap beer/getting a kicking/street fashion...

All that part eats up the entire first half of the book, the second half, much better. Starting with Eric's, but I didn't realise that this is just Vol.1 and it stops with Pete DeFreitas joining the band, booooo

A bit like Brett Anderson's first book, then.

want to read it just to see how it compares narratively to Julian Cope's Head On

It's much less colourful or interesting, but probably more accurate. Pretty much the same tone as Stephen Morris or Peter Hook's bios.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SeLNifXhuc

^ La Via Luonge | featuring Echo & the Bunnymen | A film by Bill Butt | Nacho Restoration | 1981

i know the name "La Via Luonge" as a solo cd of will's, on ochre records, which had some connection to the local record shop in cheltenham, so they'd stock all the Glide stuff. but have never seen the above.

https://www.discogs.com/Will-Sergeant-Weird-As-Fish-Le-Via-Luonge/release/900378

love the krautrock roadtrip vibe of that film, haven't seen it for years

i think i like the instrumental music from it more than i like most of their records tbh

Not sure which is considered the best Bunnymen thread but they're sounding incredible tonight (playing old stuff/random YouTube stuff after clicking through on someone else's Tweet earlier).

Will Sergeant is about to do a City Lights THird Man books webinar alongside Bobby Gillespie. Not sure if there is a Facebook feed but there has been before.

I saw Ian McCulloch in concert once, about 20 years ago. I thought it would make me appreciate Echo and the Bunnymen, but it didn't. I do like Seven Seas, though. That song seems very romantic in a Morrissey kind of way—very operatic (probably because it sounds like 'O sole mio).

There are a slew of alternative acts from that 80s that all had these Mixolydian songs that all blend together in my mind: The Cutter, Lips Like Sugar and many others by Echo and the Bunnymen; also Primitive Painters by Felt (who I otherwise like), She Sells Sanctuary by the Cult, Uncertain Smile by The The, and I'm sure there are others I can't think of right now. I was an adolescent when the 90s alternative thing hit, and sometimes a DJ would come on the radio and start playing records from when he was in college, and it would always be one of these records. I have a bad association with them but I don't exactly know why.

Speaking of Seven Seas: is this the origin of the Tortoise track title "The Taut and Tame"? Ian McCulloch says this in the lyric. Or, is this a phrase or reference to something else that I'm just not familiar with?

these Mixolydian songs that all blend together in my mind

That's unusual! Do you have problems with ♭VII chords outside of 80s alternative?

is this the origin of the Tortoise track title "The Taut and the Tame"

That was my assumption.

I thought those City Lights talks turned up on youtube shortly afterwards. Not seeing it appear yet but it is Will Sargeant, Bobby Gillespie and a couple of other talking heads talking together about recently published memoirs.
Goad to hear that Sargeant already has the next section underway since the first book ends before the first lp.
Lasted about an hour and 10 minutes.

Do you have problems with ♭VII chords outside of 80s alternative?

Nope, it's mostly just in that context. It doesn't bother me in Krautrock, or 60s Psychedelia, or Post Rock, or in an Indian Raga. But if I hear "Perfect Skin" by Lloyd Cole it makes me cringe a little.

Buh buh bite the nose off and make it the most of

SWUNG FROM A CHANDALIER

Couldn't cut the muuuuuustarrrrrd

Rolo McGinty remembers Pete de Freitas on the anniversary of his passing.

https://www.facebook.com/rolo.mcginty/posts/pfbid02Lx9ozR8uVgYLX6bAKKzaVvD5vsLTGCwmqqhLrQCr2s8tnpcAknkAfPTuVmay9R7xl

Well well. Per Echo's social media:

We have just posted what I think is maybe the greatest live film of Echo and the Bunnymen over on our YouTube channel.
Filmed live at Zeche Bochum, Germany, March the 5th 1983 during the Porcupine European Tour.
Broadcasted by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in the Rockpalast TV programme.

1 Going Up
2 With A Hip
3 Gods Will Be Gods
4 Show Of Strength
5 Zimbo (All My Colours)
6 The Cutter
7 Rescue
8 My White Devil
9 Porcupine
10 Crocodiles
11 All That Jazz
12 The Back Of Love
13 Heads Will Roll
14 Heaven Up Here
15 Over The Wall
16 Do It Clean
17 Villiers Terrace
18 No Dark Things
19 A Promise

And here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5krHYQ6SxkM

first part of will's biography is 99p on amazon uk this month

ian on sky arts' Great Songwriters this week (last week). very fidgety and rambling but always entertaining.

likes cryptic crosswords, doesn't get Only Connect though.

odd choice of songs though (killing moon, dancing horses, proud to fall, unstoppable force)

Steinbeck et al, they just wrote novels, they don't have to sing them...

I think the second volume of Will's bio comes out very soon.

The way Will describes the current dynamics of the band makes me feel sad, he comes across as quite enervated by the whole business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FoIifB2Ylk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1QFubPHyZc

i had that (glasto 85) as a bootleg, bought during my first week at university from a guy selling them in the students Union building. they do, iirc, it's all over now baby blue, she cracked, paint it black

(oh, track listing right there...)

the Crystal Days box has versions of those, and more, from Swedish radio. don't know if the glasto versions ever saw an official release.

I can't help it, that Peel Session song "No Hands" is the gothiest thing ever. Beautiful and amen. Listen to the bass. I'll never recover. That is absolutely the most beautifully goth thing I've ever heard. Oh my god, make it stop. That is going to fuck with my head all night.
Too much goth. Too much.

― think you're a fookin' bat, eh? (Bimble), Saturday, February 7, 2009 6:25 AM (fifteen years ago)

bimble otm, but it's not too much. i just heard this song for the first time earlier this week, listening to the peel sessions collection from a few years back. when "no hands" came on i immediately tried to figure out which album it was from and how i had missed it before. but it's only on that session, i think, the january 1982 peel session, i think? it rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSd36N5rBg8

I had that Glasto / Swedish radio bootleg, too -- so good!

There's only one, pitifully short and tangential Wild Swans thread on ILM, but I thought it worth mentioning here that I'm halfway through Paul Simpson's memoir and it's pretty enjoyable so far.