ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN
FRONTED BY THE EVER OUTSPOKEN IAN McCULLOCH, THE LIVERPOOL BAND BECAME INDIE HEROES WITH A SOUND THAT CONSTANTLY LEANED TOWARDS THE DARKER AND MORE DRAMATIC SIDE OF POST-PUNK
JON O’BRIEN
ALBUM BY ALBUM
Although Echo And The Bunnymen weren’t the first band to emerge from the ashes of The Crucial Three, an extremely short-lived (just six weeks to be exact) yet ultimately pivotal bedroom trio featuring Ian McCulloch, Julian Cope and Pete Wylie, they were the first to release a full-length LP.
Crocodiles arrived three months before The Teardrop Explodes’ Kilimanjaro and a full year before Wah!’s Nah=Poo – The Art of Bluff. The album’s producers ensured that all three bands remained interlinked, with David Balfe and manager Bill Drummond also working on the former and Ian Broudie mixing two tracks on the latter. But as implied by its title and the mysterious woodland setting of its artwork, the Bunnymen’s debut was a very different beast.
While Cope’s explored the sunnier side of neo-psychedelia and Wylie’s the more passionate, McCulloch’s offshoot aimed straight for the dark jugular on 10 tracks entrenched in themes of death, doom and despair. “Is this the blues I’m singing?” he repeatedly asks on the climax of second single Rescue, a brilliantly meta ode to teenage indecision, and he might as well have been.
Although Ian McCulloch remains a proud Liverpudlian, Crocodiles doesn’t paint his hometown in the most positive of lights. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” McCulloch demands on opener Going Up. That’s an understandable rally cry on hearing Villiers Terrace, a resolutely grim, if impressively poetic, snapshot of the drug-addled cultural scene his band were initially lumped in with (“There’s people rolling ’round on the carpet/ Passing ’round the medicine”). Interestingly, the man at the epicentre of the neighbouring Manchester scene, Factory Records’ boss Tony Wilson, declared that Villiers Terrace was one of the best songs ever written. Not for the first time, the impresario might have been guilty of a little hyperbole.
However, Crocodiles is undoubtedly one of the most striking and self-assured debuts of the era. McCulloch, particularly amid the swirling haunted house organs of Pictures On My Wall, has enough confidence to convincingly channel his musical hero Jim Morrison. The rest of the group get their moment to shine, too, though. See Les Pattinson’s driving basslines on Monkeys and guitarist Will Sergeant’s pyrotechnic freakout on album closer Happy Death Men.
Meanwhile, Pete de Freitas’ scatte
