1981@40: HEAVEN UP HERE - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

Two things about Echo and the Bunnymen: Ian McCulloch was operatic, not just big-voiced, if you wanted to sound like him you needed lessons which none of the main copyists took; this band took the job of arrangement with gravity so that no two choruses sounded the same nor ended the same way, even down to the most fragile pop numbers. Both of those are why Bunnymen albums always begin with epic journeys that only took a few minutes and why their 12 inch mixes, unlike those of any of their colleagues, were worth listening to and having. Echo and the Bunnymen were about what happened between the whisper and the thunderstorm.

If the debut Crocodiles was a brash, rushing diary of lifestyle it also showed that the band knew its craft and if you get hear nothing else from it you will hear dynamics. A reduced verse here or a piano there, you only knew that the next time that chorus came around it was not going to be identical to the last one. This is intensified for Heaven Up Here and while the extended instrumentation is largely absent the guitar layering and arrangements are consistently stunning. This has gone down in band history as guitarist Will Sargent's album as he is credited with rousing the band into rehearsals and arrangements so that the next album would not be a replay of the first. This saves the album. The songs are good and the production is astute but the sheer vision of the arrangements and discipline in their playing lift this mixed set into a unified experience.

Show of Strength starts like surf rock with swinging drums and twin clean guitars playing a vaguely Arabic scale. The vocals come in over this with a familiar style of a single short melodic phrase with slight variations before the chorus rips the carpet out from under its feet with a key change and extra force. The recovery bars following are thickened with an ebow on the lower strings before the next verse which adds a jangling clean guitar in one channel and scratchy rhtyhm in the other. After the next chorus  the guitars all but disappear until come in again with two versions of the scratchy rhythm. Full band for the next chorus and then a big mix of ebow and heavily distorted menacing guitar phrases. Only then do we notice McCulloch's vocal melody has changed and the ebow is howling like a banshee in the distance. And then the band fades while the vocals persist, front and centre: "Hey, I came in right on cue. One is me and one is you." Intimidating confidence has led to a precarious state in which the social gambler doesn't dare let the front down for fear of collapse. And then as the band vanishes there is only the voice in the head, repeating the phrase. It's only a movie. It's only me.

Restless warped voices, rustling and a thick electric buzz and then we're suddenly into the verse with an urgent rhythm and near whispered vocal. A skeletal guitar riff under it changes into a high whining ring as McCulloch goes up an octave. Finally, the chorus breaks out in full voice: "This is the one for the money, this is the one for the trees, this is the one called Heaven and this is the one for me." Chancing against the norms and the taboos but in this case it's not always for coolness' sake; there is a distinct sense of animal gratification here and it's at odds with the rational ovbservation. "They've got it and I had some. I couldn't handle it ... but I had some." Do it to say you've done it. This might burn off with the passing of youth but this expression of that urgent trophyism is quietly unsettling. The blend in the title of jolly old team spirit and the pursuit of cool just adds to that.

Over the Wall starts with a busy ground of percussion and guitar before a guitar/synth riff enters, gigantic and distant. A few muttered lines over apparently random snare hits before the explosion into the chorus which trails into a machine gun like chopping high on the fretboard.  The next chorus ends in a thicked version of the opening groove with a heavier pattern on the tom toms, a quote from Walking in the Rain while indistinct voice speak from a burial under the mix. The toms transfer to the snare, more gunnning guitar before it settles into a lone guitar riffing. When the band comes back in it is with force that begins to dissipate almost immediately with more quotes from teen anthems growing more roomy and delayed. "Hold me tight .... to the logical limit." Collapse into a drum machine version of the opening rhythm and synthesised winds. The unspoken solutions to problems are obscured by local one of addiction or affliction and finally because they are inaudible. Walking in the rain to get rid of but then celebrate his misery. The later near quote of a pop song is less self-aware. Around those please and above the muttering below the mix are guitar motifs that are almost pop song quotes but nothing quite connects. The clarity begins and returns with the epic riff of the chorus and the rallying cry of the title that is accompanied by the caveat: "watch us fall". The logical limit?

It Was a Pleasure comes up as a strangled funk workout as McCulloch, so compressed and processed it sounds like someone else, details a list of behavioural traits and characteristics of two players in a relationship that keep them from enjoying their time. It's static and repetitious just like the problem and ends with the Kafkaesque: "Failure to do so will result in the failure."  Frustration in a groove number. Dancing really is like standing still only faster.

A Promise starts with a two chord grind that the band had made their own from the off. McCulloch comes in in high register. Promises made and dispensed leading to a big chant of the title wet with reverb as a light ringing guitar figure. There's light on the waves as they sail off with bright singing of self-delusion.

The old side two begins with the title track. More funky chopped guitar and whammy bar riffs. Drinking and partying and more drinking. BIg yelling choruses and troubled verses, breaks into shining clean guitar riffs. Imprecations to the forces of alcohol and burning intoxication. Dr Faustus is assured that he is better in hell than in this swirling, sickening "heaven". Bass workouts and more funky dances before the last word, "sip" leaves us standing tiptoed on the edge of a cliff with only the reverb trail to cushion the fall.

Another two chord grind. McCulloch comes in like Bowie singing Brel, husky and desperate. A deep synth flute is the first of the non rock instruments on the album. "My life's the disease." A sudden change to a kind of robot staccato and the vocals are alienated with backwards echo and chorusing, from beyond the hole in the earth: "If you get yours from heaven don't waste it." Fade.

A heavy and relentless Steve Morris style tom tom pattern joined only by pan pipes. McCulloch sings in a weary mid voice that he is flying and won't come down again. All his colours turn to clouds. The guitar comes in after this, acoustic, strummed chords as the pipes soar above it, descending through a mournful minor mode. An echoey chant of zimnbo sound like a ritual. Verse two sings of cards played with difficulty and then a box that burns nicely. The sparseness is enriched by a lonely ebow line as McCulloch wails into his own fade about the nicely burning box as the zimbo chant rises until everything fades to silence. McCulloch, a difficult interview at the best of times, took pains to explain that this song refered to holding on to things, people or ideas, etc. beyond their passing. For me, it is so heavily melancholy that, whether it's correct or not, I think of the then recently disceased Ian Curtis. The setting has such a Joy Division like beauty and finality to it. If it was good enough for the Cure to write Primary, and U2 to do A Day Without Me, among a mass of undeclared tributes, I can indulge myself with this one, too.

No Dark Things starts with Chordy grind with clean guitar chords and a slightly Arabic low string guitar riff. McCulloch sings mid voice. Images of ritual cleansing left open and vague. A choppy kind of anti funk guitar break. Then McCulloch in operatic wail, perhaps in the voice of the cleanser, with the darkly funny line: "You must learn to distinguish error from my bait." Another guitar chord break but it turns into s chord grind, again clean and shiny tone. More novice from the adept about a member of their own or just someone trying it out who is no longer buying it. "We have no dark things .. just some heads and a wish. Something to scream about." The phrase no dark things in increased echo repeats into the busy and bright working band like a chant less believed than trusted.

Turquoise Days begins with a subdued grind and fragmented lines of strange reassurance. We've got a problem but come on over. This is a bookend verse which repeats after a long litany of clarification. "It's not for love. it's not for war. Just hands clasped together." But that takes a strange turn when god and guns are inserted and "it's not" becomes "if not for" and what began as certainty changes into force based on a vague conviction. It's like the mutations of a virus as it attacks its host gradually adding pain and debilitation until all that is clearly felt is response as anger or violence. Then the bookend returns with its odd mix of decadent abandon and willing self-deception. Along the way we get a decent Bunnymen verse with central section's burgeoning force, enlivening and operatic vocals. The full band plus more guitars in glorious takeoff.

All I Want fades in with a gallop of twin skeletal guitar rhythms, marimba and bass and drums in lockstep. As the pattern proceeds we get to know that this creates a kindo f pulse by which the song grows from a thin core and blows out into a bulge for the entire time, no solos or sections beyond changes from verse to chorus and an overall broadening. Whatever life the narrator has led it has come to something out of a Samuel Beckett monologue with sparse statements that seem to stack into little towers of a series of days grown frail and affectless. The chorus "All I love is all I love. All I want is all I want" roars but we soon return to a skittish catalogue of simply described moments. In the end: "Got the hands to hold the key." The track skitters off into the dark.

Not with a bang but with a whimper, as The Hollow Men says at the end about the end. The more I hear this whole album the more it makes me think that it's a more concentrated and serious look at the youth abandon of Crocodiles. The same writers have noticed more around the events and figures, things in the shadows, harmonics of worry in the inspirational accounts. While the terror of The Cure's Faith, the horror of The Banshee's JuJu are replaced by a brighter musical pallet the concerns are kindred. If you didn't pick up the words of this record there is a chance that you might take it for pop on the serious side rather than a gloom fest but a little close listening reveals that the setting might be shiny but the gems are rough and speckled.

It's also worth noting that listening now in 2021 that Heaven Up Here at 40 years old strikes first as a rock album without a sliver of masculine posturing; there is nothing of the stadium about this frequently mighty and charging music. A lot of the guitar tones are clean and McCulloch's giant voice, while it can rasp, never breaks into the Paul Rogers/strutting scream. There's plenty of sex in the lines and sounds but none of it is boastful or laddish. 1981 was a year when the notion of anti-rock was continuing its spread across independent music, whether it was called new wave or post punk, and its practitioners were either abandoning it for a cock-free pop (not a slur, btw) outright noise or, like here, finding means of using the old vocabulary for new poetry. Add the gloom of the nuclear threat, the darkness of Thatcher and Reagan politics, and you have a kind of self-examination that feels necessary rather than narcissistic: if we are the omega generation then who are we?

To listen to Heaven Up Here forty years later it first of all does sound like rock and rock that could fill a stadium and it might strike the new listener at how the subjects of the songs are not more hedonistic but questioning of that as a musical value. In my work from home routine for the past year and a half I have found how useful genres like vaporwave or darkwave are for providing a audio background that is neither too anodyne for enjoyment nor obnoxiously brash. YOutube videos of enless dark drones are given static artworks of memento mori images and in many cases the more obviously fabricated the better as they only need to remind rather than suggest. This music works very well but it is the very kind of thing I would have scoffed at if it was suggested in 1981 that it was the future of darkly motivated rock music. But here in the list so far and with more to come I am revisiting music that is both its own kind of rock music and a curative antedote to the cock rock of the decade it had just escaped. And after decades of ironic (and some not so ironic) returns to the worst impulses this can again sound fresh and simply given.

 

1981@40: FAITH - THE CURE

The Holy Hour is a description of the loss of faith. An ominous flanged bass riff is held up by a percussion that might as well be electronic as played by hand. A humming synth string motif moans. The guitars come in clean playing chords in an easy counter ryhthm. Smith's vocal is high and buried. A spare hand it given to the statements of the narrator's gradual but complete alienation from religion. His "wordless scream at ancient power breaks against stone..." He cannot join even the closest of his loved ones in the church. It's just a building which he softly leaves in the manner of one gently exiting a scene of someone else's private pain.

Then, in case you thought this was going to be a Debbie downer record, a few choppy flange chords and we're galloping along with the single Primary. A battery of twin basses (one a Fender VI) warped with the modulation effects that would illustrate the band's signature sound for the next few releases creates a tough dark restless motion. Images of the innocence of children and the awkward horror of a first love. The final lines include the primary colours in their images as Smith wails that the children of the first verse are still dreaming. Smith has dedicated this song to the recently suicidal Ian Curtis whose own crushing observations had fashioned the previous year's Closer which variously raged and whispered its way into the nervous systems of a generation. More generally Smith has spoken of the song coming from thoughts of dying young and staying innocent and going further to the notion that murder might be seen as a gift. No, that doesn't mean that Robert Smith wanted everyone to come along to a Cure gig armed: this was a moment when such statements were made to strengthen the line beyond which blared the grinning perfect teeth of the mainstream. The song hovered below the top 40 but everyone who went to their increasingly large gigs knew it. 

Other Voices opens with a standard drum pattern and a distant guitar shimmer that is taken over by a front and centre picked bass with a chunky riff. Wails in the distance before Smith comes in with the lead vocal. The narrator, abandoned, lives with desertion and eight million people, belittled by inner voices, recalls intimacy but it's ghostly, insubstantial, perhaps imaginary. "Change your mind. You're always wrong." Smith has a way of singing words like wrong that makes them sound simultaneously like self-pity and candid observation. In a way this could be the sequel to Killing an Arab as it reminds me of the same book. The way I described Albert Camus' novel The Outsider (L'etranger) is that it made me understand that all those other voices of greater society were right and would only ever be right and that I, in keeping my distance from them, was always going to be wrong. The thing is that I liked being wrong.

All Cats are Grey. A solid but easy rhythm is joined by a solemn but very easy synthesiser moan playing the same kind of modal scale heard throughout this album. A breezy, floating momentum takes over. Smith's vocal is distant. It seems to be the monologue of a corpse. It might simply be an allegory of depression or a genuinely imagined experience of death. The long-drawn beauty of the keyboards and gentle bearing of the drums fades. End of side one.

A grand swathe of synth strings, big bass and spacey drums might remind today's listeners of the Twin Peaks theme. Another buried Robert Smith vocal tells of the Funeral Party. Smith has explained that this is about his experience of the death of his grandparents. He watches and thinks of them from childhood, into maturity and then as the pale figures they are in death. As with most of the rest of the album, the structure is established with very little variation but the dynamics come through in the weight of the lyrics and vocal performance, creating a sense of inevitability. 

Doubt comes on like Primary the Sequel with galloping bass, slashing guitars and a near identical vocal melody. This is not from want of inspiration. If anything it's an admitted other side of the earlier song, describing a violent rage against the other (a lover, himself?) Well, while it doesn't hold up as a literal account, the title plays fair by telling us of the scale and context of the violence that drives him to repeat "knowing I'll murder you again." While there is so much imagery in this album taken from religion very little of it is offered as a direct commentary of it, used instead for the riches it provides as metaphor. The most violent song on an album called Faith is a song called Doubt, it's opposite. Here the doubt doesn't so much prevent action as haunt the one who has acted. Less Hamlet than Raskolnikov.

And then Faith continues the sound of inevitability with a steady slow pattern, solid bass riff and flanged six string. Smith is less buried than he is for most of the album. If anything, it is the stylistic recap of the whole set as it finally comes to rest on the overall title and theme. The lyric is typically a mix of clear imagery and obtuse statement. The unignorable line about raping children might be a literal reference to the darkest corners of organised fiath but, more typically it might be htere to get our attention to its violence and horror. The narrator rejects the traditions, the pageantry and ritual as so much dressing and leaves with nothing left but faith but the clear suggestion is that it is not faith in robes, crosses, stars or crescents but that which remains from denial of them and it doesn't sound like faith in a deity.

It was in 1981, in Britain as here in Australia, an unreamarkable thing to be an atheist. Indeed, the only people you met who made anything of it were those who reached it through oppressive experience. The Cure's use of the iconography of a child's view of religion does include commentary on the dark puzzles of the culture of the church finds a wealthier vein in taking its difficulties into the unforgiving daylight. Self-examination, the dangers of relationships, the paralysing doubt and violent response to it are all observable in the everyday, the horror of banality, the banality of horror.

And that's the thing here: you could listen to this now, never having heard it before, and easily conclude that it was the whingeing of precious emos, a symphony of snowflakes who had nothing more to add than cries of "death be mine!" But I only need to breifly repeat that this music arose from a world in real terror of its own annihilation by a cataclysmic nuclear final act. I'm not saying that they had no choice but to sound gloomy but that the great field of the mainstream was smiling as though nothing was was wrong. If the personal was, as the phrase went then, political this was and remains a political statement, no less than seomthing like Closer or Colossal Youth. Could they have lightened up just for one or two tracks? Well, you go back there with Bucks Fizz being waterboarded down your throat and try it: you're going to sound as bleak as you can get. 

This is a source point for what became goth along with The Banshees and Bauhaus and very few others.. If it seems a little childishly extreme in its negativity, give it enough listens to hear it fully and you'll hear a lot more than the application of black eyeliner. Recall, too, that all the cliches of horror movies themselves had source points and blaming Halloween for having a monster that keeps getting back up is to blame the invention, not its copies. Until Bauhaus adopted something closer to theatricality (which The Damned had also done but that was more theatre-restauranticality) this music was really just considered contemporary and I will happily attest that it fit perfectly into party tapes and radio play. There would definitely have been some who sat in dark rooms shivering at the sound but I didn't know any (and that is still pretty hard to do in Queensland).

Forty years have left this record a free standing artefact. Like my favourites from most eras this one sounds of its time and reaches without effort into our own. This is not because of any feature that marks it as a clear ancestor of more recent far (the programmed drums and guitar effects forbid that) but because of the humanity at the centre of its every moment. Faith is a record of people on a quest to know what they are and will report their findings whether it makes them look naive or jaded. It's also a rewarding listen because it's good and it's honest.