OCEAN RAIN - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN @ 40

The opening chords of track one tell a lot of the story. They're played with acoustic guitars. Second sign is the cheerful figure in the string section. When Ian McCulloch enters with his vocal he's almost audibly smiling. For all the forward motion of the previous album's plunge into anthemic showstoppers and gloomy philosophy, there was little success to be had. Times were changing and the initial bleakness of the decade in rock music was being replaced with lightness. It was all in how you did it. The Banshees went briefly psychedelic with Dreamhouse and by the time you get The Cure singing about caterpillars and the top ten was filled with squeaky clean synth duos whose videos were all endless white backgrounds and spotless image. The scousers of doom stood up to the challenge and created a joyous feast that even they would dine at.

Silver's light-spreading strings, McCulloch's powerhouse tenor declared the skies blue and his hands untied as the rising wordless backing voices gave way to a refrain so melodic that it had to be kept to la-la-las. They did it: the song is a doorburst of happiness and not a second of it doesn't sound like the band that asked it they were the half of half and half or were they the half that was whole and pleaded to be spared the cutter. And it doesn't let up.

The epic scale strings and acoustics continue but on a Phil Spectorish epic scale. What starts sounding like more Porcupine darkness turns with the vocals into a quite romantic mess of imagery conflating sex and drugs with rock and roll. "Take me internally, forever yours, nocturnal me.

Crystal Days sounds like a major key version of Porcupine's White Devil. McCulloch sings high and pure about looking for hope and hoping it's you. A brief feedback solo gives way to an almost cartoonish '60s interlude on the middle strings. 

Yo Yo Man follows with a revisit to flamenco land like Nocturnal Me (and repeats its three time rhythm). It's the closest thing so far to the old Bunnymen with images of flames, snow, bones and prayers but it's again in a major key and the  keyboard instrumental at the song's centre adds a Brian Wilson like fairy tale whimsy. When the flamenco strut returns it is with the kind of development with layered vocal lines and a drifting band track before ending on a strident string figure and a droning hum.

Thorn of Crowns comes across as a showcase of the eastern flavours the band had explored on the previous LP as well as furthering the bright clean guitar riffing they'd always taken to triumph. This one was given some working out live and in the studio but never quite takes off. McCulloch's random screeching and shouting feel uninspired and space filling. By the time his impassioned vocals are given over to a list of vegetables you know this one was destined to be the album's hamburger helper. Whatever thinking might have gone into it, this end of side one piece sounds like the kind of Doors-inspired meander that a lot of the '60s influenced bands of the time were trying out (and almost always failing at).

Side two starts with one of the era's stone cold classic anthems. The deathless Killing Moon begins with a tense atonal riff and what sounds like a flub on the guitar but through repetition proves a feature. A tidal drift under the band, aided with a spooky reverbed figure high on the piano keyboard introduces the verse with McCulloch delivering a heartfelt vocal romantic in both senses. This lovelorn scenario happens in the rich blues of a storybook illustration. A brief instrumental led my Will Sergeant's electric 12 string on the lower strings adds drama before the final verse and the first of many farewell choruses in which McCulloch approaches the aching lines about fate variously in higher registers, near spoken word and finally in the full tenor mode that made him his generation's greatest male rock vocalist. The chorus repeats as the voice sinks into the distance and the fade overwhelms it. A point of interest here is how the verses and choruses of this arrangement are played almost identically, with the whammy bar waves and string section rises etc. One thing this band could boast from the first album on was that they never played the parts of the songs the same way. There was always a completely different way to end a chorus or get into a new verse and the middle eights were always offered with great dynamics (all of that can be heard in The Cutter but it's generally how they did it). It feels that the melodic material and emotional commitment to the song kept the riches of the arrangement (the strings are utterly gorgeous) were best left as was. Then again, seldom has a reflection about death felt so much like a love song, so maybe the straight and narrow course had to prevail.

Seven Seas begins with approaching acoustics and electric 12 string before kicking into the verse with crashing piano chords and a propulsive and lithe bass figure. After some lines about tears and happy cavemen the chorus belts into its rising refrain with a glorious intro on tubular bells that lifts an already appealing song into the celestium. The theme of the words is about change, heading from constrains to the open waters of choice and challenge. After a Byrdsy 12 string solo the passionate vocal-ed middle eight sings of burning bridges and smashing mirrors. And then we don't mind that the rest is almost all choruses because they are so infectious.

A three chord organ riff and cinematic piano flourish starts My Kingdom. The words are of conflict, of arguments intense and intimate told with figures of warfare. The electric 12 string in this one is used to clever effect as an intensifier approaching a chorus. The track is the only one on the record to have a distorted guitar solo but, while it gets close to stadium rock manages to stay nice. The stuttering chorus might remind us of the C-c-c-c-cucumber of Thorn of Crowns but here the melodic payoff makes the lines richer and it feels rhythmic rather than dramatic (as it was in My Generation). The trail out solo has some nasty phrases passing between parties as another refrain (ten a penny) comes up like an old drinking song.

The album closes with the title track. This time, unlike Porcupine's massive dirge, Ocean Rain is a gentle arrangement. A pendulous bass swings with the light percussion to suggest the motion of waves. McCulloch comes in weary and observes that he's all at sea again. The verse at first seems simply to be repeated a few times for the entire song but through some subtle substitution whereby you becomes I and your becomes my etc., a world is built around the sadness of the situation. The strings play their most affecting parts on any of the songs on the album, a light statement of a minor third falling to the tonic for the chorus. Before we can really take in the momentum that has been building we are in full crashing tide by the end and McCulloch in full voice: "Screaming from beneath the waves".  The lull and easy beauty of the opening has given way to the widest ranging dynamic movement on the album. It might have felt lulling and consoling but by the end it's a scream of pain but also of acceptance. And then the gentler restatement of the chorus leaves us with its difficult message as the song comes to a clean end. 

"All hands on Deck at Dawn,

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storm

Harbours the blackest thoughts."

Echo and the Bunnymen continued for a few years longer before breaking up. There have been subsequent reunions and tours but their legacy is firmly placed in four albums that describe an arc of discovery and commitment to power of invention executed with energy of youth and a clarity beyond their years. They are also one of those bands made of solid contributors and collaborators who understood that while you could repeat the lessons of the past it could provide lessons for the future with some restraint and mindfulness that different times called for different measures. The brilliant string arrangements on this record (and the previous one) are far from the big lush washes of the likes of ABC and are better sculpted into the sound and force of a rock band ready for change but loyal to their post punk culture. They contributed to the style and texture of that culture and this record was the apotheosis of that contribution.

Listening notes: I chose the recent  hi-res download of Ocean Rain which appeared a few years back on a few of the online hi-res retailers. Beautiful sound.

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.

 

1980@40: CROCODILES - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

A rising cloud of beeps and distant howls gives way to a guitar groove that could equally be The Modern Lovers or the Byrds putting a little edge on the 12 string. The drummer is happy to use the whole kit. The bass is note clear and airy. The vocal pushes out from New Wave quirk to near operatic warbling. Short melodic phrases over a two chord groove and major gear shifts in arrangements. Going Up clues you into almost everything you need to know about Echo and the Bunnymen. "If we should pull the plugs out on all history..."

Stars are Stars adds a sparse but firm piano line for drama. The arrangement is sparse and moody but driven. McCulloch's vocal stretches from the declaiming of the opener to a looser attitude that feels more like the account of an eyewitness. Pride adds some very New Wave palm muted guitars but then some very un-post punk double stopping, the added dynamics of a guitarless verse.

Monkeys starts with a punchy guitar assault then launches into a world wise comment on the selfishness of humans and a warbling chorus of "Qui ment?" Who's lying? The opening chordy riff squeezes into a fiery ground in the background. Crocodiles starts in full gear with McCulloch showing how much Elvis lurks in his vocal. It's not an impersonation, it just sits so easily in the pocket of the rockabilly on speed backing which soon sharpens to razor slashing chords as McCulloch's rocker vocal breaks into an exasperated shout. There is a kind of wireframe drawing against black background to it.

Flip it and side two opens with one of the era's most iconic riffs, the bright pendulum of Rescue. High on the fretboard, easy to learn in minutes and played through one of the effects of the era, a chorus pedal. McCulloch comes in with his short phrased declamation. And then the chorus explodes with an improbably mix of desperation and charm: "Woooon't you come on down to my rescue?" Third verse with an industrially strong bass backing and no guitar. Final chorus blast and then heads to the fade as a vocal round. Who the hell did that in 1980? And the self aware lyrics that ask if you can tell it in a song. And the plunging descent of the chorus that begs us down but lifts us at the same time. One of the great singles of the whole post punk epoque (steady, this won't all be gush).

Villiers Terrace bangs up with the full band  at once, augmented by a piano. An unrelenting account of hedonistic panic as people chew on carpet, mixing up the medicine. A haze of nights in the dark of house parties, purple lights, over rummed punch and drugs that look different but all feel the same. The forward thrust stops the weariness of the lyric from taking route and conveys the exhaustion as well as the euphoria. Pictures on my wall departs from the concentrated lyric and band arrangement, allowing more space for the images and moods. Wailing verses of impressions of faces and places rushing by and the chorus grinds about the things about to fail: "pictures on my wall about to swing and fall." More extensive keyboards in this track with searing string synths add a cinematic tone but also betray it as of its time.

All that Jazz presents a tough but crisp groove. "Where the hell have you been?" It's easy to forget that between the escalated threat of nuclear annihilation and the rise of the uniformed hard right in the UK that everyone was just going to parties in the early '80s. The litany of fear in this lyric delivered in a repeated downward minor figure leads inexorably to the final lines: "See you at the barricades, babe. See you when the lights go low, Joe. Hear you when the wheels turn round. See you when the sky turns black."

Happy Death Men. With jungle toms, a Krautrock bass pulse and a jazz piano tinkle straight out of Bowie's Alladin Sane, McCulloch sings a melody somewhere between a clapping song and Claire De Lune. The band keep tight and forceful and are joined by a brass barrage in a break. "Happy death men polish and shine." This is less National Front skinheads than the War Pigs in boardrooms and parliamentary chambers. After a shouted coda from McCulloch, the brass, chaotic piano are driven by  feverish drums, distant wordless vocal lament into the fade. A tiny call back sounds briefly and then silence.

Ian McCulloch had been in a band called the Crucial Three. The other two were Julian Cope who formed Teardrop Explodes and Pete Wylie who formed the band that went under several names all of which contained the word Wah! It's an odd historical tidbit as a trio of future leaders sounds like a disaster. It proved to be. And then the varying fates of the three and how they scrub up now. Echo and the Bunnymen win the durability race with four hit albums and many top forty singles and plenty of touring. Cope heads Teardrop Explodes until his own forces of gravity leave him the sole member. Wylie had trouble keeping his flock for a single album. All produced great moments but only Cope has really continued with any lasting presence beyond this era.

Echo and the Bunnymen presented an impressive big sound at a time when rock bands were having to reassess what that description meant. They fronted up with accessible songs and a musical clarity few could match at the time. They were all clean lines and contained drama but provided more dynamics than most of their field. Apart from some great stirring choruses they relied on McCulloch's charismatic vocal style to divert the listener from the sameyness of almost every verse. Think of it: if you just sang the verses of these songs and later ones like The Cutter or The Killing Moon would be able to tell them apart? And then if you are pressing the verses into a generic melody is it because of a need to highlight lyrcs over tunes? Maybe, if the lyrics were more strident instead of the richly abstract litanies and declamations we get. Oddly enough, that leaves the big choruses which do differ and the grooves of each number. If it weren't for the determination of the band to create ever changing dynamics to the songs there wouldn't be a lot to report.

But there is much to report with this band. In history they figure less visibly than cohorts like the Banshees, the Cure or Joy Division despite offering plenty in the way of new approaches to rock music. Unlike The Psychedlic Furs who took a few LPs to grow into their sound and presentation or the other Crucial Three descendants whose short and stormy careers offered courses in how-not-to do it, Echo and the Bunnymen persevered and maintained. Was it the unremarkable eponymous album that came years after the first big four that left their legacy difficult to access? Do their determinedly anti-stadium rock clean lines and solo free guitar assaults put them too awkwardly to one side of the stage that otherwise clamours with processed guitars and songs of self destruction? This band is clearly the inspiration for masses among their own immediate wake but if a Bunnymenesque outfit surfaced after that the influence note was long past. That's a pity because this album and a few to come gave us a solid alternative to the old guard's posturing and the worst excesses of the new.