![]() ![]() They had never sounded so at ease in the world - or unambitious, but all their gauntlet-throwing to the charts was behind them. The stakes were high, and “The Game” is such a blithe-ass place to have gone. ![]() What did they have up their long dark coat sleeves, after the cathartic obliteration of the last album’s finale? (That boat on the cover of Ocean Rain? They needed a bigger one.) Three years had passed since the advent of Ocean Rain, with only one single, “Bring On The Dancing Horses,” to break the interim in 1985. The first single and track from the Bunnymen’s self-titled “gray album” of summer 1987, “The Game” was a long time coming. “A sense of duty was my one intention/ and an ugly beauty was my own invention.” Suppress your giggles and stay with this one. “The Game” (from Echo And The Bunnymen, 1987) These really are songs to learn and sing. Despite how easy it’s always been, especially here in America, to pass them over as another ’80s bauble with a silly name, Echo And The Bunnymen made music to last. ![]() Since 1987, there have been luminous moments, and much evidence of dignity preserved where others have squandered it, but that may be the subject of a future list there’s simply nothing to compare with the jewelry boxes of those first five albums. After a three-year hiatus, they reformed with McCulloch, and have since released six albums - more music than they ever recorded in the ’80s.Ĭonventionally and perhaps shortsightedly, this list privileges the work of the Bunnymen as they were when the world came to know them. The band took on water with the release of each single before finally floundering in early 1993. The resulting album, 1990’s Reverberation, had impossible prospects given what came before comparisons with the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed-less Squeeze were preordained. The remaining Bunnymen pressed on with a replacement, and another, sadly, for de Freitas, who died following a motorcycle accident in 1989. They made 16 singles and five albums together - Crocodiles (1980), Heaven Up Here (1981), Porcupine (1983), their masterpiece Ocean Rain (1984), and Echo And The Bunnymen (1987), plus a greatest hits, Songs To Learn And Sing (1985) - before McCulloch left to pursue a solo career in 1988. McCulloch couldn’t have done it without the rest of them, nor they without him. “The Kanye West of the ’80s.” On more than a few days during the middle years of that decade, he had to have been. “I only ever wanted, since the age of 13, to be the best singer of the best band in the world,” McCulloch told SPIN in 2008. (McCulloch comfortably inhabited his androgynous beauty, like David Bowie and Marc Bolan before him, and like those working-class heroes spent the biggest years of his fame married to a woman.) Accustomed to the gutter, the Bunnymen fixed their eyes on the stars there was no grand project besides the passé aspiration to be great. A thoroughly hetero, beer-drinking, meat-eating group of working-class young men, they weren’t as transgressive or style-setting as even many of their pale, Northern English peers. They were “always up and down” (“The Yo-Yo Man”), “going up, going down” (“Going Up”), counseled alternately by “angels and devils” (“Angels And Devils”), hostage to “laughter and crying” (“All My Life”), consumed by the eternal contest described in their most famous song, “The Killing Moon,” as “fate up against your will.”ĭuring the years of Margaret Thatcher’s administration, with its especially punitive consequences for Liverpool, the Bunnymen showed little interest in politics. Clamor and delicacy sat side by side as McCulloch struggled to find his bearings in the turbulence of coming of age. “The capacity for writing something like ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and yet being able to write ‘Sister Ray’ as well.” The Bunnymen excelled with similar versatility. “Possibly more than any other thing, the Velvet Underground are important to Echo And The Bunnymen,” McCulloch told a journalist in 1984. Nobody was Echo, as sure as none of the Smiths was named Smith and Steely Dan was a dildo. They were a group of four: Les Pattinson on bass, Peter de Freitas on drums, Will Sergeant on guitar, and Ian McCulloch as singer and rhythm guitarist. Of all its visionaries, none grew so mighty in the ’80s as Echo And The Bunnymen.īeyond the riddle of the band’s name lies a body of work that sparkles even 30 years after the end of their original run, a catalog full of encounters with mystery, prophecy, romance, and the sublime. Liverpool at the end of the ’70s was hardscrabble and hardly swinging, but from its post-punk bohemia came a music scene tye-dyed by psychedelia and other ’60s influences. ![]()
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