Great Rock and Roll Myths #1 Del Shannon & Echo & the Bunnymen

 

Or perhaps rather a correspondence between Seymour Stein and Bill Drummond then manager of the Bunnymen documented here.

 

'Seymour Stein, who owned the New York based Sire Records, contacted me. He was interested in the Bunnymen. He thought 'Pictures on my Wall' sounded like Del Shannon and Ian McCulloch looked like a star. At that point in time Sire Records was about as hip as you could get. A Liverpool band signing to Sire was unimaginable. Stein sent an offer, a five-album deal. I didn't show it to the band; instead I wrote Stein a long and detailed letter, about how the album was bringing about the destruction of great pop music. That the rot had started with Sergeant Pepper and snowballed with the progressive rock scene. When Punk arrived to save the day it was seen (by me) to be a false dawn as soon as the Pistols released an album. I quote from my memory of the letter: 'The Pistols were supposed only to release singles that blistered the charts and split the nation in two, not albums that students could sit down and listen to and contemplate.'

 

 

 The letter was pages long, in my almost illegible scrawl. I launched into a personal attack on Seymour Stein himself, telling him he had released two of the greatest white pop records of the decade, 'Shake Some Action' by the Flaming Groovies and 'Love Goes to a Building on Fire' by Talking Heads and that creators of such pop perfection should never have been allowed into a studio again, leaving their respective singles to resonate their wondrous glories for pop eternity, untarnished by the album-making tossers that created them. Both bands should have been forced to disband immediately. I told Seymour Stein that as far as I was concerned he could forget any idea of five-album deals, or any albums at all. That I would be more than willing to talk to him about The Bunnymen signing to Sire to record a single, although, I told him I didn't personally think they had it in them to record a truly great single. As for Del Shannon, the creator of 'Runaway', one of pop music's finest two minute thirty-seven seconds, how could Stein compare that to the dirge like 'Pictures on my Wall' ?.

 

 

Seymour Stein wrote back, and I paraphrase the letter from a somewhat corroded memory of it:

'Although I like to think of myself as a rather important man within the international music business, I am not powerful enough to change the whole basis on which the industry functions, i.e. singles are there to promote album sales. Album sales generate the cash that is the justification for the whole industry'. He was also flattered that I thought 'Shake Some Action' and 'Love Goes to a Building on Fire' were great records. He still wanted to sign Echo & the Bunnymen, and what did I think of the idea of Del Shannon producing them?'

 

  

The Bunnymen eventually ended up signing a deal for Korova in the UK and Sire for the rest of the world. Ian Broudie, formerly of Big in Japan and eventually the man behind The Lightning Seeds produced Crocodiles their first album. For their second, Heaven Up Here, the Bunnymen quoted from Runaway on the album's centrepiece Over The Wall. They did its spirit proud!