Pixies really came out of nowhere in 1988. And not before time! There was a need for a full on, unhinged Rock and Roll band at this point in the late eighties when frankly things were a bit dull in white guitar music and they fitted the bill entirely. I vividly recall the sensations if not the detail of a moment in that year, late summer it seems to me (in fact having checked it was probably early), at the top of my parent's house with the windows wide open. It was not a good time in my life. I was very ill, but I don't remember that about the instant. All I recall is putting this on, One of the first times I'd played it. Side One, Track One, cranking up the volume and letting the waves of sound wash through me and beyond. Out into our suburban back garden.
It was deeply American music. It came from the loins of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. David Bowie was probably thereabouts too but mostly it spoke to me of Mid -West towns that I'd never go to, of college bars, diners, raw teenage lust and dreams of driving to Mexico to get wasted. It was an idea not a reality to me in the time and place I was in, just as I think it was an idea not a reality to the band themselves, but it was a thrilling one.
Something was reborn in music that had lain dormant for a while. Pixies were seizing the promise and raw excitement of Iggy and the Stooges, The Gun Club, The Replacements, Black Flag, Husker Du and Sonic Youth and taking them someplace new. No one knew it at this point but they were preparing the ground for Nirvana and all that followed.
I wasn't the only one who was excited. The Melody Maker I remember were very, very excited. John Peel too. I remember him starting one show with Surfer Rosa's opening two tracks, Bone Machine and Break My Body. They very much bled into one another.
Pixies had the right formula and the right ingredients. No song ever outstayed it's welcome. No song ever broke the winning template they established very early on. They had Kim Deal. It's impossible to overstate the importance of Kim Deal. Without her they had no sexual allure. At least not one that would have appealed as it did. With her they had it. They had a rocksolid drummer in Dave Lovering and an inventive guitarist Joey Santiago who gave them the authentic hispanic edge they needed and blasted out rolling waves of wild, vicious unrelenting sound that somehow stayed within that template too. And they had Black Francis who provided the guiding vision.
'I do my lyrics at the very, very last minute. I’m more into making music and coming up with poetic structure….The lyrics come after I make a big shape…I come up with the structure first….Music is mathematical and needs mathematical structure more than a topic. A topic will come. You take a bunch of words and put them all together, and you have a topic. [The song makes sense] because it comes from the same mind….It’s like a Dadaist approach, which is…just taking reality from many different places and throwing it together in the same pot….Like many songwriters when they’re young they start writing songs and they write a topical song which is usually a very bad song with many syllables and many words, and it’s not very entertaining. Rock n roll is all about “Tutti Frutti!” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow-Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow”—“Surfin’ Bird”…that’s a good rock n’ roll song.' Frank Black 1989
This is a song for Carol...
Seeing Pixies as a piece of work makes sense of them to me. They're an exercise in controlled noise. A thought through career plan on Frank Black's part realised by his own contribution and the contribution of the other three. Not that there's no love involved, because it wouldn't work if there wasn't but it also wouldn't work without the science.
Pixies songs are acts of engineering and he plans, oversees and directs the process, Bob Stanley in his excellent new book 'Yeah Yeah Yeah' describes the male members of the band as looking like a bunch of plumbers, which is meant as a disparaging comment about their looks. He's on the right lines but I think they're better imagined as wearing hard hats and working on a building site.
A lot of the main American alternative pioneers were geeks. The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, Thurston Moore. Michael Stipe. Frank Black is a geek too. But he always found it difficult to find acceptance among the hip geeks.
I remember watching David Thomas of Ubu and Thurston Moore chumming up in a late night programme on British TV in the late 80s to show their disdain for Pixies video of This Monkey's Gone to Heaven just as the band were beginning to break big. They couldn't admit to liking it. Pixies were too Mid-West, too provincial, too keen to be liked to get their hipster seal of approval. They even threatened to break really big at that moment. The ultimate taboo for indie elitists. No wonder they were dismissed by a pair of avant gard icons who couldn't muster a hit single between them at any point in their careers. The main reason for the dismissal was that Santiago gave a thumbs up signal to the camera about a minute into the song.
After the bruising one two of Bone Machine and Break My Bones comes the obligatory one and
a half minute walloping drums, thudding bass squalling guitar and howling into a baseball glove thrash of Something Against You. Surfer Rosa does have its standout tracks and some moments which might be called filler in less capable hands. This isn't the case with Pixies though. I can't quite explain it. Sometimes you just need a momentary pause from depraved sexual practices, biblical lamentations and bestiality.
I'd like to amend that last post. I reviewed Something Against You on the internet with headphones. I've just corrected that horrific mistake and listened to it as it was meant to be heard and followed that by listening to Broken Face, another Pixies song I hadn't really listened to with ears before. Such a great exercise writing this blog.
Both songs shimmy, squeal, howl and sway the way any truly great music should and does. They take Side One from three to four on to five and six in a quite seamless transition of noise, pace and sound. Then we're ready but hardly ready for five and six.
Surfer Rosa is very much about the joyous experience about having sex with someone. I've done that and hope you have. It's a nice, nice space. Surfer Rosa replicates that entirely. The great moment when you think your brain might explode through lack of imagination.
At the same time it's the reverse from sex. It's the objectification of it. Pretty close to pornography. Or else art. Francis Bacon stuff. Very clever, writing and playing. But Pixies were ultimately three blokes and Kim Deal and to be honest and get to the bottom of the band and how they operated, and their themes, you'd have to think about that.
It's ugly and clever art at the same point! No wonder Pixies didn't clean up but Kurt Cobain did with his great distillation and reversal of their soul, sound sex, looks and ideas. Much good that idea did him.
Listening to Pixies twenty five years after I listened to it first time in that attic room. Pixies haven't changed but perhaps I have. It's leaner, thinner, uglier, more real. Less sexy. Pared to the bone. Commerce. Where's your 10 dollars?
I didn't review the second side. I didn't review every song. Like I said. I was sick. So is the world. Pixies amongst others predicted that. They did it very, very well. I know I'm not doing them justice! But sometimes music consoles and warms. Sometimes it doesn't. Pixies are great. They just didn't do it for me this time.
In 1985 the Bunnymen undertook a tour with a setlist liberally interspersed with cover versions reflecting their formative influences. The made some great selections and did some really fine takes on them.
Robert Christgau is an American Rock critic best known for his Consumer Guide column in The Village Voice which he's been writing since 1969. Single paragraph reviews of new album releases which he grades from A+ to E-. I skimmed through it to see what he thought of some of the albums written about on here and it was pretty illuminating. Here's a selection:
Dexys Midnight Runners - Searching for the Young Soul Rebels [EMI, 1980] Perhaps it will clear something up to specify that this is not a soul record. It is a weird record. Never have soul horns sounded remotely as sour, and Kevin Rowland can't carry a tune to the next note. There are horn interjections that make me laugh out loud at their perfectly timed wrong rightness, and with Kevin Rowland quavering through his deeply felt poesy and everybody else blaring away, I enjoy it in much the same way I enjoy a no-wave band on a good night--DNA, say. But DNA I understand. B
Echo and the Bunnymen -Heaven Up Here [Sire, 1981] Word was these erstwhile-and-futurist popsters had transcended songform, so I gritted my teeth and tried to dig the texture, flow, etc. Took the enamel clean off. I hold no brief against tuneless caterwaul, but tuneless psychedelic caterwaul has always been another matter. Ditto for existential sophomores. And, need I add, Jim Morrison worship. C
The Smiths - Meat Is Murder [Sire, 1985] It makes a certain kind of sense to impose teen-macho aggression on your audience--for better or worse, macho teens are expected to make a thing of their unwonted hostility. These guys impose their post-adolescent sensitivity, thus inspiring the sneaking suspicion that they're less sensitive than they come on--passive-aggressive, the pathology is called, and it begs for a belt in the chops. Only the guitar hook of "How Soon Is Now," stuck on by their meddling U.S. label, spoils the otherwisepristine fecklessness of this prize-winning U.K. LP. Remember what the Residents say: "Hitler was a vegetarian." C+
Fairport Convention - Liege and Lief [A&M, 1970] Because the rhythm section has oomph and the singer soul, their pursuit of the Pentangle down the wooded path of jigs and ballads isn't entirely disastrous. But it sounds more like liege than lief to me. Traditional or original, these songs are either momentary escapes--that is, dances--or tales of common folk battling fate and the class system to something less than a standoff. Matty Groves outfucks Lord Donald, but Lord Donald kills Matty as well as his own wife; the Deserter is betrayed by comrade and sweetheart, then saved--to be a soldier--by Prince Albert. And the music, inevitably, reflects this fatalism. B-
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On [Tamla, 1971] This may be a groundbreaking personal statement, but like any Berry Gordy quickie it's baited skimpily: only three great tunes. "What's Going On," "Inner City Blues," and "Mercy, Mercy Me (the Ecology)" are so original they reveal ordinary Motown-political as the benign market manipulation it is. And Gaye keeps getting more subtle vocally and rhythmically. But the rest is pretty murky even when the lyrical ideas are good--I like the words on "What's Happenin' Brother" and "Flyin' High (in the Friendly Sky)" quite a bit--and the religious songs that bear Gaye's real message are suitably shapeless. Worst of all, because they're used a lot, are David Van De Pitte's strings, the lowest kind of movie-background dreck. B+
That's just ludicrous! High Land, Hard Rain, Murmur, 3 Feet High & Rising and Loaded get more favourable reviews and he completely loves The Go Betweens, one of the finest bands there ever was and the namers of this blog. He also gives almost straight 'A's to the big names of New York punk. Still the wilful ignorance and dismissal of so much of the great character and vision that British musicians brought to the table is shameful. As for the What's Going On review...
As the late, great Lou said, "Critics. What does Robert Christgau do in bed? I mean, is he a toe fucker? Man, anal retentive, A Consumer's Guide to Rock, what a moron: 'A Study' by, y'know, Robert Christgau. Nice little boxes: B-PLUS. Can you imagine working for a fucking year, and you get a B+ from some asshole in The Village Voice?
The NME have just posted another of these charts. Just made for mugs like me who just bought it despite being far too old to buy the NME anymore. For the record I like the chart fairly well. Here are the rankings of the albums I've reviewed thus far...
1. The Strokes - Is This It - No. 4 here.
2. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On - No.25
3. R.E.M - Murmur - No.69
4. Dexys Midnight Runners - Searching For The Young Soul Rebels No 118
5. De La Soul - 3 Feet High & Rising - No 120
6. Echo & the Bunnymen - Heaven Up Here - No. 224
7. The Smiths - Meat is Murder - No.254
8. The Velvet Underground - Loaded - No .271
9. Aztec Camera - High Land, Hard Rain - No. 293
Nine out of thirteen I've chosen are rated by others here. Not bad. Glad to see Aztec Camera there. The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional, The Associates - Sulk, Siouxsie & the Banshees - The Scream and astonishingly Fairport Convention - Liege & Leaf don't chart. I think all of them should. Associates perhaps not. The Triffids should be Top 50 though perhaps few would agree. It's an outstanding, neglected record.
Dexys and Fairport should both be top 100. De La Soul too. Miles Davis Kind Of Blue should be higher than The Strokes when it's actually 75 places lower! How do you measure these things? Kind Of Blue of course is not a Rock album so how can it be compared here? What's Going On must be Top 10. Number 1 in the chart is The Queen is Dad. I prefer other albums of theirs What do I know?
Here's 90s NME journalist Johnny Cigarettes comments on the process. Worth a read.
In the early Eighties the NME ran a weekly column called 'Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer' where cult types, (generally), were offered the opportunity to share their taste in art and culture. It was a wonderful set of moments. Here were a few.
Still reeling from reading Bunnyman, I'll repost my review of Heaven Up Here from the early days of this blog. It's rambling and overlong, like a lot of my early reviews, but might be worth a read.
'Echo and the Bunnymen embodied all the archetypes of the classic band: a drummer who knew how to have a good time; a bass player who knew how to keep everybody else in time; a guitarist who was introverted, bitter twisted and fucking brilliant and a singer who had the lips, hair, voice, words and all that other stuff that you have to have from a Parthenon Drive front man.' Bill Drummond
This is one of the great romantic journeys. At least for me. Heaven Up Here by Echo & the Bunnymen is a full on, torrid, romantic ride across teenage emotions, bookshelves and British landscape. It's beautiful, dark, relentlessly emotional and quite determinedly, unashamedly intensely consistent from start to finish. If you don't like it within the first thirty seconds before McCulloch sings you certainly won't do by the end. For me it's great literature, great landscape a great statement and great art. If you don't agree, bear with me and keep on reading. I'll try and convince you.
The point when you cut yourself away from well-wishing, loving parental attention is a one off, transitional moment. Your parents, if they're enlightened, educated folk, probably want you to do it. They don't want you in their nest forever. You don't want to stay there either I imagine. But before you flee the coop you probably need a last extended, indulgent sulk. It's what the teenage years are here for. This moment has never been better documented except by the first three albums by Echo and the Bunnymen.
There's something resolutely defiant about the great Northern British guitar bands of the late Seventies. Just before Margaret Thatcher gathered force and cut her vicious swathe. The Fall, Joy Division, Blue Orchids, Buzzcocks, Comsat Angels, Sisters of Mercy, This Certain Ratio, Magazine, Wah!, Teardrop Explodes, Echo & the Bunnymen and finally The Smiths, the last in that line. There was also a wave of synth bands from the same neck of the woods at the same point in time but for the purposes of this review they won't be discussed. Because Echo & the Bunnymen is all about guitars.
This fact was quite evident before the release of Heaven Up Here. The Bunnymen had already released Rescue as one of their early singles which is one of the most muscular clanging, melodic guitar records you're ever likely to hear. If any doubt remained they released The Puppet / Do it Clean shortly afterwards to settle the argument. They had a mighty sound.
'Echo and the Bunnymen. The latter were blessed with a fierce drummer, Pete de Freitas and a guitarist,Will Sergeant who wasn't afraid to play Hank Marvin-like single note guitar solos, minimal and lightly psychedelic. Then they saw Apocalypse Now and never recovered. Their pretty tousle haired singer Ian McCulloch now believed himself to be next in line to Brando and Jim Morrison. his new psychedelia and intense self-belief led to one of 1981's best albums Heaven Up Here, which hummed ominously throughout, like a distant overhead helicopter.'
Bob Stanley, as a pop fan gets the lightness and youth of the Bunnymen here but he doesn't quite capture the darkness. The Bunnymen's early records are brooding, poetic romantic statements in the great tradition of the Romantic Poets, The Brontes and the Industrial Revolution of the great Northern cities. They're resolutely Northern. The comment about their intense self-belief is spot on however. It's spiritual in its intensity. Heaven Up Here, just as Crocodiles before it and Porcupine which came after comes on as nothing less than a quest.
Whatever happened toManicured Noise?
The shadow of The Doors over everything The Bunnymen ever did is indisputable. They never tried to deny it or played it down to my knowledge. Those turned off by Morrison's melodrama and affectations are unlikely to fall for McCulloch's. But for me their other influences are more interesting and flesh the Bunnymen out into something more substantial.
I'd take issue with Stanley's description of them as 'lightly psychedelic' though. I don't think it begins to do justice to what they achieve on Heaven Up Here. It's a heavy, disorientating record from the start. An album that replicates, pretty authentically the sensation of substance intoxication, altered youthful states. Apparently guitarist Will Sergeant was very much the guiding force behind this album. He draws on a wide pool of sources.
Lots of the bands that I liked had an art school background or were seen as “art rock.” Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Pere Ubu, the Residents, Talking Heads, Syd’s Pink Floyd, the list goes on and on. Oh, I forgot Wire. This was not a conscious thing. It just turns out like that. A meeting of like minds, sort of.'
He says the list goes on. I'd add The Fall, Joy Division, Television, The Modern Lovers, Stooges, The Beatles, (especially Magical Mystery Tour) the sitar driven phase of The Stones, perhaps Beefheart, The 13th Floor Elevators and the first wave of British Psychedelia to it. As well as literature, art, poetry and politics much of this but not all fed in by McCulloch. It's a rich palette. And on here it produced a fierce mix of purples, reds, blues, greys and blacks. And erm turquoise.
The Bunnymen are often dismissed as a teenage thing. Something that might affect you deeply at sixteen, (or perhaps shallowly depending on your perspective), but something you'll grow out of. A sixth form phase. I'm not quite sure why this time of life should be disparaged. It's one of the purest states there is. Perhaps I'm not best placed to judge because the Bunnyman were exactly that for me. My sixth form band. I did grow out of them just as I grew out of The Doors after a six month period round about that age when I bought all six studio albums. I got into other stuff. But then with time I grew back into both.
I've posted this on here before but it's the only digital picture I've got from this point of my life and it's typical of my Bunnymen phase. I'm not even quite over it here though R.E.M. have taken over in my affections. Whenever a camera was pointed at me for a couple of years I'd shift to profile and gaze deeply to the horizon. I think like legions of others I was half-imagining myself as one of the four on the covers of any of the first three Bunnymen albums. Heaven Up Here would always have been my sleeve of choice.
'Things are wrong. Things are going wrong.'
Show of Strength kicks off and precedes to do exactly what it says it will on the tin, ('that's the second time you've tried that one. Once more and you're fired' Ed.) McCulloch doesn't launch his remarkable lungs into the fray until forty three seconds in. Those forty three seconds give the opportunity for the four Bunnymen to demonstrate what a redoubtable musical force they've become. Sergeant, then De Freitas, then Pattinson and McCulloch himself. No mean rhythm guitar player. This intro is etched on my consciousness.
I can still remember the impression it made on me when I was seventeen. It takes me back to teenage parties. Putting it on record players trying to impress girls who were more interested in Squeeze. Singing the lyrics drunkenly to my friend Philip and a bloke called Frank as we staggered back to Philips folk's place in Kew after Friday nights imbibing on Richmond Green. Arguing with my mother that I was not revising enough when I would rather be listening to this.
They were made for impressionable youth. Safe, poetic, romantic, intoxicated rebellion. With Bunnymen atmosphere is all. If you don't care for the atmosphere they project than I imagine pretty much everything they do leaves you cold. They're quite a marmite band. For me when I was seventeen they offered exactly the atmosphere I wished to construct my identity within. More so than The Cure, The Banshees, PiL, even Joy Division who certainly outshadowed them in terms of the statement they were making. But not by that much by me as far as Heaven Up There is concerned. This album is right out there!
What Ian Curtis had to offer was a bit too much at this stage for a fairly contented but ambitious teenager who was building a persona slightly belatedly through records, literature, films and art. Bunnymen got pretty dark. They didn't pack their punches. But there was something about their belief and tight sense of unity and mission as a group that always led you to believe that however dark it got they'd somehow find their way back to the light
Watch this clip. It's a pretty remarkable demonstration of what four people focussing all their energies and thought processes on a common objective can achieve in terms of conveying an atmosphere and making a statement that will last. The Bunnymen have made some pretty sub-standard product over recent decades. For me they stopped making sense as a band when De Freitas died. Probably a bit before. I don't actually listen to the records any more. Don't want to. Still listen to the stuff that impressed me and shaped me between 16 and 19.
So often you see groups ceasing to have the meaning and power they've accumulated once one component is taken out of the equation. I'm afraid it eventually happened to The Bunnymen. Still they had a pretty good run. Four great albums and one outstanding one. The one I'm reviewing. Here for me they're at their absolute peak, a peak they maintained until they released The Cutter, one of the most gloriously off-centre, weird, wonderful and emotional records ever to grace the UK Top Ten.
Crocodiles, the band's first album is a pretty fine record, still one of the great coming of age debuts in British Rock history. But that's what it is. It's not fully formed and sounds like a garage band record to me despite it's peaks - Stars are Stars, Crocodiles, Rescue and Villiers Terrace which point the way to what they achieved on Heaven Up Here. It's still a process of joining the dots, a transition from the early concerts with a drum machine before De Freitas joined to him becoming a fully integrated member of the band.
It's happened here. He gives his kit one fearsome walloping in this song as on almost every other track on the album. Still one of my favourite drummers. Pattinson's loping bass is incredibly propulsive and impressive too. With the twin guitar attack rattling and chiming and McCulloch's unprecedented vocals soaring over the top of it all (who exactly sounds anything like him?) it was all pretty overwhelming for a sea of British teenagers looking for someone to pick up the baton from the fallen Joy Division in the early eighties. No surprise that it won the NME Readers Vote for year's best album in 1981 when it was released.
If Show of Strength is a statement of intent, next song With a Hip is an embodiment of the name of the band itself and the mystique that was arising around it. To some degree as with much of this album it's the sound of Liverpool and Manchester talking to one another.
With the death of Ian Curtis and the vanguard band of Northern Post Punk gone a vacuum was created. While the other members of that band realigned as New Order the contenders for their long coated legacy jostled. The Bunnymen with their unity and sense of purpose had made a jump in terms of commercial and critical potential from the pack of similarly minded bands which numbered The Teardrop Explodes, Simple Minds, The Fall, U2, Birthday Party, The Psychedelic Furs and Bauhaus. More than any band amongst that number they had the looks and hooks.
Pictures on the Wall / Read it in Books sleeve
The Bunnymen had no peers when it came to self-mythology. The Bunny God that appeared on their first single stoked the sense that their name gave off of them as a cult. They consciously courted legions of long coated well-haired youths. I was just one amongst thousands. McCulloch's looks, lips and tendency to flirt around the subject of intense, romantic love meant they offered girl appeal too.
With a Hip, takes the myth further. It comes on like a frantic vision of the fascist warren in Watership Down. The band are so accomplished by now. The sound they work up so much thicker and realised than on Crocodiles.
McCulloch's lyrics have their critics. He clearly loves words for their own sake. The way that they clash and chime and conjure up their own magic and unity. It tapped into something that a certain kind of teenager, (dreaming of beckoning life in their bedrooms), recognised in the early eighties. A fierce sense of outsider-ness and the contradictory urge to belong. He lost me by the time of Ocean Rain by which point he had begun to veer too much to the Moon in June side of things, ('my face among them kissing the tortoise shell / my planet sweet on a silver salver' Yeah right Ian).
With a Hip though is a real peak. For me it burrows, (yes) deep beneath the skin to say something mysterious but telling about an adolescent perspective of life and society, pleasure and pain, conformity and control. McCulloch has long been suggested to have a condition which affects his behaviour and worldview. In his teenage years apparently he would stare long and hard into mirrors imagining himself in the rock star state he went on to realise through sheer self-determination, bloody-mindedness and talent. He himself says he has OCD. His lyrics and stage persona suggest something more. There are a couple of interesting takes on it, along with the superb lyrics here.
'Just because we get all this respect doesn't make me anywhere near the higher reaches of the human. I don't know why the term 'human race' was invented so soon. There really aren't that many 'human beings' knocking around. That's why I wrote 'Monkeys' which is about the limitations of people who don't begin to see yet are still arrogant enough to believe that they're well formed human beings. So many people seem undeveloped to me, not yet human and never likely to be. You should be contributing to the progress of the human race rather than staying the same as it's been for the last 5,000 years. Yet it seems that nothing's changed. We don't seem to develop. If this is the way the world's meant to be it's disappointing. With all this potential for being human we all settle for routines that don't make sense, like sitting in pubs or riding around in buses or going to school. People accept these routines as the obvious way to live, but to me they're disappointing, they don't really make sense. If this is how the world's meant to be, it's probably the simplest thing in the world to understand but the fact is I don't' Ian McCulloch
The Bunnymen were wrenched and agonised between albums one and three. But they rarely lost sight of the windswept, epic drama and romance that spoke beyond this from their combination of personalities. Never more so than in Over the Wall, surely the most ambitious song on a hugely ambitious album.
They must have had such a sense of realised achievement once this was written. It was surely the moment they'd been working towards all of their career. They'd had songs which became tour de forces before live in Crocodiles and Do it Clean but Over the Wall was something else entirely. It was the track teenage devotees bought stamps, writing paper, envelopes and postcards with, with money which they might usefully have spent elsewhere, to hoist it up and over the wall into the higher reaches of John Peel's Festive Fifty for several years thereafter.
For some reason they chose not to release it off its own back as a single even though it had been part of The Shine So Hard EP prior to Heaven Up Here. It would surely have charted if they had and given them their first great existentialist Top of the Pops moment as A Forest had for The Cure the year before. In any respect Back of Love and The Cutter did that for them over the next couple of years.
It would be an interesting parlour game to divide the great English bands of the '60s, '70s and '80s into two camps, Mods and Rockers. The Beatles were rockers. As were The Stones. The Kinks, The Yardbirds and The Who of course were mods. I'd put Syd Barrett's Floyd there too. Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Mott the Hoople and most of the trashy part of Glam were rockers. Bowie, T.Rex and Roxy managed remarkably to straddle the divide between the two. The Pistols were rockers, despite liking the Small Faces as were most of the early punk groups with the noticeable exception of Wire who were Mods. The Jam go without categorisation. The Clash started as mods and became rockers. Dexys and The Specials were both mods. The Teardrop Explodes were mods. Echo and the Bunnymen were in my eyes most certainly rockers. Hence the hair!
'One of their early producers was Ian Broudie, later of The Lightning Seeds. He says, “Separately, what they’re playing didn’t seem that great. But somehow, when the four of them touched together, it ignited the blue paper. You could say to them, ‘Play A to D.’ They’d all join in and play A to D, and it would just sound great. The four of them created some kind of chemical reaction.” '
To be able to review this album properly you have to live with it. I have for the last three weeks. It's a very, very strange album and one that needs repeated listens. It's an itch you can't scratch. From Over the Wall, which is a strangely huge and immediate peak to put on third track first side, the album wends on.
It Was a Pleasure is something completely different. It jars.I imagine it's Will Sergeant's track. There's certainly Talking Heads there. Gang of Four too. It breaks up the first side. The more I listen to it the more it impresses on me.
A Promise is the big pop moment on the record. At least as pop as the Bunnymen could get at this point given their general mood. It didn't break the Top 40 though it should have done. It has a very simple dynamic and remains buoyant throughout, defying gravity remarkably from start to finish. Meanwhile McCulloch on vocals sounds like he's crying from verse to chorus. The hard to hear kiss off backing lyrics, 'We can sail on forever' speak a remarkable truth about the album. In darkness, sometimes complete blackness but heading gradually upwards towards the light. Like the sound of flapping wings.
Heaven Up Here, the title track and opening song on Side 2 is certainly not pop. There's a discussion going on, on the first four Bunnymen albums between Rock and Pop. Album one is Pop, album two and three Rock, album four pop. A discussion between The Beatles and The Velvet Underground. This discussion happens again between A Promise and Heaven up Here.
The big influence for this album was supposed to be The Velvets What Goes On. Heaven Up Here is addled and goes slightly beyond that. I can detect the fingerprints of mid-sixties pioneers The 13th Floor Elevators. Will Sergeant flipping through his psychedelic songbook
It's an unholy row. It's music for the asylum to my ears in that it seems to talk about how we keep ourselves sane in a world that patently obviously is not. It suggests that a temporary remedy might be found in intoxicants and medication. Many of us do it every weekend and if we're not careful during the week too. Groovy, groovy people.
From German TV concert show Rockpalast .Listen for the Scouse accent saying 'Nice one mate!' as McCulloch announces the song and McCulloch laughing and saying 'They're everywhere!' Nice moment.
The Disease continues the mood but there's no illusion of temporary heaven here. This is purgatory. The only song on the album that isn't a full on band effort, this is mostly McCulloch with Sergeant's rickety, cracked riffing and muffled ominous studio noise. The Bunnymen were masters of embroidering their recordings with moans, and shuddering effects to pile on the atmospherics. It said all that I wanted music to say when I heard it first. In my longcoated teenage years
But in addition to this this is one of McCulloch's great lyrics in that he says what he wants, says it with his characteristic poetic grace but his meaning unusually is absolutely, apparently clear. A friend of mine, Stephen, commented on reading this review that the Bunnymen were just great on Roman Catholic imagery. He's quite right. Cheers Stephen! Never more so than here.
'My life's the disease that could always change With comparative ease, just given the chance My life is the earth, 'twixt muscle and spade I wait for the worth, digging for just one chance
As prospects diminish, as nightmares swell Some pray for Heaven while we live in Hell My life's the disease, my life's the disease
If you get yours from Heaven don't waste them If you get yours from Heaven don't waste them If you get yours from Heaven'
The Disease is as bleak as the album gets. Side Two remains dark but as with A Promise from this point on they slowly but surely claw their way upwards.
'One day someone will explain to Bono that pop is always more expressive when it is trying to mend a broken heart than when it is trying to save the world.' Bob Stanley (Yeah Yeah Yeah)
'What d'you say, When your heart's in pieces, How to play, Those cards in sequence.' Echo and the Bunnymen All My Colours (Zimbo)
The Bunnymen understood the importance of mystery. McCulloch despised the obvious rock gesture. Hence he despised Bono like no other and was almost equally disdainful of Springsteen. And he was fated never to approach a shadow of their sales because The Bunnymen were always best standing on the margins, aloof, lofty and removed. When they moved centre stage for their self-titled fifth album, put a straight close up picture of the band on its sleeve and tried to appeal to America (with some success ironically), they lost the plot entirely for me.
At this point in the game however The Bunnymen were out-thinking and outplaying U2 every step of the way. In this year U2 released October which was a very hesitant, uncertain record, stumbling towards the epic widescreen sound which would eventually sweep all before them (commercially, if not in terms of artistic value I'd argue). But at this point it was The Bunnymen who were calling the shots. McCulloch said in various interviews that this was supposed to be a soul album. That idea is best realised here.
All My Colours is one of the Bunnymen's greatest moments. There was an extraordinary five minutes when The Bunnymen played the Womad Festival in 1982 and the Burundi drummers were brought on to add percussion and fully realise that track. I imagine everyone who was there will remember those moments forever. One friend of mine, Tim Jones was. I'm deeply envious. Peter De Freitas, You're missed.
With a lot of bands there's talk about an imperial phase. The Bunnymen had at least three years of these. No Dark Things is an incredibly thoughtful song. A struggle towards the light. The lyrics are fairly difficult reading because there's not a huge difference between Curtis's and McCulloch's mindset at this point. Maybe, with The Bunnymen there was just more pose involved throughout.
Turquoise Days is the one song that sticks within the Apocalypse Now fixation that Bob Stanley talked about earlier. It's surely set in the Vietnamese killing fields that Coppola documented. It tries to make meaning out of the meaningless and somehow does so. Like every other song on the album, it establishes itself inside a tantric moment that never breaks. A hypnotic, semi-conscious state.
There are lots of stairs in the Bunnymen world and some more of them appear in All I Want. McCulloch seems to be sat at the bottom of them. It's almost a nursery rhyme song between waking states and dream. The lyrical and musical themes are similar to the ones we've experienced before; grief, failure, doubt, pain but ultimately redemption wins out over all of them. As with Marquee Moon and a few other dream state albums that I'm aware of, I'm tempted to just turn the record over to Side One and let the process start all over again.
So there you go, Heaven Up Here. A remarkable object. As I said it was voted album of the year by NME readers in 1981 and quite right too though there were a lot of other very fine albums released that year. The Bunnymen continued on the momentum and attention this great album gave them.
For me Porcupine was a slight, though definite descent from Heaven Up Here despite its two glorious hit singles. I'm probably not the first person to feel it frozen in retrospect though I loved it in 1983.Those two 45s, Heads Will Roll, My White Devil, Higher Hell and In Bluer Skies are as good as anything on Heaven Up Here. The rest is not. Ocean Rain was a shift into baroque chamber music which never quite captured my heart the way their earlier efforts had, though Killing Moon and the title track were undeniable.
Having listened to this for the last three weeks for this review I just want to listen to it again pretty much right now because it's that good. It's nice to know you were right when you were sixteen. Echo and the Bunnymen knew for a while exactly where the treasure was buried!
Sat myself up in the chair!
'Within the soul of Echo and the Bunnymen there was a pure aspiration that transcended all those would be bragged up memories. A glory beyond all glories where the gates are flung open and all you can see is this golden light shining down on you, bathing you, cleaning all the dark grime and shit from the corners of your soul. You know what I mean.
