New York in 100 Songs - # Marianne Faithful

 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,747 Perfume Genius - Too Bright

 

Perfume Genius consistently says what it says on the tin. All you can ask of a modern artiste !

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 37 Joan As Police Woman - Lemons, Limes & Orchids

 

'I know you got soul ! If you didn't you wouldn't be in here.'  Joan As Police Woman got soul, Alwys have done. Latest album Lemons, Limes & Orchids. is only the latest evidence.

.

Jan Wasser has an original sctick. She doesn't hark back to Dylan. Or Joni. Or Beatles. Tim Buckley perhaps. But primarily we're talking Stax and Funk. Al Green. War. Labelle. Soul sirens.

Lemons, Limes & Orchids unwraps with languid grace. Like waking up in the morning with a sensual body on the sheets to embrace and cherish. Lips to kiss. It's altigether wondrous. It has wings. And it flas them to wonderful effect.  

Song(s) of the Day # 3,918 The Painted Ceilings

 

Yeah! The Painted Ceilings. What a nice way to start the week.Their debut gambit,Maybe There's a Difference  a seven song mini album sets out its stall with a song called You're 23 !

I don't know how to tell you Painted Ceilings but I'm not. I'm fast approaching 60. But I feel like I'm 23 sometimes. And I know what I like.

I like this. Urgent melodic indie guitar from New Brighton that feels like it knows its Orange Juice. Irs Modern Lovers. It's Beatles. This will do. Infinity and beyond. Well New Brighton at the very least. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 185 The Clash - Combat Rock

 

Ooh I like Combat Rock. But then I like The C;ash. They weren't huge at my secondary school. The Stranglers I remember. My best friend at Secondaty School said they were huge at Latymer. 

A great bloke I knew said the Dickies were preferable to the Clash. He knew a lot about life. Less about music. 

New York in 100 Songs - # Magnetic Fields

 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,748 The Beach Boys - Friends

 

This came out in 1968 and sunk like a stone commercially. Failing to get anyway near The Billboard Top 100. It fared far better in the UK. It's a brief, melancholic and excellent record that I imagine obsessive fans of the band adore.This needs tempering with the realisation that soothing as this all is nothing on here would have made it onto Pet Sounds in all likelihood.

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 186 XTC - Black Sea

 

One of the first albums I bought. An indicatorof me being to discover my own taste. I still think Black Sea is great. Looking back to The Kinks. And forwards to Blur. 

So much going on. On every track. It's Pop. But awkward geeky Pop by a buch of oiks from Swindon. We live in a different world and it's difficult not to get a little dewy eyed and nostalgic listening to this now. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 38Jake Xerxes Fussell - When I'm Called

 

Jake Xerxes Fussell is one of the finest old school folk practitioners there is. Reared in Georgia and working out of North Carolina his work is unfailingly spare and heartfelt.

Never more so than in this year's offering When I'm Called.. It took me from half six to half seven this morning with languid grace and dignity,

This kind of music takes you out of yourself and makes you feel a part of something greater than yourself. It has a serene beauty. You couldn't really want anything more than what albums like this offer.  

Song(s) of the Day # 3,918 The Lost Notes

 

I don't generally like this time of year. It's cold and dark it's a time of year that reminds me of people I love who have died. And generally I experience money difficulties. moments of loneliness and tend to feel rather bleak in one way or another. But this year I'm feeling different as November winds down to December. This year I'm feeling positive and hopeful and full of energy and fight.

No better way to spend the remaining days as we count down to Christmas and 2025 than scooping up albums I've missed. The Lost Notes Good Luck Shoes is frankly rather Mumford & Sons lite and I never could stand that band. So I only got as far as the second song nefore I decided. 'This is fairly frightful and went on to something that was more to my taste. Still, it was alright I suppose. If you like that sort of tat. Onwards and upwards! 

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 187 The Television Personalities - The Painted Word

 

The Television Personalities had a particular vision which endures. Mental health and furs. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,749 Elastica- Elastica

 

I still have enormousfun with Elastica's Elastica and always will. It's the sound of being young and shameless. Shameless in its plagiarism. Flawless in its taste and spite. These aren't love songs as such but sum up the times they were written, recorded and released perfectly. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 39 Fievel Is Glauque - Rong Wieicknes

 

Ihaven't been gigging tis year as much as I would have liked owing to monetary and working concuderations. But I have been to The Lubber Fiend a fantastic new cooperative venue just aroud the corner from me a coulple of times.

I managed to catch Fievel Is Glauque there a couple of months back. One of my most treasured discoveries of recent years. 

Descibed by Uncut Magazine as a fascinating curveball. Second album Rong Wieicknes is precisely that. A transatantic duo Zach Ohullups and Ma Clement who shuttle from Brussels to New York and draw on Classical Jazz and Avant Garde sources.

This is a playful, souffle lite concoction. There's a lot of thought behind this in the same way that there always was with emotional and musical forbears. Stereolab and Broadcast. I have a  Fievel Is Glauque t shirt from that night. I think I need to wash and wear it again. 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,917 Wallice

 

A slight lie in after a rare night out with a good friend. The sun is open in the Newcastle heavens and my bath is run. Wallice's The Jester playing on my headphones as I prepare myself for it.

It's a very 2024 product. Self examination and emotions. A young woman with a pout and long plaits. One that may find it difficult to differntate itself from the pack. But essentially likeable. 

New York in 100 Songs - # Lou Reed

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 188 Killing Joke - What's This For !

 A post from last year about this record. 

As general as Christmas approaches, there are musical departures to sour the mood and make us reflect. Just yeaterday Shane MacGowan. A few days back Geordie Walker of Killing Joke. A mighty musician and a mighty loss.

It was one of those deaths that made me think of my secondary school, forty years and more back now, and its rituals and practices. It's foibles. I went to a reasonable sized comprehensive called Grey Court in Petersham in South West London. An unremarkable place in most ways but the portal to crucial, personal memories.

As we moved up towards the fifth year the students of my year, and the boys particularly used to write the names of the artists and the bands they liked on their bags and pencil cases. I remember certain bands tallying highly. Cramps, Rezillos, DEVO were greatly liked. Killing Joke seeme to be rated and listened to more than anyone.

I didn't listen to them. I wasn't a John Peel listener crucially and primarily focused on what was in the charts an on Top of the Pops until I was in the fourth year and started to be fascinated by Echo & the Bunnymen who were still an underground concern largely at this point though not much discussed by my yearmates in Grey Court in the corridors or plaugrounds or celebrated on pencil or school bags.

Prompted by the news of Walker's death and the sad reaction of a schoolmate of mine for whom they'd meant a lot at the time, I listened to The Joke's second album What's This For! earlier this week. It's impressive first of all. Ritualistic, fierce and primitive. A set of pagan rites as much as songs; a set of circles around a campfire, all driven onward by Geordie's echoey and driving guitars.

Killing Edge were never the easiest of bands to listen to. They recollect the nihilistic and anarchistic spirits of their times as well as anybody, of squats and marches,  and would naturally appeal to the teenage boys that we were. It was around the time when you might think of reading Lord of The Flies.There's something almost fascistic and scary about its intensity.

Good as Killing Joke and Walker were it's still not really my thing. I'm glad the playground is far behind. Secondary School was never something I enjoyed. Ultimately I think I found the peer pressure which was king there stifling and claustrophobic. I was glad when I could leave in 1982 and start to develop my own tastes and interests. Construct my own identity  Still Killing Joke offer powerful reminders of those times and What's This For! is a fascinating and impressive record. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 40 Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat

 

Laura Marling to my mind is excellent. Consistently excellent. She works on the Folk Seam. Tended by the likes of Nick Drake, John Martyn and most obviously Joni Mitchell , which is the consistent, inevitable reference point.

She also sprinkles in the modern. She talks about aging, relationships. Sensitively, lovingly. Patterns in Repeat is another great Laura Marling album. Good for the soul. 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,917 Mud Whale

 

It's mid November. It;s grey outside my window. Never mind Mud Whale are here to save us from misery with their melodic Grunge Lite album Humans Pretending To Be Human

To give them their full name Mud Whale are a Cleveland Emo Grung quartet. This album will not change your world. But there are worse ways of spending thirty one minutes of your life.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,750 Orange Juice - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 189 Bauhaus - In The Flat Fields

 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 41 Bananagun - Why is the Colour of the Sky?

 

Why is the Colour of the Sky? Why indeed.Bananagun Australian furry freaks and Afrobeat enthusiasts are back. And that's always going to be something to celebrate,

This takes off wheer ehe band left off with 2020's The True Story of Bananagun. It might as well have been 1967 frankly. Because this is where this beauty and crazed intensity first springs from.

There's a joyous utopian energy here which cannot be stilled. A glorious thiry five minute and ten song run. The second dawning of the Age of Aqyarius. And not a moment too soon.

Song(s) of the Day # 3,916 Robin Guthrie

 

Tobin Guthrie's new album Astoria comes across as ambient classical music for elevators, Awash with synths and melody. I confess I didn't stay for too long.

New York in 100 Songs - # Jay Z & M.I.A

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,751 50 Cent - Get Rich Or Die Tryin'

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 190 John Hiatt - Bring The Family

 

Not the kind of record I went for in 1987. It felt too old for me and I'm afraid it still does as I make my way towards sixty. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 42 The Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick - The Illiad & The Odyssey & The Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick

 

The Goalie's Anxiety At The Penalty Kick. A stone cold Existentialist classic novel from 1970 by Austrian writer Peter Handke.  About an unhappy disolute man who commits murder and then spends the rest of the book seeking to escape from himself and his lack of remorse. Without success. I told you it was Existentialist .. The kind of thing I tracked down and latched onto hungrily as a teenager undergoing the process of construction of who and what I was.

An equally fine early Will Wenders arthouse movie. And now fifty years an more on an excellent Philidelphia band of Indie misfits and today's Song(s) of the Day. The kind of proud statement of individuality and desire that always jumps out at aging would be bohemian oddballs like me.

Six fellow travellers from the city of brotherly love setting out on their journey. Their second album The Illiad & The Odyssey  & The Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick shines forth with the hungry vision of youth. The moment when you're devouring these classics for the first time. Discovering love. Making those friendships and alliances that will keep you secure and safe for the rest of your journey. Shaping your soul.

Listening to this first thing on a bright April morning with the sun streamung through my windows makes me glad to be alive and pleased I made my way on the road I chose when I was 16. That I.found my way to The Go Betweens and Television. Carson McCullers and Graham Greene. Camus and Sartre. Satie and Debussy. Oliver Postgate and Roald Dahl. Hal Ashby and Gustav Klimt. The girls I fell for and the friendships I forged.

The Illiad & The Odyssey  & The Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick is a record from a band that instinctively understands the small joys of these choices and this act of formation.These people are born bohemians. This is a fantastic record and a fresh love 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,915 Bananagun

 

Why is the Colour of the Sky? Why indeed.Bananagun Australian furry freaks and Afrobeat enthusiasts are back. And that's always going to be something to celebrate,

This takes off wheer ehe band left off with 2020's The True Story of Bananagun. It might as well have been 1967 frankly. Because this is where this beauty and crazed intensity first springs from.

There's a joyous utopian energy here which cannot be stilled. A glorious thiry five minute and ten song run. The second dawning of the Age of Aqyarius. And not a moment too soon.

New York in 100 Songs - # 17 Tedeschi Trucks Band

 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,752 Charli XCX - Charli

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 191 Husker Du - Flip Your Wig

 

Flip Your Wig found Husker Du on a major label. You wouldn't have known it, Apart frim a slightly cleaner production they remained consistent to their trajectory and values, 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 43 Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band - Loophole

 

Mick Head seems to be enjoying a surprising but well deserved curtain call of late. As someone who's always appreciated and sometimes been blown away by his work since he first emerged with Pale Fountains in the end days of Eric's it's a gratifying thing to witness.

Head has always been a talent to note and enjoy. Personally I've sometimes found him a little too in thrall to the past. That of his heroes. Arthur Lee's :Love, Simon & Garfunkel, The Byrds. I love that tradition too, so I'm not about to complain but I've never thought it entirely healthy to immerse yourself so utterly in times which have gone by. Look at Morrissey. You lose track of the here and now and your pursuit becomes an exercise in nostalgia and can sometimes lose its way. Those who peddle in this too staunchly are not always reliable witnesses.

This seems to be a particularly Scouse tendency and prediliction. Head is not alone. There are plenty of Liverpudlian  fellow travellers. Lippy types. McCulloch, The Coral, Bill Ryder Jones, Lee Mavers. Head has always been probably the mist restrained and artistically inclined of these. Intent as much in his legacy as his present and his past. A painter at the easel at the port or the bay. Beret cocked, False moustache. Paintbrush at an angle.

He's painted another minor masterpiece in Loophole latest record with the Red Elastic Band.It's one of his best records I'd say and will get his fanbase swooning in the aisles.It's an 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' exercise. Mistly he hits bullsetes.The quality contril is very high. Sometimes the steals are a bit blatant. The Human Race filches Lou Reed's Hangin Round lock stock an barrel. But what did Oscar say about imitation.The man knows what he likes and plenty of others will love this too. Good luck to the man. Well done too. I imagine he's enjoting this. .    

Song(s) of the Day # 3,914 Dialup Ghost

 

Six on Tuesday morning. Bath had. Lessons planned. An hour to kill before heading to the fitness centre. Just time to listen though to First Mate Darren 'Starbuck' Jones latest tip. May You Live Forever in Cowboy Heaven'. From Nashville's finest Dialup Ghost.

Just my cup of sick if you'll pardon the expression. From the sleeve of skeletal gun toting desperadoes onwards. .American Bohemian Weirdo Expressionism for forty minutes. My run down charts are full of these kind of nutty statements these days and may the well never run dry.

 

Thes people can't really sing and the playing is basic but consistently heartfelt and utterly committed. Som emight tellyou that love is allyou do. Ifficial rundowns might consistently tell you that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are in terms of the new conformity of grief and despair. Here is another record

New York in 100 Songs - # 18 Talking Heads

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 192 Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

 

My best friend and I hung around in out college days with a less than sympathetic type. I wouldn't remotely know where to start with that guy and his list of teenage crimes. Not a sympathetic sort. Let's put it that way.

But he had a car. And when you're a teenager you're nothing if not opportunistic.Cerainly my best friend and I were  We should be slightly ashamed of ourselves but of course we're not.

We all loved Talking Heads. How could you not.  The less than sympathetic type drove us up to London one Friday night lto one of the Scalas famous all night bills. He feel asleep in the seat between us. Woke up in the middle of Stop Making Sense and told us that it had stopped making sense. Oh how we laughed. The fim and album are of course wondrous in every way. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,753 Whitney - Light Upon The Lake

 

No not that Whitney. Gentle Indie Soulful fragility out of Chicago.

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 44 Ducks Ltd - Harms Way

 

'Raindrops on Roses and whiskers on kittens'. Byrds fringes. Leather trousers and Chelsea Boots. These are a few of my own personal things.

It's perfectly clear that the C 86 Dream that I experienced in my eatly twenties is one that will not die. There are any number of bands in San Fransisco who adhere with religious and limp wristed devotion to its commandments and principles.

If that's not enough to whet your appetite Toronto based Indue based collective Ducks Ltd's .Harms Way might scatter your skittles. Right up  my drippy Indie Schmindie Cul de Sac.

Song(s) of the Day # 3,913 Our Girl

 

Late in the day today. Three lessons taught online from half eight til  half one.An hour and a half at the fitness centre. Then a shop for Garibaldi biscuits and more and I'm back at my desk with cup of tea and said biscuits. Tucking in. The sun set already in the Newcastle heavens.

Our Girl's The Good Kind tick my boxes in a Monday afternoon  in a world I'm finding increasingly tick box giverned. Recirded at Rockfield Studio's with John Parish at the mixing desk their second album feels spacier and more considered than before.

Silky glossy and quietly confident. Dreamy. They're a London three piece and they harness a rich melodic sound. This took me from five to six with consummate grace.  

New York in 100 Songs - # 19 Sylvain Sylvain

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 193 Big Audio Dynamite - Big Audio Dynamite

 

Still a nice record to put on once in a  while.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,754 Godspeed You ! Black Emperor- F#A#

 

Every now and then Godspeed You ! Black Emperor come along to remind us that it's the end of the world as we know it, and they feelcrap. It's a dirty job but I suppose someone's got to do it.

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 45 BMX Bandits - Dreamers On The Run

 

It's apt that I've fallen under the sell of Dreamers On The Run, the latest album by The BMX Bandits this morning.I've just come back from a short holiday break in Glasgow this week. It's the city the Bandits mecurial leader and visionary Duglas T. Stewart is most readily associated with. A place where the musical scenes and sensibility he was a mover and shaker within still looms large.

 Dreamers On The Run is in every respect a tribute and addition to the seam of music which Stewart emreged from at the end of the Eighties. The sleeve of the album here depicts him in bearded reverie, and serves up reminders of visionary mavericks of the Sixiues. Scott Walker, Dion, Van Dyke Parkes and Del Shannon spring to mind.

The record does not shame comparisons such as these. A Naive Art album in the tradition of The Modern Lovers, Jad Fair, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian and The Delgados, it's an LP of continual childlike wonder and beauty.

Not for all tastes perhaps. Best enjoyed and appreciated if you have wimpy C-86 blood flowing through your veins. I'm a man of such DNA and this was an excellent start to my Friday morning. It's surely Stewart's masterpiece. I imagine he's incredibly pleased with this, and with very good reason. Dream on Duglas. You fragile pearl. .

Song(s) of the Day # 3,912 Red Ribbon

 

Intensity. Ooh I likes me a bit of intensity. This morning Red Ribbon courtesy of Darren Jones the ever reliable First Mate of ISWAB . New album where they go eponymous though it's not their first.

You get obscenity and female anguish. Courtney Hole meets Angel Olsen and Kristin Hersh on the heath under a full moon and stir up the cooking pot.

I likes me a bit of melodramatics and angst. This has both in spades. Emma Danner's move from Seattle to LA seems only to have sharpened her talons. Nice work Darren

New York in 100 Songs - # 20 Sharon Van Etten

 

Echo & The Bunnymen - Heaven Up Here

 Occasional repost of reviews that I was quite proud of. Here's one of Echo & the Bunnymen's great second album, posted first early on in the year.

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'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, A 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 to Manicured 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.

 

'As a creative person working with both music and art, were there any musicians who are also artists that were inspiring to you?

Lots of the bands that I liked had an art school background or were seen as “art rock.” Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Magazine, 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!

 

Over the Wall is a remarkable marriage between Rock and Roll, Prog Rock and Post Punk. It's Del Shannon and Hank Marvin wedded with Nineteenth Century Romanticism, with Nietzsche and Camus bedding in on the rhythm section. Excuse my flights of fancy. It still stands up despite the risk it runs of being pretentious in that it's aiming so high. It's one of the rare moments on an album of séances and nagging doubt and dread where The Bunnymen achieve exorcism and take flight.

 

 

 '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.

 

A Promise

 

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.

 

 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!

  

'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.

Good.

I drink my tea.' Bill Drummond