Echo & The Bunnymen

Being born in Liverpool and forming a band. Few geographical backdrops could certify a more daunting task, ever since collective culture was upended by four moptops concealing at least three great minds, the kind that come along once in a blue moon. Yet even a decade after the end of the Beatles' arc, if the ghost of the Fab Four still inevitably haunts the Merseyside capital, it's equally true that reckoning with such a looming recent past gives vital energy to a wave of artists who, between the late 70s and early 80s, allow the city to count itself among the nerve centres of British new wave.

Treading the local stages are names like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Wah!, Big in Japan, Pink Military and Teardrop Explodes, each bearing an artistic vision so distinctive that calling it a "school" would be limiting, though their common traits are still recognisable in an anguished, visionary psychedelic streak.

Of course, the band best able to channel these sounds into an immediately gripping song form are Ian McCulloch's Echo & The Bunnymen. Flagship of the renewed Liverpool Sound, they are the missing link that, via the bridge of new wave, ideally connects the original beat sound with the 90s Britpop phenomenon. The Bunnymen's formula filters, through the angular rhythms typical of the era, a gripping blend of pop and psychedelia, declined in different variations across their first three (master)works: harsh and stripped-down, marked by cutting jingle-jangle guitars on their debut "Crocodiles"; solemn and hypnotic on the follow-up "Heaven Up Here"; eccentric and inclined equally towards symphonic raga and danceable bass-and-drums interplay on "Porcupine".

Critics, enraptured, crown them as the symbolic band of the Liverpool musical renaissance, and so, once the "Porcupine" tour wraps up, McCulloch and company realise the ground is fertile to raise the stakes even further. The making of what would become "Ocean Rain" indeed revolves around the desire to break through beyond the tried-and-tested solutions of the new-wave movement and establish themselves not just as a sublime product of their time, but as cornerstones of pop-rock as a whole.

The writing phase between the final months of 1983 and the start of '84 is the turning point that leads McCulloch to let go of much of the roughness of their early days, as the project's more romantic side begins to take over.

The first creative sessions yield "The Yo-Yo Man", "Seven Seas", "Silver" and, above all, a demo version of "The Killing Moon", recorded at Crescent Studio in Bath. It's only an embryo of the masterpiece to come, but it's already clear these aren't the usual Bunnymen: the customary angular guitar riffs give way to acoustic Washburn guitars, while Pete De Freitas would swap his usual vigorous, geometric drum take for a more understated rhythmic arrangement, played with brushes.

Having road-tested the new songs on a training ground that was anything but secondary (the Peel Sessions), the band understood the table was set for the definitive recording sessions, scheduled not in England, but in Paris.

The French capital was in fact the ideal setting for the romanticism the band was after, a perfect middle ground between the Bunnymen's trademark nervy pop and new artistic influences going by the names of Jacques Brel and, above all, Scott Walker. Under the guidance of Henri Lonstan at Les Studios Des Dames, the band crafted surprising string arrangements that steeped their performative drive in a baroque quality meant both to elevate the melodies and to lend them a patina of languid sadness.

Will Sergeant, the guitarist and cornerstone of the band's aesthetic, commented on the orchestral parts: "We wanted to create something conceptual with over-the-top orchestration; not Mantovani, but something that pointed to a twist." And rarely had the band's earlier work been so adept at conjuring visual imagery.

Conceived as a decisive turn towards the quartet's more pop-oriented side, "Ocean Rain", true to McCulloch's by-now proverbial intransigence, proceeds in an oblique manner rather than one hinting at compromise, presenting itself to the market as a mysterious, composite object. The conceptual unity Sergeant speaks of belongs to a literary universe that is at times fairy-tale-like, at times plunging into gothic menace, a sonic representation of the nocturnal mode underpinning English fantastic literature.

And while the electroacoustic trickery and eccentric orchestrations that make up the album are anything but impenetrable, the tracklist as a whole, alternating between crystalline melodies and melodramatic digressions through a dark night of the soul, clothes the band's much sought-after romanticism in a distinctly unsettling ambiguity. Every yin has its yang on "Ocean Rain": for every "Silver" or "Crystal Days" or "Seven Seas" shining with a melodic immediacy worthy of Lennon/McCartney, there creeps in the nightmarish, breathless yearning for an unattainable beauty on "Nocturnal Me" ("Do or die/ What's done is done/ True beauty lies/ On the blue horizon"), the chilling stasis in which heaven and hell cancel each other out on "The Yo-Yo Man" ("Froze to the bone in my igloo home/ Counting the days 'til the ice turns green/ You know when heaven and hell collide/ There are no in betweens"), and the Doors-like shamanism of "Thorn of Crowns", where Sergeant's guitar tries to soften a lacerating tension with contagious melodies that nonetheless smack of vain hope.

And amid this constant swaying of emotions, the band even allows itself to place "The Killing Moon" at number six, a genuine technical knockout and one of the greatest singles of the decade. The song, which climbed to number nine on the UK Singles Chart, is the summa of the new Bunnymen sound: bass mixed right up front to lay down the pace over an electroacoustic bed, and a vocal line that coils in on itself before releasing into the outburst of an oppressive determinism ("Fate up against your will", the opening line of the miraculous chorus that, according to legend, came to McCulloch in a dream, like some latter-day Keith Richards...).

For his part, the singer, as usual, is keen to remind everyone that he was elsewhere the day modesty was being handed out: "I often introduce 'The Killing Moon' as the greatest song ever written, and I mean it. It's different from anything I've ever heard. It's so simple and so beautiful".

Beyond the customary loose-lipped boast from a man notoriously unable to hold himself back, it remains true that the song is the classic heavy-hitter that seals a great album's place in immortality. But within the economy of "Ocean Rain", "The Killing Moon" also marks the dividing line into a second section in which the fantastical journey drifts away from the orbit of nocturnal oppression and takes on the character of an ocean crossing.

First it's "Seven Seas" that strings together yet another gem, as if the jangle-pop openness of "Crocodiles" had merely been a training ground for a songwriting perfection that now sketches strange melodies over a surreal landscape, a kind of revisiting of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", caught between post-modern Calibans ("Here the cavemen singing/ Good news they're bringing") and enchanting shipwrecks ("Seven seas/ Swimming them so well/ Glad to see/ My face among them").

But it's with the closing title track that the album's splendid cover image becomes indelibly etched in the mind: McCulloch drifts along in his boat with a understated crooning, while the orchestra and Sergeant's arpeggios slowly trace the sea around him and the starry night into which his voice recedes, dragging the storms of a lifetime along with rising key changes ("Your port in my heavy storms/ Harbours the blackest thoughts").

It is the definitive consecration of a songwriting whose psychedelia unfolds essentially from the symbolism of the frontman's pen, reaching fulfillment in an eccentric, innovative orchestral pop, forever suspended between flawlessly crafted melody and a gaze towards otherness.

Unfortunately for the Bunnymen, beyond the success of "The Killing Moon", "Ocean Rain" carries a complexity that would only be fully grasped with time. Critics were initially disoriented and turned up their noses, while audiences struggled to recognize themselves in a band that had by now moved away from new wave clichés, yet remained too unwilling to compromise to definitively break into the mainstream pop market.

It was inevitable that such a response to an artistic effort of this magnitude would lead the band to close out its own high point with "Ocean Rain" itself. What followed were increasingly self-referential releases and attempts, sometimes merely predictable, sometimes clumsy, to bask in their own former glow, but without the shine or the desire to astonish of that remarkable 1980-84 run.

In the meantime, though, "Ocean Rain" had thrown open a door onto the pop-rock trends to come. Between the '90s and the 2000s, albums built on acoustic foundations and string arrangements would proliferate beyond count, and, above all, the Bunnymen's songwriting would be duly honoured by legions of musicians from the brit-rock revival, while covers of "The Killing Moon" would pour forth in abundance, some even from bands with a real impact on the history of so-called indie-rock (Pavement, for instance, recorded a live version on their 1999 "Major Leagues Ep").

"Screaming from beneath the waves", sang Ian McCulloch in 1984. And, as with every masterpiece worthy of the name, the waves of History ensured that cry was received and transformed into a fresh artistic vitality. It may well be coincidence that its architects were four lads from Liverpool, but the enduring beauty of the songs on "Ocean Rain" carries the romantic scent of one of the most fascinating changings of the guard in the history of British pop.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

17/08/2014