When I picked up a ticket for Echo and the Bunnymen’s Apples for Isaac album launch, I assumed that, at £25 a pop, it would likely be a run through of the new album and maybe a crowd-pleasing Killing Moon tagged on to the end.
When I received a message as the date got closer reminding me that this was an hour long set only and that a full, normal show at Camp & Furnace shouldn’t be expected, it kind of confirmed my early assumption.
A couple of years ago I saw them at the Echo Arena with a full orchestra re-imagining Ocean Rain and came away slightly disappointed. Will was majestic as ever, but Ian McCulloch was seated for much of the gig, and worse still, they had added a female backing singer to their ranks who, to be frank, wrecked songs like Nothing Lasts Forever. It just wasn’t Bunnymen. It might have been the cavernous Arena venue that gave the songs a cold and hollow ring, but something was most definitely amiss.
The songs were still great, the orchestra fab, but Bunny magic was not in the air that night and I wondered if it would ever return.
Since that gig, reports of lacklustre performances, vocal issues and the continuing underlying tension between Mac and Will did not bode well for the future of the Bunnymen, but I considered a quarter of a ton not too big a risk, and at least I would get to hear the much lauded new stuff with Will adding live magic weaved by his fingertips onto an album devoid of his presence bar four tracks (and it shows -more of which later).
The band arrived onto a stage bedecked in candles and to a haunting Gregorian chant and immediately launched into a joyous Brussels is Haunted, possibly the most immediate of the songs on Apples for Isaac. Unbelievably, a storming All That Jazz followed, with the stage drenched in a strange light which meant every member of the band was visible, aside from McCulloch who seemed to exist in a familiar silhouette all evening, but it was already clear that vocally he was on top form, and most importantly the swagger and the stage moves were back, so the silhouette worked to transport the audience back to the early eighties and rather than looking at a singer of pensionable age, we were looking at the Mac of old, but this time, depending on angles, he is dressed as Johnny from Mean Streets or alternatively an old time Baptist minister, but coolness personified, as I’m sure he’d like me to point out. This feeling was accentuated by a most pleasurable surprise when a phenomenal Heads Will Roll, sliced through the Camp and Furnace, McCulloch positively attacking the mic whilst Will got his mystical Middle Eastern thang on. All around, gobs were smacked.
A blistering Rescue followed and was met raucously by a crowd, who as one, realised that far from being a trawl through the new album, this was likely to be an intimate revisiting of the best of their back catalogue with a couple of newbies thrown in for good measure.
The range of McCulloch‘s voice was astonishing tonight as were Will‘s furious guitar lines. Aside from a few thank you’s, Mac the Mouth had been absent but on half-hearing one yelled request he asked “Say that again…” and then realising what had be said replied “No Chance“, as the band launched into Flowers, a song that tonight demonstrates Will Sergeant‘s ability to mix wig out guitar lines with plucked beauty.
More requests for songs were met with a “Yer wha‘?” and “I don’t know what you’re saying…” before realising it was a request for Jacques Brel‘s Jackie. “Oh No! No Way. No! I wouldn’t mind doing Manique, if you know Jackie you’ll know that one. But we’re doing neither…we’re doing this one though…” as the opening bars of The Cutter was met with a visceral roar of recognition and it positively sizzled as McCulloch strived and succeeded in hitting the high notes of yore.
(More shouts)
Shhh, shurrup, you ignorant bastards (laughter)! You know, when I was a kid, wasn’t that long ago to be honest, I would never talk shite when my Dad was speaking…good job he never spoke!
This was the segue into McCulloch‘s beautiful rumination on the impending end that awaits us all in the bittersweet The Unstoppable Force, with the killer lines “Stars align/As you notice suspicious signs/And more and more diminishing time/You’re in sight of the finishing line/Here comes your unstoppable force…”
“Oh and by the way…school…utter shite. I dunno whether I slipped through the net, but it’s a load of fucking crap…and they teach you shit. And they’re all iffy…thank you!” was the intro to an utterly dramatic and majestically spellbinding Over the Wall with Sergeant shelling out shimmering shards of savagery as McCulloch hollers and yelps magnificently over the guitar violence accompanying him.
“Thanks for coming. Weather’s shite, as usual, (yell from the crowd) Sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying, you’re just speaking and stuff (repeated yell) Now that was a shriek. (repeated yell) That was a bellow…or a roar…it beggars belief sometimes…” was the lead into a beautiful Nothing Lasts Forever which morphed as it often does into Lou Reed‘s Walk on the Wild Side/Coney Island Baby only this time, as well as Mac‘s comforting croon, Will adds delicate, sparkling drops from his guitar which leads to a full on crowd participation moment. “Doo duh doo duh doo, duh duh duh doo duh doo duh doo” indeed. It was punctured by a shout from the crowd and mid song Mac the Mouth responded, “What was that yell I just heard? Was it important enough to yell (it was repeated – “G’wed lad“)? No it wasn’t important, I was being sarcastic. Maybe less yelling…I wanna play football for the coach…”
Simply wonderful.
“Sing along to the next one, I keep forgetting to say that, sing along…with gusto…if you want…the chorus is the catchiest bit…” and indeed it is because the song in question is Seven Seas, and the instruments drop out on occasion to allow some of the questionable audience Mac impersonations to be fully heard. It is spirited and splendid.
“It’s Sunday night and everything else is crap. Everything in the world’s crap really. Footy’s gone crap, they can’t even pass the ball. I think they’re all colourblind (more yells from the crowd), Sorry, are you saying something witty and clever? What are you saying? I like you anyway. I don’t want to get a cob on over something I don’t understand (more yells) Oh, here we go again. Do we need a translator up here? (“Yeah!”) Well we haven’t got one. Maybe I need to read one of those books that they sell to understand Scouse, not the ones in the shops, they’re crap. They have these, ‘the word for a pie is a pie…’ (More yelling) What? My God, have you said something again? What the fuck. Do you teach or something? I’ll read your book when it comes out”. As preambles go, it was good, but even better was a truly funky and brilliant Bedbugs and Ballyhoo with Mac swaying to the infectious groove delivered by the rest of the band.
(More requests)
“We’ll do that one again but we can only do so many, I’m sorry.
We’ve got to do ‘Leaning on the Lampost at the Corner of our Street’, George Formby. I think he was in The Smiths. He wrote the songs anyway, load of crap. Banjo tunes.
You know them rock climbers, what the sod’s that all about? Climbing, a very sheer(more shouting)… sorry, I know you clearly like to yell…sheer face of a sodding rock thing, with no safety net. Not for me that!”
The glam stomp of Labs Rat Ran follows including the sax solo (I don’t think I was alone in not being particularly ‘taken’ by it) whilst Will provides perfunctory guitar accompaniment… and herein lies the only problem with the new material. It has become clear that Will only plays on four of the tracks on Apples for Isaac. A recent interview with McCulloch had him saying that he provided the guitar on the other songs (and pretty well every one is a belter) by imagining/knowing what Will does, so…why not just get Will in? The four tunes that Sergeant is on have that ethereal, otherwordly Bunnymen sound, the ones he isn’t on sound like they are missing something… because they are. Will is a unique player and his embellishments move Bunnymen songs into the higher echelons of magic, and the mystical. McCulloch‘s lyrics are consistently wonderful but to deny them the spiritual sparkle that Sergeant offers means that Apples for Isaac is a very, very good album, when it could have been truly great.
Just as most people don’t regard Reverberation as the Bunnymen, it is hard to accept the tracks that are minus Will as being the Bunnymen either.
The Bunnymen was McCulloch, Sergeant, Pattinson and DeFreitas.
Then it was McCulloch, Sergeant, Pattinson.
Now it’s McCulloch and Sergeant.
Anything less, and it ain’t the Bunnymen.
(With a nod, a wink, and a “Are you courting?” to Mark E Smith)
But squabblefests aside, what I didn’t expect tonight was that I would see the Bunnymen deliver a set of greatest hits with both Mac and Will at their brilliant best in a show that brought back memories of their 1997 comeback pomp. They were simply, and surprisingly, sensational, and all around me the heads and sages of the city were in concurrence, seemingly as equally awed as I was. And there was still more to come.
“Sing along with this if you like, I think you know it“.
This crowd needed no encouragement to join in with one of the greatest (Mac would say THE greatest) songs of all time, The Killing Moon. It was moody and it was magnificent and it was followed by a celebratory and joyous Bring on the Dancing Horses, and as the final song of the evening there was much to celebrate, because Echo and the Bunnymen are back to their majestic best.
The swagger, the moves and the mouth are all evidence that Mac is back to being the greatest frontman of all time, fronting the greatest band of all time (as long as Will is a part of it).
Tonight was both a privilege and a pleasure to be up close and personal with a peerless and precious Echo and the Bunnymen.
Prince Far Out
(Lying with the leylines on Matthew Street)
