60 ALBUMS @ 60 : #29

Echo and The Bunnymen – Heaven Up Here (1981)

I’m kidding myself on if I really believe that the next 28 albums in this rundown are really less favoured than Heaven Up Here.  I’m typing these words a few weeks after putting the final list together.  I’m typing up each piece in reverse order, and I surprised and indeed shocked myself when I realised it was now time to witter on about Echo and The Bunnymen‘s second LP.  I did look up and down the list of what’s still to come and contemplated shifting it up a few places, but I told myself that I had to stay disciplined and stick with what was decided back at the end of February.

1981 proved to be the band’s breakout year.   A Promise brought their first Top 20 single and Heaven Up Here went Top 10 in the album charts.  Their media exposure was greater than ever, although it would still be a few more years before Mac graced the cover of Smash Hits and found his face pinned to the walls of thousands of impressionable teenagers.

Nope.  The Bunnymen were among those that were vying for the mantle of the band best placed to grab the affections of the raincoat-wearing brigade who were still reeling from the shock of Ian Curtis‘s suicide and for whom music was a very serious business.   It wasn’t quite my profile, as can be illustrated by my increasing love for synth-pop that very year, but there is no doubt that this was the album that made me really sit up and take notice that the latest Fab 4 from Liverpool were genuine contenders.

I’ve written before that listening to the album’s two opening tracks – Show of Strength and With A Hip – felt at the time to be as powerful and immediate an opening one-two punch as anything I had in my growing record collection. More than 40 years on, and I still believe it is up there.  The third track isn’t too shabby either:-

mp3: Echo and The Bunnymen – Over The Wall

The fade in and slow build-up perhaps tricks listeners into thinking it’s a comedown and non-event after the opening two songs, but the catchiness of the simple, almost nursery-rhyme-like chorus, allied with Will, Les and Pete‘s combined attacks on your aural senses gives way to a realisation that you’re listening to gothic atmospheric rock at its very finest.

The big hit singles would come later on in the band’s career.  They would also, in the shape of Ocean Rain in 1984, make another genuinely sensational album that came close to making this rundown.  But as I suggested yesterday when talking about Tindersticks, the more mood and atmosphere that can be brought to an album, the better.  Heaven Up Here, from its sleeve to the contents of its grooves, is packed with both.

JC