Echo & The Bunnymen – Page 2 – THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

Big In Japan, Echo & The Bunnymen, Expelaires, Lori & The Chamelons, Teardrop Explodes, Those Naughty Lumps, Wild Swans

A GRAND TOTAL OF 9 SINGLES….

This is some of what Bill Drummond wrote in August 1990 when The Zoo – Uncaged 1978-1982 was released finally bringing together all the various singles and most of the b-sides:-

We had one room up some dark, dirty stairs. We paid six pounds a week rent. We had one phone and an answer machine which we played all our cassettes on. We believed albums were the downfall of GREAT POP MUSIC. Although The Beatles were the greatest group ever, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was a disastrous wrong turn that pop music is yet to recover from.

Big In Japan were a group that I and David (Balfe) had been in. It split in August 1978 and we put out the band’s demos as our first release. We were seem to be ripping off other ex-members. From that point in we were deemed unethical, underhand and undeserved of the ‘premier Liverpool independent label’ reputattion that grew around us.

Other than Expelaires, which was the only other Zoo record not to sell, we made the descision to get involved with a group based on their choice of name alone. We had no idea what sort of nusic Echo & The Bunnymen played before we went in to make their first records.

We fought and quarrelled with the bands, memebers got sacked and others brought in. We drove around the country in David’s Dad’s car with boxes of records, sleeving them and selling them. There was no independent distribution network in 1979.

Due to a lack of finances we signed The Bunnymen and The Teardrops to major labels and took on the role of managers, something we had no idea about. Our plans for the future were to build giant pyramids out of ice, travel space and make movies. We believed The Teardrops and The Bunnymen were the new Beatles and Stones – We were wrong, nothing is ever the new anything.

We burnt out.

But the last single on the label was the greatest.

I thought it would be an idea to kick off 2015 with each of the nine singles in turn:-

Cage 001

mp3 : Big In Japan – Nothing Special
mp3 : Big In Japan – Cindy and The Barbi Dolls
mp3 : Big In Japan – Suicide A Go Go
mp3 : Big In Japan – Taxi

Cage 002

mp3 : Those Naughty Lumps – Iggy Pop’s Jacket
mp3 : Those Naughty Lumps – Pure and Innocent

Cage 003

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Sleeping Gas
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Camera Camera
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Kirkby Workers Dream Fades

Cage 004

mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – The Pictures On My Wall
mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – Read It In Books

Cage 005

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Bouncing Babies
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – All I Am Is Loving You

Cage 006

mp3 : Lori & The Chamelons – Touch
mp3 : Lori & The Chamelons – Love On The Ganges

Cage 007

mp3 : Expelaires – To See You
mp3 : Expelaires – Frequency

Cage 008

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Treason (It’s Just A Story)
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Read It In Books

Cage 009

mp3 : The Wild Swans – Revolutionary Spirit
mp3 : The Wild Swans – God Forbid

The last of these singles was on 12″ vinyl while the rest were all 7″. And Bill D is of course spot-on in his assessment that Cage 009 was the greatest of the lot. (I know my dear friend Dirk from Sexy Loser thinks so…..)

Happy New Year Folks

Colourfield, Echo & The Bunnymen, Pete de Freitas, Wild Swans

PETE DE FREITAS : AN APPRECIATION

I received a really nice e-mail the other day from Scott who asked if it would be possible to re-post something from the old blog.

It was a piece from 14 June 2009 and it’s title can be found in the first line……

—————————————————————

I cannot believe it was all of 20 years ago…..but it is.

14th June 1989 when the life of Peter Louis Vincent de Freitas ended as the result of a motorcycle accident.

He was 27 years of age. And he was the first dead pop star I ever shed a tear for.

Born in 1961 in Trinidad, Pete de Freitas was a bit of a posh boy, educated at a famous Roman Catholic public school near Bath, England, and while he was far from dim, he was never keen on pursing an academic career. So by the age of 19, he was living in London, sharing digs with another lad from his old school, and both of them dreaming of forming a band.

Pete’s flatmate had a big brother who was involved in the music industry, part of an ever-growing new scene on Liverpool. That big brother and his close mate started staying overnight at Pete’s place whenever any of the bands they were involved with played in London. Pete would sometimes go along to the gigs, which is what he did one August night in 1979.

Pete’s flatmate’s brother was David Balfe, and his mate was Bill Drummond. The band they took Pete to see at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road was Echo & The Bunnymen – a three-piece act backed by a drum machine. The drum machine was in fact ‘Echo’, the humans were ‘The Bunnymen’ – Ian McCulloch (vocals), Les Pattinson (bass) and Will Sargeant (guitar)

The band were getting a lot of attention, but it was widely felt that they would sound a lot better with a real drummer. Within 12 months of seeing them for the first time, Pete had that gig, just in time for the recording of the band’s second single, but their first for a major label.

From 1980 – 1986, Echo & The Bunnymen were one of the most entertaining bands on the entire planet. All four band members contributed to the songwriting, which showed in the magnificently tight unit that was the guitarist, bassist and drummer, while up front they had a hugely charismatic singer who was not slow in offering his opinions on any subject under the sun. They attracted a huge following, many of whom dressed in identical clothes and wore their hair in the same way as their idols. They enjoyed Top 30 success with seven of their singles, but it was their LPs which found them at their best, all four of them going Top 10.

Live, they were truly electrifying, with shows that stretched out for well over two hours featuring not just the hits, but great and unusual versions of album tracks as well as a handful of covers from many of their own influences.

Many people associated with the band, not least their larger than life manager and the frontman had predicted massive things for the 1984 LP Ocean Rain. And while it sold in impressive numbers, it didn’t conquer the world….

The band began to drift apart in some ways. First of all, McCulloch recorded a solo single. The others started producing and appearing on records by other bands. And in 1986, Pete de Freitas left the band.

Along with two members of the Bunnymen road crew, he took himself off to the USA to form The Sex Gods. The idea was to take the money he had made from his time as a Bunnyman, head off to places like New York, New Orleans and Jamaica, filming themselves as they went along living a truly hedonistic life. It was a bender to end all benders.

There were drunken rows, drug busts, near fatal car crashes amidst the chaos. Later on Pete de Freitas would admit he was going insane. He was eventually brought back to the UK by Bill Drummond.

He was temporarily replaced as the drummer, but the rest of the band soon realised how much they needed him, and he was allowed to re-join.

Echo & The Bunnymen released an album in 1987 called The Game – this time with very little hyperbole, and although it went to #4 in the UK charts, critical reaction was lukewarm. This time it was singer Ian McCulloch who decided that enough was enough, and he quit in 1988, intent on the solo career.

The other three decided to keep going, on the basis that having failed to really crack America with Mac at the helm, they could maybe succeed with someone different, unlikely as it might seem. The new recruit was Noel Burke, ex-frontman of St Vitus Dance….and someone who sort of looked and sounded like Mac….

The new line up were in rehearsals in Liverpool in June 1989, and Pete de Freitas was on his way there when he crashed his motorcycle on a back road near Rugely in Staffordshire. As I mentioned earlier, he was just 27 years old.

Years later, Les Pattinson in an interview with a music magazine said that he still thought of Pete every day. At his funeral, the three remaining original Bunnymen cried their eyes out….albeit McCulloch could not bring himself to speak to Pattinson and Sergeant for what he considered a betrayal in replacing him as singer.

I remember reading about Pete’s death in a newspaper the next day. My eyes welled up and my throat tightened. The man who I thought was the coolest man on planet pop was no more.

Quite a few years earlier, not far from my school, I had seen a motorcycle accident when the unfortunate rider was hit by a bus whose driver couldn’t have seen him. It was an incident that I hadn’t thought about much since, but it was the vision that flashed before my eyes as I read the paper, and it was something that gave me some sleepless nights over the next few weeks. Even as I type this, I can see that accident from over 30 years ago….all triggered off by the premature and sad death of a pop star.

You’ll see from the photo above that Pete was a good-looking man. He was someone who just about everyone I ever went out with during my years at University would admit to fancying. When you heard about the way he lived his life, you just wanted to be him.

He was only two years older than me. And while I have had a great and memorable almost 46 years on this planet, there’s still a part of me that wishes that I had lived his life for just one day…as long as that day wasn’t June 14th 1989.

R.I.P. Pete de Freitas. I still think of you every time one of your songs comes on my i-pod….

mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – All My Colours
mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – Nocturnal Me
mp3 : The Wild Swans – Revolutionary Spirit
mp3 : The Colourfield – Take
mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – Do It Clean (live – 1983)

Footnote

There were a lot of really nice comments left behind after the piece appeared, many of them thanking me for such a heartfelt tribute.

A few months later I received the most wonderful e-mail from Pete’s daughter. Lucie-Marie de Freitas was a very young girl when her father died, of an age before she could develop any memories of him.

Her e-mail explained that the treasure trove of songs, articles and videos have helped her learn so much about her father and the incredible impact he had in his short time on earth. She thought it was remarkable and moving that so many people still remembered him after all those years and she thanked me for the tribute I had made.

Talk about leaving me speechless.

April Showers, Echo & The Bunnymen

MAD WORLD

One of the 45s featured in the regular Saturday series on great Scottish singles was this:-

mp3 : April Showers – Abandon Ship

Released to almost complete indifference in 1984, it really is one of the great lost singles of the era. April Showers was a short-lived Glaswegian pop duo comprising Jonathan Bernstein and Beatrice Colin.

I’m a huge fan of this song. It was the only piece of music the band got round to releasing (other than the b-side!!) . Today is probably now the fifth time I’ve made it available as an mp3 over the past eight years. I was amazed that a few weeks ago the very same Jonathan Bernstein dropped me an e-mail, thanking me for the kind words and asking if I’d be interested in having a read of a book that he had co-authored and which was due for publication in the UK later in the year.

How could I say no?

The 300+ page book in question is called Mad World : An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs that defined the 1980s. And it’s very very good……

Jonathan moved to Los Angeles quite a few years ago and is nowadays more widely known thanks to his exploits as a movie screenwriter, author an occasional contributor to magazines and newspapers. For this particular project he has hooked up with Lori Majewski, herself a successful music and entertainment writer.

Th authors were inspired to write the book came about after they both read an interview with a well-known 80s musician from the UK in which he had discussed the inspiration, writing and recording of the song, as well as its reception and place in pop history. If it could be done for this particular song then why not for others which had made such an impact on them as music fans?

Each of the 36 individual chapters begins with an introductory paragraph which puts the artist and song into a broader context – where and how they fit with the rest of the 80s and perhaps any enduring influence they have had on music all these years later. Each of the authors then offer very short pieces expressing their own views on the song or the artist before the pages are turned over to those who matter most – the musicians. This is where the excellent writing skills and styles of the authors shine through – all of the interviews were carried out face-to-face or by e-mail in the classic Q&A style, but they appear on paper as superbly written monologues.

This leads to a consistently entertaining read – no single musician comes across as a pretentious prat nor do the authors leave anyone hanging out to dry (although it should be pointed out that some of the tales highlight how different musicians in the same band see things from different perspectives and you have to draw your own conclusion as to which is the truth and which version is fabricated…..)

It is a book written initially for an American market and so the songs and bands featured will have had to enjoyed a bit of success over there for it to make commercial sense. As such, there’s a number of songs in the book that I am no fan of – and a couple that I’ve never even heard of – but at no time did I feel like ever skipping any of the chapters.

The title is also a wee bit misleading for the songs featured were released between 1978 and 1985, an era which the authors unashamedly say was the Last Golden Age Of Pop. So there’s a lot of great music from the decade missing from the book but those of you with a bent towards great indie or electronic pop will particularly enjoy the chapters on New Order, ABC, Echo & The Bunnymen, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, The Normal, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Joy Division, OMD and The Smiths among many others.

What I particularly enjoyed was the authors abilities to look at the 80s in a way which is warts and all and come to the conclusion that it was a time far preferable to nowadays when any semblance of individuality is ridiculed on TV ‘talent’ shows or is then removed by such bland, dull and ultra safe production values designed to appeal to the biggest common denominator.

“Were the artists ridiculous? Was the music overproduced? Was the influence of Bowie ubiquitous to the point of being suffocating? Guilty on all accounts. But it was also an era of imagination, vaulting ambition and incredibly memorable songs.

Mock and ridicule the excesses of the 80s if you want, but don’t try and deny that the stars of the era had personality. They may have been pretentious, pompous and absurd, but it was their own pretension, pomposity and absurdity. They didn’t have to bow their heads and nervously wait for the approval of a jaded record executive on a judging panel. Love or hate them they were their own glorious creations.”

The other great strength of the book is the diverse backgrounds of the two authors.

Majewski is an American who was a teenage music fan in the period concerned with an undiminished passion and love for the likes of Duran Duran and Adam Ant but a huge appreciation of what makes a great indie song – she’s the contributor who likes The Smiths and is not ashamed to admit that she knew nothing of Joy Division until she checked out the original version of the song covered by Paul Young; Bernstein is Scottish, older and, thanks to April Showers, a participant in the era. He claims he is too sour by nature, too uptight and suspicious of emotion to declare himself a fan of anybody, but this enables him to take a dispassionate approach to each singer or band and articulate just how he feels they are worthy of a place in the book – except in the chapter on The Smiths where he simply says ‘Not A Fan’. But I’m willing to forgive this for all of his other contributions – in particular his words on Simple Minds – where he captures perfectly how all of us who had grown up with them in Glasgow were feeling as they took the USA by storm.

Together they have cooked-up a really good read. One which can be enjoyed in bite-size chunks or devoured ferociously in a single serving….either way it won’t come back on you and leave feeling queasy. Indeed, I suspect it will leave you longing for further servings.

Mad World has been well received by critics and fans alike since its publication in the States back in April. UK readers can pick pre-order copies on-line in advance of its release date next week on Monday 1 September from when It will hopefully be available in all good book stores.

Here’s one of the songs featured in the book in its full extended nine minute plus glory:-

mp3 : Echo and The Bunnymen – The Killing Moon (all night version)

Enjoy

MAD WORLD by LORI MAJEWSKI and JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

Published by Abrams & Chronicle Books

320 pages : RRP : £12.99

Echo & The Bunnymen

LAY DOWN THY RAINCOAT AND GROOOOOOVE…

Back in the early 80s, I spent almost every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night within the student union at Strathclyde University, I wasn’t a fashionista – I probably had about ten different shirts to choose from (five of which were black) and maybe three pair of jeans (two of which were black). But no matter what clothes were nearest to my skin I never went anywhere without my fabulous olive-coloured raincoat that I’d persuaded my dad to give me….

The raincoat was in homage to Ian McCulloch who I thought was one of the coolest men on the planet. He, along with his bandmates, always seemed to be photographed wearing some sort of coat although thinking back that’s probably more to do with them insisting their photoshoots take place in the likes of Iceland.

Without fail the student union ‘disco’ would feature at least one Echo & The Bunnymen song during the course of the evening and without fail it was cue for me to get up on the dancefloor and do my thing. Sad poseur that I was, I inevitably tried to dance while wearing my raincoat. It might have been draped over a chair or wrapped under a nearby table, but the second a Bunnymen track began to blast out, I’d race to where the coat was and put it on. I now accept that I must had looked like a dickhead…..

Then in 1983 I saw the video to the new Bunnymen single, and wouldn’t you know it Mac was on the stage of the Albert Hall doing his thing – but without a coat. From that moment on, the raincoat never again was seen on the dancefloor….

All of this came back to me the other day when the single from 1983 came on via shuffle as I sat on a train heading to the football. I smiled at the memories. It was also a sharp reminder that it’s a belter of a track:-

mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – Never Stop (Discotheque)

That’s the 12″ version which I bought on vinyl at the time and still have all these years later. The b-sides were a ifferent version of a track that had featured on the 1982 LP Porcupine as well as what I assume is an early demo-type version of what would later become a hit single:-

mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – Heads Will Roll (Summer Version)

mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – The Original Cutter

I’m very fond of Heads Will Roll, so I thought I’d also add the LP version to this posting.

mp3 : Echo & The Bunnymen – Heads Will Roll

Admit it. It does make you want to dance.

Enjoy.