20. Echo & the Bunnymen, Echo & the Bunnymen (1987)

By the time the self-titled LP Echo & the Bunnymen landed in record shops, three full years had passed since the release of the band’s preceding album, Ocean Rain. It was surely a variety of factors that led to the lengthy gap between proper records (and in the college radio marketplace of the nineteen-eighties, defined by more or less annual releases, three years was a very long time), so it’s understandable that the reasons offered by individual band members shifted over time. As recently as a few years ago, the group’s frontman, Ian McCulloch, was insisting that taking a prolonged break was very purposeful and an example of the boastfulness that saddled him with the nickname ‘Mac the Mouth.”

“It was a stupid idea and it was just a smug way of us saying, ‘We’re so far ahead of every other band, we’re taking off a year so you can try to catch up,'” McCulloch said. “That was kind of what that message was, but it was never explained properly, and if I had said that I’d have been crucified. ‘This fella’s so arrogant.’ And it wasn’t arrogance, it was just funny, because I’m from Liverpool and especially when we’re in Liverpool with fellow Liverpudlians, everything we say is designed to be like one-upmanship.”

Other times, the official line was that Echo & the Bunnymen declared a brief hiatus because they were simply sick of each other, an understandable outcome of extensive touring. Then there was the contention that the band’s manager, Bill Drummond, urged them to retreat from their usual cycle to concentrate on writing songs. That version of events doesn’t align with Drummond’s recollections. Many years later, Drummond suggested he was basically done with the band by that point in time.

“I stopped after Ocean Rain,” Drummond told interviewer Simon Reynolds. “I’d lost interest by then. I felt they’d achieved what they were going to achieve. I did think that it was now time for somebody else to take over who could maybe exploit their situation — not exploit them — and make them into a successful worldwide act. I’d done all I could to get interesting records out of them and make them an interesting band.”

There was other professional churn. Drummer Pete de Freitas, in a struggle with mental health issues, exited the band for a while. When he was welcomed back, it was officially as a hired hand, no different than any other studio musician who might be brought in to fill out a track. In the midst of all that, Echo & the Bunnymen hunted around for a new producer, flirting with truly unorthodox ideas, such as Eddy Grant and the team behind some of ABBA’s biggest hits. They worked on a few tracks with Laurie Latham, the go-to producer for the Stranglers and Paul Young, including on the college radio hit “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” which was included on the singles compilation Songs to Learn & Sing. After initially reuniting with Gil Ocean Rain co-producer Gil Norton for the next full-length album, Echo & the Bunnymen circled back to Latham. He would be the one, they thought, who could edge them closer to that global success Drummond mentioned.

Latham definitely made Echo & the Bunnymen sound slicker than they ever had before. The group was never exactly rough around the edges on their recorded work. The songs usually had a luxuriant pop sound. The self-titled album takes that to a whole other level. Cut for cut, there’s an unmistakable sheen. Latham sometimes spent a month or more on a track, and that meticulous attention shows, for better or worse. For every song that brushes against pop majesty, most notably “Lips Like Sugar,” there are couple more that feel seriously overworked, such as the twinkly “Blue Blue Ocean,” the weirdly Jimmy Buffett-ish “All My Life,” and the tonally chipper and lyrically grim “Lost and Found” (“I was standing/ Under sliver studded skies/ In a forest burning ashes/ On the bonfires of our lives”). “Bombers Bay” is about British troops being packed off to war, but it’s incongruously smooth, like a dippy love ballad.

The band and their immediate cohorts generally contextualized Echo & the Bunnymen as a natural evolution in their sound. The album wasn’t received that way in all quarters. Fans and the music press at the time were deeply suspicious of anything that smacked of acquiescing to the perceived desires of the masses. The band was beset with derisive commentary that they’d sold out.

“They said it sounds great on the radio,” guitarist Will Sergeant said at the time. “What are they talking about? Who cares about the radio. It’s our record. Now it’s just something to be ashamed of.”

It did sound great on the radio, though. “The Game” was like vintage Echo & the Bunnymen but with the more ethereal elements blunted, and “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo” leans into the instinctive comparison with the Doors that was often made, inviting it further by bringing in Ray Manzarek to play keyboards. The latter tracks also has the playful verve of Siouxsie and the Banshees, which really makes it stand out when it’s plopped into a set. Those tracks got some radio play in the U.S. and helped push the album to a higher peak on the charts than the band had experience before on these shores. Through it all, the band denied there was any calculation behind that success.

“It’s just sort of happened out of the blue,” McCulloch insisted to The Los Angeles Times. “We suddenly seem to be more popular, and the record certainly wasn’t designed for that. If we had designed it like that, it definitely wouldn’t have been more popular.”

Echo & the Bunnymen gave it their all in support of the album in the U.S. Following a headliner tour, they joined New Order and Gene Loves Jezebel to barnstorm through the summer concert season together. It was a lot of time together, and the strain started to show. McCulloch always has a touch of prima donna to him, a trait that only grew during the recording of Echo & the Bunnymen. Around a year after the album’s release, following another chunk of touring, McCulloch announced the band was breaking up. The other members disagreed, so McCulloch simply departed for a solo career. The remaining band members recruited a new lead singer, Noel Burke, but a further pall was cast over attempts to move forward as a slightly reconfigured unit when de Freitas was killed in a motorcycle accident. That shambling version of Echo & the Bunnymen released only one album, the poorly received 1990 effort Reverberation, before breaking up.

McCulloch and Sergeant reunited a few years later for a project that they dubbed Electrafixion. When Echo & the Bunnymen bassist Les Pattison came on board, too, they reached the logical conclusions that they should simply reclaim their more famous band name. Although the lineup experience some fluidity over the years, Echo & the Bunnymen has been a going concern ever since. If there was messiness along the way, that was simply how things worked with the band.

“I don’t think anyone has ever found out what makes us tick,” McCulloch mused not long after the release of Echo & the Bunnymen. “The best thing is that I don’t think we really know ourselves.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.