Undergoing various lineup changes, SDC turned first into Death Cult, and then the Cult. With the jettisoning of “Death” went the group’s remaining Gothic vestiges. With amazing speed and shamelessness, the Cult devolved into straightforward long-haired cock rockers. The reference points were of late-sixties and early-seventies vintage: the Doors, Steppenwolf, Led Zep. A vague aura of quest clung to song titles such as “Revolution” and “Spiritwalker.” But by 1985 the Cult essentially became everything the Sex Pistols and punk had aimed to destroy. Singer Ian Astbury was last seen in the company of Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger, performing as a surrogate Jim Morrison in the rock nostalgia outfit, the New Doors.
IF GOTH TOOK ONE ROUTE
from postpunk back to loud and proud rock, Echo and the Bunnymen followed another: not descending into the darkness but soaring into the light. The celestial drive of their crystal guitars and beseeching vocals suggested a quest for some kind of grail or glory. In the band’s early days, the Bunnymen’s lead singer, Ian McCulloch, was himself often compared to Jim Morrison. His baritone had a similar rich timbre and grandeur, but he also possessed a purehearted adolescent quality that the Doors’ singer had rapidly lost through self-abuse and self-aggrandizement. When the Liverpool band first hit the scene in 1979, they were considered harbingers of the “new psychedelia,” despite the fact that in those days they never ingested anything more deranging than pints of ale. Later, the Bunnymen were identified with what some called the “Big Music”—a style of purified eighties rock that was postpunk in its minimalism, yet redolent of the sixties in its feeling of transcendence—alongside groups such as the Waterboys and Simple Minds. But of all their contemporaries, it was U2, the Bunnymen’s rivals, who ultimately took the Big Music sound and made it
big
.
The template for that sound was laid down by Television, who were either the last sixties group or the first to make eighties rock. One of the seminal bands from New York’s midseventies CBGB scene, Television actually had a much bigger impact in Britain than in America.
NME
predicted that the group’s singer and lead guitarist Tom Verlaine would dominate the next decade like Bob Dylan had the sixties. Television even had a couple of U.K. hit singles. In a weird way, Verlaine and Television’s second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, showed British bands the path to a non-American future for electric guitar, insofar as their playing owed little to Chuck Berry or the blues greats. Hearing Television’s 1977 debut,
Marquee Moon,
“was just such a throw-down to me,” U2’s guitarist the Edge said. “The electric guitar had really become such an unoriginal-sounding instrument.” For all their transcendental song titles, such as “Elevation,” “Glory,” and “The Dream’s Dream,” there was nothing wispily hippie-dippy about the New York band’s music. It was diamond hard, a music of fierce purity. You can hear the reverberations of Television’s plangent sound all across eighties British music, but nowhere more richly than on Echo and the Bunnymen’s first two albums,
Crocodiles
and
Heaven Up Here
.
Listening to 1980’s
Crocodiles,
the first thing you notice is how sparse the sound is. Les Pattinson’s granite basslines carry the melody, Will Sergeant’s jagged quartz guitar leaves lots of empty space while avoiding anything resembling a solo, and Pete De Freitas’s minimal drumming is all surging urgency. Then you marvel at the precocious authority and poise of McCulloch’s singing. Many of the Bunnymen’s songs are rooted in doubt, anguish, despair—“Is this the blues I’m singing?” wonders McCulloch on “Rescue”—but the tightness and brightness of the Bunnymen’s sound transmits contradictory sensations of confidence, vigor, elation.
The Bunnymen’s audience overlapped with Joy Division’s—those overcoat-clad young men with the weight of the world on their shoulders—and in some ways
Heaven Up Here
feels like an answer record to the previous year’s
Closer
. It is harrowed by the same things: hypocrisy, distrust, betrayal, lost or frozen potential. In “The Disease,” McCulloch sings about how his life could change “just given a chance,” then pleads, “If you get yours from heaven/Don’t waste it.” But whereas
Closer
shows Ian Curtis fatally mesmerized by his own dread visions,
Heaven Up Here
ultimately turns its face toward the light. “We have no dark things,” declares McCulloch on “No Dark Things,” pointedly renouncing Gothic gloom and doom, and a few songs later, the album goes out with the blasting euphoria of “All I Want,” a celebration of desire for desire’s sake.
Filling out their spare sound with guitar overdubs, keyboard glints, vocal multitracking, and atmospheric vapors, the sheer majesty of
Heaven Up Here
put Liverpool back on rock’s map in a way it hadn’t been since the Beatles. Unlike other British cities, from the outside Liverpool looked like it hadn’t really responded to punk. In reality, the upheaval of 1976
did
galvanize Liverpool’s live music scene, which had been stagnant during the early seventies. “But the city never produced a classic punk group or anything like Oi!,” says Paul Du Noyer,
NME
’s Liverpool correspondent at that time. Nor did postpunk flourish there, at least not the kind of experimental sounds that came out of London, Sheffield, and Leeds, such as industrial synth noise, avant-funk, and apocalyptic dub.
“All that postpunk vanguard stuff, we’d just think that was completely
stupid,
” says Bill Drummond, who managed Echo and the Bunnymen and cofounded the pioneering Liverpool indie label Zoo. According to Drummond, it’s not so much that Liverpool music had to be tuneful—“it had to be a
celebration
. McCulloch’s lyrics were often angst laden, but there was a gloriousness to the music.” One could say exactly the same about the two other leading postpunk groups to come from Liverpool during this period: Wah! Heat, with their ringing chords and endless crescendos, and the neopsychedelic outfit the Teardrop Explodes, whose singer, Julian Cope, described the band’s songs as “cries of joy.”
Cope, McCulloch, and Wah! front man Pete Wylie were originally in a “band” together. The Crucial Three existed mostly as a figment of bragging and gossip. They only wrote a couple of songs and never played a gig. This sort of phantom band—the Mystery Girls, the Nova Mob, A Shallow Madness—was a peculiar hallmark of Liverpool. Almost every significant person on the incestuous scene was involved in a group with every other significant figure at one point or another. “People enjoyed the role-playing aspect,” says Du Noyer. “They liked the process of naming groups and conceptualizing around groups more than the grind of getting equipment together and rehearsing.”
The entire Liverpool scene clustered around the punk club Eric’s, which served as the laboratory for the city’s future stars, including the band Big in Japan. Formed by Drummond, its ranks included the charismatic glam punkette Jayne Casey along with future Banshee drummer Budgie, future Frankie Goes to Hollywood singer Holly Johnson, future Lightning Seed/record producer Ian Broudie, and future Zoo cofounder/Teardrop keyboardist/music biz mogul Dave Balfe. Romping somewhere at the intersection of Roxy,
Rocky Horror,
and the zany, garish Scottish pop-punk band the Rezillos, Big in Japan were “an explosion of color,” says Drummond. “We totally went for it onstage. And were totally embarrassing.”
Unlike the Leeds groups—Gang of Four’s ambivalence about entertainment, the Mekons’ cultivated ordinariness—the Liverpool postpunks had no embarrassment about their desire to be famous. “Stars are stars and they shine so hard,” McCulloch sang on
Crocodiles
’s “Stars Are Stars.” The lyrics are typical Bunnymen widescreen imagery, but McCulloch could equally be singing about his feelings about rock’s firmament—a mixture of awe and absolute confidence that he’ll be up there, too, sooner rather than later. Obsessed with Bowie (for a period he insisted on being called Duke, as in Thin White Duke), McCulloch spent his teenage years feeling as if “there was this big movie camera in the sky,” he said. “The first line in ‘Going Up’ on
Crocodiles
—and it’s a terrible line—is ‘Ain’t thou watching my film.’ It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but that was what spurred me on.”
McCulloch didn’t particularly look like star material in the early days. Appallingly shortsighted, he wore “aviator blue-tinted glasses, really crap, and often with tape at the corner ’cause they were also falling to bits,” recalls Drummond. But behind his spectacles and shyness, he was a natural. Luminously pretty, luscious-lipped and tousled, he’d also been perfecting the art of presence and projection through many narcissistic hours of self-contemplation before a mirror. McCulloch was so certain of his destiny that he skipped the opportunity to go to college and spent two years doing nothing, just waiting for the absolutely perfect group to coalesce around him. And it did.
NME
’s readers voted Echo and the Bunnymen the number two group in the country in early 1982, while decreeing
Heaven Up Here
to be the previous year’s best album. This was essentially an anti–New Pop protest vote by postpunk’s silent majority, who’d chafed during the past year when it seemed that anything and everything was hip except made-in-Britain, all-male guitar bands, the one thing
they
actually liked. The Bunnymen were effectively picking up the slack left by the demise of Joy Division. But they weren’t alone. U2 also placed well in various readers’ charts.
Not coincidentally, around this time, Ian McCulloch started to make bitchy comments about U2, describing their anthemic songs as “music for plumbers and bricklayers” while boasting that the Bunnymen were “an oceans and mountains band.” Behind the dissing lay an astute perception of threat. U2 were the Bunnymen’s nearest rivals when it came to capturing that post–Joy Division audience. True, some of the abandoned flock had joined in New Pop’s celebration of shiny surface pleasures. “What’s been called the ‘new pop mentality’ is a
resignation,
” suggested Andy McCluskey, singer of Liverpool-based synthpop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. McCluskey diagnosed New Pop as a mass retreat from the sheer visionary intensity represented by Ian Curtis. “I think Joy Division were the very last band who could come along and
look
for something.” But those who didn’t buy the New Pop dream still pined for a band that represented some sort of vision quest, a band worth being devout about.
U2 stepped forward to fill that role. Their first really successful single, “I Will Follow,” made it clear that they were in the market for converts. Prior to that, they’d recorded their debut single, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” with Martin Hannett, and done another single, “A Day Without Me,” that was actually inspired by Ian Curtis. On that track, Bono sang as the departed Curtis looking back on “a world I left behind.” It was almost as if Bono was consciously preparing to take on the role vacated by Curtis. According to Tony Wilson, that was pretty much the case. “Two months after Ian died, U2 were brought round to my office at Granada TV by this plugger looking to break them, and I remember Bono sitting on my desk saying how incredibly sorry he was about Ian’s death, how it had really hurt him…how Ian was the number one singer of his generation, and he, Bono, knew he was always only ever going to be number two!” laughs Wilson. “And he said something else. Something like, ‘Now he’s gone, I promise you I’ll do it for him.’ Not quite that silly, but along those lines!”
In 1983, the glory boys broke through, with all those not seduced by Goth’s vampy ways rallying to the new transcendence, aka the Big Music. In February, both the Bunnymen and U2 enjoyed their first U.K. Top 10 hits, with “The Cutter” and “New Year’s Day,” respectively. After briefly intersecting with New Pop, Simple Minds reverted to their true calling, stadium-ready art rock, and produced an increasingly bombastic series of hits, on which Jim Kerr’s panoramic lyrics, teeming with lofty intangibles, invoked wanderlust and wonder.
Elemental imagery was all over British music in 1983–84, from the Waterboys’ songs such as “The Big Music,” “A Pagan Place,” and “The Whole of the Moon,” to Big Country’s hits “Fields of Fire (400 Miles)” and “In a Big Country.” It wasn’t just a mainstream phenomenon, either. Formed by ex-Fall members Martin Bramah and Una Baines, the Blue Orchids topped the indie charts with
The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain),
a magnificent album of acid-soaked neopsychedelia teeming with pagan and pantheistic poetry. Their anthem “Dumb Magician” ended with the defiant call to transcendence—“The only way out is up”—while “Mad as the Mist and Snow” used verses by W. B. Yeats as its lyric. The Blue Orchids had supported Echo and the Bunnymen on the latter’s 1981 U.K. tour, and in some ways the two groups were underground and mainstream versions of the same quest for “a glory beyond all glories,” as Bill Drummond put it. You could see the affinity in the groups’ record covers:
The Greatest Hit
showed the setting sun glinting over a silhouetted mountainscape, while
Heaven Up Here
gorgeously pictured the four Bunnymen staring into a navy blue sea while standing on an ebb tide beach whose wet sand reflects the dark turquoise sky.
Along with lyrical and pictorial imagery of natural grandeur, the Big Music groups shared a Celtic connection. They were all from Scotland, or Ireland, or the heavily Irish Liverpool and Manchester. They also often gave the quest for “indefinable glory” a vaguely military or messianic aura. The Bunnymen tapped into this spirit with their 1980 shows, using camouflage, dry ice, and inventive lighting to create an
Apocalypse Now
atmosphere. U2 turned pacifism itself into a crusade on their third album,
War
. On the ensuing tour, Bono marched about onstage clasping a white flag.