A bright, cold and shining morning today. The perfect weather for listening to Echo & The Bunnymen's spiky second album, 'Heaven Up Here'. Haven't heard it all the way through for a long time, but doing so reminded me why they were/are such a special band. The complete package. From Mac's perfect haircut down, they had it all. A virtuoso guitarist, a fantastically muscular rhythm section, a motormouth vocalist who could (almost) walk it like he talked it, and, in Bill Drummond, a lunatic visionary for a manager. Come on, a tour of ley lines? Genius.
After the slightly druggy disheveled bedsit debut of 'Crocodiles', 'Heaven Up Here' was wide open spaces, as wide as the Weston Super Mare mudflats the band were pictured in the middle of on the cover. Will Sergeant's sharded guitar, at one moment angled and chorded, the next deadened and picked, provides a perfect counterpoint to McCulloch's grandiose lyrics. It's a blown clean kind of record - cold, frosty, but something I find easy to love.
Can't wait for Ocean Rain at the Royal Albert Hall...
1 comment:
Matt, come on - didn't Echo and his Bunnymen always smell a bit of wee? From a man who claimed he could emote even if he was singing from the Wirrel telephone directory, I can't help hearing him singing "Pass Me The Butter" on the band's biggest hit.
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