There’s Magic In Those Grooves

The algorithm has awoken. It is sentient. It sees that I am constructing something approaching a memoir. It is aware that I am sifting through the findings of my past. It can’t write these memories for me, though whisper it quietly, it knows a friend who can.

Spare a thought for Proust, now assailed by recipe pages with pop up ads that refuse to close and ingredients listed thoughtlessly in US measurements. What is a cup? I know what a cup is, but which cup? Etc.

The algorithm feeds me a video of Echo & The Bunnymen filmed live at The Royal Albert Hall in 1983. The concert is old. The upload itself was three years ago. Nothing is fresh, but here it is. The algorithm knows. The algorithm senses. It’s just trying to help. A credit perhaps, in exchange for this assistance, somewhere below the editor’s name and the book’s dedication. It thinks I’m writing a book. (It’s antecedent, the cheerful floating paperclip, has stirred in its slumber: ‘It looks like you’re writing a book…’)

Several of my friends attended that concert, in 1983. I’m not sure if I could’ve gone. Did I have the money? Were the tickets sold out? Was I allowed at age 17 to go unsupervised to an evening concert in London? What about school the next day? Important exams looming on the horizon. Who knows. I should watch – I will watch – and see if I can spot a familiar face in the crowd. Music is the only time machine you’ll ever need.

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Echo & The Bunnymen were the first band I ever went to see live. This was a year earlier, in 1982. I was 16 years old. They played at The Cliff’s Pavillion, a largely uninspiring venue that felt like nothing more than an enlarged school gymnasium. (See also The Anson Rooms in Bristol for a similar vibe. Or the Prince’s Pavillion in Falmouth for a similar municipal seaside venue). It wasn’t much, but it was where entertainers of all kinds performed (and still do to this day). Bands. Comedians. Touring theatre productions. Male voice choirs. Pantomimes. You get the picture.

It did its job. I saw The Pixies there at the height of their powers and they were astounding. The Smiths were scheduled to play there – I trekked to the venue through winter snow – but cancelled at the last minute for spurious reasons. (Something they had a reputation for doing). I could list a dozen or more other bands I saw there over the years – and whether they were good or not could not in itself be blamed upon the utilitarian nature of the venue.

Echo & The Bunnymen were great. They were on the cusp of success. They’d taped their first ever appearance on Top of the Pops the previous day and it was being broadcast that same evening as they were playing for us out on the stage in Southend. If I needed something to ignite an appreciation of the live experience, they did a fantastic job.

Echo & The Bunnymen were an important band to me. They were one of the first bands that I’d followed from their inception. A lot of my musical tastes were inherited or inspired by what my siblings were listening to. Even some of the music I discovered for myself was from artists that had already been making records for two, three years or longer. At such a formative age, these periods of time felt significant.

It’s pointless talking in any detail about the music itself. You need to listen to that. Words don’t cut it. But I want to try and convey what that music meant to me. For a long time in my life Crocodiles – the debut Echo & The Bunnymen album – was my go to if anyone asked for my favourite record of all time. It took a lot to shift it and the album that now sits above it was (ironically) released around the same time. But that’s another story for another time.

The band released what I consider to be four essential albums. After Crocodiles came Heaven Up Here which boosted their already growing reputation. Porcupine was the awkward third album – stilted in places, the effort involved in making it could be heard in the songs, like cheap clothing where you can see the stitching. It did give them two hits though, the booming and anthemic Back of Love and the sitar driven The Cutter which was where their Top of the Pops debut came.

Album four is the one most people will point you to as their masterpiece. Ocean Rain came backed with a 35 piece orchestra. The songs had a sweeping, cinematic feel. It was definitely an effortless and classier production than its predecessor. I understand why people love it and I rate it highly too, but it’s not quite the same band once you add in that orchestra.

There was a long (for the times) three year gap before the band released a fifth album. It was self-titled, which seemed a bit uninspiring. Their star had been eclipsed by The Smiths. Music felt like it had moved on and my tastes with it. I can’t slag the album off, it simply didn’t interest me. I won’t go through the whole discography, save to say the lead singer quit and the drummer died unfortunately in a motorbike accident. Album six therefore had a significantly different line up and was a commercial failure. After that there was a hiatus until 1997 when singer Ian McCulloch rejoined and the band have been pretty active ever since. I don’t dismiss their later works, I’ve never heard them. (And that’s fine by me).

But let’s return to Crocodiles. This record was produced by Bill Drummond (later to form the KLF and burn a million pounds on a remote Scottish island) and Dave Balfe (Keyboard player in fellow Liverpool band The Teardrop Explodes). To my ears it’s an incredibly hedonistic record. It has a confidence about it from the playing of the music to the breadth of the vocals - it's there in the lyrics too. It’s full of magic, you can sense an obvious Doors influence in some of the more psychedelic moments, but it never sounds derivative. Like all the best albums, it inhabits its own self contained world. Best of all, I can never at any point picture the recording process. It feels like something fully formed that was simply handed down to the world. It’s effortless.

I don’t imagine there was a big budget to record it. I assume it was recorded in a very short space of time. Balfe and Drummond were not established producers, not really producers at all back then. I don’t – and don’t want to – understand the precise details of how it came to be made. It’s alchemy for me. A process beyond my understanding. There’s magic in the grooves, and that’s why I love it.

Two tracks intended for the album were left off its original release (apparently because the record label bosses erroneously thought these tracks contained obscenities). This is another part of the magic, because the album runs at just a couple of minutes over half an hour. It’s the perfect length. (You can enjoy those missing tracks elsewhere, they’re great too.) The album comes with a brilliant cover – the first of four from photographer Brian Griffin that played a key part in making that run of early albums so distinctive.

If you love Crocodiles, you’ll love Heaven Up Here too. Some of the songs are as good as or better than those on the debut. But the album's longer (an extra 10 minutes or so) and as beautifully produced as it is, it doesn’t quite capture the cohesion or relentless energy of the one that came before it. Porcupine is definitely a misstep, but I kind of like it for its awkwardness and its sluggish grind. All the workings are on show here. It came out at a time when I was amenable to wallowing in my own depression and this was the perfect accompaniment for that mood. Ocean Rain with its orchestral backdrop is a fine work, glacially beautiful in places, but somehow not the same band that burnt me up with Crocodiles.

Music can change the world. It can take me places that my legs simply can’t, a car can’t, or a train or aeroplane. It’s an inner space. It’s bollocks when you try to explain it in words. But it's thrilling when your sixteen and it's still thrilling at sixty.  

 

 

I saw Echo & The Bunnymen live twice, in 1982 and 1983. If you want some understanding of just what a phenomenal live band they were back then, the Albert Hall concert will tell you everything you need to know. (It's also a perfect encapsulation of the fashions of the day, if that's your thing.)