Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch – Interview – October 2009 [PART 1]
By: Bronya Francis
Imagine this: you are an eighteen year old girl, in a taxi on the way to interview one of the most established British rock stars, namely Ian McCulluch of Echo and The Bunnymen fame. You get out of the cab once it has arrived at a large Kensington hotel, aided by a concierge, ready to break your fall if you are clumsy enough to lose your balance; I know I am one of those people, but luckily my body steadies itself, uncharacteristic of its usual gawky state. You walk into one of its dining areas, surrounded by middle-aged important-looking men dressed sharply in hand-tailored suits, and slim elegant women dressed sleekly, head to toe in dark tones of navy, chocolate brown, slate and the like. The ceiling is embossed with various mock-Victorian patterns and you spot the occasional white Grecian statue placed understatedly in shadowed corners. In one small section of this restaurant sits McCulloch’s PR and a couple of established journalists sipping on tea, accompanied by all sorts of posh complimentary biscuits. Up you stumble to the PR, feeling quite inadequate, not having even gone through one year of university, compared to everyone else in the room, the majority of whom are most probably on six-figure salaries, shop regularly at Liberty and live in gorgeous townhouses that have W1 postcodes.
Through all of this exciting opulence you hear bright laughter come from one of the large sofa chairs, accompanied by a thick Liverpudlian accent. And it is then that you catch a peep of Mac, as he is known, dressed in torn dark jeans (his pale, skinny knobbly knees peeping visibly through the stringy, tattered holes mid-way down his trousers), a black hoody (zipped up right to his collarbone), the compulsory pair of dark sunglasses (semi-opaque, teasing whoever talks to him by revealing just the blurred outline of his eyes), all topped off with a thin spiky hair ‘do (dyed an unsympathetic black).
He has the look of any quintessential rock star, yet the warm air of that bloke you’ll see down the pub every Wednesday; you know, that pub that has Sky Sports and a widescreen TV. I say this because he loves football (a supporter of Liverpool), so I ask him how their home game went last night, and receive a moaning answer about how it was so boring; “you know when your team plays against a rubbish one and their footwork becomes lazy because they just know they’re going to win?” No, I don’t know actually, because on the subject of football I am clueless. Eventually I sway the conversation on to what we are, or at least I am, really here to talk about, before he starts talking about the offside rule which would in all honesty get me into a right pickle.
Rockfeedback: Echo and The Bunnymen have been going for over thirty years now...
Ian McCulloch: “Yeah, that’s right actually, because our first ever gig was in ’78… wow. And I’m only 26!”
RFB: What’s changed?
Ian McCulloch: “Not a lot to be honest. I think lyrics change, the melodies are different, it’s just an ongoing process… the style of writing, it’s my diary, it’s my self-expressive art. I’m still doodling around the edges, and every now and then you get a page that is a complete and utter masterpiece…”
RFB: So it’s totally yourself expressed in the music?
IM: “Yeah. Through songs I try to keep my pride and my self-esteem, my ambition and my romanticism, and my self-doubt, guilt- all in one.”
RFB: Do you ever get tired after over 30 years of touring?
IM: Yeah, I do now. I used to say I loved touring but it wasn’t really that; I loved playing live… I did say to the management that I don’t want to be slogging ‘round, I don’t like being on tour buses, bouncing around with twelve other blokes, sharing a toilet, travelling through the night… I can’t sleep until the bus stops because I get claustrophobic, so I used to sleep in the lounge and wait for everyone to go to bed. I’m generally last asleep anyway… I don’t mind doing the odd bit of travelling ‘cause that’s part of it; I like [gigs to be] spaced out more, you know, we’re doing four shows in Britain next month, and then we go to America for four shows… then we come back and do some more shows in December… sometimes I don’t look forward to the gigs and I just do a crossword backstage! I like it when I’m in the town already the day before… I’ve always been like that but I think when you’re twenty-one you’re running on another energy as well as your own, whatever you’re buying, energy in a packet… [but playing live], it always feels like the first time, and it still thrills me now that we’re going to San Francisco to play Ocean Rain next month, and Los Angeles and Toronto as well, because we’ve never done it in those towns, and that kind of made me really look forward again to the live thing. One night I thought, that’s it, I want to do Ocean Rain.
RFB: Do you get any free time to see the countries in which you play?
IM: “I’m not really one of them sight seers. New York, [for example], it doesn’t matter what building it is whether it’s the Empire State or it’s just something that says ‘Johnny’s Bar’ on it, it doesn’t matter. [New York] has an atmosphere that is totally unique; it’s brilliant, all that steam [RFB: we think what Ian means is exhaust fumes?], and all the sounds, it is like a big factory, but it has sounds that you like, and they last all night long. And the same with Liverpool… if it was tarted up one hundred per cent it wouldn’t be Liverpool.”
RFB: Where’s your favourite place to play?
IM: “New York’s one of them. I get nervous in Liverpool, no matter how cocky I might seem because I know that I’m their boy, you know? I love playing London as well; when we played [The Royal Albert Hall] last year it was so emotional. The Albert Hall was always a saviour because we were the band that made the breakthrough to allow other bands to play there, when we did two nights in ‘83… chairs got broke… after we played it, they let all the other bands in.”
RFB: Do the audiences’ reactions differ from city to city?
IM: “Liverpool’s different because I know a lot of people who are there, and I want Liverpool to know that this is their son, kind of… whoever comes and sees us, eighty per cent [of the audience] will have seen us before, and they’d have seen us over the years, so it’s not like we’re coming to play a different crowd every time, they’ve been with us from the off… We’re playing our songs and they love it. [If] you’re established and you’ve got classic songs, they’re the things that determine the audience that is going to be there. At festivals, [we draw] our own crowd and it’s weird; it took a long time to get to that stage because I resented doing them for ages.”
RFB: Do you not get a lot of new, younger fans by playing festivals?
IM: “Yeah, that’s what happened. I think it was V that we played, last year, and we went on, and I was looking out and I was like these people look quite young! And they were all singing to every song, I couldn’t get my head round it, I loved it… it was like the first time they’d seen us but they were all singing to songs that I struggle to remember. And it was all the way through the set- it normally happens in ‘The Killing Moon’ or ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, but not in songs like ‘Rescue’- you know, the fans always sing the chorus and that but this is weird. And I thought ‘something’s happened’. You know what I think? I think we’ve got to that point now where people like us across the spectrum, and they know that we write great songs, and that we’ve got ‘cool’ written all over us. What we always wanted to be was like The Velvet Underground; it wasn’t about being the biggest thing in the world, it was about being one of them in your collection.”
RFB: It would be hard not to let that realisation have an effect on you…
IM: “I just think I’m more gregarious with people in conversation. I’m more… I don’t know whether I’ve got more humility but I try and make it obvious that I just want to have fun and be nice. That shouldn’t flavour what you think of the songs; they’re still serious songs, but if I wanna crack a joke outside of that, that’s what I do, you know? I feel more relaxed in myself, and I’m still dead cheeky but… by not needing to be liked, or loved, or bought, or played, it seems to have helped.”
RFB: Does being more comfortable in yourself reflect in your song writing?
IM: With the new album, I think I’ve re-found my cheeky, riddled sarcasm, which came by surprise. But you can’t sit down and go ‘I wanna write a song like I did in ‘Crocodiles’. I noticed myself [making] little friendly, suggestive prods and pokes on the days when I felt like a cheeky chappy... ‘The Idolness Of Gods’, at the end [of the new record], that is about everything. I once said that ‘The Killing Moon’, well I always say, that it’s the best song I’ve ever written, and I now know why it is because it’s not just a song- it’s about everything, it’s like a jigsaw- ‘The Killing Moon’ can be put together in any way because it’s about everything from some angle. I knew when I wrote it that it was about everything, and I forgot, and it’s only recently that it’s come back. I’ve always loved singing it, and just thinking about that song… ‘The Killing Moon’: the title alone, it’s the best title of a song of all time. And ‘The Idolness Of Gods’, when I started writing that, it was shards of thoughts and rhymes…”
Artists in this article: Echo & The Bunnymen