Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch – Interview – October 2009 [PART 2]
By: Bronya Francis
RFB: There’s a line in ‘Proxy’, a track from the new album, which exclaims “Everybody look at us now”; what is the message you’re trying to convey in that song?
IM: “Well, that’s meant to be me talking to journalists or anyone who is a possible Bunnymen Conscientious Objector. My favourite line is “I love it when you say you’re better than me,/ Like you know you’re as clever as me”; a lot of people deal with clever people by calling them something else instead of just saying “you’re cleverer than me”, trying to get at them with criticism in any shape or form, especially with someone like me. I know there are certain journalists out there, who, if I wrote the musical equivalent of the Mona Lisa, they’d shoot it down in flames, slash it up with a knife, because for some reason they’ve got it into their head that they don’t like me.”
RFB: Has music journalism changed a lot over your career?
IM: “[Music journalists] would write articles, proper things, where you could discover something that you didn’t know, not just over-critical stuff a paragraph long… Maybe I should [make a magazine], try and find some great writers…”
RFB: That’s what Jon McClure is doing; maybe you should get in touch with him…
IM: "Nah, he can get in touch with me!"
RFB: I’m sure he’d love to… so what was it like working with Johnny Marr?
Mac: “Yeah, it was good. We wrote some really good stuff, yeah. But we decided to kind of shelve it… he’s great, though. What I loved, apart from the songs, was [that we had] so many funny moments as well, just crying laughing… telling jokes, we’d laugh our heads off to the point of tears. I can see him now, wiping tears away and me doing the same- it was hysterical. Maybe that was the main thing about it. Me and Johnny are always going to write great songs. We did things that we’d always wanted to do in a way; there was one song that we called… oh I can’t remember the title… but he said [Mac puts on a gruff voice] “I’ve always wanted to write a song like this”. He had this backing track, and I put the vocal on it, and he went “Incredible, we are David Bowie” (we were both massive Bowie fans)… Bowie could do anything…”
RFB: Does it help if you have a really good relationship with the people you work with?
IM: “Sometimes it can be an awkward relationship. Me and Will are so close, sometimes we don’t even notice it ourselves; there’s a real bond with me and Will and we’ve had laughs. But it was a different kind of thing with me and Johnny- it was purely as a project, really, for the both of us- and I think he helped me gained confidence, as well, because he’d say “God, your voice! That’s you, there in the lyrics”… Working with Johnny I could see that he does things, inversions, because he knows how to play the guitar. Will still doesn’t really know how to play guitar, he just does it, he’s instinctive and, to me, the most lyrical guitarist since Mick Ronson- utterly beautiful guitar lines- and he can hit it like no one else can… Watching Johnny, he’d layer things and it would sound like something different… it sounded like an inversion that you can’t work out, and that’s too clever for me… it’s like saying “I’m that good, I want to make a chord progression that no one can work out”, unless they’ve got seven hands… [Johnny] was a little bit reclusive, I thought, in terms of what he wanted to do because he was doing electronic [music] and I think he realised that was only a short-lived project.”
RFB: Do you prefer working with a partner creatively?
IM: “I enjoy both but I love writing on my own as well. I wrote [‘The Idolness of Gods’] just on a guitar, it wasn’t painstaking or anything like that, but I had to do chords that I’d never done, because I had the tune in my head before- that’s how I [write songs] now, usually I think of a melody… it’s more raw, I think, more like how a kid would do it… it’s funny: for me the process of song writing becomes more naïve, in a way, as I get older.”
RFB: Is there much else to do after thirty years of being in the business?
IM: “Just write songs. It’s like saying to a bricklayer, “Have you any plans to build more f**kin’ houses?” Each house is different, and each song is different. It’s my self-expression, I may as well stop talking, you know? Five people in my life have said that they didn’t kill themselves [after listening to] ‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’. Writing another one of them and saving five more lives, that’s my ambition… think big.”
After over thirty years with The Bunnymen, and eleven albums, Mac shows no signs of retiring. What he says makes a lot of sense; he is one of those people whose observations seem so obvious yet no one else sees what he does until they listen to his songs. Ian has certainly made me think about the way I conduct my interviews; he has so much knowledge about the music industry, it’s just such a pleasure to listen to him muse about journalism, touring, recording, anything- even politics. And if he is keeping people from committing suicide through writing songs, Ian McCulloch, along with the ‘Bunnymen, has got to be doing something very special indeed.
Artists in this article: Echo & The Bunnymen