Taylor wrote:
Similar in the sense of being pseudo-poetic, though.

Yeah, true. Though you could say that about an awful lot of bands and artists, in various ways, from the bleeding Doors to the bleeding Libertines.

I liked Echo & The Bunnymen personally but I get the arrogance bit. They were talented but perhaps guilty of wanting to show off how clever they were by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at a lot of their songs, just because they could.

From McCulloch's arch Bowie styled delivery, to the strings, the orchestral flourishes and the guitar bombast from Will Sergeant, it was all a bit much and competing for space sometimes. When it did come together it did it well though and I always thought EATB were really good at conveying euphoric rush stuff - Back of Love, Never Stop (Discotheque), Nocturnal Me. Actually I thought Pete Wylie and Julian Cope's best work could be described as agreeably euphoric too coincidentally.

I do wonder with the Bunnymen how much was down to production excess. I assume you have all heard the original version of The Cutter, a pared down, raw, wall of jagged guitar sound version which is really, really good and absolutely totally different from the chilly and polished version which was eventually released.

The best thing about both LC gigs Ive attended was leaving with a "date" lined up after each. The "dates" themselves turned out to be as unmemorable as the gigs unfortunately (Im sure the girls involved would agree).

As far as Im aware no woman has even looked at me twice at any of the other hundreds of gigs Ive been to over the 30+yrs of voluntary hearing damage Ive subjected myself to.
Cole's audience: "desperate wimmen".

I think you're being too harsh on Will Sargeant, Taylor. He really had a way with a tune, I reckon, and was a great arranger, too. I don't want to start sounding like a "well-crafted ... blah blah ... songsmith" type bore. It's just that, for instance, the version of Never Stop from their show at the Albert Hall is properly lovely. And he made a sound that gave a perfect home to the brilliant timbre of Ian McCulloch's voice. It was always just McCulloch's fucking awful lyrics that spoiled it. If you can manage to tune out the part of your brain that listens to the words and just treat his voice as another instrument (like you have to do with much of Bowie's cut-up lyrics) then you've got a great noise going on.

Fucking hell. Hipsway.

I loved Hipsway back in 1985/86. "the Honeythief" was great, so was "Ask The Lord" (or whatever it was called). They had a slower song called "Long Black Car" or something like that, which was quite good as well.

I remember the rest of the LP being very average though.

Having had a bit of a thread-inspired Lloyd Cole-athon, I think it's worth pointing out that the pseudo -intellectual lyrics lambasted on here didn't make it past the first album with maybe a single exception.The rest of his work is cafe-culture free.

Purves Grundy wrote:
I think you're being too harsh on Will Sargeant, Taylor. He really had a way with a tune, I reckon, and was a great arranger, too. I don't want to start sounding like a "well-crafted ... blah blah ... songsmith" type bore. It's just that, for instance, the version of Never Stop from their show at the Albert Hall is properly lovely. And he made a sound that gave a perfect home to the brilliant timbre of Ian McCulloch's voice. It was always just McCulloch's fucking awful lyrics that spoiled it. If you can manage to tune out the part of your brain that listens to the words and just treat his voice as another instrument (like you have to do with much of Bowie's cut-up lyrics) then you've got a great noise going on.

(a) I think this is right.

(b) I was at that gig, folks.

Wyatt – well, it’s about my perception, which like I say is informed by knowing nowt about either band’s sound really. The big glaring exception would be the “People Are Strange” cover – but I don’t really know how representative that is of the Bunnymen.
But they were a pair of bands I’ve always mentally filed together, as people used to like them both, it seemed. A girl I saw when I was about 17-18 had LPs by them both, but wasn’t playing them anymore…
It’s kind of like the way I would file U2 & Simple Minds together, the difference there being I actively dislike them both. But for thread crossover action, I’ve never heard that “New Gold Dream” album and a lot of people here who seem otherwise sane love it, so if I ever see it in a charity shop, I’ll probably buy it. People probably do the same with Happy Mondays & the Stone Roses, no doubt in a lot of people’s minds Blur & Oasis occupy a similar space. No greater logic to it than that.

I’ve probably heard a fair bit of both in a career of frequenting indie discos now stretching into its twentieth year.

G.Man – that’s the chap, “The Honeythief”, I think I used to quite like that, it’ll be over twenty years since I last did – I have no idea if it’s any good and I suspect the only way I’ll find out is if you were into it before you left Germany.

Ha! No, I was into it when I lived London.

The Honeythief (12" version)

Ah, your speaking halting German to German restaurant patrons in order to boost your tips period.

Thank you, I shall have a listen tomorrow to see if it dislodges my Harpo earworm.

Taylor wrote:
I bloody hate Echo & the sodding Bunnymen. Their songs are just totally useless objects, and useless objects which aren't even beautiful tend to get me down. I could possibly take their appalling doggerel if that bloke wasn't so beerily messianic, full of that "amateur band" arrogance without substance (as if he considered arrogance an end in itself). I do like "The Killing Moon", because unlike their other stuff it's properly lovely, musically. But the rest just seems to be a load of sub-stadium rattle and rumble, with some self-important voice prattling on about nothing. Can't bear the histrionic edge to his singing, either, not when the actual words are gibberish - I mean the fact that they're gibberish doesn't necessarily matter, but what does matter is that they're gibberish without any kind of aesthetic appeal.

Their songs don't even seem to evoke anything. They just seem to be saying "this is BIG!" A real 1980s bore. Only difference between them and U2 is that EATB had some basic self-awareness.
I dunno, I always found Villiers Terrace really evocative of the old, arty, Bohemian Liverpool and I assumed it was about McCulloch's unease in the midst of all that intoxicating but slightly unsettling wierdness.

That particular Liverpool doesn't really exist anymore, all the old protagonists are around McCulloch's age or older, although you still see them come out en masse for some gig or other, usually at the Philharmonic, and it's really amusing to be surrounded by them in the bar beforehand all being fantastically bitchy about one and other. Pete Burns was perhaps the doyen of that same scene.

And I even took Villiers Terrace to actually mean Gambier Terrace in Liverpool 8, where Lennon and Sutcliffe, Shack and The Boo Radleys all lived at one time or another and which even now is a beautifully evocative place, all faded late Georgian grandeur, but apparently the song's really about the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hitler's unhinged joy at the realisation of it.

So you've got to give him that one, it's probably worth Lloyd Cole's entire career though I agree they were blustering plodders in the main... or at least McCulloch was.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambier_Terrace

And to back up sw2boro the people who really took the Bunnymen seriously would have been the same people (at least the same demographic but probably the exact same people) who four years later were so seduced by the Lloyd Cole aesthetic.

They would have also discovered The Smiths inbetween but that's different somehow, The Smiths obviously transcend early 80s studentsville whereas I'm not sure the Bunnymen do, despite them still being quite popular, and of course Lloyd Cole certainly never did, he seemed outdated and quaint to me by about 1987.

G.Man wrote:
Fucking hell. Hipsway.

I loved Hipsway back in 1985/86. "the Honeythief" was great, so was "Ask The Lord" (or whatever it was called). They had a slower song called "Long Black Car" or something like that, which was quite good as well.

I remember the rest of the LP being very average though.
I saw Hipsway three times in the 80s, they were the band to see for a while round my way.

Ask The Lord was used in a beer commercial in Scotland along with another commercial for the same beer using a tune from a band called Win. At the time both seemed to be the coolest things around so much so that both songs made our local radio stations top ten records of the year despite neither being hits.
That probably tells you all you need to know about Scots relationship with alcohol.

Harry Lime wrote:
And to back up sw2boro the people who really took the Bunnymen seriously would have been the same people (at least the same demographic but probably the exact same people) who four years later were so seduced by the Lloyd Cole aesthetic.

That seems to be contradicted by, you know, the actual data.

Taylor wrote:
Even at 17, I found him totally hysterical.

Was there ever an age at which you weren't cool?

Yeah, 38.

Ha ha ha, good answer.

I really like Lloyd Cole's new album. The man obviously has listened to a lot of country music lately.