Echo & the Bunnymen

Well, My Chemical Romance did it, didn't they? They got, uh-

The Bunnymen

...

Bunnymen on, didn't he, yeah.

Yeah.

There you go.

Hour number three, Melnyk in the Afternoon on TSN 690.

Ian McCulloch and Echo & The Bunnymen.

Cracking your fingers.

Brand-new album coming out next week.

Yeah

... who looks like he could be a, a member of Echo & the Bunnymen.

Yeah.

[laughs]

Uh, Dexy's midnight runners are very pivotal to the story of the book.

Um, uh, The concerts they put on in late 1981 at the Old Vic were seminal for me and only bested by Echo and the Bunnymen at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983, which I write about later in the book because I'd seen them very early on as well.

Those Bunnymen shows, just before they started recording Ocean Rain, they did they did two nights at the albert hall no band had played there in 10 years since and it was it was just the most incredible concert i only went one of the two nights but uh it was the most incredible concert and another one that shows up and we've like delta five that some people may remember and pete wiley and it's his guitar on the cover it's not the wham guitar we referred to earlier.

Pete Wiley has a Powell, I think it's a Gibson.

And if the book is partly about artists either consciously or subconsciously sort of selling out to make the charts, we were willing to sell out as much as any act whatsoever.

And we start out as this very punky, trio playing in front of skinheads and hardcore punks and we end up being like whatever you tell us to do we will do it if it will get us in the charts which is embarrassing but it was it's the truth

now i think that early period of wham is one that does get a little overlooked because i think they were doing a similar thing to lots of other bands they were coming into soho and trying to make things happen trying to get on a label trying to get on top of the pops and it ends up you know in their case taking off on a huge scale and in some of the other bands mentioned perhaps on a different scale and you've got Echo and the Bunnymen, like you say, playing Albert Hall and all these R.E.M. coming over from the US and they're an indie band at this point and they end up changing a lot over time and becoming much more of a mainstream act.

You've got all kinds of things to look up in this book.

The Fall’s later recordings, especially The First Episode, showcased a deliberate shift toward dissonant chords, complex rhythms, and literary references.

The band’s relentless evolution exemplified Manchester’s willingness to push against genre constraints, foreshadowing future post-punk acts like Echo & the Bunnymen, who would also emerge from this fertile ground.

By 1979, Factory’s roster had expanded beyond Joy Division to include artists such as The Cure, Human League, and the nascent New Order.

Each label release carried a distinct visual identity—the infamous twelve-inch black square of The Cure or the hand-drawn graphics on New Order’s Blue Monday—reflecting the Manchester scene’s embrace of art-house aesthetics intertwined with music.