Echo and the Bunnymen have had their fair share of drama over the years, but they're getting along fine now, the enigmatic guitarist Will Sergeant tells BRIAN BOYD
WITH A MOUTHY front man in Ian McCulloch, an enigmatic yet gifted guitarist in Will Sergeant, plenty of personnel changes over the years and having done the break-up/reform two-step, there’s always been plenty of drama with Echo and the Bunnymen. Difficult to believe now, but there was a time in the early 1980s when it seemed like a toss-up between Echo and the Bunnymen and U2 as to who would emerge as the all-conquering global superstars.
Never the most cohesive of bands, McCulloch and Sergeant have had a tumultuous relationship, and there was an entire decade when the two weren’t on speaking terms.
“We’re getting along fine now, no trouble at all,” says Sergeant, just back from a hugely successful US tour and readying himself for the trip to Dublin.
"All has been really good lately and it was interesting for us over in the US. We were playing the first two albums, Crocodiles[1980] and Heaven Up Here[1981] and we always had great support over there – college radio really took to us the first time around. What I noticed about these shows, though, was the amount of young people in the audiences. You do find it a bit odd at first, and you're almost asking them how they came to hear of the band, but apparently we're name-checked by a lot of today's groups.
"So just as I heard of Scott Walker from hearing David Bowie talking about him, so these younger fans have heard of us from bands such as Pavement and The Flaming Lips, and even our old mates U2 – not that we were ever mates – have mentioned us, I believe. Or maybe that was just The Edge talking about my guitar work on The Cutter."
While the stone-cold classic The Cuttermay still be their best-known song, there's plenty in their catalogue which still stands up to the test of time – not least songs such as The Killing Moonand Bring on the Dancing Horses.
There was always something about the interplay between McCulloch’s somewhat monotone vocal and Sergeant’s minimalist guitar style that gave the band a slightly eerie feel – and some still take them for a typical Factory-era Manchester band.
"Oddly, for a guitarist, I took my style from Kraftwerk," says Sergeant. "What I actually do on the records is really simple. I know I'm not the bloke out of Thin Lizzy or whoever, who is able to do all those twiddly guitar bits. To be honest I find that all a bit boring – that thing of how many notes can I possibly fit in here? I don't do those bluesy-style riffs. The way I see it is that other people have been doing it better than me for many a year so I took a very simple approach. You can hear it best on Bring on the Dancing Horses. It's almost like you spend hours on the guitar in the studio trying to make it so it doesn't sound like a guitar".
Back when the Bunnymen were recording their early albums, they were actively encouraged (in contrast to today’s stipulations) to experiment. “We had this producer, Hugh Jones, and he basically just gave us this amazing toy box – we used to use slit drums, get loads of blokes in playing recorders and mess around on auto harps,” he says. “We’d work for hours and hours and just leave the tape rolling. It’s the best part of being in a band and the key to our sound is that we were never really musicians – we were just punks who wanted to be in a band. So when people go on about my guitar style I find it funny, as I was just learning as I went along. I don’t have training in anything and I certainly never wanted to be a technical musician”.
They’ll be bringing a live orchestra to their Dublin show to play their classic Ocean Rain album in its entirety. Arguably the band’s best album, and a definite fan favourite, they first dusted down the 1984 work with a show at London’s Royal Albert Hall three years ago which was followed by a show at New York’s Radio City. Picking up ecstatic reviews for their orchestrally-enhanced performance, Sergeant still wryly remembers how the album was reviewed when it was first released. “We got really slagged off for that album, people thought we sounded like The Moody Blues!”.
What the band enjoy most about playing the early albums now is that they can put in changes where they think a certain section can be improved. “There are sections there where you can go off piste,” he says. “And on any given night some amazing things could happen. They tend to be one-off moments, we change things a bit in little areas here and there to keep it all together and stop it from falling down. And it’s great to be able to play a full album. These days people have trouble listening to just one song as they flick through their iPods, but for me saving up to buy an album when I was younger was a really big deal. There’s a disposability about music now, which makes doing these Ocean Rain shows even sweeter for us”.
Echo and the Bunnymen play their
Ocean Rain
album at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin tonight
