Saturday 5 September 2009

E is for ...



E is for ...
Echo and the Bunnymen

The hair! Ian McCulloch's hair spawned a thousand imitation hair cuts. Sometimes broody, but a much lighter sound than The Cure, the Bunnymen fused post-punk, physcadelia and the massed sound of a philharmonic orchestra to create a unique sound and a cult following both in the UK and the US. Listening to the Bunnymen I always get the sense of emerging, blinking, back into the daylight of the world around me, of emerging from somewhere darker to a present where the sun is breaking through the clouds after a period of prolonged rain. This may, of course, be a memory of watching them on the Sunday evening of a wet Glastonbury in 1985. It had been a VERY wet Glastonbury, but the rain had stopped and sun shone weakly in the evening as Echo and the Bunnymen took to the stage.

Musically great, and always uplifting, here are 3 of my favourite Bunnymen tracks for you to listen to on Spotify:



E


or Ecstasy, the preferred drug of the Second Summer of Love and the Acid House culture that exploded into consciousness in the late 1980s. Seen by the establishment as the spawn of Beelzebub, E, or MDMA as it is more correctly known, led to a reduction in anxiety, fear and aggression, an increase in empathy, compassion and forgiveness and feelings of intimacy and love for others, which all led to thousands of ravers 'blissed out' dancing to house music in a field in the home counties.







Eurythmics
Dave Stewart and Annie
Lennox: a great partnership that was Eurythmics before launching Annie on a successful solo career and establishing Dave Stewart as a successful producer and songwriter. He married Siobhan Fahey, of Bananarama.