Forty years ago today – on 23rd October 1983 – Echo & The Bunnymen stole the show at the RSC. Music journalist Steve Sutherland looks back
Forty years ago today – on 23rd October 1983 – Echo & The Bunnymen stole the show at the RSC. Then a music journalist for Melody Maker and at the gig, Steve Sutherland takes a look back at the groovy goings-on.
We could be here all day debating the greatest Hamlet ever to grace Stratford’s RSC stage. David Warner in 1965? Kenneth Branagh in 1992? David Tennant in 2008? Or more recently, Paapa Essiedu? All different. All in their own way superb.
But what about the weirdest? No contest! Forty years ago, on Sunday, 23rd October 1983, Hugh Laurie - yes, (itals) that (itals) Hugh Laurie, he of A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves & Wooster, Blackadder, House and all that - emerged from the wings dressed as the Prince of Denmark, Yorick’s skull nestled in his hand. Stranger still, instead of the usual “To be or not to be” or “O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt”, the lines he recited went a little like this: “I've been up to Villiers Terrace/ To see what's a-happening/ There's people rolling 'round on the carpet/ Mixing up the medicine...People rolling 'round on the carpet/ Biting wool and pulling string/ You said people rolled on carpet/ But I never thought they'd do those things…”
Mr Laurie, you see, was here as the special guest of Echo & The Bunnymen and, as the first encore, he declaimed, as if written by the Bard himself, the lyrics to Villiers Terrace, a song from the band’s first album, Crocodiles. Hang on! Echo & The What'sallthatnow? Lest you’re too young to remember or the Eighties just weren’t your bag, Echo & The Bunnymen are a psychedelic rock quartet from Liverpool who were inspired by David Bowie and, along with The Cure, The Cult, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Bauhaus and Joy Division, were members of the premier league of goth bands known for their gloomy outlook, drab long raincoats and extravagant hairstyles. They were named and originally managed by a Scotsman called Bill Drummond who ran the Merseyside independent label Zoo and went on to form the KLF, an art project that became an unlikely hit-making monster and culminated in the outfit burning £1 million on a bonfire as some kind of statement/stunt. Drummond had mystical designs for the Bunnymen - lots of talk of leylines and Norse gods and such - a concept readily adopted by the band’s gorgeously coiffeured singer Ian Mcculloch who was equally famous for his rampant ego, dry scouse humour, having sumptuous lips and for claiming that the band’s second, LP, Heaven Up Here, was the greatest ever made.
Truth be told, by 1983 the Bunnystar’s sparkle had dimmed a little and they appeared to have lost their way a bit musically. Their third LP, Porcupine, released in February of that year, was not as ecstatically received as expected and so the Bunnies took to diversionary tactics, playing a series of shows in unusual settings such as Iceland. In July they performed in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, and the next May they’d do their Crystal Day, 24 hours' worth of events for fans in their home city, beginning with a café breakfast, followed by a bike tour and ferry ride and culminating in a concert at Lime Street's St. George's Hall which was filmed for Channel Four's groovy pop programme The Tube.
Sandwiched in between, were the RSC shows. Scheduled as the grand finale of a week of youth events in Stratford, tickets were £6 and the gig was advertised by a poster featuring the words Echo & Ye Bunnymen in suitably Tudor-ish script with a drawing of Shakespeare wearing bunny ears and holding a carrot. It sold out so fast that a matinee was added. Apparently the two shows shifted tickets faster than any performance in the history of the RSC and McCulloch - known to his fans as Mac - is reputed to have claimed: “Now I’m bigger than Henry V!”
The matinee was apparently a bit of a shambles. The band’s families and high-falutin’ representatives from their record company attended and it put the band off their stride. The evening show, though, was a stormer. I travelled up from London by coach to witness it as part of a music press junket and I recall shrouds of dry ice and a sprinkling of unfamiliar, new numbers such as Seven Seas and The Killing Moon, which was granted its first ever outing and of which McCulloch later boasted: "“I’ve always said that The Killing Moon is the greatest song ever written… for me The Killing Moon is more than just a song. It’s a psalm, almost hymnal. It’s about everything, from birth to death to eternity and God – whatever that is – and the eternal battle between fate and the human will. It contains the answer to the meaning of life.”
These songs would eventually emerge on their next LP, Ocean Rain, which put the band back on track and returned them to the charts. By this point in their career, they’d gotten over accusations in the music magazines that they too slavishly copied their heroes and, as a show of defiance, were cheekily incorporating snatches of stuff like The Doors’ Light My Fire into the set's looser numbers which had a tendency to expand into guitar-wig-outs and lyrical jams. In fact, four years later, they covered The Doors’ People Are Strange for the soundtrack to the spiffing Kiefer Sutherland comic vampire movie The Lost Boys.
This emboldened new attitude is something I found I’d banged on about at length when I recently dug out my review which was published at the time. Here’s a snatch: “This new Bunnyapproach - presuming they can get away with anything providing they present it wryly enough - bodes well… and even when the final encore went something like, ‘C-c-c cucumber, C-c-c cabbage, C-c-c cauliflower’ Mac’s sass turned inanity into enigma.” Pretentious twaddle, naturally.
I think I must have had a beer or two because down the years it’s been reported that there was some sort of riot or something at the gig with fans tearing up the seats and chucking stuff off the balcony which resulted in the RSC banning rock gigs from the venue forever more. Can’t say I witnessed any such thing. The final word of my review still sums it up for me after all these years: “Magic."