A Conversation with Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch – HuffPost 6.3.14

Mike Ragogna: Ian, you have a new album with Echo & The Bunnymen,Meteorites. How do you straddle the solo career and the band?

Ian McCulloch: Hopefully, quite well. I get asked this question a lot, it’s hard to give a definitive answer. Sometimes I feel I need… not so much a break from the Bunnymen, but I need to get certain songs out. The easiest way to explain it is sometimes I feel I write “I” songs and sometimes it feels like I’m writing “we” songs. They cross over slightly, for instance on this album there’s a lot of personal stuff. There’s something in it, maybe it’s the melody lines. There’s another way of describing that or explaining it which isn’t too flattering in one way, but with Bunnymen songs there’s less “woe is me,” or in fact, hopefully on this album no “woe is me,” which is kind of implies that I write my solo stuff “woe is me,” but I’m trying to eradicate that as well. I think that with solo stuff it’s more confessional and I’m kind of taking on blame for the way I am. But I think with the Bunnymen, whatever I say, even if it’s exposing my frailties, I do it in a more angst-ridding way.

MR: How does the process work with you guys creatively these days?

IM: I wrote most of this batch on a bass guitar that kind of didn’t need an app. I’ve started playing basslines on solo stuff and on some of The Fountain. I found I was fairly good at it in a hamfisted way. Basically, after finishing Pro Patria Mori in my flat–it’s a massive flat–in my superflat, which doesn’t mean I’m a mansion-owning Scouser, it’s just bigger than normal, but I’ve managed to turn it into a very… it’s not a hovel, but it’s lived in, if you know what I mean–but the only instrument in the building was a child’s piano with preset drumbeats, which I am going to master for the next album. It’s got about twelve white keys and seven of the black ones. I might write a symphony on it, or whatever Beethoven wrote, I’ll write a few of them. So the only other instrument was a bass guitar, a fairly crap one, a Stagg, it’s called, which is hardly Gibson. But it was the only instrument there, so I started playing that. It was the day after I finished Pro Patria Mori, which had taken so much out of me that I hadn’t even played. So I just started playing basslines, I didn’t know what they were for particularly but they just sounded different. I’d gotten used to [white bottle? 7:16] in that total way that can be brilliant but can also limit where you go. For every C there’s an A minor, for every A minor there’s an F and then a G. I suppose I wanted to break free of that a little bit, but also it was just because I picked up this thing and thought, “Bloody hell, these sound good. They’re cyclical basslines that kind of reminded me of early Bunnymen. I found I was playing in a different key, I got into writing songs in C, which seemed to suit the song but I want to sing the high stuff, and I found that writing things in C make it difficult to go up the octave in the way I can and historically get to do. But by playing these riffs with the open D-string, or playing the twiddly stuff on the G-string. I found that it gave me the octave thing I can do. A lot of people think it’s a hard excuse if it’s up in C, but all of the songs like “The Cutter,” “The Back Of Love,” a lot of those songs were written in D, so it enabled me to use the low voice and the open octave and even the very high falsetto stuff for backing vocals. So I was like, “Wow, this stuff sounds great,” and thne I did early demos of it, added some guitars, spiky, choppy stuff that I used to do early Bunnymen. I was like, “Wow, this sounds like the Bunnymen but now.” Then Youth got involved producing, and we added them to the demos and worked with a few things. They just brought this sound to it, using strings like spiky “Eh-eh-eh-eh,” which again was like the early stuff, it was related to it, but it was the in-laws rather than direct family, if you know what I mean. I went through maybe eighteen months or two years of melancholy depression depression, which I’ve gone to in the past, but it always came in waves, even as a kid, I knew it would come but the wave wouldn’t last that long. I actually enjoyed the waves of melancholy.

MR: What are some things that have happened that have been very significant to you as a professional musician over the years?

IM: One thing is that these waves kind of became tsunamis and I didn’t know when they were going to stop raging, I can’t even snap out of them sometimes. They’re very good for writing songs and stuff, especially the lyrical side, they’re really good for that. My wife used to say, “You do this on purpose, you get into this kind of down thing so you can write songs,” which I used to kind of half admit that was true. But I always seemed to be able to, if not console them, at least ride them. Then over the last few years I had some personal things I won’t go into, but I suppose trying to change your life by facing the waves and trying to prevent them going so long, I’m doing something about them, which could involve loads of things. Accepting that maybe it was more of a problem than something I could just say was part of my personality, no one wants to feel shite for more than a year non-stop. But I think without that I don’t think I would’ve come up with songs like “Meteorites” and “Is This A Breakdown?” So I knew I had to use the way I was feeling, that’s one aspect, and also feeling that a statement had to be made almost with this album, no jokes, no fluffy songs that didn’t really stack up, songs that I wanted people to hear. There were no “half-baked” things going on, I wanted to make sure every breath, every word, every letter counted.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

IM: Every now and then, I bump into people who I like. Glasvegas was one, I said to James [Allan], “Whatever you do, don’t wear white and don’t look like a geisha girl with your next record,” and guess what? He wore white with a little geisha parasol. I also said, “don’t ever go up your own ass and certainly not anyone else’s.” Unfortunately they have a Support Tour with U2 and there’s no margin when you do that. And Jake Bugg is someone I know, we met somewhere in London recently. I think Jake Bugg is fantastic, especially when he does the ballad-y kind of stuff, the slower, less skiffle-y Dylan stuff, which I like as well, but when he writes one of them beautiful ballads they’re kind of beyond his years in a way. I just think he’s great. I told him, “You seem as cool as you get, don’t listen to anyone’s advice apart of mine and don’t go up your own ass or anyone else’s.” That’s the advice I give. If you stick to that, hopefully you’ll still write the great melodies, but even if you don’t you can say to yourself, “I didn’t go up anyone’s ass.” That’s a great rule to live by I think, otherwise you’ve let yourself down. You’ve got to be strong enough to know when you’re good and when you’re brilliant. Jake Bugg is kind of knowing that. It’s going to be tough because he’s a solo act, leading a band. It’s hard when it’s your name and you can’t share that weight of your own sense of who you are. You can share that in a band because it then becomes… The Bunnymen, we know, there was always an underlined, shared knowledge of what we were and it can be defined by what you don’t do. There would be times you can’t possibly do that because it wouldn’t feel right, you know sometimes you can get manipulated, but we were always the vocal bastards of that kind of scene and music. “We don’t do cowboy hats, we don’t do religion, and we don’t do arse licking, never mind arse fucking buttholing.”

MR: Well, I think that answered all of my questions. It’s been an honor talking to you.

IM: Wait, Mike, one question from me. What did you think of the album?

MR: Well, I think it might be my favorite from you guys in a long time. Hope that doesn’t hurt your feelings.

IM: It’s the best insult, you know?

MR: I think so. I’m just hesitant to commit because I need it to be part of my life a little longer.

IM: I agree. At the time, Ocean Rain was a classic but it certainly drones, and this is only fresh off the mixing desk and it already feels like a weighty album.

MR: Also, I think the depth of it reaches further than the others.

IM: Yeah, I agree.

MR: How do you feel about the influence you’ve had? Echo & The Bunnymen has affected so many bands.

IM: It’s funny because a lot of it I wish I hadn’t influenced because there’s so much shite out there. Hopefully, I’ve influenced people to pout more when they’ve got a pair of lips. I do like the early stuff of Coldplay, the fact that Chris was open about how much we’d influenced him and his band. I think if we helped influence songs like “In My Place” or “Fix You,” then brilliant. I think we had more influence on American bands to be honest, or at least there were more American bands saying how much they loved us, like Pavement, or even the Pixies, at least when I’ve spoken to them they’ve said we were a massive influence. The Flaming Lips, a band I really like, Arcade Fire said we influenced them. I think they’re a great band, to be honest. So yeah, it’s great when you like the actual stuff you’ve influenced. With Arcade Fire I find myself thinking, “God, I wish we sounded like that.” People will say they sound like us. But yeah, I think this album will make people sit up. People like Chris Martin will envy being able to write a song like me. No one can get near that kind of stuff. The race is back on.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne

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