IAN MCCULLOCH (from ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN)
(Acoustic Set)
with support from
JOHN MOUSE
ROB LEAR
Sunday 16th September 2012
The Globe
Cardiff
7.30pm / 18+ show
£22 adv from | www.swnpresents.com |
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| Spillers Records |
I felt excited to think of the Bunnymen as exciting again.
I’ve re-found my
spite – some might call it ‘angst”, I prefer to think of it as spite.”
The Fountain was kick-started in 2007 when McCulloch began working on some
new ideas with three London-based musicians. “I thought [Will Sergeant and
I] needed to do stuff differently, but so the result still sounded like the
Bunnymen,” he says. “What we got with Think I Need It Too and Forgotten
Fields, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is how it should sound.’”
The album was pieced together over the next year, with Mac and Will working
on tracks at their management’s Parr Street Studios in Liverpool.
Mac : “ The last few years have
been pre-and post renaissance years, and the Bunnymen, because of this album
& these songs and the Ocean Rain shows, feel more important than ever”
He points to The Idolness Of Gods’ cathartic “soul-baring” and the words of
Do You Know Who I Am. “‘Do you know who I am?’ is a phrase you daren’t ever
say,” he muses. “It’s very tongue in cheek, but I’m saying throughout the
album that I know exactly who I am. And I feel like rubbing your noses in it
again. I know what I’m on about now. It’s more like… if I was an actor, it
would be like Jack Nicholson or De Niro, they just know what they’re fucking
doing. But I’d like to think I choose my roles better than De Niro…
“I think that sense of confidence has been borne out by the gigs we’ve
done,” he adds. “I don’t get any softer. Onstage, it’s my natural habitat.
Not that I’m looking down on the audience, but physically I am. I love it,
but then I also think, What the hell is it all about?”
Among the album’s greatest moments is the shimmering, impish Shroud Of
Turin, in which Mac comes face-to-face with Christ.
“The song is a kind of conversation with
Jesus,” says Mac. “It’s
tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also just another way of praying. It was based
around a gig in Rimini at a club called, I think, The Transylvania, and I saw
this image in the monitors, it was Jesus’s face. I stopped the song, and said,
If you all want
to file past, you can see the Shroud Of Turin. It’s also a play on ‘urine’,
he pissed his keks on the cross. ‘That urine stained shroud in Rimini”
So how did you think you and Jesus would
get on? “Well, we got on
fine. But there’s a version of me that’s Beelzebub, and then there’s the Ian
people seem to prefer – Ian, the nice but fragile one. But he’s actually Mr
Hyde. He’s the one that’s hard to live in, the awkward one that bottles
things up, he’s the nightmare. Not the loon. But I love my Dr Jekyll, he just
flies off, he’s a clever little sod.”
The album’s widescreen, crystalline sound
is the work of Scottish
producer John McLaughlin, whose credits may come as a surprise to some
Bunnymen fans. “He’s done work with Busted and Five, who I loved!” smiles
Mac. “He said the Bunnymen were his favourite thing of all time, but really
I think it’s The Clash and Bruce Springsteen. I just became really good
friends with him. I really want a big, solid undertow beneath the lyrics,
not all jingly jangly like Siberia. I wanted someone I could trust to get
the sound – when he heard me playing The Idolness Of Gods with just guitar,
it made him cry. He gets why I write the way I do. There’s glory in it.
Certain lyrics make you go, ‘Bloody hell.’ It’s the atmosphere I can evoke
with the way I sing and write melody.
“I’m just a better writer and better singer
these days,” he adds. “I
want to sound like Sinatra singing in the Reprise years. I know I go on
about it a lot, but he’s the only one I can still aspire to better, cos I’m
better than all the others. My voice has got more… honest, which fits these
songs. This album is about something, rather than just sounding like it’s
about something. It’s about having lived life, but still feeling like a kid.
I’m a not traditional songwriter. What I do at my best is poetry.”
And how do you rate The Fountain in terms of the Bunnymen’s other albums?
Mac smiles. “It’s the best thing we’ve done since Ocean Rain…”
Pat Gilbert
