BIRTH OF THE COOL
Scouse chancers with one 15-minute non-song, to weavers of rock'n'roll mystery par excellence, ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN flowered on Crocodiles, the beginning of their wild trip into legend. But as its survivors recall, 40 years on, genius rode shotgun with outrageous fortune. "The world was lucky the Bunnymen were on that stage that night," they tell KEITH CAMERON.
APRIL 1980. ON THE SOUTH WALES farm where Black Sabbath and Queen made records that defined the 1970s, Liverpool quartet Echo And The Bunnymen are making their debut album Crocodiles – an auspicious band and an auspicious record for a new decade. To a casual observer, however, the events in Rockfield’s Quadrangle studio one evening would have seemed highly inauspicious. Especially the moment when the band’s singer, Ian McCulloch, leapt at his producer, David Balfe, and grabbed him by the throat.
Forty years on, all the interested parties agree something of the sort happened. But why? Why did the singer grab the producer by the throat?
Mick Houghton, the band’s then-publicist, thinks it was because McCulloch was incensed at Balfe adding trumpets to Happy Death Men, the album’s epic freakout finale. Bassist Les Pattinson seems doubtful. “I recall someone put trumpet on, but didn’t we drop it in the end? I do remember Dave would go berserk on the piano, and we would go, ‘No, Dave.’ He was Mr Commercial and wasn’t afraid to admit it. You’d just tell him to fuck off if he came up with an idea. Even though now and again they’d be great.”
Guitarist Will Sergeant agrees it was probably because Balfe wanted to add keyboards, doubtless the swirling ’60s psych variety he played in The Teardrop Explodes, the Bunnymen’s Liverpool friends-cum-rivals. “When he did the organ on Do It Clean, I was really pissed off,” says Sergeant. “Not as in, ‘Oh, I don’t think we should have an organ’ – more like, ‘Fuck off Balfey, we’re not having a fucking organ on it, you cunt.’ Mac did get him by the throat on the couch in the control room.” He hums Happy Death Men’s trumpet part. “Actually, it might have been because of that.”
Ian McCulloch, however, brusquely dismisses the Happy Death Men theory, offering an explanation that to his mind makes far more sense: “Balfey was smirking at me.”
Shortly to turn 21, the three weeks in Rockfield recording Crocodiles was McCulloch’s first prolonged time away from Liverpool, and his girlfriend Lorraine. The loving couple were in the midst of their third lengthy conversation of the evening on the studio control room’s payphone. “We were sitting around twiddling our thumbs,” says Balfe. “It just went on and on. Eventually, I started parroting what he was saying: ‘Yeah Lorraine, yeah Lorraine…’ Mac said, ‘If you say that again…’”
Balfe said it again. McCulloch hung up and went for him. “You fucking twat…” But in furiously lunging towards Balfe, he hadn’t noticed a pile of unspooled recording tape on the floor. “I slipped on this tape,” says McCulloch, “and ended up grabbing his