Bunnyman

Will Sergeant Constable £20 ★★★

Nearly two decades after Merseybeat, Liverpool’s music scene had a second flowering, producing 1980s student-bedsit stalwarts Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, alongside chart-toppers such as Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

But if The Beatles mined romance from the working-class Liverpool of their childhoods, the city of influential Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant’s 1970s adolescence was a grim, postindustrial place of darkly furious fathers and dismal prospects, enlivened only by occasional visiting Slades and Bowies, and later by punk’s DIY boom.

Sergeant’s memoir takes an earthy stroll through his early years, unafraid to tell it like it was: mainly rubbish. It hits its stride when it pinpoints stickyfloored punk club Eric’s as Liverpool’s grubby yet thrilling musical epicentre, where such future stars and cult legends as Frankie’s Holly Johnson, the Teardrops’ Julian Cope

(right) and the late Dead Or

Alive frontman Pete Burns made their earliest fashion mistakes.

Sergeant recalls Johnson dying his hair white and shaving his National Insurance number into it for maximum Saturday night effect. The exuberant Cope ‘just about manages to transcend being really annoying’, while Burns – in those days ‘a crimp-haired Nosferatu… with full-eye contact lenses as black as death’ – is so terrifyingly scornful that the bashful Sergeant doesn’t dare buy anything at the record shop where Burns works until he goes off for his tea break. Amid all this, the tracks are being inauspiciously laid for some of the most striking British pop music of the 1980s. Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch is too shy to sing a note until the band’s first performance; Manchester contemporaries Joy Division are notable for the speed of their van, which frequently passes the Bunnymen’s rusty Transit in a flurry of V-signs on the M1. Bunnyman ends just as the group find a record deal and the band’s drum machine – not actually the ‘Echo’ of the band’s name, contrary to legend – gets a human replacement in doomed drummer

Pete de Freitas. The

1980s are coming, and a sequel beckons.