Echo & The Bunnymen

“Like other great bands, Echo and the Bunnymen thrived on the chemistry of its four elements, with each having a distinct personality that operated at full steam only when together. Mac the mouth, Will the psychedelia loving trekkie, Les the dream-obsessed rock around which the band was built and Pete the Trinidad-born foreigner who became a top-class drummer overnight. All four parts together completed the puzzle by the name of Echo and the Bunnymen. They could still function without one of the cogs, mind, yet it wouldn’t be quite the same. DeFreitas was the last to join, in 1980, replacing the less than reliable drum machine, Echo, ahead of initial rehearsals for what would shape up to be their fiery debut, Crocodiles. It aligned them at the forefront of the so-called Manchester-Liverpool axis (Fall/Joy Division-Echo and the Bunnymen/The Teardrop Explodes) and set the tone for their career: post-punk fraught with atmosphere, mystery, psychedelic textures and a surplus of attitude. It didn’t last, of course. How could it? The band splintered apart as their eponymous fifth effort began to make serious inroads in terms of popularity. Mac went it alone, the other guys mystifyingly tried to keep going without their charsimatic singer. Neither made much of a dent and things only spiralled for the worse with Pete DeFreitas’ untimely death. However, with the passing of time, whatever bad blood existed between them begun to evaporate. By ’94 the remaining trio patched things up and gave it another go, beginning one of the extremely rare reunions that has kept a modicum of dignity, with a string of low-key, decent to good albums that continue to this day.”