“One of the greatest songs ever written,” says Echo & the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch. This being “Mac the Mouth” – as he was christened during the Liverpool band’s imperial 80s heyday – he’s obviously talking about one of his own: a new song called “An Unstoppable Force”, a Bunnymen ballad in the grandest tradition of 1984’s ethereal masterpiece “The Killing Moon” and 1997’s stately comeback hit “Nothing Lasts Forever”.
“It’s got a perfect lyric, like ‘Imagine’ has a perfect lyric,” he says. From the opening line onwards – “One of these days, I know I’ll lose the will for the thrill of the chase” – it sounds as though at 67 he’s facing up to mortality. “Not mine though,” he insists. He’s actually got a “plan” – typically absurdist – for living a long life. “Apparently Putin and the Chinese fella [Xi Jinping] have got things that can make you live until you’re 150. So I’m going to be a Putin advocate, get some pills off him, and then stab him in the head. Then I’ll have another 50 years to write lyrics like that.”
McCulloch is raging against the dying of the light. “You’re never too old,” he tells me, which seems to be the central driver behind the unexpected psych-pop vim and vigour on Echo & the Bunnymen’s first album in 12 years, the excellent, tune-packed Apples for Isaac. “Like a fine wine,” he says of the album. “Although it’s more fizzy pop.”
You wouldn’t think it’s been 40 years since McCulloch ruled the roost in British alt-rock. Together with founding guitarist Will Sergeant, the Bunnymen emerged in 1978 from Liverpool’s famous Eric’s Club scene: McCulloch all lips and hair and cigarette poses while the band’s overcoated melancholic post-punk psychedelia, equally of the earth as the skies, swirled around him with enigmatic grandeur. After hits like “Rescue” and “The Cutter”, 1984’s orchestrated classic ambitiously raised the bar for post-punk: they took out an NME advert declaring it “the greatest album ever made”.
But they couldn’t keep pace with rivals U2 – 1987’s dour self-titled fifth album and subsequent drink-and-drug induced split saw to that – while their post-1997 comeback albums have intermittently reached former peaks. But they maintain an outsized influence on acts from Coldplay to Radiohead to Courtney Love to Arcade Fire; Noel Gallagher has been at two recent London shows; they’ve been covered by everyone from The National to Manic Street Preachers. McCulloch actually befriended Chris Martin while Coldplay recorded their 2002 second album A Rush of Blood to the Head at Liverpool’s now defunct Parr Street Studios. “He does text me once in a while saying he loves me,” McCulloch says. “So I say how’s about giving me a production credit? Even though I did nothing except Bowie-dancing and telling him ‘that’s great, that’s shite’.”
But the sense of renewal is welcome after a period of creative stasis and concerns over McCulloch’s health and lifestyle (more on which later). “The timing is right. It sounds alive and now.” He brings up a contrast with the new single from Simple Minds a contemporary of sorts, “Beginner Boys”. “It’s just so overproduced. And I like Jim Kerr, but it’s like, bloody hell. Maybe living in Sicily, it’s still catching up with 1984.” He draws parallel with the sense of purpose on 1980 debut album . “It’s vibrant. But I’ve never felt older than I did back then.”
An audience with McCulloch is a trip like no other. We meet in a small back-street pub in Liverpool city centre, McCulloch looking well, slim and bestubbled, still rock star-ish even dressed down in black hoodie and bucket hat. Gruffly, loquaciously Scouse with the bravado long-since hardwired to his core, he’s maintained that mischievous twinkle, especially when he thinks he’s just said something funny, which is often. Equally, he can be hard to stay on course. We take odd detours – he sings me a random ditty about Jimmy Tarbuck’s teeth – as he throws away barbs at random bête noires, such as why dogs shouldn’t be pets (“they don’t fit anywhere but outer space”).
During a discussion about new song “Can’t be Sold”, a tribute to the spirit of the eldest of his three daughters, he turns his ire on the Tate brothers. “The misogyny,” he dismays. “Who the f**k are they? Just total idiots. You’ve had to do that because you can’t cut it. They look s**t as well, by the way. Dorks. People at school you’d say – ‘the head on you’.”
And then there is his take on modern music. “No one’s got an identity. All these idiots who don’t know why they write a song.” He doesn’t mind Fontaines DC (“I don’t hate it, it’s interesting”) but has particular issues with Bloc Party (“utter shite”).
But like his songs, which can be wounded and bruised, he can also be vulnerable. He often circles back to his dad, who died in 1988 on the same day McCulloch quit the Bunnymen on a flight home after a tour of Japan. He was an obsessive gambler who’d fritter the family money away. “He was my biggest influence. So funny. But he’d go missing for two weeks. And now every second advert is a gambling one. It’s ruining families. I might have a word with Andy and get him to sort it out.”
He’s talking about Andy Burnham. “I like him,” he says. McCulloch invited Burnham to a recent Bunnymen show in Manchester, along with Liverpool Regional Mayor Steve Rotherham (“Don’t bother him, Rotherham.”) On Burnham, he says: “He’s got charisma. He’s diminutive-ish. Though compared to other people, like a certain Irish singer, he’s a giant.” It wouldn’t be a McCulloch interview if he didn’t take a pop at his old nemesis Bono. “But he’s started off well. He’s making a difference. I think the Tories are scared of him.”
McCulloch can’t explain exactly why Apples for Isaac took 12 years. Covid was a factor, while technical issues and missed deadlines pushed things back, although he does admit at one point: “I’m a lazy bastard and the telly’s on and I’m doing crosswords all day long.” There was also the fact that McCulloch has entirely written and produced the album himself, and played most of the instruments (late Blondie drummer Clem Burke drums most tracks).
“People have said it’s an Ian McCulloch solo album – is it f**k,” he says. But what about Sergeant? Completely different personalities, it’s no secret the pair have got on like oil and water for a long time: Sergeant recently said he’s been totally ostracised from the songwriting process, noting this year the “manageable but long-standing undercurrent of animosity” between them. “Because I know what the Bunnymen is more than Will does by a long shot,” says McCulloch.
Sergeant only plays on four tracks, something McCulloch had wanted to keep concealed before the album credits were circulated among journalists. “I wanted people to be like, ‘Will’s on fire’,” he says, when really it’s McCulloch playing and copying Sergeant’s style. He said Sergeant sent him some “brilliant stuff” but also things that didn’t fit. “Some of it wasn’t even the same key. I thought it was sabotage,” he says, spluttering.
He brings up a comment from Bill Drummond, early Bunnymen manager and future leader of pop-pranksters The KLF, who once said Sergeant was the heart and soul of the band. “He’s the spleen of the Bunnymen, always has been. And that was important because apparently you need a spleen but don’t depend on it. This is an album with no spleen.” It seems like their relationship is at a low point? “No,” he says. “We’ve been touring and it’s brilliant. He’s playing brilliant. I just can’t lie for him.” Anyone who has seen the Bunnymen live recently will testify that Sergeant’s abilities are essential to the experience.
McCulloch also took his time over the lyrics. “I wanted it to have an importance, to me more than anyone else.” There are personal reminisces, as on sparkling lead track “Brussels Is Haunted”, about the band’s first trip abroad and the allure of the Belgian capital, and the funky “Hijacked”, a cryptic re-telling of a childhood story he doesn’t want to publicly disclose. “Lab Rats Ran”, runaway 70s New York rock with a roaring sax solo, seeks a reset from the modern world. “I’m saying: I’m a luddite, and I want to go back to purity,” he says.
But combative opener, the -era Bowie-ish “Take Me By the Hand”, sets the tone with a list of things he doesn’t need: protecting, correcting, defending, mending. McCulloch has been very open about his excessive drug and alcohol intake over the years, but he says concern for him – even as gigs this year were postponed due to ill health – are a nonsense.
“It’s me saying – f**k off with all your advice, and putting me in a box, or a body bag. Because I’m not going in there. I don’t need fixing.” Have people been trying to fix him? “Yeah, all that ‘look after yourself’. What do you think I’m doing?”
Yet on “The Light That Surrounds You”, he asks, “Are you failing your health as destiny beckons?” He says that’s him turning that advice on others, and besides he’s not: he’s cut back to five cigarettes a day at most, and whenever he has occasional checkups – “when I’m forced to” – he gets the all clear. So a lifetime of getting on it is all good? “It works for some,” he smiles. “But I’m just not having that worry people have about mortality, constantly gauging your intake about everything. Don’t try to foist your non-morals on me.”
Still, McCulloch is making the most of the moment. Of the album, he says: “I’m leaving nothing to chance, especially now. And my confidence – it’s not arrogance. It’s just self-determination. Because what’s the point if you’re not going to be brilliant?”
‘Apples for Isaac’ is out now. Echo and the Bunnymen are touring the UK until 22 December (bunnymen.com)