The first time I ever heard Echo & the Bunnymen, I would have been a Junior in high school, and still otherwise obsessed with comparatively indelicate bands like Kraut, Iron Maiden, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag and Venom. But in much the same way certain songs by the Psychedelic Furs had done barely a year earlier, I was starting to glean that music could be more than just a cathartic bludgeoning tool for the perpetually irritable. Enter the Bunnymen.
I hate to give MTV any credit, but with just a single airing of the mysterious video for “The Cutter,” finding pale and pasty singer/songwriter Ian McCulloch, all pillowy lips and a giant black haystack of hair, crooning odd couplets about mustard and crucifixes with that big, sonorous voice over film strips of the band scrambling over Icelandic snowdrifts, I was completely intrigued.
Let’s go there now, shall we?
The single in question had been culled from the band’s third album, Porcupine, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t find that LP and made do with an E.P. that featured “The Cutter,” and a handful of other tracks. That record came sheathed in practically a plain, navy-blue sleeve with the band’s name on it, and a tiny, enigmatic photo in the bottom right-hand corner. On the back cover, there’s a shot of the band rehearsing in what looks like someone’s sitting room.
In exceptionally short order, I started playing this curious EP (apparently officially titled The Sound of Echo, although that title is nowhere on the sleeve) to absolute death. Yes, I continued to be intrigued by the magisterial otherness of “The Cutter,” but the other songs – all previous singles by the band – like the urgent “Never Stop,” “Rescue” and “Back of Love” were all amazing. The best track, however, for me was the live version of “Do It Clean,” recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, which seemed like an awfully big room for a band I’d only just heard about to be playing.
Prefaced with the repeating recording of the cryptic phrase, “You Can’t Just Shoot a Man in the Back!,” guitarist Will Sergeant unleashes a riff that is far punkier and crunchier than anything you might otherwise expect from this band, ushering in McCulloch and the rest of the boys for a protracted and endearingly noisy rumination on the wisdom of keeping murder tidy. It’s fucking fab.
As fab as it was and remains, however, this particular version of “Do It Clean,” in later years, was never committed to compact disc. Very comparable versions are out there, like on the Crystal Days box set, but the specific version for The Sound of Echo (or simply the Blue EP, as my crowd referred to it), cannot be had anywhere other than on that slab of vinyl. Oh, well, that’s not true, it’s also on YouTube… this is it. Bask in its brilliance….
Fuckin’ great, right? Told’ja.
Anyway, I snapped up each successive Bunnymen album after that, and also delved into the records that preceded it, and while there is a vast quantity of greatness in their whole discography, that Blue EP remained, for me, the quintessential document of the brilliance of Echo & the Bunnymen, full stop. Yeah, Ocean Rain and their big breakout eponymous record from a few years later are great, but if you could only take one Bunnymen record with you, I’d suggest The Sound of Echo. But hey, that’s just me.
Time went on, as it tends to do, and when neither that version of “Do It Clean” nor a full, proper re-release of The Sound of Echo on compact disc ever surfaced, the 12” vinyl EP became even more sacrosanct, to me, and I came to further regard every aspect of it as crucial. Why did they even release it? Was it as a primer for the American market? A stopgap to divert attention from the long delay after Porcupine? And what the fuck is that weird, tiny photograph on the bottom-right corner of the sleeve? An ice monster? A scary robot? Father time? The Great and Powerful Oz? I had no idea, and there was precious fuck-all information provided to solve that mystery.
Forty years later, I have recently discovered the answer to that last quandary.
Just as a refresher, this is the image (albeit blurry) on the bottom of the sleeve of The Sound of Echo.
Last week, my sister-in-law Lizzie – on holiday in Europe – posted the photo below, with the inscription “Bonjourno Milano”
Looks familiar, right? This, evidently, is a face on the fountain on the main façade of the Central train station (Stazione di Milanot Centrale) in Milan, Lombardy, Italy.
Now, why a post-punk band from Liverpool, England would choose this image is truly anyone’s guess, but at least now I can say I know what it is.
And so can you.
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