Echo & the Bunnymen Live at "Cream" Liverpool NME.com Live Review, May 31st 1997

"...Ten years after they disintegrated onstage at Wembley Arena in front of papier-mache pillars and bewildered indifference, Echo & The Bunnymen are back together. A new album ('Evergreen'), a sense of unfinished business and a determination to embellish past glories has driven the Bunnymen back to Liverpool. And bizarrely, where the Velvet Underground, Television and the Sex Pistols all failed, they look like succeeding. Their return is one of supreme confidence - devoid of middle-aged decay, a spectacle of ferocious spirit and sonic innovation. And at its heart is singer Ian McCulloch, wrapped in a fur-trimmed overcoat, his voice full of rasping self-confidence and hopeless emotion.

They start at the beginning. 'Rescue' and 'All That Jazz' were two of the first songs they ever learnt to play. Seventeen years later, with Will Sergeant's harsh metallic guitar and McCulloch's repeated roars of, "This is the blues I'm singing", it's clear that playing them again will be neither archaic nor the sound of cabaret. Three towering new songs - 'Don't Let It Get You Down', 'Altamont' and 'I Want To Be There' - are subsequently dispatched with swaggering menace just to prove the point. At which juncture, McCulloch feels the need to flex his larynx just a little further.

"Do you want to know what these songs are called? Not that it matters, 'cos they're all fantastic." What follows is even better: dense smoke, flashing strobes and five silhouettes scraping their way through 'The Back Of Love' with guitars that sound like violins. They then sweep through the vast melancholy of 'Just A Touch Away' and 'I'll Fly Tonight' - two new songs with the breadth of The Verve and the beauty of Geneva.

It's the first comeback in history not to be dogged by a nauseous sense of distress, the first one to actually sound important. The dense electronic noise that starts 'Over The Wall', the distant peaks of forthcoming single 'Nothing Lasts Forever' and the refurbished pop of 'Lips Like Sugar' are all proof of a band determined to obliterate a new generation of pretenders.

The need to succeed now is as strong as when they began, perhaps more so, because the prospect of being greeted as an ageing irrelevance is a mortifying thought for all of them. The finale of an elongated 'Do It Clean', complete with ricocheting distortion and renditions of 'When I Fall In Love' and 'Sex Machine', followed by their greatest moment - a stately 'The Killing Moon' - confirm that any such thoughts can be banished for the foreseeable future."

Review by James Oldham
Photography by Jennifer Jeffery