Echo & the Bunnymen @ Manchester Apollo, 29.3.98

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You can just about picture the scene at the box office as they all queue up trying to buy their tickets to the 90s.

Bon Jovi just squeezed their way through under the strict proviso that they get themselves some smart new haircuts and promise to no longer sing about anything remotely slippery or wet. Depeche Mode paid their fare but then blew the rest of their pocket money on a great big bag of drugs, so that kept them out of the way for a while.

Echo and the Bunnymen however were turned down point blank on the premise that their contribution to music and worthwhile entertainment was and still is completely negligible. And there was also absolutely nothing that could be done with singer Ian McCulloch’s hair.

So they were banished for evermore to the ‘lost decade’ where they would spend eternity performing the same old and tried rhythms to your mum and dad. But damn those ticket touts! They’ll always let someone slip through.

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And so here we are, in 1998, approaching the millennium, expectation ringing loud in our ears, and Echo and the Bunnymen still on stage strangling small mammals and calling it music.

It took Liam Gallagher’s strained "yeah yeah yeah" on ‘Nothing Ever Lasts Forever’ to ignite the slightest bit of interest in their pitiful comeback, but tonight with the prized vocal placed back in the clumsy hands of the band it sounds like nothing more than a painfully shrill whine, or perhaps a mating call to a partially lame hound with impaired hearing.

They all possess annoyingly smug expressions throughout their ‘performance’, although the reason for this escapes me. There’s no passion, no energy, no emotion. "Can you tell I’m enjoying myself?" mutters Ian McCulloch as if he’s reading badly from an especially weak Baywatch script. Well no I can’t, but can you tell how little fun I’m having?


And the audience! God, the audience!! It’s much more of the same with them I’m afraid. Shameful hair-dos (although slightly smartened up so their kids won’t laugh at them), dancing like flower-pot men on the first day of spring, and mouthing the words, although not necessarily the correct ones, like a sadly enthusiastic goldfish.

This is surely the modern British equivalent of Chinese water torture. And to think we’ve placed the fate of our official World Cup song in Ian McCulloch’s utterly incapable hands. God help us all.

James Berry