From: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org (seven-seas-digest) To: seven-seas-digest@smoe.org Subject: seven-seas-digest V4 #467 Reply-To: seven-seas@smoe.org Sender: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org Precedence: bulk seven-seas-digest Wednesday, October 5 2005 Volume 04 : Number 467 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 07:59:52 +1300 From: "Kristin Smith" Subject: seven-seas Kelley Stoltz article (3/3) 3 of 3 There, some 20 years on, a pioneer of some sort (actually, the first fan who'd ever been there, Yorkie said), I stood in the very room pictured on the inner sleeve of Echo's 1980 debut, Crocodiles (Sire), a picture I had stared at for hours as a kid. Later that night Yorkie and I went to a Liverpool club to meet up with Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant, who was holding court as a guest DJ and blasting throug h his Nuggets collection and other '60s psych jams. During a break, Sergeant came by to say hello and have a beer, and I asked him how the new album was coming along. He said great and added that they'd chosen the title just that afternoon: "It's called Siberia b and you're the first person in the world who knows that." I rewound to my younger days and thought that if I was 14 and somebody told me that would actually happen, I'd have said they were crazy. With Siberia (Cooking Vinyl), and with only McCulloch and Sergeant from the old days, the Bunnymen have made their best record since Ocean Rain. The album was produced by Hugh Jones, who was behind the mix of Echo's 1981 album, Heaven up Here, but where that was the beautifully atonal pop drone of a young band, Siberia is a collection of songs reflecting on love lost and by boys now grown. The best tracks, "All Because of You Days," "In the Margins," and "Of a Life," find the old balance between Sergeant's swirling guitars and McCulloch's smoky croon, and it sounds, for the first time since '84, like they have several new songs they actually like and have thought a bit about. "Parthenon Drive," named after McCulloch's childhood street in Liverpool, is a welcome addition to the Bunnymen canon and is something along the lines of Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" b the older McCulloch looking back and remarking that "revolving round a 45 ... you're glad to be alive, around 45." If the best music bears repeated listenings and lifestyle changes, then the Bunnymen are, for me, among the best. They've sprung from the underground, grown to the size of stadium tour madness, only to fall apart at the height of their popularity, break up, go solo, survive the death of the original drummer, and re-form again. McCulloch says Siberia was named such because "the Bunnymen were the band that came in from the cold," and likewise, I think it was them out there with me in the cold all those years ago. Echo and the Bunnymen play Dec. 5, 8 p.m., Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $25. (415) 346-6000, www.ticketmaster.com. Kelley Stoltz recently put out his own version of Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles, titled Crockodials (Beautiful Happiness). His new EP, The Sun Comes Through (Sub Pop), comes out Tues/11. ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://www.villiersterrace.com * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * ====================================================================== ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 22:39:28 +0100 (BST) From: Steve Griffiths Subject: Re: seven-seas Kelley Stoltz article - Yorkie. Yorkie was given the name 'Yorkie' by Pete Wylie - because, in Wylies opinion, he was ''Good, Rich, and Thick''!! I don't think you get Yorkie bars outside of the UK, but the t.v. advert in the 70's had a song about a Yorkie bar and how it was good, rich and thick. Steve G. Kristin Smith wrote: [2 of 3] Of course, others had been on this "new music" from the start, like the owner of the local "imports only" record store, who made frequent forays to England to stock up on 12-inches and 45's by the cool English groups and resold them to me and a few other guys back in Detroit at insane prices. I would happily fork over two weeks' allowance and the entire earnings from mowing the neighbors' lawn for a picture-sleeve single I'd never seen. I collected them all. "Rescue" 12-inch b $40. Sure. "The Puppet" 45 b $25. OK. A cassette bootleg at $15 (kept in those days in a secret drawer behind the counter). Gotta have it. "A Promise" 12-inch b $30. Can I pay half now and half later? The Bunnymen were at the top of their game then, and those prices didn't seem so exorbitant. Nowadays I could have the whole lot on eBay in a day and for a fourth of the price. How do I know? Because 22 years later ... I still have the Bunnymen bug, and every time I'm looking for records, I see what there is of theirs in the bins or on auction online. Instant karma But now there are other bills to pay and far more bands to check out and different stuff to buy and collect. I had been tempted to buy a few Bunnymen things over the years, but really I had it all b and wouldn't I be better off saving up for a mono mix of the "White Album," or paying the phone bill? b but when I saw a huge promo poster for the first Echo single, from 1979, on eBay early this spring, I convulsed like I was 16 again: In all my years, I'd never seen that. And so it was. Buying an $80 Echo poster on eBay proved to be some kind of karmic debt repaid: The poster led me to befriend the seller, Dave "Yorkie" Palmer, who was a childhood friend of the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. In fact, it was at his mother's house that the Bunnymen and the Teardrops had rehearsed for their first two years. He had had that poster all that time and had since gone on to have a fair music career of his own in the band Space. After I explained that I would be coming to have a look around Liverpool in a month, after my tour, Yorkie offered his services as my personal tour guide to all the old haunts of the late-'70s Liverpool post-punk scene's inner circle. That scene revolved around the seminal Eric's Club, on Matthew Street, which opened in 1976. Just opposite the by-then-defunct Cavern Club, Eric's featured the first northern performances of the Sex Pistols and the Damned and later would host the first shows by the Bunnymen and the Teardrops, in 1978, as well as regular performances by Joy Division, the Fall, XTC, the Cure, OMD, the Buzzcocks b a who's who of the period. Yorkie walked me by where Eric's used to be, and then to the site of the old Probe Records, the still-hipper-than-thou music shop of Liverpool, around the corner from the spot where the La's rehearsed, and finally, the next day, to his mother's basement, where the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes rehearsed their first songs. ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://www.villiersterrace.com * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * ====================================================================== - --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger NEW - crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://www.villiersterrace.com * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * ====================================================================== ------------------------------ End of seven-seas-digest V4 #467 ********************************