The Alternative Number Ones: Ian McCulloch’s “Proud To Fall”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

There is no Echo in Echo & The Bunnymen, just as there is no Hootie in Hootie & The Blowfish. Both band names are pure distilled nonsense. As the years have gone on, though, a whole lot of people still see Darius Rucker and think "Hootie." Ian McCulloch has never had that problem. When McCulloch split from his iconic mope-rock band and went solo in 1989, nobody called him Echo, even though he continued to make records that sounded a whole hell of a lot like the Bunnymen. This tactic didn't work for long, but it worked well enough to land the solo McCulloch in this column. For one month, at the very tail-end of the '80s, we gave ourselves to him.

Like his contemporary and rival Julian Cope, a guy who's already appeared in this column, Ian McCulloch is a product of a Liverpool post-punk scene that seemed to forcefully reject all traces of Beatles influence. McCulloch is way more successful and famous than Julian Cope -- better songwriter, too -- but their careers are forever interlinked, partly because they started out together. For a very brief moment in 1977, McCulloch and Cope, along with future Wah! founder Pete Wylie, were in a teenage band called Crucial Three together. Here's how McCulloch describes Crucial Three in a book excerpt that Stereogum ran in 2014:

It lasted for about an hour. We played one horrible song in my mum’s front room. Julian had a silver bass. He’d painted graffiti on it, like “I Am a Punk” or “Get Punkitude.” He was a dickhead extraordinaire. Wylie played some kind of Les Paul the color of fudge. I stood there with a bog roll and a sponge on my head mumbling some kind of crap. It was an hour of abject bollocks. The other two still believe that we toured.

After the quick and unceremonious end of Crucial Three, McCulloch started another group called A Shallow Madness; his bandmates would later join Julian Cope to form the Teardrop Explodes. McCulloch on that band: "I’d have eaten fucking rat rather than rehearse with them. They were rubbish." This is a good place to point out, if you haven't already noticed, that Ian McCulloch is part of a long tradition of ferociously egotistical and extremely funny British rock frontmen. The man is an absolute quote-machine. In that same book excerpt -- from Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein’s Mad World: An Oral History Of New Wave Artists And Songs That Defined The 1980s -- McCulloch refers to his onetime contemporary Bono as "a gibbering, leprechaunish twat." I like this guy.

After those two bands quickly died out, McCulloch met guitarist Will Sergeant, and they formed the uneasy bond that would become Echo & The Bunnymen. They recruited bassist Les Pattinson and played their first show in 1978, opening for the Teardrop Explodes. Rumor has it that "Echo" was actually the name of the drum machine that they used for their early shows, though the band has always denied it. Before long, they linked up with Pete de Freitas, a drummer who played a lot like a drum machine.

Echo & The Bunnymen played around Liverpool for a while, and future KLF founder Bill Drummond discovered them and became their manager, just as he did for the Teardrop Explodes. Drummond was smart. The Bunnymen had off-the-charts potential. Ian McCulloch, with his floofy hair and enormous lips, looked like a total star, and he sang in a cool-as-hell baritone bray that sounded like a crossbred fusion of David Bowie and Jim Morrison. Sergeant drowned his guitar in reverb, making for a grandly swoopy and majestic atmosphere. The rhythm section played with urgent precision. Drummond released the Bunnymen's debut single "The Pictures On My Wall" on his Zoo Records label in 1979, and he got the band a deal with the Warner imprint Korova.

In 1980, the Bunnymen released their debut album Crocodiles. It's a great fucking record -- grand and cryptic and dramatic and often vicious. From Crocodiles on, I'd put Echo & The Bunnymen right alongside the Cure and Siouxsie & The Banshees on the top tier of theatrically swoony British rock bands. The Bunnymen arrived fully formed; it's wild to me that a band that young was able to come up with "Do It Clean" and "Rescue." After that, the Bunnymen made another four albums that sounded a whole lot like Crocodiles, and you won't catch me complaining about that. There are much worse ways to spend your day than to do the full Bunnymen deep-dive and play all five albums straight through.

Crocodiles wasn't a huge UK success, and neither was the 1981 follow-up Heaven Up Here. Some of the singles from those records charted in the UK, with "Crocodiles" scraping the bottom of the top 40, but they weren't exactly hits. The Bunnymen played their first American shows in 1981, but they were total nonentities over here. In the US, the Bunnymen never escaped cult status. In the UK, though, the band started to take off with the release of their 1983 album Porcupine. The absolutely badass single "The Cutter" went top-10 over there. Another top-20 UK hit, "Never Stop," did well on American college radio, though it didn't cross over to the Hot 100.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y2ItNtCMgqc&ab_channel=EdgarAldrett

Predictably enough, the Bunnymen started to come apart as they found more success. When 1984's Ocean Rain came out, McCullough told anyone who would listen that it was "the greatest album ever made." It's not, but it's really fucking good. "The Killing Moon," another UK top-10 hit, is an absolute towering masterpiece of a song. It's still the biggest Bunnymen track, and it'll live forever on movie soundtracks. "Bring On The Dancing Horses," recorded for a best-of compilation, popped up on the Pretty In Pink soundtrack and did well on American college radio. The Bunnymen weren't willing to follow U2 and the Police's playbook; they didn't want to spend months at a time touring the US. At home, though, the Bunnymen were big enough to headline Glastonbury in 1985.

That was Echo & The Bunnymen's peak, and once they slipped, they didn't last much longer. The band's 1987 self-titled album wasn't quite as good as Ocean Rain, though the single "Lips Like Sugar" is a total banger. (For whatever reason, the programmers at WHFS in DC loved that one. I heard "Lips Like Sugar" on the radio all the time well into the '90s, and I probably thought it was a lot newer than it was.) Still, the Bunnymen's days were numbered. Drummer Pete de Freitas, dealing with some serious addiction issues, quit and then rejoined the band. The Bunnymen contributed a not-that-great cover of the Doors' "People Are Strange," with actual Door Ray Manzarek on keyboards, to the Lost Boys soundtrack, and they toured America with New Order, a band who will eventually show up in this column. In 1988, Ian McCollough decided that he'd had enough, and he quit the Bunnymen.

As he got to work on his debut album Candleland, Ian McCulloch suffered a pair of losses. First, his father died while he was finishing up the Bunnymen's final Japanese tour. Then, shortly after he left the band, Pete de Freitas died in a motorcycle crash at the age of 27. McCulloch was also pissed off that his ex-bandmates decided to keep going without him. They tried to record an album with the B-52's' Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, which would've been interesting. When that didn't happen, they found replacement singer Noel Burke and released the 1990 album Reverberation. (The single "Enlighten Me" peaked at #8 on the Modern Rock charts. It's a 7.) McCulloch called them Echo And The Bogusmen, which is pretty good.

Ian McCulloch's main collaborator for his solo debut Candleland was Ray Shulman, one of the original members of the '70s prog band Gentle Giant. Gentle Giant broke up in 1980, and by the end of the decade, Shulman was producing for alt-rock bands like the Sugarcubes and the Sundays, both of whom will eventually appear in this column. Shulman, who died earlier this year, was a gifted multi-instrumentalist. He played bass and keyboards on Candleland, while McCulloch played his own guitars. Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser sang backup on the title track, while the Cure's Boris Williams played drums on a couple of songs, including the single "Proud To Fall."

I have no real idea what McCulloch is talking about on "Proud To Fall." Come to think of it, I never know what Ian McCulloch is talking about. His lyrics are always perfectly opaque -- weighty enough to suggest some actual meaning but cryptic enough that I never really worry about what that meaning might be. At least for me, Echo & The Bunnymen were always more of an atmosphere thing. I love hearing McCulloch's baritone drone-sigh, and the actual words that he sings have never much concerned me. But I'll take a stab at it here.

On "Proud To Fall," McCulloch seems to address a romantic relationship that's all fucked up. This other person is a total mystery to him: "Here you come again, acting like a savior/ There you go again, talking like a stranger." Maybe it's all about to fall apart. Even if it ends, though, McCulloch is happy that it happened at all: "From start to finish, I was proud to fall/ And I fell deep within it, I got lost inside it all." Now that I think about it, he could even be singing about his old band, though I doubt he'd ever admit it.

"Proud To Fall" is pretty in the same way that a lot of Echo & The Bunnymen songs are pretty. Ian McCulloch can't summon the majesty of Will Sergeant's guitar tone, but he manages a pretty decent facsimile -- acoustic strumming under twinkly, effects-heavy leads. His voice is breathy and narcotically content. Ray Shulman surrounds that voice with swooshing effects, which suit him nicely. The song has very little of the operatic force that the Bunnymen brought to something like "The Killing Moon" or "Seven Seas," but the track has a graceful, reassuring twinkle working for it. I'm pretty sure I heard "Proud To Fall" on the radio a few times, and I probably thought it was Echo & The Bunnymen. (I might've also thought that it was the Psychedelic Furs. I used to get those two bands confused all the time, even though I generally think that the Bunnymen are a whole lot better.)

Ian McCulloch released the "Proud To Fall" single with a cool cover of Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" as the B-side. The Candleland album did pretty well on the UK charts but barely scraped the Billboard 200. McCulloch's debut sold better than the album that Echo & The Bunnymen recorded without him, anyway. He followed "Proud To Fall" with the vaguely New Order-esque "Faith And Healing," which peaked at #10 on the Modern Rock charts. (It's a 6.)

In 1992, Ian McColloch released Mysterio, his second solo album. He still had enough juice to score a couple of hits on the Modern Rock charts. "Honeydrip" peaked at #6. It's a 6. McCulloch's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Lover Lover Lover" peaked at #9. It's a 5. But Mysterio didn't sell as well as Candleland, and McCulloch's solo run went cold.

"Proud To Fall" remains Ian McCulloch's most-streamed solo song, but it's still well under a million Spotify streams. (For perspective, "The Killing Moon," the Bunnymen's biggest Spotify hit, has more than 162 million plays.) I'd be shocked to encounter "Proud To Fall" in the wild today. If McCulloch's solo career is remembered at all, it's probably as a footnote in the Echo & The Bunnymen story. After a couple of years, that story picked up again. In 1994, McCulloch and Will Sergeant buried the hatchet, and they started a new band called Electrafixion. After one not-terribly-consequential Electrafixion album, McCulloch and Sergeant brought bassist Les Pattinson back into the fold, and Echo & The Bunnymen were a band once again.

Echo & The Bunnymen released their reunion album Evergreen in 1997. Lead single "Nothing Lasts Forever" was actually a top-10 UK hit, but it didn't do anything in the US. Another single, "I Want To Be There (When You Come)," made it to #26 on the Modern Rock chart, and the Bunnymen haven't been back on that chart since. The band has released six more albums, which haven't had anything like the impact of their classic '80s material. Ian McCulloch has released a couple more solo albums, too; his most recent was the crowd-funded 2012 LP Pro Patria Mori. The Bunnymen are still active, but they're mostly a nostalgia act now. Earlier this year, they toured the UK, playing Ocean Rain in full with orchestral backing. I bet that was fire.

When Ian McCulloch scored his sole Billboard Modern Rock chart-topper, he was coasting on the fumes of a great band that ended just as the chart was coming into being. "Proud To Fall" is a pretty good song, but the best thing about it is that it sounds a lot like his old band. That's fine. Echo & The Bunnymen had a hell of a run, and when you have a run like that, you should be able to coast on it for the rest of your life. I doubt I'll ever do the deep-dive on the latter-day Bunnymen albums; the few post-reunion tracks that I've heard are just OK. That's fine, too. Echo & The Bunnymen made "The Killing Moon" and "Do It Clean" and "The Cutter" and "Bring On The Dancing Horses." They wrote their name on the sun. Anything after that, including a random #1 Modern Rock hit, is just gravy.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BEATS: "Proud To Fall" has left no cultural footprint that I can detect, so let's look elsewhere in Ian McCulloch's career. Here's "The Killing Moon" soundtracking the hypnotic opening scene from 2001's Donnie Darko, a movie that I have seen so many times:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=76IkuYLoJkE&ab_channel=PabloFdezAlonso

THE 10S: The Smithereens' "A Girl Like You," an almighty power-pop crunch-beast that was rejected from the Say Anything soundtrack, peaked at #3 behind "Proud To Fall." I'll do anything I have to do just to convince you that it's a 10.