After reading the first two volumes of Will Sergeant's memoirs, and finally--for all intents and purposes--completing the EATB discography within the last few years, there was no way I was NOT getting tickets for this tour. It doesn't matter to me that, at this point, it's only Ian McCulloch and Will and they haven't released an album of new material since 2014 (the album Meteorites).
The only time I've seen EATB was summer 2017 at Pine Knob when they co-headlined with Violent Femmes. (I wrote a little bit about that show in this blog). Though it seemed most in the crowd that night were there for Violent Femmes, I was definitely there primarily for Echo.
Every so often, the subject of the now legendary 1987 Echo/Gene Loves Jezebel/New Order tour is mentioned. A Rockin' the Suburbs friend brought it up today and noted that he will also be seeing Echo on this 2024 tour, his first time since seeing them in '87. I regret not seeing EATB on that '87 tour. I had a chance to go. My old college friend Bill poked and prodded me to attend and now I haven't a clue as to why I didn't. Maybe I was worried about saving money for school? Lord knows I could have benefitted from getting the hell out of Caro for one night. Maybe I was worried about how I'd get to Pine Knob, as I didn't have the most reliable transportation in the world. I'm pretty sure I still had my grandma's hand-me-down 1972 Chevy Nova that was prone to stall at every stop sign and stop light until it was properly warmed up, which took about a half-hour. I doubt my parents would have been keen to let me borrow one of their cars. So I missed that show and didn't see Echo or New Order in their primes. (As for Gene Loves Jezebel, they are a band that has been forgotten by time, and I was never into them anyway).
Echo & the Bunnymen released their self-titled "grey album" in summer '87, had a moderate MTV hit with "Lips Like Sugar" --the song that had all the cool kids screaming "sell out!" at the top of their lungs, in the days when "selling out" was the biggest crime any underground musician could be accused of committing. Most prominently, EATB had their cover of the Doors" "People Are Strange" on the Lost Boys soundtrack. They seemed to be keeping pace with U2 as the next big thing from Britain/Ireland--and then Echo's drummer Pete de Freitas died a few years later in a tragic motorcycle crash (June 14, 1989) and the band's fortunes took a serious hit.
After Pete died, Ian "Mac" McCulloch went solo, Will tried to soldier on with a new singer (with mixed results), and I lost interest in both Echo and Mac's solo career. It took about a decade-and-a-half for me to go back and re-discover the band as well as all the music they'd made that I ignored and missed.
So here we are, almost four decades after I discovered the band, and I'm looking forward to seeing them--for only the second time--live in concert.
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