“There’s nothing really original in Liverpool. There’s not another Liverpool sound or anything. There will be soon, because there is definitely a lot of enthusiasm around, but it’s just at the moment everyone seems to be so far behind London.”
- Member of The Yachts,
Melody Maker, October 1977
“’I like mountaineering,’ said Bill, ‘with a hit record I could fund an expedition.’”
- New Musical Express, 1978
“When Mac (of the Bunnymen) walks down the street you know he is a star. That’s another thing. The Zoo doesn’t mind stars. As long as they are real stars.”
- Bill Drummond letter to Dave
McCullough, Sounds journalist,
August 1979
“…and something Bill Drummond said when the Teardrops first started set him off laughing aloud, ‘Don’t ever take acid Copey,’ Drummond had said, ‘You’re quite like that in any case and it would be just horrible!’”
- Julian Cope, Melody Maker,
May 1984
In an interview in 1986, Julian Cope revealed that he was writing a book about the early days of the Liverpool music scene. This Cope manuscript evolved into Head-On, a no holds barred classic published in 1994 to rave reviews and detailing not only the rise and disassembly of The Teardrop Explodes but, amongst other things, their rivalry with Echo And The Bunnymen.
As you might imagine, Cope was centre stage at all times - it was his book, after all - but what made Head-On so compulsive was the great supporting cast of characters. The Teardrop Explodes’ keyboard player David Balfe, for example, fulfilled a kind of Iago role to the cotton-sock wearing Othello, and spent most of the time going through a revolving door as he fell in and out of Cope’s affections. Another main protagonist in the book was Bill Drummond, who first stepped onto the stage of the Liverpool music scene after seeing The Clash perform at the famed Eric’s club in Mathew Street on 5th May 1977.
A key factor behind the formation of what became Big In Japan was a Liverpool band called Deaf School, who had signed to Warner Brothers and released their debut album 2nd Honeymoon in 1976, and were to follow it up with Don’t Stop The World in 1977. Deaf School was an art school band shipwrecked by the emergence of punk rock, but had built up a strong following in Liverpool. “The reason Big In Japan started,” states Clive Langer (aka Cliff Hanger), Deaf School’s guitarist, “was because they were Deaf School’s road crew. We’d gone to America and had left all of our equipment in Liverpool, so Phil Allen and Kevin Ward - who used to do our lights - they decided to start a band.” Although Drummond was not a roadie, he was a friend and keen to get involved, and along with the Spitfire Boys, Big In Japan were one of the first punk bands in the Liverpool area.
The original line-up was a trio of Kevin Ward (bass/vocals), Phil Allen (drums) and Bill Drummond on guitar, and Big In Japan made their debut in May 1977 at a teacher training college called Bretton Hall in Wakefield, where they supported The Yachts, another Liverpool band sailing in waters that were to be marked on the nautical map as powerpop. Big In Japan played three songs they‘d written the day before. “We also tried to do Louie Louie,” Ward told a Melody Maker journalist in October 1977, “I knew the bassline and we thought that was enough. That was stupid. The guitarist was a total nutcase on stage. He’s like Captain Sensible on guitar – just goes totally out of control. No one took it seriously, which was good.” With no more material available, they also played a song called Big In Japan a second time. The nutcase on guitar – Drummond – later stated, “We went down a storm and realised we could get away with it.”
The band soon recruited Jayne Casey to help out on vocals, becoming a four-piece before Ian Broudie became the fifth member, joining the line-up to add another guitar. At twenty-four years old, Drummond, whose CV already included a stint as a trawler fisherman, an art student and a set designer, was the elder statesman, making sure the band worked hard in the rehearsal room and taking care of important matters such as booking and driving the vans used to transport the band to gigs. When he returned from touring America with Deaf School, Langer went to see Big In Japan and, “I was quite excited by what they were doing, as it was a bit more relevant for that period than what Deaf School had become. So, when the opportunities arose, I would jump on stage with them.” Langer was never officially a member of Big In Japan, “I was more like a friend, as I lived in the same flat as Kevin and would see them all the time, and if Deaf School weren’t working I would hang around with them.”
Langer saw Big In Japan many times during these early days and recalls that, “right at the beginning they were quite shambolic. It depends on what period you’re talking about, I think. The Big In Japan I knew was Stage One, with Phil on drums and Kevin as the lead singer really, and Jayne was, I think, doing bits and pieces. Bill was there, and Ian as far as I can remember. They were good but a bit shambolic. Bill was always good live because he was one hundred and ten percent all thrown in. They couldn’t play very well initially, but then they got better and better quite quickly. It was those punk days when anyone could do it, and if you’re not that good it doesn’t matter.”
Big In Japan was soon a fixture at Eric’s as a support act, and then as a headliner, and built up a small but dedicated following inspired by their music, look and set list. “We were known as the Liverpool punk band,” Drummond told Mark Cooper for his book Liverpool Explodes! in 1982, “but we weren’t really punk, we were show band punk. We didn’t have the idealism that the younger people had. I wanted to have hit singles.” Whether or not songs like Suicide A Go Go, Taxi and Big In Japan were potential hit singles wasn’t put to the test with a major label, although Melody Maker were prescient in describing the band as a, “conceptual art attack” rather than as a punk or new wave band.
True to the emerging DIY spirit of the time, the first time Big In Japan appeared on plastic was on the first single that Eric’s issued on its own eponymous label in November 1977. By this time Roger Eagle, who ran the club, was also their manager, and for economic purposes the 7”, called Religion Brutality And A Dance Beat and featuring the track Big In Japan, was split with The Yachts, who contributed Do The Chud under another name – The Chuddie Nuddies – as they’d just issued their debut single, Suffice To Say, on the Stiff label.
Amazingly, Drummond didn’t play on Big In Japan as he was on holiday in Brittany in August when the band went into the studio, and Clive Langer was drafted in to play his parts. “When I got back and heard about this, and that it was going to be our first single, I was…. I was going to say ‘devastated’ but that would be too strong a word,” Drummond later wrote in 2006, “but disappointed isn’t the right one either.” He must have been upset - he was a founder member of the band, and for Eagle to record the song without him would have been frustrating. As for being drafted in at short notice, Clive Langer recalls, “It was, ‘Bill can’t make it - do you want to play?’ OK… (sings) Big in Japan! Big in Japan! - It was not very hard to learn. Bill wasn’t there, so I stepped in.” As for Drummond, Langer remembers, “He didn’t seem to be bothered really. We didn’t fall out about it. I would not have done it if he wouldn’t have been OK about it.”
The single was reviewed in the music press, with Ian Birch in the Melody Maker stating, “It’s conceptual art school mayhem, with vocalist Jane howling out ‘Big In Japan’ and winding up in some ludicrous chopstick percussion.” As for the emerging fanzines, one named Chainsaw stated that, “The Chuddy Nuddies is the good one. It’s a bit Stranglers-ish - lots of organ, not very much guitar. As for Big In Japan… well the tune is alright but the vocals… it’s so high pitched squeaky and shrill it sounds like someone’s killing a vicar. It’s so bad I’m getting to like it.”
A copy of the split single was actually sent to John Peel by Noddy Knowler, who’d first met Peel in the summer of 1975 when the Radio One DJ was booked to play a gig at Liverpool University’s Carnatic Halls of Residence in Mossley Hill. Knowler, along with his partner David Kay, was a DJ himself with the Radio Doom Mobile Good Guys Disco, and was also booked to play that date, arranging in the process for Peel to use their equipment to play his records. After the gig, a grateful Peel told Knowler that if he was ever down in London he should pop into the BBC and sit in the studio when he was broadcasting his show, which was, at that time, called Top Gear. Knowler, along with his girlfriend, later took up this invitation, and also went out to dinner with Peel, “and someone from Virgin records who might or not have been Richard Branson, but I can’t remember.” With regards to the Eric’s single, Knowler was used as a go-between and wrote to Peel, “Please find enclosed a copy of the first release on the Eric’s label. Double A side by all accounts. Prefer the BIG IN JAPAN side myself.”
Musically, Drummond was right in describing Big In Japan as a punk show band - a track like Cindy And The Barbie Dolls worked well with Casey’s strong theatrical presentation, whereas SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men) drew inspiration from the assassination attempt on artist Andy Warhol. “Well, that’s been dropped from the set now,” Drummond told a fanzine writer some time in 1978, “We’re doing about ten new songs and there wasn’t really room for it.” As one of the songwriters, Drummond also fielded a question about why Big In Japan songs were observational narratives rather than dealing in subjects like boredom, oppression, unemployment and teenage angst, which were becoming the stock in trade of many punk and new wave bands. “I don’t know. It’s never occurred to me when I’ve been writing songs. I mean, do I have to mention Liverpool Football Club to convince you that we prefer our heritage to a televised culture?”
One young, hardcore Big In Japan fan was David ‘Yorkie’ Palmer (later of Space), who saw the band at Eric’s on a number of occasions. “I can never express to people how great Big In Japan were,” he told me, “Jayne won’t have it, Ian (Broudie) won’t have it, Bill won’t have it. It was just their band to them, but to me, as a young kid and as a fan, it was astonishing, just the subjects of their songs. I was into Warhol and Burroughs and they covered both of them. I’d found a band that liked the same things that I liked and wrote songs about it.”
Palmer not only saw Big In Japan at Eric’s but also travelled to a number of gigs outside the Liverpool area, including one in Stockport. Here he saw how Casey dealt with a crowd, “It was packed in there, and there was some lad at the front giving it “Get your tits out!” to Jayne (who had marvelous tits), but I just remember she grabbed hold of this lad’s hair and she was doing Cindy And The Barbie Dolls and singing “Oh Oh Oh Cindy” and swinging his head around, the poor fellah. It must have really hurt, but she just locked onto him for the rest of the song. That’s a nice memory - you just did not fuck with Jayne.”
It was Palmer who later coined the famous description of Big In Japan as a “supergroup in reverse,” as many of them went on to greater things. But at that time they were struggling to get a contract and win fans outside their hardcore support. “There were things like the Probe Records petition to get them to split up,” laughs Palmer today. “People thought they were just a fucking joke. But, being Big In Japan and being Bill, the first people to sign the petition were them.”
This petition was instigated by a short-lived band called The Nova Mob, whose membership included two young lads called Pete Wylie and Julian Cope. “We were dedicated to making Big In Japan split up,” Cope later told Mark Cooper in 1982, “We wanted to get a petition of fourteen hundred filled, and then they’d have to split up. Drummond insisted on fourteen thousand, so we said, OK. We had all these petitions up in Probe Records and places, but a lot of people thought it would be undiplomatic to sign. Big In Japan all signed it - with gusto! Phil Allen signed it because the rest of them had just kicked him out of the band. We only got about seven signatures!”
Although there was talk of a month of gigs in London, the recording of demos and a possible deal with Jet Records that eventually fell through, this didn’t translate into a recording contract with an established record company. By 1978 there had also been line-up changes, with Budgie (Peter Clarke) joining on drums, and when new bass player Holly Johnson missed a week of rehearsals he was replaced by Dave Balfe, who’d already been through the ranks of a few bands. But, by the summer of 1978 Big In Japan were approaching the end of the road.
After the Stockport gig, having missed the last train back to Liverpool, Palmer was given a lift by the band and recalls one of them asking Budgie, “’How can you join The Slits? You’ve got a penis.’ Budgie is sitting there looking really dejected because everyone was having a go, and in hindsight now I know that everyone was having a go because they were on the verge of calling it a day. He was going to play with The Slits and they thought, ‘You won’t get the job, you’re not good enough.’ And then he did. Then he joined the Banshees and is one of the best drummers to come from that era.”
Big In Japan split up after their last gig at Eric’s on 26th August 1978, and Casey was quick to form Pink Military Stands Alone. But after a live EP they took their time in making their next musical statement. “In the last year we’ve been very quiet and stayed out of things, but it’s been a planned things really,” Casey told the New Musical Express in 1980, “we didn’t want to play much - we weren’t ready for it, we were working towards something. Now, we’re ready to make a brilliant LP.”
As for Bill Drummond, he planned to set up a record label called Bill’s Records, specifically to issue a single by Big In Japan. He struck a deal with Noddy Knowler, who, in April 1978, had moved from Radio Doom to run a two-track studio that was part of the Merseyside Visual Communications Unit (MVCU), based upstairs at 90-92 Whitechapel in Liverpool. The MVCU traded under the name Open Eye, and also ran a gallery and a cafe. Knowler had been brought in to record local bands, had already upgraded the studio from two to four tracks and, as time progressed, began producing a number of bands from Liverpool and the surrounding area, including Big In Japan.
According to Knowler, “When I met Bill Drummond they were in the middle of splitting up,” but this meeting led to his helming a number of tracks in the MVCU studio to go on the proposed EP. “It was funny because it was almost a posthumous recording,” Knowler recalls today. He remembers laying down three tracks - Cindy And The Barbie Dolls, Nothing Special and Match Of The Day – and, as for how things went, “It was a four track studio, so we recorded the backing track – the drums, the bass and guitar – as a stereo pair then we overdubbed the vocals on the third track and the lead guitar on the fourth track. That was standard procedure.”
With the band splitting up after the recording and a final gig at Eric’s, the now former Big In Japan bass player David Balfe asked Drummond if he could get involved with the label; “Drummond was six years older than me and he’d done a lot,” Balfe stated a couple of years later, “and there was me, this weird kid who’d come over from the fields a month before.” But Drummond agreed, and the name Bill’s Records was discarded before the eventual name for this new independent label was settled on - Zoo Records. According to Knowler, however, the first single was basically an MVCU record, “because we paid for everything. We recorded the A-side – the B-side tracks they already had in the can so their contribution was those - the two A-side tracks and all the costs were MVCU,” As for the label name, “Bill had thought of the name Zoo and I went along with it.”
In November 1978, Zoo issued the resulting four track Big In Japan EP, From Y To Z And Never Again. The tracks - Nothing Special, Cindy And The Barbie Dolls, Suicide A Go Go and Taxi - were recorded between 1977 and 1978 and featured the various line-ups of the band, from the Y-Z of their career. The arresting, fold-out sleeve clearly thanked the MVCU, “for putting up the money to make this record,” and, musically, it was an excellent, short sharp overview of the band, and a fitting vinyl tombstone.
When it came to John Peel, Knowler now took Bill Drummond down to London with him to personally hand-deliver a copy. “That was my second visit to John, and by then his show was on in the evening – ten o’clock. He said it looked very good, but he couldn’t play it until he’d reviewed it.” What Peel meant by this was to actually play the record and establish the exact timings of the tracks and make sure there was no swearing on it - this was, after all, the BBC. Knowler and Drummond actually sat in the studio as Peel was broadcasting his show, and Knowler remembers Peel spinning around on his chair to say something to them and knocking the arm of the turntable, so that the record being broadcast actually jumped live on air.
Ironically, when Peel did listen to the Big In Japan EP the record must have jumped on one or more of the tracks as he had to request another copy due to a faulty pressing. “There isn’t really any need to pay for it, since it’s merely a replacement,” replied Knowler - at this time, there was no Zoo postal address, only the MVCU’s on the letterhead. Peel must have commented that he found Cindy And The Barbie Dolls, with Casey’s sped up helium vocals acting as a strange counterpoint to Ian Broudie’s singing, not to his taste, as Knowler - who had produced the track at MVCU in August 1978 - was quick to defend it:
“You should give Cindy And The Barbie Dolls another listen - it really is the best track on the EP! I know the ‘pinky and perky’ vocals are a bit off-putting at first, but after a couple of listens they just add to the absurdity of the whole thing. I feel that the overall effect follows in the true traditions of The Bonzos and The Mothers! English comedy music at its best! (I know that The Mothers isn’t English comedy music but I feel that Cindy is very much a cross between The Bonzos and Zappa’s Mothers as Ruben & the Jets).”
Crucially, the EP received positive reviews; “Another independent worthy of a basinful of anyone’s airwaves. Actually, it’s mainly the great Taxi track that makes the whole thing value for money, particularly Jayne’s vocals and the climax after five minutes, fading out on a drum sound as full as a bull’s bum,” wrote Danny Baker in the New Musical Express, whilst Andy Courtney at Sounds declared it, “Excellent material carelessly handled in the studios, but there are redemptions. Nothing Special is outstanding: a self-effacing someday superstar settles for pop defeat, and possibly a goatskin hankie from Jackie O’s wardrobe.”
Of course, whilst there was a strong market for the From Y To Z And Never Again EP in Liverpool, Drummond later related how, as there was no independent national distribution network at the time, to shift units on the back of good reviews like this they drove to record shops around the county in David Balfe’s father’s car. Knowler recalls that, when he took Drummond down to Peel to hand him a copy of the EP, they’d also gone around trying to get places like Rough Trade to take copies at the same time.
The positive reaction to the EP in the music press led to a reunion of sorts, via the offer of a Peel session. Whether Peel or his producer John Waters contacted Drummond, Knowler, MVCU, Zoo or somebody else in the band is unknown, but on 12th February 1979 a line-up of Jayne Casey, Holly Johnson, Ian Broudie and Budgie laid down three tracks - Suicide High Life, Goodbye and Don’t Bomb China Now - which were broadcast on 6th March 1979. Notable by his absence was Bill Drummond, who bookended his Big In Japan career by not taking part in their last recording session. Maybe he was spending a day at the Zoo with David Balfe.
The posthumous EP sold around six thousand copies, and at this stage Knowler recalls that Drummond and Balfe strolled off with the label, which really could have been the genesis of the MVCU’s own imprint. “We should have registered the name really, but Colin Wilkinson who was in charge of MVCU wasn’t bothered. He said to me, ‘What’s in a name? It’s what’s in a group that counts.’” Subsequently, The MVCU established their own Open Eye label, whose first release was Street To Street - A Liverpool Compilation, an album which not only featured the Knowler-produced Big In Japan track Match Of The Day but had sleevenotes penned by John Peel. He described the track as, “a little gem that reasserts the strength of the twangy guitar in a perverse little theme that would have made John Barry spit with impotent rage fifteen years ago.”
With regards to Zoo, Drummond later stated that he wanted the second single to feature Pete Burns, who worked at Probe Records, displayed a unique dress sense and was one of the dominant personalities on the small Liverpool scene. He’d already been in a short lived band - The Mystery Girls - with Julian Cope and Pete Wylie, and was in the process of forming a band called Nightmares In Wax, but the plan didn’t bear fruit. Instead, Zoo’s second single was Those Naughty Lumps’ Iggy Pop’s Jacket, released in February 1979. By this time, Drummond and Balfe’s car journeys had forged a partnership with emerging independent distributors like Rough Trade, Lightning and Bonaparte, who handled a single that was either fully or partially funded by the band.
Crucially, Drummond wrote to John Peel, not only to promote this second single in the Zoo catalogue but also the third by a new band called The Teardrop Explodes, whose recording and pressing he’d financed with a bank loan. “Both bands are from Liverpool,” he wrote, “Those Naughty Lumps have been about for over a year, delighting many with their shambolic sets. The Teardrop Explodes have only been together since just before Christmas and are everybody’s favourite not so serious, serious band around here. They are doing a spot for Granada TV this Thursday night. If you are interested I can send you info and tapes of both bands. Thanks.” The TV appearance in question was on What’s On, presented by Tony Wilson, where the band performed the B-side of that third Zoo single, Camera Camera.
The Teardrop Explodes emerged out of a group of young men who gravitated towards Eric’s, had seen bands like The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned and began turning threats of forming their own bands into reality. As well as conversations in Eric’s, on the top of the buses that went in and out of the city centre and over cups of tea at the Armadillo Tea Rooms, one of the most important factors in the emergence of the Teardrops was a basement in the Fairfield area of Liverpool. So, let’s rewind the tape a little.
“There was this lad I saw walking up and down the road with a bass guitar and he looked cool and I was into punk and that,” recalls David Palmer, “I remember the first time I plucked up the courage to shout across the road, ‘Are you going to see The Adverts at the Malford Hall tonight?’ He said, ‘Oh, no’ - very polite in fact - and walked over towards me and said, ‘I’m going to see Pere Ubu at Eric’s.’ I’d not heard of Eric’s before, and I’d never heard of Pere Ubu. After subsequent conversations he lent me Pere Ubu records - they were his favourite band - on the original labels, and on pain of death if I scratched them or whatever. We started talking and he came around a couple of times.”
This meeting with Julian Cope was before Palmer had been to Eric’s and seen Big In Japan, but was at a time when Cope was beginning to fold and unfold a number of bands together and, eventually, turning to the practicalities of actually making music. “He started this band called The Shallow Madness and asked if they could rehearse in our cellar,” recalls Palmer. “I said, ‘I’ll ask my mum,’ and she said, ‘No.’ I must have mentioned it a few times and he asked a few times and for some reason she relented. She said, ‘We’ll try it.’ We had to run a lead down from upstairs before we got the electricity sorted, then they started rehearsing there as The Shallow Madness.”
The Shallow Madness was the last stop on a list of many bands Cope journeyed through to reach his final destination with The Teardrop Explodes. In fact, he broke up The Shallow Madness one morning at the Armadillo Tea Rooms and formed the Teardrop Explodes the same afternoon with the same line-up - Paul Simpson on keyboards and Mick Finker on guitar - but with Gary Dwyer replacing Dave Pickett on drums. Cope played bass and sang. Palmer: “From then on it was my mum putting up with this band making a racket downstairs, because there was no soundproofing until, to make it easier for her, we brought lots of boxes home and did the room out as best we could and put up heavy curtains and things like that. Then Julian said, ‘We’ve got some friends who have got a band, could they rehearse here as well? They haven’t got a drummer, they’ve got a drum machine.’ That’s how the Bunnymen ended up rehearsing here. So, the Teardrops would rehearse two to three times a week and the Bunnymen would rehearse two to three times a week, but they would rehearse of an evening because they were quieter.”
Ian McCullough had been part of the original Shallow Madness, but clashes with Cope saw him leave to play guitar and sing in this new band. Over time this arrangement worked well for both bands, and Gladys Palmer, who charged them a small fee for the use of her cellar, managed to put up with the noise. This did, on occasion, lead to problems with the neighbors, and even visits from the local constabulary. “We’d get that knock on the door, ‘Yes officer?’” recalls Palmer, “I’d have to shout down to the Bunnymen, ‘Could you put the keyboard on?’ I had to pretend to be the keyboard player just so I could say, ‘I am in this band,’ that we were trying to do something rather than saying, ‘Well, we let this band play here.’ Palmer watched both bands rehearse and get tighter and tighter as musical units.
The Teardrop Explodes took their music out of Gladys Palmer’s basement and onto a stage for the first time on 15th November 1978, when they played at Eric’s with support from those other denizens of the cellar, Echo And The Bunnymen, who comprised of Ian McCullough (vocals/guitar), Will Sergeant (guitar), Les Peterson (bass) and Echo the drum machine. Bill Drummond and David Balfe saw them and were quick to ask the Teardrops to record. “We had a single out after two gigs,” Cope later Dave McCullough of Sounds in August 1979, “That’s what Zoo are all about.”
This was indeed what Zoo was all about, and after seeing the band rehearse in the Palmer’s cellar Drummond took the Teardrops into MVCU on 1st December 1978 to record their first EP, with himself and Balfe acting as producers and engineers. Three tracks ended up on the record - Sleeping Gas, Camera Camera and Kirkby Workers Dream Fades - and unlike the Big In Japan and the Those Naughty Lumps records, which had been housed in fold-out unglued sleeves, the Teardrops’ 7” came in a traditional picture sleeve, although the artwork for the front was on the rear of the sleeve and the artwork for the rear was on the front. Whether this was the intention of Zoo and the band remains unclear. Was it a printing error? Whatever the case, The Teardrop Explodes were on their way.
One of the most arresting scenes in Head-On sees Cope walking into the one room Zoo Records office in the Chicago building in Liverpool’s Whitechapel area, where Drummond was surrounded by army surplus camouflage scrim netting. Cope had been assiduously visiting and shopping at various army surplus stores to dress himself, and even stated in an early interview with the Melody Maker that, “we’re heavily into army gear, I’ve got seventeen pairs of army pants all hanging up, and we’ve even got a jeep,” so he probably thought the netting was for The Teardrop Explodes. But Drummond, somewhat sheepishly, admitted it was for Echo And The Bunnymen, who were about to go out on their first headlining UK tour. Cope was so upset that he ran upstairs and cried. Drummond stated in an interview in 1981 that it was intended for the Bunnymen, telling the Melody Maker, “We knew they played fantastic music but they were so static. Bill Butt (who was to do their lighting) and I were walking down the road saying, ‘what can we do with them?’ when I saw this camouflage netting in a fashion shop. I thought, that’s it. I strung it up in my office and when they saw it they wanted it straight away.”
At that time, Drummond was being pragmatic. Like The Teardrop Explodes’ debut 7”, the first single by Echo And The Bunnymen, The Pictures On My Wall/Read It In Books, received rave reviews in the music press. Sounds even made it single of the week - “this Liverpudlian trio will astonish all of us who looked upon that city’s music scene as some sort of deranged Disneyland with a cutting vengeance.” Drummond must have purred like a cat when another writer described it as, “The first piece of seven inch perfection from the excellent Liverpool Zoo label, who are at the core of a Liverpool movement that threatens quite rightly to dominate the last few month of the last year of the decade.” Drummond initially described Mac and the boys to John Peel as “That weird and little known Liverpool Group Echo And The Bunnymen. It’s a grower. The B-side maybe should’ve been the A, It’s the toe tapper.”
The Bunnymen were not to remain “little known” for long, as Seymour Stein soon wanted to sign them to Sire records. “I told him that we wanted to be like modern day pirates,” Bill Drummond told the Melody Maker in 1981, “and he was saying, ‘Pirates, pirates, whadya mean pirates? Like Douglas Fairbanks?’ I don’t think he understood, really, and besides, there wasn’t a pirate shop nearby.” In fact, Stein almost had to hoist the financial Jolly Roger as Drummond later revealed that, after offering a deal to the Bunnymen via Zoo, Stein discovered that he has reached the limit of his expenditure for new acts. He got around this by approaching Rob Dickens at Warner Brothers publishing and convinced him to sign the Bunnymen through a new label set up for this specific purpose. Amazingly, Dickens already had a connection to Zoo as he’d produced one of the tracks on the Big In Japan EP - Suicide A Go Go - as a demo at a London studio in November 1977. Dickens had been connected to Deaf School, who were, in turn, connected to Big In Japan.
“He kind of patched up the first album,” recalls Clive Langer, “as we’d fallen out with (original producer) Muff Winwood, and then we did the second album with him. He was not only our publisher, but quite a good friend. He fancied himself as a producer. He was not experienced, so when we worked with him we were all having our say. He would have known Kevin and Phil from the Deaf School days already, so they could have approached him. It wasn’t like I had to introduce them as they already knew each other.” Thus, Dickens, in his day-to-day role of looking after publishing at Warner Brothers, had already done a deal to bring Zoo into the fold for publishing. As he already knew Drummond from Big In Japan and had something of a working relationship with him he needed little or no persuading from Stein, who, to be fair, buttered Dickens up, telling him that he was the best A&R man in the UK. Thus Echo And The Bunnymen ended up on the Korova label, which was established specifically for them, although it did later host a number of other acts.
Drummond brokered this deal in order to give the Bunnymen every chance of mainstream success. After all, it seemed at this time quite a stretch for a small independent label to fund the recording of albums for their artists and then find the money required to market them through advertising and tour support. Although Manchester’s Factory Records issued the debut LP by Joy Division in June 1979 and Rough Trade were also starting to drop long playing anchors by artists like Stiff Little Fingers and Cabaret Voltaire, it was initially thought that they would sell in small numbers and storm the emerging Independent Charts, rather than the national charts. It was also easier, cheaper and less risky for small labels to issue a number of singles.
So, when Julian Cope caught Drummond scrim-handed he was working hard to prepare the Bunnymen visually for first their major UK tour. Later that night, after Cope had dried his tears and gone home, Drummond popped round to see him. “I’m sorry Julian. I should have told you. I do feel really bad,” Cope recalls in Head-On, “It’s just… well it seemed perfect for the Bunnymen. And… well, we couldn’t have afforded it for the Teardrops anyway. You know. I wanted it to be right.” Cope went on to describe it as typical Zoo bullshit - “He just liked the idea and had to do it now” - but took great succor from Drummond’s closing line. “Then he said I was more talented than them, but he could direct them because they were not so willful and they let him get more involved.” Cope saw this as one of the important markers in his career. He was more talented than the Bunnymen, and Bill Drummond recognised that.
The picture of Drummond that emerges from Head-On, even through the prism of Cope’s prose, is of a man devoted to the bands on his label. In August 1979, Cope, when asked to describe his label boss in an early Teardrop Explodes feature, stated that “Bill is a loveable blundering idiot. I remember we went to his place one day and he answered the door with the words ‘I am a turd’ written on his forehead in brown crayon. His wife had done it while he was asleep and he didn’t know it was there! That’s him all over, you know. Loveable.” Lest we forget, at this time Echo And The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes were beginning to establish themselves as recording and touring artists - Drummond and Balfe not only ran Zoo Records but now managed both bands, putting them on something in the region of £30 a week each.
Bill Drummond was not a passive manager. When Echo And The Bunnymen played a gig at Gaetano’s restaurant in Manchester in July 1979, he performed a short two-minute skit entitled Danger Quentin There’s A Dog Behind You before the trio hit the stage. He was accompanied by the Teardrops’ Paul Simpson, who was asked to provide some strange sounds whilst Drummond also played guitar and related the story to the audience. He also went out on the road with the bands, although David Palmer recalls it could be a bit worrying with him at the wheel of a van,
“I remember going to a gig with the Teardrops once and, God, I have never been so terrified in my life. It was Bill driving, and going over Snake Pass it was bad enough going. It was a sheer drop and it was terrifying as he was quite a manic driver, but coming back it was pissing down and you were on that side of the road where it really was a sheer drop, with Bill, this manic figure, driving and Gary (Dwyer) telling tales of this legendary character called the Ithampothicus. It was pure gothic horror. Maniac at the wheel and someone telling you about this thing on the moors, and it was just wonderful.”
Whilst Drummond was working hard, with the money from their advance, to make Echo And The Bunnymen the biggest, most legendary band in the UK, the same also applied to The Teardrop Explodes. He’d produced their first two singles - Sleeping Gas and Bouncing Babies - with David Balfe, and issued them on Zoo, but the third, Treason, was turned over to former Deaf School guitarist Clive Langer, who’d not only gone solo but was moving into production. “Everything was connected,” recalls Langer, “Bill was managing them and I knew Bill well, and obviously they respected me a bit because I’d made three albums with Deaf School by that point and done the early Madness stuff, so they just thought, ‘What would Clive be like?’ I suppose.” Clive was very good indeed, and crucially re-arranged Treason in the studio, taking the “just a story” lyrical coda at the end and turning it one of the main hooks throughout the song.
Zoo gave Treason a strong push upon release in March 1980, and even linked up with Malicious Damage in London for some cross promotion. “When the second Killing Joke single came out - Wardance and Pssyche - Scott (Piering) was doing promotions for Rough Trade,” recalls Adam Morris of Malicious Damage, “and we did a deal where they did a mailout and we shared the cost with Zoo Records in Liverpool. It was the Teardrop Explodes’ Treason and Killing Joke’s Wardance in the same mailer. That’s how I first got to know Scott, as we packed all of the mailers together.” Scott Piering was already working hard to promote early singles on Rough Trade, and was quick to jump into the debate about plugging when Radio One abandoned their strict playlist format in August 1980, “We have never pushed for playlisting, but I think records like Spizz Energi’s Where’s Captain Kirk or The Mo-Dettes’ White Mice, which were pushed by independent pluggers employed by their managements, would have benefitted greatly from being on the playlist. The Joy Division single (Love Will Tear Us Apart), for example, was playlisted automatically because of its high chart position, and that is the way we like it to happen – much in the same way as The Specials’ Gangsters happened. In general, I see all kinds of signposts marking the coming of age of the independents, and this move by the BBC is one of them.”
Treason became Zoo’s best-selling single to date, shifting in the region of sixteen thousand copies, which was strong sales indeed for a small indie label at the time. Even then, major labels were not sure about signing the band due to their hybrid nature. As Julian Cope told the New Musical Express in April 1980, “You get people who are heavily into bands like Joy Division coming along to our gigs, probably expecting something similar, and then finding us too commercial. Then you have all the pop people who don’t even bother to come to see us ‘cause we’re bracketed away as a weird band.”
By this time, Bill Drummond had already established a personal relationship with Tony Wilson and Factory Records, and in August 1979 he agreed that his bands would take part in The Leigh Rock and Music Festival, a festival located between Liverpool and Manchester which was also billed as Zoo Meets Factory Half-Way. “Zoo Records and Factory Records bring you the flesh that brought you the vinyl…” stated the poster generated by Factory, which received its own catalogue number, FAC 15. One of the bands on the bill was Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, whose debut single, Electricity, had been issued by Factory in May 1979. Amazingly, as they were a Liverpool act, this could have been a Zoo release. “Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark had a studio around the corner on Button Street, opposite Probe, and had a manager who took this song into Zoo,” recalls David Palmer. “It was definitely a single, a brilliant single called Electricity, and Bill wasn’t there - it was Dave who listened to it, took it out of the cassette player, walked to the door and threw it down the stairs and told him to get out of the office with his ‘rinky dink’ music. He went straight to Factory, who released it in a beautifully designed Peter Saville black embossed sleeve and the rest is history.” Whilst OMD went on to score worldwide hits, to be fair to David Balfe everyone on the Liverpool scene at the time just thought OMD were simply not cool, which may have been the reason he reacted so theatrically to hearing an early version of what later became a hit single.
As for the lack of record company interest in The Teardrop Explodes, to solve this problem Bill Drummond used Zoo money to fund the recording of an album. This was a major expense for a small independent label, although matters were helped by a cash injection they received from Seymour Stein, who licensed Zoo’s sixth single, Touch by Lori and The Chameleons. “Lori and the Chameleons arrived at the Zoo’s turquoise office a couple of months ago with a neat attaché case full of cassettes and told us it contained ‘future pop’” ran the Zoo press release. “They are from the Allerton district of Liverpool, have yet to play outside a living room, and like melodrama, songs that break your heart, and the future.”
In fact, whilst Lori Lartey - “a bird we used to watch walking down the street” - was the vocalist, the band’s other members, Andrew Newton and Douglas Stewart, were actually David Balfe (on keyboards) and Bill Drummond (on guitar), with Tim Whittaker from Deaf School on drums. Musically, Touch was “rinky dink” too, and a very well-crafted early electro-pop single. “Balfe and I thought it sounded brilliant,” Drummond later related in his book 17, “Even revolutionary. We thought it sounded exactly how pop music should sound. Fragile, mysterious, beautiful, sexy.”
Reviews were of the no-nonsense variety. “This is a hit single,” gushed Dave McCullough in Sounds, “I bet you Touch is this summer’s Jilted John trash culture success.” It was probably after reading this review and buying a copy of the single that Stein agreed and paid Zoo in the region of £4,000 to license it. The re-released version on Korova was made single of the week by Dave Lee Travis, who played it every day for a week on his Radio One show, but the record only reached number seventy in the charts before falling back to earth. But Warner Brothers did take up the option of another single, and Drummond and Balfe spent three days at Rockfield Studios in Wales crafting what they thought was perfection. “We thought we had made the greatest pop record ever,” Drummond again related in his book 17. Sadly, The Lonely Spy, a story about Lori’s lover being gunned down by the KGB in Red Square, got the short end of the cold war and failed to sell.
However, some of the money received for the licensing of the first Lori and The Chameleons single went towards funding those Teardrop Explodes album sessions, although it has also been stated that Bill Drummond secured additional funding by remortgaging his house. Clearly, he was as fully behind The Teardrop Explodes, who did not have a major label deal, as he was Echo And The Bunnymen, who did. A month at Rockfield was block booked, the first two weeks turned over to recording the first Bunnymen LP and the second fortnight to Teardrops sessions. The gamble paid off - eventually, The Teardrop Explodes were signed to Mercury/Phonogram, who, I imagine, paid back their recording costs as well as covering additional sessions to complete the LP.
Drummond and Balfe - as The Chameleons - worked hard producing the Bunnymen’s debut LP. Drummond was very much in synch with the band, sharing a vision of not only how they should present themselves on stage but also how their records should sound, and according to David Palmer this extended to backing himself and the band when some early sessions had apparently not yielded the required results.
“Quite early, when they got Pete De Freitas in (on drums), they got a producer (Pat Moran) who’d produced Iggy Pop’s Soldier LP, because they all loved The Stooges. They went and recorded with him, but when they got it back at the Zoo offices it just sounded a bit straight ahead rock, sort of New York Dolls and Stooges - probably what you’d expect someone like that to do. There were a couple of other attempts, and I think that was when Dave and Bill decided to produce the first LP themselves, because not only did they have a vision of how the Bunnymen should sound but it tied in with the way the Bunnymen saw themselves as well, and I think that was quite important. They were quite visionary in that sense - they were on the side of the band rather that what current trend was selling or what a label would dictate. (The label) could have said, ‘No, we want this kind of Americanised Bunnymen thing,’ but they stood their ground and thought they could achieve something greater, or to use one of Bill’s phrases, ‘more legendary.’”
The resulting LP, Crocodiles, was soon being played by John Peel, who privately allocated stars (and timings) to each track. Pride, The Pictures On My Wall, All That Jazz and Happy Death Men all received his highest accolade - three stars - and every other track received two. In the music press the LP received gushing reviews too. “The Bunnymen have dug an admirable first burrow. Merseybeat with spiked waters is worth getting addicted to,” stated the Melody Maker, and the New Musical Express went even further, declaring that “Crocodiles is destined to be one of the contemporary rock albums of the year”. Better still, the production was praised - Adrian Thrills stated that, “a lot of the credit could also go to the production team of - no, not Martin Hannett! - Chameleons Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe and Original Mirrors guitarist Ian Brodie. The three men at the controls create a sound full of body and depth without the aid of convoluted studio trickery.” For the record, Ian Broudie, former Big in Japan guitarist, had produced the second single - Rescue - which was included on the LP, which went top twenty in the UK charts.
Bill Drummond was very much on a mission with the Bunnymen. Whilst Dave Balfe went through his revolving door phase of membership with The Teardrop Explodes, Drummond was present when the Bunnymen did their first UK and American tours, as he was when the Teardrops made it across the Atlantic later on. There was just something about the Bunnymen that had the critics - especially in the New Musical Express and Sounds - fondling them with praise. Apart from the music - and their stage lighting and camouflage netting - it was the growing quote-ability of lead singer Ian McCulloch, who was not only happy to tackle questions about what was being hailed as new Scouse psychedelia but also to be quite blunt as to what drove him on. “Yeah… ego. It’s all kind of gratifying your ego. We want to do things that are valid; good songs, that mean something sincere. But egos always at the back of it.” McCulloch was also quick to slap down any accusations that the Bunnymen had ‘sold out’ to a major label. “For a start, Zoo wanted us to do it,” he told Melody Maker in October 1979, “If we hadn’t signed we wouldn’t be doing this tour and have all these lights and things. It’s just a job, right? Would you criticise a bloke who works for Ford for not making his own car?”
Although Zoo had received positive press and reviews and had two of Liverpool’s best bands under their wing - as well as the less highly regarded Expelaires - Drummond still had to perform the behind the scenes chores associated with running a small label and managing artists, from running the office, booking studios, pressing records and printing sleeves to handling expenses, sorting out bookings, driving vans and going out on tour. Neil McCormick worked for the Hot Press magazine in Ireland and interviewed both the Bunnymen and the Teardrops around this time, as well as wangling a support slot for his band Yeah Yeah when the Teardrops did a short tour of Ireland around 1980. He saw Drummond up close at this time, “He was obviously only in his twenties, but he seemed old to us as we were just kids. But he was this enthusiastic, Scotsman, very talkative and generous with his time in talking to a young musician like me.”
As for the Teardrops’ tour of Ireland, “I do vividly remember him behind the mixing desk in McConnagall’s, where we supported the Teardrops, watching them and watching their whole show. He was a fan as much as a manager, and that’s all well and good as a lot of managers disappear during the show because they’ve seen it maybe six hundred times already, but he was there absorbing every detail as I remember.” Also absorbing every detail at this show was independent publicist Mick Houghton, who’d been assigned to the band by Mercury.
McCormick recalls that, “Julian Cope did this incredible show, and got really angry with the audience and had a kind of breakdown halfway through the set as he thought they weren’t paying enough attention, and he had a rant. He stopped the band from playing and threw down his microphone and said, “We are all in this together! There should not be a barrier between us!” He went on, and when they were silent and he’d got their attention he built the band back up and they got back into the groove.” McCormick remembers being very impressed by this, although when Cope did exactly the same thing at the next gig he asked Houghton if Cope did that every night. “How else do you become a legend?” was the reply.
Drummond (and Balfe when he was not on tour or in the studio) was learning on the job, but one of the key things he did for the Echo And The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes was to hook them up with major labels. This gave both bands financial backing and access to big business machinery when it came to press, publicity and distribution. These were the things that Big In Japan never had, and so obtaining them for bands he was managing was vital to their forward momentum. No-one knew then that small independent labels like Factory, Rough Trade, Mute and even the growing sinews of Beggars Banquet, who’d scored massive success with Gary Numan, were not only going to be in the game for the long term but, through artists like Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths and Depeche Mode, would release million selling albums and singles that would be plugged onto radio playlists and into the charts by people like Scott Piering.
Ironically, despite the critical momentum behind the Bunnymen, it was The Teardrop Explodes who got into the singles charts first. Their first major label 7” was When I Dream, which had just about made a dent in the top fifty upon release in September 1980, but when Reward was issued in January 1981 it went top ten, and by the time Treason (It’s Just A Story) was reissued and went top twenty in May 1981 everything had changed. Suddenly, Cope and the latest incarnation of the Teardrops, as well as Drummond and Balfe (who was having his cake and eating it when allowed) were having to deal with Top Of The Pops and other TV appearances, promotional videos, headline tours of the UK and Europe and dates in America as well as interviews in the serious music press and more glossy teen pop fodder.
Although he managed both bands, as Cope began to climb up the fire escape in the sky Drummond began to devote more creative energy to the Bunnymen. Although they’d yet to score a hit single outside of the independent charts, he worked hard to ensure that they stood out from other bands, and strived to put his ideas into practice. By January 1981 he’d smoked £20,000 out of Warner Brothers for an Echo And The Bunnymen feature film based around a one-off concert in Buxton, Derbyshire. Shine So Hard was intended to show the Bunnymen at work and play, and Bill Butt was the producer. “Bill Drummond and myself knew it was time to have a Bunnymen video, but none of us wanted a straight promotion thing and we’d already considered a film,” Butt told the music press at this time, “The idea of a mystery gig seemed to tie in with the film and could relate to the Bunnymen because they do seem to be a band that are looking for things, in a way, finding new directions.”
Drummond was originally going to direct the film, but this was turned over to John Smith, with Pat Duval acting as cameraman. Of course, on the set Drummond was more than happy to share his vision with the Melody Maker, “It’s going to be much more like a classy feature film than a normal promo movie. You know, if we had them walking through the woods or something you’d immediately think it was a Rough Trade band or something, whereas this is the sort of film that maybe Bowie would make.” Bowie would make? Drummond really was beginning to roll forward with his sound and vision now.
With sessions for the Bunnymen’s second album approaching, Drummond also saw the film as a kind of closing of the first act of the band’s career, “Really, this show will be the last time we use the camouflage netting on stage and the same lighting design, so in all its something of a momentous occasion.” As well as the film there were also plans for a spin-off book and an EP, but in the end, although a thirty minute cut of the film was shown at the ICA in London and some footage was deployed for promotional purposes, Shine So Hard didn’t receive a general theatrical release and only the EP saw the light of day.
At one point before the Buxton concert, Drummond turned up at the hotel in climbing gear. Whether he’d scaled a convenient crag remains unknown, although he was a fan of the great outdoors and his attire was very much in keeping with the fact that he had formed a company called Atlas Adventures with Bill Butt. “One of the things we want to do is swim the channel,” he told a bemused journalist, “We plan on having an adventure every two years, each time in a separate continent. Once you realise that you can do anything you want to then there’s no stopping you. When you’re seventeen you think you’re going to do everything - jump out of a plane in a parachute (what else?), climb Everest etc, but then you don’t. We’re going to put this right with Atlas Adventures.”
Rather than spread themselves too thin, by April 1981 Zoo Records was being wound down as Drummond began to concentrate upon management and Balfe - whilst retaining a hand in Zoo Publishing - dedicated himself to The Teardrop Explodes. Indeed, the last single issued by the label had been the original version of Treason in March 1980, and it would not be until January 1982 that a final Zoo single would be issued by The Wild Swans.
Upon planning to move down to London in 1981, Drummond was accused of turning his back on the Liverpool scene, but was quick to defend his corner, “Well, I’m not from Liverpool for a start. And secondly it’s just not financially sane to stop here. If I manage a band you have to become big. I want to take on the world, not play the cult game. To be big and still be good is to me the real challenge.” That was the sort of quote that Ian McCullogh would have been proud of.
It was through the medium of the Bunnymen that Drummond intended to rule the world. By this time the growing drug consumption of Julian Cope had contributed to a souring in relations between Zoo management and The Teardrop Explodes, brought about - possibly - by the fact that Cope found it hard to square the circle of David Balfe being both a collaborator and his co-manager. But, as well as backing Cope’s Scott Walker compilation, Fire Escape In The Sky – The Godlike Genius Of Scott Walker, in 1981 and releasing it on Zoo, Drummond did convince Cope to buy into his vision of what became Club Zoo, located at the Pyramid Club in Liverpool, where the Teardrops played every day for a number of weeks. Drummond was probably helping out Roger Eagle, who owned the building, but the Teardrops’ performances ranged from the erratic to the brilliant. “It was wonderful,” recalls David Palmer, who was there many a night, “just the variety and the fact that the Teardrops had to play every night. The sets would never be the same and Sleeping Gas might be the single length or it might be forty minutes long.” There were also priceless moments when Balfe whispered something into Cope’s ear and left the stage and the singer announced, “Dave needs to take a shit.”
At this time, the Teardrops were gearing up to issue their second LP, whose producer Clive Langer recalls how hands-on Drummond was at this point. “I was always kind of surprised and excited by what he was doing because he was kind of like an outlaw, and a successful one as well, which was great. I always liked his attitude. I liked it when he came into the studio when we were working with the Teardrops and told us whatever he thought. He was exciting to be around and excitable. He is excitable and fun to be with really. Unpredictable. Out of the norm, which makes things much more interesting.”
How unpredictable and interesting was best illustrated when Drummond related to the Guardian newspaper in 2016 how the Teardrops’ second LP was named by his old mentor Ken Campbell. At the time, Campbell had returned to Liverpool to become artistic director at the Everyman Theatre, and Drummond took Balfe to see him and get some guidance as to what to do with this increasingly dissolute band.
“Give me £100 and I will tell you.” was the reply. The pair got the money together and the answer was “Wilder!”
“What do you mean, Ken?”
“I mean Wilder! That is what you need your band to be. Wilder!”
Not only was the second Teardrops LP, released in 1981, called Wilder, but the subsequent unreeling of the band suggests they also took Campbell at his word! Drummond summed them up perfectly when talking to Mark Cooper around this time, “I see the Teardrops as a battered Second World War bomber heading back home across the Channel; they’re losing and gaining height, circling around and dodging fire but keeping going, chugging away. And they’ll always make it back – to a fanfare, with the crowds cheering and the home fires burning.”
By this time David Balfe was back in the bomber with Julian Cope, and in one interview he explained that the split between him and the singer was due to his partner in crime at Zoo Records. “One of the things that led to a lot of the bitterness between Julian and I when we split was that Bill, much to my annoyance, had this big thing to sell Julian, and he started getting the solo interviews and everything, and I really believed it was a heavy group, as much as the Bunnymen.” As they spiraled towards the recording of their third LP, the Teardrops grew too heavy, and Drummond would sell on their management to their tour manager, and focus on the Bunnymen alone.
In many respects, the influence of Bill Drummond was vital in presenting the Bunnymen to the world through the sleeves for their singles and albums. Whilst McCullogh’s hedgehog hairstyle was his own invention, Drummond had a big say in the photo shoots for album sleeves, which became miniature Atlas Adventures - from forests to arctic wastes - that subsequently inspired other bands to be equally wide-angled in their own album covers. Of course, the route to being ‘legendary’ and ‘heroic’ was, on occasion, smoothed by dog food.
“The band said that it absolutely stank,” David Palmer laughs when recalling the photo shoot for the cover of the Bunnymen’s second LP, 1981’s Heaven Up Here. The sleeve showed the band on a beach with seagulls flying above their heads, but “to get all of the gulls they had to throw loads of (Pedigree) Chum (dog food) into the water. It was a long shoot, and they said it just stank. Thankfully you don’t get that impression off the sleeve, you just get the birds hovering around.”
The final single issued on Zoo, in January 1982, also had a Bunnymen connection. Sometime in 1981, Palmer’s mum allowed another band to start rehearsing in her cellar - The Wild Swans had been formed by former Teardrops member Paul Simpson, who now switched to lead vocals whilst Jed Kelly provided a mesmerising guitar counterpoint. At one point, Mrs. Palmer wanted to throw them out as she thought they smelled, but her son discovered that the problem was not their personal hygiene but a dead rat that was decomposing beneath the bottom step of the stairs leading down into the basement. Palmer also recalls that one of the benefits of The Wild Swans rehearsing in the cellar was that original drummer Justin Staveley would occasionally do a bit of gardening. “I remember him saying once, ‘They’re all arguing about which bit is which and which bit is what and which bit goes where and I’ve just played the same drumbeat to every fucking song we’ve just done and no one has noticed.’ So he just started pruning our roses.”
Bunnymen drummer Peter De Freitas was a big fan of the band and funded and produced their debut single. The record featured London-based Rolo McGinty on bass, who’d been recommended by Julian Cope and would travel up for rehearsals, gigs in the area and this recording session. “It was recorded in this big dining room which had endless reverb in it, a real swimming pool sound,” McGinty recalls today of the time working at Pink Studios. “Working with Pete was really good because underneath it he was a real pro.” The only problem was that he somehow misplaced the master tapes, and so the final mixes of both sides of The Revolutionary Spirit/God Forbid were in mono. “It would have sounded more like a plush radio production, but actually it was fine as it was,” states McGinty. Indeed it was, and even in mono the single was one of the best records to be released in the post punk period. In agreeing to release it as a 12”, Drummond gave Zoo a final release that was a fitting finale, and although The Wild Swans were not as successful as the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, Simpson and Kelly went on to enjoy commercial and critical success as The Lotus Eaters.
As for Zoo, this was the end of the road. “I would imagine the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes would have really, really taken a hell of a lot of anyone’s time, so that probably had something to do with it,” states McGinty, who went on to form The Woodentops. The parting shot from Zoo came in 1982, with the release of a compilation LP entitled From The Shores Of Lake Placid, which brought together a number of rare and unreleased tracks from bands on the Zoo roster, including David Balfe’s Turquoise Swimming Pools.
Ian McCulloch and co toured hard to support their third LP, Porcupine, in 1983, playing UK, European and American dates, but, most interestingly, in July 1983 the band played three gigs in the Outer Hebrides. The jaunt was planned by Drummond, who told the New Musical Express it was, “a chance to see my favourite group in my favourite part of the world.” He confessed that it was a ludicrous thing to do from a financial perspective, but it did generate some excellent publicity for the band in the music press. “More vaguely, Drummond hopes the islands and highlands will influence the group in some positive, semi spiritual way,” wrote Paul Du Noyer, who accompanied them on this trip for the New Musical Express. “A group like The Jam, he theorises, aspire to a housing estate outlook, and Wham, for example, reflect the inner city, but the Bunnymen, in Drummond’s eyes, are tapping ‘more glorious’ sources - hence the exotic settings that have become a feature of their LP sleeves and videos.” Also, as Drummond later related in his own writings, he had, at this time, a theory about the mystical powers of a Rabbit God called Echo, and even planned an early Bunnymen tour based on drawing rabbit ears on a map. Whilst in the Outer Hebridies there was also the small matter of delving into leylines, and a midnight visit to the mystical stone circle of Callanish. “Once at the site, manager Drummond lay prostrate at the circle’s centre, absorbing quantities of magical vibration and damp peat,” wrote Du Noyer, “Scoff if you will - but at that moment his protégé, Mac McCulloch, was back at the hotel being inspired to whomp a belligerent Scotsman, following a heated argument about socks and politics. Obviously, we were meddling with powerful forces.”
By this time Drummond needed all the energy he could muster. He was not only managing the Bunnymen but had begun working as an independent A&R man for Warner Brothers Records in London.