Echo & the Bunnymen
Crocodiles
About This Review
Re-Play reviews look back at landmark albums — how they were received at the time of release, the influence they've had on music in the years since, and where they stand today.
At Release
Echo & the Bunnymen's debut arrived in the summer of 1980 trailing a reputation built almost entirely on live performances and a single, 'Pictures on My Wall,' that had circulated in small quantities the previous year. The Liverpool scene that produced them — the Eric's club scene, which also gave the world Teardrop Explodes and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — was the most fertile creative environment in Britain outside of Manchester, and Crocodiles arrived with an expectation that it would be significant. That expectation was not disappointed.
Ian McCulloch's voice was the immediate point of differentiation. Here was a singer who had absorbed Jim Morrison and Lou Reed and then processed both through a specific Northern English emotional register — melodramatic but never without irony, grand but with a consistent undertone of self-awareness about the grandeur. Will Sergeant's guitar work was equally distinctive: he had developed an approach to reverb-heavy lead lines that created an impression of vast open spaces within songs that were, structurally, quite compact. The rhythm section of Pete de Freitas and Les Pattinson drove everything with a looseness that contrasted productively with the density of what was happening above it.
Critics received the album well but with reservations about its occasional unevenness — the later tracks were less immediately gripping than the opening run, and Ian Broudie's production was considered by some to have ironed out some of the live energy that made the band so compelling in person. These reservations were not wrong but they were slightly beside the point. Crocodiles was an arrival, and arrivals are about announcement rather than perfection.
Oasis's Gallagher brothers have cited McCulloch as the primary template for their understanding of what a singer should project
The Influence
The Bunnymen's influence runs along two distinct channels. The first is the direct aesthetic line: the reverb-soaked guitar sound, the baritone vocal delivery, the gothic-tinged romanticism that strips away irony at the moment of maximum vulnerability. This is the line that runs through The Alarm, the Psychedelic Furs at their most melodic, and more recently through artists like Beach House and Cigarettes After Sex, who have built entire careers on the spatial quality that Sergeant established on these early recordings.
The second channel is more broadly cultural: the Bunnymen modeled a particular kind of rock-star attitude — the serious artist as heroic figure — that proved enormously influential on the self-conception of British bands for the next fifteen years. Oasis's Gallagher brothers have cited McCulloch as the primary template for their understanding of what a singer should project. The elevation of the frontman as intellectual and aesthete, rather than as entertainer, drew directly from what McCulloch performed both on record and off it.
YouTube does not permit embedding of Echo & the Bunnymen videos due to label restrictions. Search for "Rescue" or "Do It Clean" on YouTube to hear the album's key tracks.
Where It Stands Today
Crocodiles sounds better now than it did in 1980, largely because the production choices that seemed slightly flat on initial release have aged in a way that places the record in comfortable proximity to contemporary lo-fi aesthetics. The rough edges that bothered some reviewers at the time are now audible as authenticity markers. The album has the quality of something made by a band that was still learning what it was, which is both its limitation and its most attractive feature.
What endures most completely is the sense of possibility that runs through the whole record — the feeling that anything could happen next, that the band had not yet committed to a defined approach and was therefore free to try anything. The subsequent Bunnymen records, particularly Heaven Up Here and Ocean Rain, are more fully realized as artistic statements. But Crocodiles has a rawness and a confidence operating simultaneously that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to recapture once you have become the thing you were trying to become.