Echo and the Bunnymen: Ocean Rain

We were out of sync in our Echo and the Bunnymen phases. Mine came first — and I was already a few years late — followed a year later by yours (I hope I'm not being vain in recalling that you acknowledged some influence from me). By then I'd moved on, largely because I had dismissed this album as not up to the standard of the earlier albums.

Not that I bought the album at the time — I didn't get it until fifteen years later. But I heard almost all the songs on John Peel's programme, taped them, and listened to them repeatedly. Though I can't have heard that tape for over 20 years, I remember some of the Peel comments that were captured on my tape copy: of Crystal Days, Peel said, "not sure if there's any reference to Crystal Night"; of Thorn of Crowns, "sounding very much like The Doors there, I must say"; and "I like what I read of Ian McCullough being asked what The Killing Moon is about, and just replying that it's about the killing moon: when you buy a book of poetry, you shouldn't have to buy another book to understand the first."

Several months before the album came out, Echo and the Bunnymen had recorded a Peel session with different arrangements of four of the songs. No strings for a start. The title track was especially different. The tempo of the song was significantly faster, and the chorus had a neat skiffle-shuffle acoustic strum to it. I always preferred that version, though its memory has gone almost completely now. Funny how the Peel quips last longer.

Ocean Rain was also one of the first songs (possibly the very first) I ever heard on CD. One of the geeky guys in Magdalene had a CD player in his room in , and a bunch of us crowded in to hear for ourselves what this new gear sounded like. He demonstrated with the quiet opening to Ocean Rain so that we could marvel at the lack of surface noise. Another Peel quote, from more recently: "life has surface noise".

I wish I could find that tape.

MusicBrainz entry for this album