You credited me with introducing you to Echo and the Bunnymen, but it was Phil Richardson who recommended this album and led me to buy it. He might have even been in your room when he did so. That would have been November 1983. I'd enjoyed the two singles earlier that year, Breaking the Back of Love and The Cutter, but Phil said, "Crocodiles, that's the one to get." That's how I remember it, and that's what I did a few weeks later, back in Woking.
And it grabbed me straight away. That scratchy post-punk guitar sound. The sixth form angst: "you spit at the sky because it's empty and hollow / all your dreams are hanging out to dry."
It was the soundtrack to that particular Christmas holiday, along with Moondance and Blue — which were definitely your influence.
Last week a friend of mine started reading Bill Drummond's 45 and I told him he was in for a treat. In it he talks about managing the Bunnymen and producing Crocodiles. "The album was shit. It was tinny, reedy, thin; not an album by the future greatest band in the world. I had failed." Apparently the band knew this, too.
But a couple of months later, I was sitting on the battered sofa in The Zoo office in Button Street, a copy of the Crocodiles sleeve on the floor, front side up. The photograph, taken by Brian Griffin, was of the band in a wood at night, the trees lit up. From where I was sitting, the photograph was foreshortened. I imagined I could see something in the picture that I hadn't noticed before. The four members of the band were all looking aimlessly in different directions. Les, the most central figure, was leaning against the trunk of an ash tree. The tree must have been coppiced at some time, because it had two primary trunks, that had grown to twist gently around each other. I went out into the street with the sleeve of the record and asked a passer-by, a middle-aged woman, if she would look at this album sleeve from a certain angle. What did the ash tree in the middle look like? 'The head of a spooky rabbit. Why, what am I supposed to see?' She confirmed my suspicions… I spent most of the day looking at this weird apparition, kinda hoping it was a mistake but knowing this was the real Echo making his presence known on the sleeve.
Last time I looked I couldn't see the spooky head, but I think I was looking from the wrong angle, and I can see it now. Could that story have played a part in inspiring that rather overrated film with a spooky rabbit?
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