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Heroes can be hard to find, but whoever we decide to put on a pedestal, well find the pedestal has three legs and one of them is a bit wobbly.
Thats it! Exactly! Thats how we should start the biog.
Okay Mr McCulloch, youre the boss.
Nobodys perfect, at least thats what were trying to say in that opening sentence. Even the very great will make mistakes along the way. It takes a big man to fess up to that, and only a stupid one would deny it.
For more than 20 years, Echo & The Bunnymen have been striving for greatness, occasionally tripping over their long coats, but more often than not providing the listening public with moments of glistening pop brilliance. Now comes a new chapter, with the arrival of a solo record from frontman Ian McCulloch, his first without cohort Will Sergeant for more than a decade. As Mac himself says, there may be no Will, but theres a lot of willpower.
When the Bunnymen returned from the wilderness in 1997 with the hit album Evergreen, it was regarded by many in the know as the greatest comeback of all time. But no mere flash-in-the-pan was this; the Bunnymen had the audacity to stick around afterwards, delivering two more studio releases and the emotionally charged Live In Liverpool collection.
With the band on hiatus, McCulloch has returned to the studio and come up with a set of songs which, while not straying too far from the Bunnymen ethos, seem to have a more personal stamp on them.
Im much more confident now than I was when I last did any solo stuff, suggests Mac. Its the first record Ive made solo-wise where Im happy with the reasons why Im doing it and with the way its turned out.
From the upbeat, eternal optimism of the opening Love In Veins, through anthemic jangle of Seasons, to the dirty strut of High Wires, its the sound of a man who knows his time and place - and its now, its here.
Special mention should go to Sliding, possessing as it does a deceptive little hook that worms its way into your soul long after the song is over, the heartfelt Baby Hold On, which somehow manages to merge the worlds of Smokey Robinson and Lou Reed, the unsettling, shuffling semi-ballad that wouldnt have sounded out of place on the Bunnymens Ocean Rain, and the lachrymose ode to Liverpool childhood that is Playgrounds And City Parks.
