Heaven Up Here
(Korova 1981)
“This is the one for heaven, and this is the one for me...”
I remember the suffocating grays of the concrete and the sickly yellow electric light in the shop store windows. I remember most of all the deadened expressions on the melted-candle faces of all the shoppers. Music seemed to be the only way out of this world of wretched mediocrity and in a horrible little shopping centre in the middle of England I bought my first Echo & the Bunnymen album. I was a teenager and in sore need of something to transport me to somewhere else, and this record was called Heaven Up Here and it had the picture of a rain-soaked beach on it. Go figure. In those days album covers were important.
There’s a reason those albums you first fell in love with really mean something. It’s an old story. The problem is now, in 2009, my love for Echo & the Bunnymen has burnt out (1). But long after playing the Bunnymen to death and grimacing whenever my gaze rested upon the E section of my music collection, I still believe that the first four albums were all I needed and the first album I ever bought by Echo & the Bunnymen is still my favorite.
Heaven Up Here has a distinctive place in the Bunnymen long player quartet. It’s funkier than Crocodiles, more focused than Porcupine and (obviously) harder than Ocean Rain (2). Its rank may depend on your preference for the Bunnymen as a brooding rock band with an amazing rhythm section or as lush, romantic, orchestra-backed balladeers. Either way, Heaven Up Here is an all too brief and powerful snapshot of a band at the peak of its powers, flourishing and living up to its potential. For me, Ian McCulloch’s voice came to fruition in this album’s multi-tracked sphere, Will Sergeant brandished his otherworldly, twanging, eastern-tinged minimalist guitar with an angry abandon that would never again return in the same way again, Les Pattinson’s steadfast bass drove the songs into a prospective eternity of never-ending patterns and Pete De Freitas pounded away as if he was trying to hit the floor beneath and through his drum kit. To my young ears it didn’t get much better than this (3).
Listening back now, Heaven Up Here still holds up (naturally, or I wouldn’t be writing this) and when I’m open to the possibilities of nostalgia and playing the record on a good system, I’m sometimes amazed at how easily I’m carried back to the world this album created for me in my adolescence.
The two introductory songs, “Show of Strength” (a self-defining opening title, if ever there was one) and “With a Hip” throw you right into the bass and drum maelstrom, which doesn’t effectively let up (give or take a couple of numbers) until the album ends. This rhythmic backbone carries the songs along with such an exhilarating velocity that, from the very beginning, the Bunnymen’s modus operandi becomes clearly one of escalating momentum. The bass and drums may follow a traditional route, in the sense of following a regular linear pattern, but in a sharp and complimentary contrast, the guitars (both Sergeant’s lead and McCulloch’s rhythm) squeal, twang and chime all over songs with electrifying and unruly animation, as McCulloch’s low-end and increasingly high-end vocal timbres yell, warble and shoot for the heavens.
Two songs (previously showcased on the Shine So Hard EP) “Over the Wall” and “All My Colours” are so integrally rhythm based and evidently born from a band developing their style in a live context, it almost sounds as if the Bunnymen were held back on preceding releases. Instead, Heaven Up Here shows a band in full bloom, developing their sound and playing to their newly discovered strengths. After all, this is an alliance that started out as a three piece with a drum machine, only to lose the robot drummer and replace it with a real-life one (and a fucking amazing one at that) and then evolve exponentially. For all the band members, the fruits induced from this machine-to-man conversion were abundant and patently ripe, and exceptionally flaunted on this sophomore release.
As a song like “No Dark Things” attests, Echo & the Bunnymen were muscularly assured and driven rather than dependent on the staid mores of rock convention, with open arrangements that left room for the unexpected arrival of a clanging guitar, rather than an expected middle-eight and a perfunctory lead solo. These revolving guitar lines would play in my head for days. The hypnotic overlapping rotations of “A Promise” (for example) in all its stratum and substratum shapes would often stay in my subconscious as a ghostly imprint, tinkling away as an incessant sonic mantra and my own private soundtrack, long after hearing it in the real world. “Heaven Up Here” with its ramshackle clatter really did sound like a paean to wanton inebriation, both in concept and conception, and even the more gradual build of tracks like “Turquoise Days” delivered a glorious adrenalin inducing middle crescendo before trailing off enigmatically to “set sail” on an aural drift of guitar atmospherics.
It wasn’t the fractured self-doubt or the metaphysical meanings attached to the songs that caused this album to last, but the “guts and passion” behind them. Even if the rest of the Bunnymen albums don’t carry as much existential weight as they used to do, discovering Heaven Up Here had a formidable influence on my young mind. I carried that album to my bosom like a shield to the world and it in turn guided me towards other discoveries (4) until it was overused and spent and left in a potent memory, only to be intermittently stumbled upon on and remembered for all its glory. Long may it continue to remind me how good it still is.
Notes
1. To me, and with the benefit of hindsight, the game was up for them in 1989 when they lost their drummer. Not when the bass player left or when I noticed the singer couldn’t hit the high notes anymore or after becoming increasingly frustrated with everything they released after Songs To Learn And Sing.
2. I think it should be mentioned that Ocean Rain had a place in my heart (how could it not?) Maybe that album’s immediacy or grandiosity caused it to outstay its welcome. I probably listened to it too much.
3. Psychocandy was yet to be discovered.
4. Notably psychedelic garage rock.
