40 years is a long time. It’s been 40 years since Charles married Diana, 40 years since the first London Marathon, and 40 years since Echo & the Bunnymen first graced our musical stages.
Well technically 44. But it will be the 40 years of magical songs tour that Echo will be embarking on next year.
“It will be our 44th anniversary, we started the band in 1978 but who’s counting anyway?” Will Sergeant told me. Sergeant formed the band, as guitarist, with frontman Ian McCulloch and bassist Lee Pattinson. This tour will be just Sergeant and McCulloch heading on the road to give their fans a show that has already been delayed by a couple of years due to the pandemic.
“The gigs were planned well before the plague hit these shores. We had to move them a couple times. … But to play live for our fans is the best reward. I love this job.”
And it’s been a spectacular job to have for the past 40+ years with multiple world tours, gold-selling albums, and years of success. To mark the occasion, the band is also re-releasing their first four albums on vinyl.
“I love all those albums and they need to be recognised as the ground-breaking classics they are,” continues Sergeant. “I’m chuffed they are getting a re-release. A lot of happy times are wrapped in those songs.”
The return of vinyl is one of the many changes and trends that Sergeant has observed over his time in the music industry, and one that he’s quite pleased with:
“There have been lots of changes. … The rise of vinyl, the fall of vinyl, then the rise again; it seems people love the tangible artefact. The artwork of records has always been a big part of the attraction to me. It’s great that records are back. The availability and collectability of LPs makes me happy. If I find something I’ve been after for a while I still get an excitement, they are just very nice objects.”
As well as this, the ever-changing times have led to some points of conflict for Will Sergeant. When moving onto the topic of new styles of recording and listening he told me that:
“Recording has become a lot easier, sometimes too easy. Anyone can make a record now on a laptop. When we started big studios were very expensive, up to a £1000 a day at some of the posher ones. Now you can spend that on a computer and have your own studio in your bag, which is pretty cool when you think about it.”
Which then fed into our later conversation about the state of the music industry and how The Bunnymen would have fared in the age of streaming:
“Today things are so transient; kids hardly ever listen to a whole song before they flick onto the next one. In my view you need to live with music, let it grow in your heart. We grew naturally with the fans and the label stuck with us along the way, they looked at a longer game plan. I’m not sure companies would be doing that now, slowly building up artists. Everyone is after fast cash.”
Sergeant then continued:
“I once compared streaming to reducing the value of music to that of used toilet paper. I now think it’s worse than that. All artists from the beginning of recorded music have been sold down the river by the big companies and somehow everyone is still going along with it as though it’s OK. It’s sonic slavery.”
And he makes a decent point. The age of streaming and music on demand has led to artists being paid very little for their work, with an estimate from the Trichordist suggesting that the average Spotify artist payout was $0.00397 in 2017. An extreme example of this is Tasmin Little, a classical violinist with 755,000 monthly listeners, who disclosed via Twitter that in 2020 she had 5-6 million streams in six months and was rewarded with a pay-out of £12.34. It’s absolutely incredible.
So, unless you have the backing of a solid fanbase to make money via physical album, merchandise, and tour sales, it’s incredibly difficult to make a living as a music artist.
However, this is an area that Echo and The Bunnymen have always been lucky with, as multiple nights of their tour, slated for February 2022, have already sold out.
But who knows if this will be the end for The Bunnymen? Is this to be their final swansong?
“Who knows? I don’t for sure,” says a thoughtful Sergeant. “It can be a very fragile situation within the band, but it’s been like that since the beginning, and we have survived a shed load of trauma, drama, personnel changes, different managements and even death. All have flowed under the Bunnymen bridge and yet we are still here and ready to rock.”
Echo and The Bunnymen will be playing Sheffield City Hall on 1st February 2022 to kick off their 40 year anniversary tour.
