A retrospective on Echo and the Bunnymen’s Heaven Up Here, exploring the album’s epic scale, the band’s evolution from their debut, the charged atmosphere of their 1981 era and the bold creative leap that set them apart from their Liverpool contemporaries. A critical look at how the record became a windswept landmark of early eighties post-punk and the defining moment in the Bunnymen’s ascent.

By 1981 Echo and the Bunnymen had already outgrown the tag of Liverpool’s next big thing. The city was awash with bands skulking through basement venues and chasing the last echoes of post-punk, yet the Bunnymen always felt slightly apart from the scrum. They were part of the scene but never defined by it. Where other groups favoured jagged swagger or nervy pop, the Bunnymen carried themselves with a chilly grandeur, as if they had been imported from some vast, wind-stripped plateau rather than the banks of the Mersey.

Crocodiles had won them attention and a clutch of admirers but there was a sense, even then, that the band were bracing for something larger. They wanted scale. They wanted to escape the cramped rooms and conventional expectations that could easily have boxed them in. Heaven Up Here is the sound of that escape, recorded in Rockfield Studios in Wales where the weather and landscape matched the band’s mood. The sessions, monastic by all accounts, the group shutting themselves away and drawing out a sharper, more elemental version of their sound.

From the first moments of Show of Strength, you can hear that shift. The song doesn’t ease itself in but storms the gates, every instrument sounding taut and ready for impact. Les Pattinson had grown into an astonishingly melodic bassist by this point. His lines on the debut were confident. Here they are commanding. Pete de Freitas, the fated, youngest and in many ways the quietest member, drives the entire record with a precision that never loses its human edge. His drumming on Heaven Up Here explains why the band were so protective of him. He had that rare gift of making a rhythm feel both anchored and restless, a pulse that pushes the band into braver territory.

Will Sergeant is the architect of the album’s vast spaces. Critics often latch on to guitarists who fill every second with notes. Sergeant did the opposite. He left gaps, held back, let certain chords ring until they seemed to glow in the mix. On Over the Wall, his playing becomes a kind of topography, mapping out the contours of an imagined coastline. He had already shown flashes of this approach on Crocodiles but here he fully embraced it, giving the record its sense of scale without resorting to bombast.

Ian McCulloch, meanwhile, had grown into the frontman he always hinted he might become. There is confidence in his voice on Heaven Up Here but it is not a swaggering confidence. It’s something more guarded. He sounds like a man making sense of a world that is shifting under his feet. His lyrics during this era often veered into impressionistic fragments, the kind that prioritised atmosphere over narrative, yet they land with surprising clarity. On A Promise, there is a tension between the romantic and the resigned. All My Colours feels like the inside of a fever dream, equal parts yearning and disorientation.

Crucially, Heaven Up Here is a record shaped not only by ambition but by discipline. The band were not chasing complexity for its own sake. They were chiselling away at their own ideas, stripping the songs of anything superfluous. The result is an album that feels both lean and expansive, intimate yet immense. There is nothing indulgent in it. Nothing that feels tacked on. Every track serves the larger landscape the band were building.

The Liverpool environment of the time also left its mark. The city was in economic decline and cultural flux, yet bursting with creative energy. The Bunnymen were surrounded by other rising acts the best piloted by others of The Crucial Three; Wah!, The Teardrop Explodes, A Flock of Seagulls, but while some chased pop brightness or flamboyance, the Bunnymen were drawn to something more elemental. They carried with them a strand of romantic fatalism that owed as much to windswept beaches and night bus rides across Merseyside as it did to their musical influences.

Sergeant’s fondness for Led Zeppelin often surprises people until they actually listen to Heaven Up Here with that in mind. Not the bluster or blues rock, but the sense of dynamic tension, the interplay between hush and detonation, the way space is used as effectively as noise. The leap from Crocodiles to Heaven Up Here mirrors, in its own way, the leap Zeppelin made from their debut to Led Zeppelin II. A sudden widening of scope. A feeling that the band have discovered their engine and decided to rev the bollocks off it.

You could draw parallels with Joy Division’s shift from Unknown Pleasures to Closer, or The Cure’s move from Seventeen Seconds to Faith. But the Bunnymen’s progression feels more rooted in a sense of physical geography, as if the band had stepped outside northern post-punk entirely and wandered off onto a grey beach at dusk, taking their music with them. The sea imagery in their work wasn’t poetic window dressing. It was part of who they were. They sounded like the tides they grew up near.

When Heaven Up Here was released, some listeners were thrown by its severity. It didn’t offer easy singles or radio-friendly warmth. It demanded attention and rewarded patience. Over time, though, it has become one of those albums that grows larger in the memory, a record bands cite when they want to talk about artistic leaps rather than career maintenance. It remains a totem of what can happen when a young group, still burning with hunger, refuses to play safe.

By the final notes of the title track, the storm has passed yet the air still seems charged. You come away from Heaven Up Here with the sense that you’ve walked through a landscape rather than listened to a collection of songs. The Bunnymen would go on to make more polished and more commercially resonant records, but they never again captured this exact combination of youthful intensity and hardwired harder rock purpose.

Heaven Up Here remains not only a leap forward but a declaration of identity. A moment when Echo and the Bunnymen realised the size of the world they could build and stepped straight into it without flinching. It stands, even now, like a cliff face on the musical map of the early eighties. Stark, beautiful and utterly its own.

The Boy With The Guitar Strap.

Review of Andy Crofts live at Pier Road Gallery, Littlehampton.

Crofts’ own compositions; catchy, well-crafted pop songs that wear their Ray Davies influences proudly formed the heart of the evening. English Summer, Westway, Jennifer Sits Alone, Sleep, Wondering, An Ordinary Romance and more. These songs resonate as a thoughtful canon and shine in an acoustic setting stripped of embellishment and with clear enunciation.

Doors at 6.45. Leave your smart phone apps and your algorithmic advances at home, if you want proof that music still needs human hands, a heart and a mid-session tune up or two Andy Crofts delivered it with authenticity at the final PRCA Session of this year.

You might know Crofts as the Brazil-born multi-disciplinary instrumentalist formerly integral to Paul Weller’s outfit or as the main man behind indie band The Moons. But strip away studio sheen and a full band arrangement, his particular forte, what you’re left with is something far more essential: one bloke, two young colouring-in kids, an electric acoustic six-string, a new amplifier, and a well employed songbook that spans his own Home Counties folk pop and some perfectly curated covers.

The intimate setting suited him, even if as he confessed with disarming honesty that he finds these close-quarters gigs more nerve-wracking than playing to hundreds of thousands at Glastonbury. Out there you can hide behind the lights; here, if your music stand collapses, you forget a chord (D7) or your young daughter clatters off her chair mid-song, everyone notices. The beauty and terror of ‘the toilet tour’ eh?

Crofts’ own compositions; catchy, well-crafted pop songs that wear their Ray Davies influences proudly formed the heart of the evening. English Summer, Westway, Jennifer Sits Alone, Sleep, Wondering, An Ordinary Romance and more. These songs resonate as a thoughtful canon and shine in an acoustic setting stripped of embellishment and with clear enunciation.

The covers arrived like love letters from a pre-digital age. Honeybus’ “I Can’t Let Maggie Go” emerged unplugged and liberated from its Seventies white bread-advert production. The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” bounced along with an unexpected verve – Terry and Julie still crossing that river in our collective consciousness, no matter how many Reels were distracted by. From Badly Drawn Boy’s ip-so fact-o singalong “Something To Talk About”, to a Crofts meditation on Lennon’s raw demo of “Watching the Wheels,” from “And I Love Her” to “Good Thing” a formerly-reggae number rendered in acoustic pop – each reimagining proved that great songs transcend their original arrangements when you ‘handle with care’ – “over to you George”.

PRCA’s faithful got exactly what live music should be: confessional, imperfect, immediate, impossible to replicate with a million lines of code.

A one-man analog breakwater against a tech tide.

45renegade.

In 1975, David Bowie did what he did best and shocked everyone by completely changing direction. Fresh off the theatrical dystopia of Diamond Dogs, he abandoned glam rock for the smoky soul clubs of Philadelphia, emerging with Young Americans, an album that bewildered fans and critics alike. Was it cultural appropriation or genuine artistic evolution? A cynical cash-grab or a brave reinvention? Five decades on, Bowie’s “plastic soul” period remains one of his most divisive yet fascinating chapters – a skeletal ex-pat English art-rocker uniquely attempting American R&B and somehow pulling it off. Here’s why Young Americans deserves another listen, and why it matters more than you might think in the Bowie story.

So here’s the thing about Young Americans: it’s the sound of Bowie burning down everything that made him a star and dancing in the ashes. After the glam apocalypse of Diamond Dogs and all that Orwellian dystopia, he relocated to America, got absolutely obsessed with soul music, and came back with what might be the most audacious act of cultural appropriation – or appreciation, depending on your politics, in rock history.

Released in March ’75, this is Bowie’s “plastic soul” period, a term he coined himself with typical self-deprecating wit. But don’t let that fool you. There’s nothing remotely plastic about the grooves on this record. Recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia – the same room where the O’Jays and Harold Melvin cut their classics, with backing from some of the city’s finest sessionaires, this is as authentic as a skeletal English art-rock chameleon can get when he’s knee-deep in American R&B.

The title track opens proceedings like a slow-motion car crash of strings, backing vocals, and that unmistakable Bowie croon, now deeper, more soulful, dripping with a kind of desperate romanticism. “Do you remember your President Nixon?” he asks, and suddenly you’re not just listening to a pop song but witnessing Bowie’s America, all Watergate paranoia, sexual confusion, and the dying embers of the American Dream. It’s protest music for the disaffected, too fucked up to march but too aware to look away.

Then there’s “Win,” which nobody talks about enough. Luther Vandross is buried in there somewhere in the backing vocals – yes, that Luther Vandross, before anyone knew his name, and the whole thing builds like some kind of gospel testifying session that never quite commits to salvation. Bowie’s always been good at leaving you hanging, spiritually speaking.

“Fascination” came later, added for the US release, and it’s pure cocaine-and-mirrors funk, co-written with Vandross. The falsetto, the handclaps, the sheer cheek of it all – it shouldn’t work, but Bowie’s got that alchemist’s touch. He takes these American forms and filters them through his alien sensibility, and somehow it comes out sounding inevitable.

The real revelation, though, is “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Seven minutes of strung-out funk that sounds like Bowie’s finally stopped running from something or maybe just paused for breath. The bass line alone could hypnotize you, and by the time the strings come swirling in, you’re gone. It’s the sound of 4am in a city you don’t know, with people you’ll never see again, and everything feels both meaningless and utterly vital.

Of course, there’s the Beatles cover – “Across the Universe” which some people hate on principle. Fair enough. But Bowie strips away all the cosmic whimsy and turns it into something genuinely melancholic, like he’s found Lennon’s hymn to universal consciousness at the bottom of a bottle. It’s maudlin, sure, but it fits the record’s emotional landscape perfectly.

And we can’t ignore “Fame,” can we? The funk bastard child of Bowie’s collaboration with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar, recorded during these sessions. His first proper American number one, and a deliciously bitter pill about the very celebrity machine he’d been feeding for years. The irony of becoming even more famous by singing about how much fame fucks you up wasn’t lost on anyone, least of all Bowie himself.

In the Bowie canon, Young Americans is the hinge. It’s where he stops being a glam rock prophet and starts his journey toward becoming… well, everything else. Berlin, Eno, the Thin White Duke persona, all of it begins here with this sharp left turn into soul. Some fans never forgave him for it and saw it as betrayal. But that’s always been Bowie’s genius he never gives you what you expect, and just when you think you’ve got him figured out, he’s already three moves ahead.

The album’s not perfect. It’s occasionally overwrought, sometimes too slick for its own good, and there are moments where you can hear Bowie straining against the limitations of his voice in this register. But that’s part of what makes it fascinating. You’re hearing someone genuinely stretching, genuinely trying to become something they’re not, and somehow making that transformation itself into art.

Looking back, Young Americans feels like Bowie at his most vulnerable, stripped of the sci-fi armour and glitter makeup, just a deeply weird English guy trying to make sense of America, fame, and his own restless creative spirit. It’s not his best album that’s an argument for another day, but it might be his bravest and it’s undoubtedly enduring. And in an era where most rock stars were still doing the same shtick they’d been doing since 1968, that counts for something.

The plastic soul, it turns out, had more heart than most of the genuine articles.