St. Georges Hall

[adders]

First Set

1. The Fountain
2. Rescue (paused to talk)
3. Do It Clean (intro)
4. Proud To Fall (paused twice to talk)
5. Zimbo
6. ???
7. Fools Like Us
long gap talking, (now with piano & additional guitarist)
8. Rust (pause at beginning)
9. Somewhere (from 'West Side Story')
10. The Game
11. The Idolness Of Gods
12. The Killing Moon (pause to ask for lights down)
13. Candleland

Second Set

14. Nothing Lasts Forever\Don't Let Me Down (pause to talk)
15. History Chimes (piano player got it wrong, so Ian tried with just guitar and got it wrong and abandoned it).
16. ???
17. Lips Like Sugar (intro only - audience clapping out of time put him off)
18. Ocean Rain (paused a couple of times and talked, started playing 'The Fishmonger's Wife'!!!, went back into Ocean Rain).

Concert Room setting was glorious - couldn't believe it was 26 years since I was at Crystal Day (although that was in the main hall). Everyone was quiet apart from a drunken woman who kept screaming for him to get on with it - she got escorted out. There were too many stops in the songs, (stopping to complain about lighting or the noise of a door closing ruins the song more than whats causing him to stop in the first place), the ones he did whch were complete were good. Couldn't make out a lot of what he said but a lot were laughing. There was a dig at Ringo, Benitez, Torrez and a bit of praise for lunatic asylums, the bunnymen & EFC (about time!).

[adders]

Just re-read that - and in total there were 13 songs from start to finish (counting those with pauses).

[camden jack]

So there was no "question & answer" thing as announced at the end??

[King Of Kings]

NO THERE WAS'nt

[Voodoo Billy]

To be fair, Mac did mention during the performance that it was meant to be informal with questions/answers but there weren't many forthcoming from the audience.

[black francis]

I would have like to have known how many black hoodies does he own.

[King Of Kings]

MAC has no consistency - He never has really.

He is a bad investment, and he lives in chaos in a “Peter Pan” like fantasy world.

I really do believe for what ever reasons he is trying to commit commercial suicide, with his adhoc shambolic performances.

Why his management tolerate such behaviour when they clearly don’t get a significant return from their investment I shall never know.

Why advertise the event as a evening with Ian McCulloch including Questions and Answer session and then omit the second half. That’s an insult not to mention false advertising.

I think the Bunnymen and McCulloch only exist now to complement Peat and Peasy’s Alter egos.

All they are accomplishing is tarnishing any reputation they have left.

I hope the Crocodiles/ HUH live up to expectations.

I want to so much praise my heroes of yesterday but sometimes they don’t give you the opportunity.

[fat cherry]

I think the Bunnymen and McCulloch only exist now to complement Peat and Peasy’s Alter egos.

and theres the plot for the next 'life on mars/ashes to ashes, a sort of jeckyl & hyde but its really roadies who set up the stage, go to the dressing room, take a load of drugs and come out as the band. There's always lots of inner turmoil and fire on stage because deep inside, even though they're shredding solos and swinging mic stands (yeah really) like theres no tomorrow, they know deep down that they will change back and have to clear the mess up. Obviously there'll be an even more tense moment when the lewad singer demands a ciggie, forgetting that he is in fact, the ciggie roadie - hw will he accomplish this without revealing his true identity?

Sometimes KOK you're brilliant. You just dont know it.

[the ghost of guitarplayer]

Better still, and taking into account our American cousins who might prefer a US-based sci-fi show, I vote for a new cult TV show called "Bunnymen Leap". The opening lines could be,

"Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Ian McCulloch led a group of musicians in Liverpool to develop a top secret project, known as "Echo & The Bunnymen". Pressured to prove his theories of his greatness or further risk the band's credibility, Mr McCulloch prematurely stepped on Will Sergeant's guitar effects pedals and vanished. He awoke to find himself still in the present, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was once not his own. Fortunately, contact with his past time was made through brainwave transmissions with Pete & Peasy, the Project Observers, who appear in the form of holograms that only Mr McCulloch can see and hear. Trapped in the present with a chicken in the basket setlist, Mr McCulloch finds himself leaping from one 80s Bunnymen song to song, without putting things right that continue to go wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap towards new cutting edge, breathtaking music."

[Mr. Brian]

I like the fact that Fools Like Us, Rust and History Chimes were in the set but all those pauses and restarts seem like a disaster. That's the stuff of an unpolished band down at the local bar and not a veteran musician.

Is "Don't Let Me Down" a typo and supposed to be "Don't Let It Get You Down" or did he do a bit of the Beatles song?

[adders]

It was a few lines of the Beatles song - he's done this lots of times in past with 'Nothing Lasts Forever'.

In over 40 Bunnymen\McCulloch gigs I've been to since 1982, this one was the most disappointing (although I did think I was witnessing the last bunnymen gig a couple of years ago at the Carling Academy when Mac - again - kept stopping the songs & complaining about lighting, etc. I think he stormed off at the end without acknowledging the audience, unlike the rest of the band).

A few years ago I really enjoyed the Prohibition gigs, and hoped it would similar to that. Especially after hearing some good reviews from recent gigs.

Despite this I'm looking forward to the Olympia gig though (mailnly because it's the full albums and not the usual stuff they do every year in the Carling Academy).

[the ghost of guitarplayer]

It must be Mac just can't do one-man acoustic shows. A couple of years ago I saw Hugh Cornwell doing exactly the same thing. Small venue. No stopping and starting songs. Talked in between songs. He complained once in what was a great show, about people using their mobile phones with the flash on to take photos. He even did a signing session afterwards with the fans. Not the same venue that I went to, but the same tour:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDoY0S43FJs&feature=related[/youtube]