To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of their Ocean Rain album, Echo and the Bunnymen played a special show at the Nokia Theater. Ocean Rain is probably ECB’s most iconic album and features their most popular song, “Killing Moon.” It was a brilliant and unique idea to celebrate an album’s anniversary rather than doing some half-hearted third “reunion” tour, which is what bands typically seem to do these days when running low on funds. At least Echo and the Bunnymen tried to make it purposeful and convince us it was for art and not money, even though we know that’s not true.
The show was split into two parts, The first half consisted of Ocean Rain in its entirety, backed by an orchestra. After a brief intermission ECB played other classics and new material off their latest album, The Fountain.
During the entire run through of Ocean Rain, black and white images of the band flashed on the Nokia’s towering HD screens on either side of the stage. The images all appeared to be curated from the numerous publicity photos, concert photos and candid photos of the original 1984 tour for Ocean Rain. These photos showed McCulloch and the band at their height of not only critical acclaim and popularity, but also physical condition. Jeremiah was convinced the low lights and the photos were an attempt to veil the band’s age, but much, if not most, of ECB’s audience has ripened with the band, so I think they know how McCulloch feels. I thought the photos were a great way to capture the moment and added an element of romance and fond reminiscence of where ECB were at that point in time and were truly an example of a band on the brink.
For the second half of the show, Echo and the Bunnymen came out, sans orchestra and quite low lighting, playing some new songs off “The Fountain,” which sounded like new ECB material, but not too much so that the band was unidentifiable in the songs. ECB also used the second half of the show to play some of their other hits which don’t appear on “Ocean Rain.” My personal favorite ECB song, “Bring on the Dancing Horses” sounded great and reminded me of just how great the 80s were. I left the show waxing nostalgic for a bygone era…
