Echo and the Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch Sorry for Slagging Bono
- Posted on Apr 29th 2010 11:00AM by Steve Baltin
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In their early '80s heyday Echo and the Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch was never shy about speaking his mind. McCulloch tells Spinner that behavior came from the arrogance of youth. "We always thought we were a cut above everyone else, hence the album title 'Heaven Up Here,'" he says. "'It may be hell down there cause it's heaven up here,'" he adds, quoting his own lyric.But an older, mellower McCulloch has a different view on band feuds. "The competition was won a long time ago, if we were competing with the people I was slagging off," he says. "We won in a lot of ways, but it was never a competition and that's kind of what I realized."
What changed his outlook besides age? "Maybe when I realized that I didn't know the people I was slagging off as people and I'd say things that were below the belt," he admits. Pride also becomes less important with age and that was clearly a motivating factor when he was younger. "It was mainly brought about in the first place with journalists saying, 'What do you think of your contemporaries, U2?' And it was like, 'They're nothing like us in my view,'" he says. "That's what instigated us: 'Can't you see we're the Bunnymen?' It's a Liverpool thing as well to be honest."
McCulloch also wonders if his insults had an effect on Bono. "There are things I've said that maybe made Bono worse and more like the showman, me saying from the word 'go' that I thought he was a buffoon," he says. McCulloch now realizes that wasn't the case, though he can't resist getting one jab in. "He obviously isn't a buffoon. He's a clever bloke and he's written some good tunes -- nothing with any profundity, I don't think -- but some decent melodies," he says.
In the end, the wiser and humbler McCulloch will admit that Bono beat him in one aspect: "He's got at least one more private jet than me."
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