Echo and the Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch Warms to Audience Participation

Rufus Wainwright has made headlines recently for requesting that fans not clap until after he has left the stage during the first half of his show. Echo and the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch used to be able to relate. "When they used to clap I'd go, 'Stop clapping.' Or if they sang along I'd say, 'You don't know that,'" McCulloch tells Spinner of his early reaction to fan adoration.

McCulloch's reasons for not wanting the applause differed from Wainwright and Bruce Springsteen, who during previous acoustic tours would ask that fans not clap along during his songs so as not to break his concentration (of course, between songs they could clap and yell "Bruuuuce"). For McCulloch, it was due to fear. "Something clicked: 'Don't be scared of enjoying yourself and other people singing along,'" he says. "And it's fantastic now when people sing along to 'The Killing Moon.' Nearly every show we do, they sing along. It can be overwhelming."

McCulloch also admits he used to be very "frosty" at festivals, but that changed a few years ago. "I noticed we did a 10,000-person tent at V [festival] and everyone was singing along to songs," he recalls. "I thought, 'How do you know these songs?' It was a young audience; we'd obviously done something right."

At Coachella, where enough of the younger, brasher McCulloch shone through enough for him to introduce 'The Killing Moon' as "the greatest song ever written," Echo had a substantial crowd who did indeed sing along to that classic and others. And McCulloch admits that he now welcomes the response. "Yeah, we've won the battle with ourselves, kind of," he says. "We were always our own worst enemies and it feels now that we can walk onstage and people will accept it as an important band or a legendary band or a great band. It might've taken 30 years, but it was worth hanging around for it."