Page 102 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Echo?” This used to annoy lead singer and frontman Ian McCulloch, as they
all naturally assumed it was him.

In fact, the name was dreamt up randomly by a friend of the band long before
the musicians became famous with hits such as The Killing Moon, Bring on

the Dancing Horses, Seven Seas, and Lips Like Sugar.

“This guy we knew had a list of band names he’d made up, and Echo & the

Bunnymen was on the list,” explains Will Sergeant, guitarist and one of the
original Bunnymen, now 65. “But Mac [McCulloch] didn’t want to be called

‘Echo’, so he told everyone it was the name of our drum machine.”

Once the hit singles arrived, and the Bunnymen became a solid fixture of the
80s indie rock scene, everyone grew accustomed to their weird name, and

stopped wondering who Echo was.

By the end of that decade, the Liverpool outfit had racked up four top 10

albums and 11 top 40 singles in the UK, while featuring on the soundtracks for
the 1986 and 1987 films Pretty In Pink and The Lost Boys earned them a loyal

fanbase in the United States. But Sergeant says he and the original band
members were always deeply distrustful of commercial success.