‘How Far?’: Echo and the Bunnymen’s haunting David Bowie moment
Whenever Echo and the Bunnymen leader Ian McCulloch strikes gold, he makes it his mission to make it known. After all, when he wrote ‘The Killing Moon’, he chalked it up to some kind of divine intervention. “I woke up … as if God had given it to me in my sleep,” he said. “Recently I realised what it is – it’s that soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’ – but it’s even better because I’m fuckin’ singing it.”
This would no doubt be a wildly egotistical statement if the song had not actually been a product of sheer excellence. However, McCulloch seemed to immediately recognise the magic of his creation the moment it came to him, his reach for a godlike lightbulb moment swirling around in his mind like a culmination of his drive and the many influences that kept him going.
One such figure was David Bowie, who has been a seminal influence on the musician since day one. In fact, everything seemed to change the moment he heard The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, which incidentally became one of his favourite albums of all time. Explaining his appreciation for The Quietus in 2013, he said the record “gave my life a magical class” and gave him “the give of inspiration”.
Therefore, it’s no surprise he spent the rest of his time trying to emulate or embody the ‘Starman’ in some way, knowing that he was the blueprint for the peak of extraordinary artistic expression. To him, Bowie wasn’t just a musician; he was a true innovator who reinvented what it meant to create true musical art, and that’s precisely what he set out to do himself.
While ‘The Killing Moon’ developed alongside McCulloch’s love for Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ as he took the initial lyrical inspiration and tried to transform it into something more otherworldly, it wasn’t the only song that saw him attempting to recreate some of the singer’s pre-established magic. Another was ‘How Far?’, which immediately made him feel like he had written a song so profound Bowie himself could have penned it.
Most of the song’s appeal hinges on how McCulloch tackled open-ended questions, not just linguistically but thematically. Using rhetoric, McCulloch channelled the Bowie-esque take on existential musings, centring the entire story of the song on the one sole-defining question: “Are we not the ones?” McCulloch was so impressed with his creation that it could have easily slipped into Bowie’s discography unnoticed.
As he explained to Songfacts: “That whole song, for me, was a David Bowie moment. I felt like I’d written ‘Starman’ or something. Not just because of the astral thing, but because it just had something of Bowie.”
Adding: “That’s how I like to write. I always know my answers to it, but I want it to be just cryptic enough without it being contentious.”
Moreover, by channelling Bowie, he could access aspects of his artistry he might not have otherwise, leaning into the big spiritual questions he always seemed destined to inject into his work. As a result, Bowie operated as a springboard, enabling him to explore his own craft and reach sonic territories he never knew was possible.
