Slagging off U2: The reliable side hustle of Echo and The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch
You can get from Dublin to Liverpool by taking the ferry to Holyhead and hopping on a two-hour train, but if you’re Bono, it wouldn’t be worth your trouble. At least not according to Ian McCulloch.
“U2 have never been liked in Liverpool,” the Echo and The Bunnymen frontman told the Irish Independent in 2011. “We know a fake when we see one.”
For Bunnymen fans as well as those only vaguely familiar with the Liverpool band’s substantial catalogue, the insult comedy of McCulloch, aka “Mac the Mouth,” is part of the group’s place in pop history, for better or worse. His disinterest in diplomacy when discussing his fellow musicians pre-dated the Gallagher Brothers by a generation, and has only shown signs of a softer evolution in recent years, as McCulloch now marches into his late 60s.
As a young Scouser in the 1980s, though, the attitude was usually full knives-out anytime the Bunnymen were out on the promotional circuit and Ian McCulloch had a microphone placed near his face.
It wasn’t enough that he believed Echo and The Bunnymen were the best band in the world at the time; it was also that all of the bands getting more attention than his were massively unworthy of it.
“I just say things that I mean,” a 25-year-old McCulloch tried to clarify to the Boston Globe in 1984 while touring America, a country he openly admitted to hating. “Like, U2 are one of the worst groups I’ve ever heard in my life. I don’t think they’ve got anything. They don’t have good songs, no sex, no intelligence.”
Moments later, in the same interview, McCulloch was equally brutal in his assessment of the entirety of punk music, calling it “as bland in a way as Boy George. I mean I loved it at the time, but it was another set of people wanting to be teenage rebels; you get it every now and then and it doesn’t mean anything in the long run. All the punk thing was ‘It was everybody else’s fault.’ They took none of the blame.”
U2 were not a punk band, of course, but McCulloch might have accidentally revealed more about what rubbed him the wrong way, so often, about Bono and Co. Something about that righteous blaming of the outside world, the lack of inward reflection. Or maybe it was just the fact that U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen had formed around the same time, played a similar style of music, and one was just significantly more commercially successful than the other.
Either way, the insults kept coming, with McCulloch referring to Bono as a “sodden mountain goat” and U2’s songs as “music for plumbers and bricklayers,” which wouldn’t necessarily seem like such a bad thing if you’re truly a man of the working class.
Unfortunately for McCulloch, hating U2 in the 1980s was just like hating Coldplay in the 2020s. You’re never gonna land a deadly blow, nor are you ever gonna get any returns of fire from your opponent. Bono, in typically annoying fashion, took numerous opportunities to praise McCulloch and Echo and The Bunnymen for “raising the standard” when the two bands were both coming up, and in more recent years, U2 bassist Adam Clayton even did the ultimate reverse-troll move by wearing an Echo T-shirt on tour, prompting McCulloch to do an about-face in his public assessment of his Irish foes.
“I saw Adam Clayton wearing a Bunnymen T-shirt on stage, and I thought, ‘That’s a lot cooler than slagging someone off who you don’t know,’” McCulloch told XS Noize in 2018. “Looking back, we were a very similar band. … It wasn’t that they were annoying or bad, because they wrote some excellent songs. But I knew that everybody in Warners [Music Group] wanted us to be like U2. I resented them more for that than the actual group, which I’ve only just realised now.”
This cuddlier version of the Bunny Man even went so far as to describe Clayton as “my favourite bass player” and Bono as “incredible” and reminiscent of “John Lennon”.
“Anyway, that’s enough of me complimenting Bono and U2,” he said, catching himself. “They have always been nice about us, so hopefully, they will find out that I’ve said some nice things about them.”
Later in the same interview, McCulloch did refer to Police drummer Stewart Copeland as a “twat” and, more specifically, “a bigger twat than Sting.” So, at least he hadn’t fully turned over a new leaf just yet.
