‘How Far’: The Echo and the Bunnymen song that made Ian McCulloch feel like David Bowie
Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch has a knack for talking up his own music. It’s why he once credited ‘The Killing Moon’ to God, and why he felt like David Bowie when he wrote ‘How Far?’.
A lot of what McCulloch goes through when inspiration strikes is what you might call instinctual. And while most of his songs have some hidden, deeper meaning, he’s always reluctant to reveal too much. But this is also because he believes giving too much away ruins the appeal. As he told SongFacts, “I never really tell people what the meaning is to all the songs because that surely spoils their journey.”
It’s also why we don’t know too much about masterpieces like ‘The Killing Moon’, just that it came to McCulloch from some kind of divine power. “You don’t dream things like that and remember them,” he once said of the main lyric. There’s also a lot of space-related imagery in there, which gave the theme its expansive feel, while probably adding to McCulloch’s hunch that it came from somewhere otherworldly.
Space was something McCulloch was interested in as a child, and it filters through in much of his music. Pair that interest with his “obsession” for cryptic messages, and you’ve got endless possible interpretations to play with. But the fun, on McCulloch’s part, goes beyond being impossible to read. It bleeds into how he feels as an artist, sometimes making him think like he’s stumbled on gold, like how he felt when he wrote ‘How Far?’.
The funny thing in this case, and in all of them, really, is that McCulloch is never aiming for greatness. He wants to make good music, of course, but when he feels he’s landed on genius, it’s usually a serendipitous affair. With ‘How Far?’, he started by thinking of questions aimed at “someone who doesn’t exist”. A lot of his writing comes from this: questions he knows his personal answers to, but which become interesting when he puts them out there for others to do with them what they will.
This is why ‘How Far?’ is the way it is, with a string of questions that make you think: “How far d’you think we’ve come? / How far d’you think we’ve come? / How long, how long, how long / How long d’you think we’ve walked? / How long d’you think we’ve walked?” There’s a lot of space-related imagery in there, too, like “We’re all astronauts / Lookin’ for heaven” and “When all our stars have gone / How dark will it become?”
When he went into the studio, something about the song made him feel the way he thought Bowie felt when he recorded ‘Starman’. “That whole song, for me, was a David Bowie moment,” he boldly declared to SongFacts. “I felt like I’d written ‘Starman’ or something. Not just because of the astral thing, but because it just had something of Bowie.”
He went on, comparing it to ‘Life on Mars’ as well: “That’s a hell of a song to compare it to, but that’s what I always aim for. I’ve never set out going, I want to write this song like Dylan, David Bowie or whoever, but when it happens, it feels like one of the things you’ve loved all your life.”
These comparisons are never a matter of ego. As McCulloch made it clear, it comes from a place of simply loving your heroes and feeling pride whenever you emulate them. What’s even better is that these songs are genuinely good, too, more than worth their place compared to some of the best in history.
