It was the early 80s, the age (as some of us excitedly imagined) of the Death of Rock: and what I liked about the Bunnymen (when I liked them, which was far from always) was that the rock they made seemed to come from right inside this territory of loss of belief this sense of a catastrophic cultural ending. Frank Zappa produced his first solo LP: he belongs, in short, to a world set aside an era of swirlingly expansive transformational utopia shelved, and (in less than a decade) lost from view. Respected composer and ethnomusicologist in his own right, Shankar had played on such (half-forgotten) outer-edge countercultural landmarks as Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, Amon Düül’s Wolf City, and - with Yorkshire prog-fusion guitarist John McLaughlin, the acoustic Indo-jazz virtuoso collective Shakti. It starts with the heart of the song the bit not by the Bunnymen, the element allegedly foisted on them in remix, when the record company sent the first drafts back: the drone-clot of Carnatic non-rock violin, as played by Tamil sessionman Lakshminarayanan (more usually just L) Shankar. Wait till we do get to the edge, and then we’ll turn and give them a rousing chorus!” “They do not like all that about ending and failing,” said Merry. The wrong kind of rock and the wrong kind of snow….
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