No band gets to choose their own fans, but you can’t help but feel that, since their ’90s reformation, the Bunnymen’s celebrity supporters haven’t exactly encouraged their better tendencies. Getting a little late-Britpop uplift via the backing of Oasis and The Verve around 1997’s Evergreen didn’t hurt, but through the 21st century, endorsement from the likes of Arcade Fire, Elbow and above all Coldplay meant the band seemed to settle a little too comfortably into their late-career role as stately, elegiac alt.rock elder statesmen.
Whereas the original Bunnymen spirit was wilder, more unruly: lairy, louche and grandiose. Ian McCulloch was the original Cosmic Scally, one foot on the Kop, howling on David Fairclough, the other in some Benelux brasserie, crooning along to Jacques Brel. The balance between the gutter and the stars was crucial, and their scratchy, psychedelic nonsense-funk was just as vital an ingredient in their potent scouse slumgullion as their keening, arctic intensity or their swooning sex shanties.
Maybe the stars have aligned, maybe the waning light has raised the stakes, but somehow this late in the day, approaching their 50th anniversary, on their 13th album, the Bunnymen have tapped back into that founding spirit. You’ll have heard “Brussels Is Haunted” by now, roaring out of the radio: equal parts Proust and Ian Rush, frites and mayonnaise. In his own mid-sixties, Mac’s pole star David Bowie formally introduced his final chapter with “Where Are We Now?”, haunting the Schöneberg strasse he once prowled. By contrast, Mac seems freshly intoxicated by the sense-memory of frozen Stolly, the rum and cassis of the Brussels nightclubs where the Bunnymen were greeted as post-punk conquistadors on their first trip abroad, in 1980.
And he seems to have slipped out a side-door from the wintry memory palace. Apples For Isaac is 11 brisk tracks, keen not to outstay their welcome, none breaking the four-minute barrier. Even as Will Sergeant is eclipsed in the band he founded, reduced to a hired hand supplying occasional lunar tremolo and skyscraping solo, McCulloch flying solo, writing, producing and playing almost everything himself, covers the waterfront of everything you want from a Bunnymen album: the desolate docks and the dreaming spires, the spooked sidestreets and the ecstatic stadiums.
“Take Me By The Hand” opens on the iconic A/G chords of “Silver”, then lurches into a nervy funk that reminds you what a crucial influence the Bunnymen were on the sublime shambles of early Happy Mondays. “The Honey” (“it feels like flying but there’s no sky/Feels like crying but the tears won’t cry“) slaloms gloriously like Stevie Heighway, reminding you of when the Bunnymen felt part of a fancy-dan British pop forward line alongside The Cure and New Order.
But elsewhere the album draws deep on Mac’s rich and strange memories of the 1970s, outside of the holy trinity of Bowie, Cohen and Reed. “The Light That Surrounds You” has an ecstatic, scarf-waving chorus that might have graced one of ABBA’s epic Scandi-Hispanic ballads (“Chiquitita”, “Fernando”), while “Lab Rats Run” is a delirious fantasia taking in Pelé, Henry VIII and Elvis on his throne, pondering his fifth Cornetto, driven by a sax fusillade worthy of prime Wizzard.
At the heart of the record, Side Two, track one, is “The Unstoppable Force”, which, this late in the day, turns out to be one of the truly great Bunnymen ballads. It begins, quite naturally, at post-punk ground zero: the sound of the first Velvets album, Lou Reed’s guitar from “Heroin”, John Cale’s strings from “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. But Mac uses this as a launchpad. On an album keen not to outstay its welcome, you feel, quite reasonably, that this one should have run maybe three times as long.
“More and more diminishing time, you’re in sight of the finishing line…” Mac croons, quite beautifully, bringing some of the sly Leonard Cohen gravitas to the final curtain. Because the unstoppable force, as both Isaacs, Newton and Asimov, knew, is gravity: the slow, patient reducer that brings all fireworks and footballers, poets and pop stars, back down to the cold old earth eventually. Maybe it’s the presence of Blondie’s Clem Burke drumming throughout (and this is quite a swansong for that particular maverick), but it’s an album touched by mortality, emerging richer and stranger for it.
Almost 50 years ago on Crocodiles, the Bunnymen began their long, strange space odyssey with “Going Up”. If Apples For Isaac is the beginning of the descent, if it inaugurates the official start of the Bunnymen’s Late Style, this promises to be one of the great final seasons in British rock.