Echo & the Bunnymen • The Puppet • Live at The Lyceum • September 7th 1980

Echo & the Bunnymen • The Puppet • Live at The Lyceum • September 7th 1980

Audio:
Echo & the Bunnymen • The Puppet recorded live at The Lyceum, September 7th 1980

Musicians
Ian McCulloch • vocals, rhythm guitar
Will Sergeant • lead guitar
Les Pattinson • bass guitar
Pete de Freitas • drums

Produced, Engineered, Mixed • Echo And The Bunnymen, Tim Summerhayes

Video:
Shot live at The Lyceum, September 7th 1980. From the 1981 film “Urgh! A Music War”, directed by Derek Burbidge.
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The Bunnymen’s show at the Lyceum on September the 7th, 1980 was the first time the band had played since the debut album Crocodiles had hit the number 17 spot in the UK charts in July.

This was the set list that night:

Going Up
Do It Clean
Read It in Books
Rescue
Over the Wall
Pride
Pictures On My Wall
The Puppet
Monkeys
Villiers Terrace
All That Jazz
Happy Death Men
Crocodiles

The Puppet was not a track from the Crocodiles album. It was released later as a single, a week after the Lyceum show. The Puppet was recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, and produced by Bill Drummond and David Balfe, as Crocodiles had been. But it’s not clear to me if the song/the recording hails from the Crocodiles sessions at Rockfield. I suspect not, because it seems that The Puppet was debuted at the September 7th Lyceum show, and after the song finishes, McCulloch says, “That was a new one”.

The Bunnymen then seemed to have played the song on most of the remaining shows in 1980, and then only a handful of times in 1981. Presumably the sheer volume of excellent new material that would make up 81’s Heaven Up Here album started to take precedent. I know they didn’t play it at the December 9th 1981 show at the Hammersmith Palais, because I was there. Hanging around after the show I hassled David Balfe, who was playing keyboards with the band, and who had added the excellent descending synth line to the ecstatic latter part of The Puppet. I asked him why the band hadn’t played the song, and if memory serves he simply answered, “I don’t know, maybe next time.”

The Bunnymen only performed The Puppet only about a dozen times, and for the last time at a show at the 688 Club in Atlanta, Georgia on October 10th, 1981. Almost 30 years later, a Guardian review of a Bunnymen show in Manchester starts with: “Midway through the Bunnymen's first British gig in ages, Ian McCulloch finally loses patience with a heckler. "We're not playing The Puppet!" he snaps. "We played it once and it was crap!" …Their third single, from 1980, remains the only misfire in a glorious heyday…”.

Personally, I love The Puppet, but I would certainly agree about the glorious heyday sentiment. In 1980/81 The Bunnymen were my favorite band, and Heaven Up Here in particular remains one of my most cherished albums.

Having scoured the net for several years, I found that there’s not much decent footage out there of the Bunnymen during their 80/81 heyday. So the footage of them at the Lyceum performing The Puppet from the Urgh! A Music War film is very valuable. However, the clip has always frustrated me. Firstly, the sound is weedy and compressed. And secondly, the excellent live footage is spoiled by being intercut here and there, with a secondary narrative of scenes, presumably shot outside the Lyceum that night, of punks and other young scruff bags waiting around on what looks like a typically grim and wet London evening.

So this video is an attempt to rectify the situation. Using the US DVD, I’ve reordered the footage in order to omit the extra scenes from within the performance. And I’ve synced the finished edit to the audio from the CD, which I’ve beefed up to give it a more dynamic feel.
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I’m looking to restore and upload some of the other early Bunnymen video material, including Shine So Hard. It seems criminal to me that the John Smith-directed Shine So Hard film hasn’t resurfaced in good quality yet. Shot at a show in January ’81, Shine So Hard is a brilliant 30 mins of the Bunnymen storming through some of their best material, and enigmatically lurking about in the full Apocalypse Now! combat gear.

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