Book - Bunnyman: A Memoir by Will Sergeant

How can it be that a couple of notes played in the right way, in the right order and making the right sound can make you laugh or cry?

I don’t know. I do know that when ‘Back of Love’ came out I thought it was the best song ever made. And then they put out ‘The Cutter’ and I thought that was. And so Echo and the Bunnymen earned their place in my musical awakening.

I picked this up during those dark days when nothing was open and was determined to support as many businesses as possible. This is why my TBR pile rose to well beyond 20, not counting the even longer book wish list on my Evernote.

As a fan of the Bunnymen, I knew was their link to Julian Cope (Teardrop Explodes) and Pete Wylie (Wah!), who I also liked, especially the latter. Julian Cope gets mentioned early and throughout as instrumental in their early success when ‘everything just kept falling their way, no work was needed’. Disappointed not to see Pete Wylie mentioned at all so I guess I will have to learn part of the story about the Crucial Three somewhere else. Come to think of it, I don’t think the Crucial Three were mentioned either who I always understood as the predecessor to these three bands.

But hey ho, this is not their story. This is the story of someone from a village outside of Liverpool, growing up in post-war Britain in a place where the Beatles exploded from and figured out his way out of the 60s and 70s and into forming one of my favourite bands of the time.

Will Sergeant seems to be about the music - or the art - rather than fame and has never courted that. He needed to belong and luckily found his crowd. Did his shyness and lack of confidence mean he was the original shoegazer? Probably. 

Sergeant does claim that words like ‘bagsy’, ‘afters’ and ‘dinner’ for school lunches were a Liverpool thing whereas that’s exactly what we called it at my school some 180 miles further south.

Bunnyman provides a wonderful respite from my usual memoirs and historical fiction. Will Sergeant is a superb, witty writer and I hope he does more.

This book is a wonderful, insightful and short read for anyone who had their musical awakening in the post-punk era.