NEXT week, Echo & The Bunnymen will celebrate their 40th anniversary with a show at CQAF Marquee in Belfast – though frontman Ian McCulloch jokes that it will be "closer to 50 years" by the time they complete the tour after cancellations due to Covid.
Their 40 Years of Magical Songs concert in Belfast is hotly anticipated: "I'm really looking forward to it, the last few times have been absolutely fantastic," says McCulloch.
"They have a sense of humour and are very down to earth, similar to Liverpool. I like The Crown with all the little booths and bells, that don't work, to order a bevvy. I can impersonate the accent as well."
The Liverpool crooner can indeed pull off Belfast and Glasgow brogues with some aplomb, but what about those heady days in the 1980s when the band played Belfast?
"I remember one when I was drinking something that wasn't very sophisticated," he recalls.
"There was a bomb scare and I stayed in the dressing room for a bit. I performed some of the gig on my knees, people thought it was a religious thing but really, I was steaming."
Much like audiences, you can sense his enthusiasm for the band's return to the live stage after the lockdowns.
"At home I'm pretty reclusive, I don't need to go out that much but not having the pub to go to for a pint was crap," he says.
"It's given me a different outlook for the future: I'm going to enjoy this and do it as well as I can. I've always cared but this tour has taught me – this is what happens when you do your thing, enjoy it and do it as well as you can."
The Bunnymen's first four classic albums have been recently reissued on vinyl after being out of print for some time. Mac suggests the band's second album Heaven Up Here is a personal favourite.
"It was so good, the faces on the cover is us looking out to the ocean, our horizon is expansive. I think musically our horizons were broader than anyone else at the time in terms of the soul of the music rather than where we were going success-wise."
The cover art of the 1981 album was taken by British photographer Brian Griffin in the Welsh seaside town of Porthcawl.
"The songs had a lot of meteorological and elemental stuff, it was more a feeling within the sound of the band: it was untouchable. I thought we were not so much far ahead of everyone else but far removed from what else was going on at the time."
Over The Wall from the album has been added to recent set-lists. It remains an arresting listen whether live or in the studio and, like the artwork, the track exists in a world of its own not tied to typical 1980s sounds and fashions.
"We tried to use sounds that wouldn't date the records," explains McCulloch.
"One thing we tried to steer clear of was synthesisers. With Ocean Rain [the band's 1984 album regarded by many as their masterpiece] we would strip the songs down live and use a keyboard for the string parts.
"Although they were underpinned by bass and drums all the hooks were in the guitar and vocals. I've noticed a younger audience in Manchester and Nottingham, not so much in Liverpool, they're probably at home watching Liverpool [FC] on the telly."
McCulloch adds that the band's run of seminal albums from 1980 to 1984 – Crocodiles, Heaven Up Here, Porcupine and Ocean Rain – are like "the suits in a deck of cards: the diamonds, the clubs, the hearts and spades. Those four were like a set".
"I always felt four was like a magic number. It's there to hear, we did things no-one else was attempting," he says.
"We were influenced by Bowie in that we wanted different types of songs going through one album like on Crocodiles. Crocodiles [the title track] sounded nothing like Villiers Terrace and Stars Are Stars was nothing like Rescue, but they would all fit together.
"I wanted it like that otherwise I would get bored. Rock bands get fixated on the audience – Bowie never did that and neither did we.
"With Bowie, the music was intelligent. I used to joke to myself thinking our audience would be professors and learned women: I wasn't aiming for that intellectual thing but the lyrics were different to the other bands."
The conversation turns to meetings with the late, great David Bowie who Mac suggests was better than "da Vinci and Rembrandt, and Rembrandt was great" before saying: "I always felt not good enough on the day when meeting him.
"The first time I was covered in mosquito bites, I say it in the song Me and David Bowie.
I'd reacted badly to these bites, I said to him, 'This isn't my normal face'.
"The next time we (Mac and Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant) were supporting him as Electrafixion and I was using a Bic razor – it was before the three-blade thing – and I had blood all over my face.
"From behind I heard, 'I recognise the back of that head'. I was like, 'Can you just meet me once when I'm not covered in s***e?', but he was lovely."
The Bunnymen's music has added an important soundtrack element to several film and television soundtracks, among them Pretty In Pink featuring Bring On The Dancing Horses, and vampire favourite The Lost Boys which included the band's version of People Are Strange by the Doors.
Of the first McCulloch suggests, "I didn't like Molly Ringwald": on the latter he adds: "I'd said 'no' initially to [director] Joel Schumacher, he asked our manager to talk to me so I spoke to him on the phone and he flattered me so much I said, 'I'll do whatever you want'.
"We played it live with Ray Manzarek [The Doors' organist] before and he said, 'Jim (Morrison) would've loved it', so I was like, 'Right, we're doing it'."
Themes in the Bunnymen's 1984 song The Killing Moon from Ocean Rain overlapped and helped set the tone of the 2001 movie Donnie Darko, but when director Richard Kelly removed the cut from the start of the film for a special edition, a vital element was lost. McCulloch wasn't impressed.
Bunnymen mythology has often been driven by the band's enigmatic frontman, also known as 'Mac the Mouth'. Before our interview ends, he addresses the myth that the song was a co-write with God.
"I woke up and the line was there – God woke me up and it came out my brain, I got the chords and there you go: the best song ever written."
Echo & The Bunnymen, Saturday April 30, CQAF Festival Marquee, Custom House Square, Belfast. Tickets via cqaf.com.
