The Culture Bunker

Version one, recorded for BBC Session April 1981, released on "Peel Sessions Plus", 2008 and "Wilder" reissue, 2013

Julian Cope - vocals, guitar

Troy Tate - guitar

Jeff Hammer - keyboards

Alfie Agius - bass

Gary Dwyer - drums

Version two recorded live in 1981 and broadcast by WLIR radio / recorded at Guildford Civic Hall, June 1981 and broadcast by the BBC, available on "Zoology" compilation (2004)

Julian Cope - vocals, guitar

Troy Tate - guitar

Jeff Hammer - keyboards

Alfie Agius - bass

Gary Dwyer - drums

Version three recorded Autumn 1981, released on "Wilder" album, November 1981.

Julian Cope - vocals, guitar, bass (?)

Dave Balfe - keyboards

Troy Tate - guitar

Gary Dwyer - drums

Ted Emmett, Luke Tunney - brass

James Eller - bass?

Written by Julian Cope

"Peter says

Julie says

I think it's time you started stalling

We think it's time you start falling

Fall"

("Pride" - Echo and the Bunnymen,  1980)

"More than in Liverpool

And junior school

Like lions we cling to our pride"

("Kolly Kibber's Birthday", Julian Cope, 1984)

January 1981 was a strange time for the Teardrop Explodes. Ok, let's rephrase that. It was a strange time for Julian Cope. The four piece band which had created "Kilimanjaro" and the yet to be released "Reward" had fallen apart. Guitarist Alan Gill had departed, unable to tour and with his mind blown by whatever was happening in the group. Cope had reasserted his control by sacking Dave Balfe, who was getting his head together in a country cottage in true hippy style. In reality he was in Rockfield Studios, or a cottage nearby, equally mind blown. 

Now Cope was leading the band and had decided he didn't want to play bass any more. If he was leading he was leading from the front. He was now the focal point, the singer, the potential pinup in Smash Hits just like A&R man Dave Bates had suggested. Only there was no group, it was Cope and drummer Gary Dwyer. More musicians were needed and quickly.

Bill Drummond had suggested Troy Tate as guitarist almost as soon as Gill was on his way out. Tate was a little older than Cope and Dwyer and had played in Shake, an offshoot of the Rezillos who had issued two singles in 1980. Tate was installed before Christmas 1980 and there is video footage on YT of Tate and Dwyer being interviewed on some children's TV show by Keith Chegwin or some such. The hiring of a new keyboard and bass player would be more difficult. 

In "Head On" Cope writes how he'd never auditioned band members before and it was a strange experience, made weirder by the fact Cope was on acid, Tate was chugging beers and Gary was just there. Bass players came and went, including Rolo McGinty - a few years before he formed The Woodentops. Cope claimed McGinty wasn't even as good as himself, but in Paul Simpson's book "Revolutionary Spirit" he claims McGinty had a conviction which would have made it difficult on their forthcoming US tour. And after all, Tate would use McGinty on his solo records around the time. Eventually Cope picked Alfie Agius for the bass player role. There were less keyboard players to audition and finally they picked Jeff Hammer, "totally uncool and wrong for the hip Teardrop Explodes". But Hammer was the first auditionee who Cope could tolerate and so he was in. *

The song the band used as their audition piece was a new song called "The Culture Bunker".

Cope has said the song choice was deliberate, it was a new song so at that point it was malleable, it wasn't fixed in concrete or on recording tape. It also gave little evidence of the band's style. Obviously any auditionee would have had some inkling about who the Teardrop Explodes were, even though at the start of 1981 they weren't household names yet. But "The Culture Bunker" was unlike any song already in the TX catalogue.

Because it's oddly funky.

Now it's hard to say whether it was always this way - there's clearly a home demo recorded by Cope on his own featuring acoustic and electric guitars, synth, snare, bass and vocals - but as soon as the full five piece band are playing it, "The culture bunker" gets a good lop sided groove going. Of course it starts with Cope strumming on his own, hammering a G# chord while ba-ba-ba-ing a melody, then the band jump in as the intro changes to a G chord where it stays for the whole of the verse. The chorus moves relatively between C and F before hanging on the G again, alternating the F and Eb on the final lines of the chorus - "I feel cold when it turns to gold". The song only really feels at home on the G in the verse and there's definitely a Can influence in the steadfast refusal to go anywhere off that chord.

The BBC recording ** has almost all the elements in place, Dwyer's drum pattern is rock solid (as ever, his drumming is seriously underrated you know), Cope is grooving and jangling on rhythm guitar giving Tate a chance to arpeggiate or add choppy chords, Hammer's keyboards just act as pads and Agius is getting funky on the bass, there's a few flashes of slap bass at the end of the occasional line. But the song fades out after two verses and choruses with Tate tentatively playing a three note solo, a launchpad for further exploration. 

The live version issued on "Zoology" is a fine demonstration of all that was right and wrong with the 1981 lineup. Cope's guitar sounds out of tune and he gives up playing in the main body of the song, Hammer makes up for the lack of guitar by overplaying on his string synth with a lot of odd glissandos (Glissandi?) and Agius just funks his stuff. But Tate gets to rip off a tasty solo aided by some delay on his guitar. But it all sounds very professional - Agius and Hammer aren't improvising and it's up to Tate to get wild(er). When Cope returns to the song, working around one of the two standard endings (see later) he sounds bored. But he does manage to drag in the "And everybody's singing..." line from "Take a chance". Not that many fans hearing the song in the summer of 81 would recognise a song from a different variant of the band from 1979. "Take a chance at fame" indeed. The irony couldn't have been lost on Cope. Then after seven minutes it all stops, very professionally. In the sleeve notes to the 2013 "Wilder" reissue Cope says this lineup's take on the song sounded like "Fucking arena hippies". He's not wrong. Incidentally Cope's notes on "Zoology" claim it's a recording from WLIR in New York, he's wrong, it's a BBC recording from Guildford. (The WLIR version is better, for the record)

We'll get to the recorded version later. As for now, let's talk about the song itself.

In "Head on" Cope describes "The Culture Bunker" thus:

"We had a new song, 'The Culture Bunker'. It was a comment on my meanness and inability to get off on the success of the Bunnymen and Liverpool in general. The open bitchiness of the song assuaged some of my guilt and the chorus refrain was aimed straight at Mac: "I feel cold when it turns to gold for you."" 

"The culture bunker" is probably the most well known Teardrop Explodes song outside of their singles output because it exposes the raw nerves around the Liverpool scene at the time. To put it simply, Cope was jealous of the success he saw being attained by his rivals. He had been in a near legendary band with Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie for about a week back in 1977, this was The Crucial Three. Since then the crucial three had been in a number of short lived or imaginary bands around the Liverpool scene before settling on the Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen and Wah! Heat respectively. At the time "The Culture Bunker" was written the Teardrops were being written off by the music press and hadn't had any commercial success. "Crocodiles" had ended 1980 at number 7 on the NME's albums of the year list 27 places higher than "Kilimanjaro" and both "Better scream" and "Seven minutes to midnight" had been well received by the press and public. Was Cope on the ropes? 

Now I've tried to find out the first reference to The Crucial Three in the music press and the earliest appearance seems to be in an interview with Echo and the Bunnymen in late 1980 to promote "The puppet" single. Even without the knowledge of the band's name, the closeness between Cope, McCulloch and Wylie must have been discussed in interviews. At this point Wylie wasn't much competition but McCulloch was. The rivalry between Cope and McCulloch turned toxic around the end of 1979 after a combined Bunnymen / Teardrop Zoo Records tour. It was clear by the end of '79 that the two bands were moving in different directions, not least because the Bunnymen had major label interest by this point, Sire Records with the backing of Warners. For all Cope's proclamations in the press that Zoo gave Teardrop more flexibility and freedom, he was jealous of his former band mate getting more attention, especially when the Bunnymen's record company advance allowed them to buy new Fender guitars and amps. And after all, McCulloch was already paranoid - hence the quoted lines from "Pride" - who were Peter and Julie if not Ian's former band mates who wanted him to fall? 

So there was a lot of jealousy and ego trips around Liverpool in early 1981 and Cope channelled his feelings into "The Culture Bunker". It starts with a plea for success - "oh take me to your heart", "I'd like some of this, I've been waiting so long" - Cope is desperate for the success he can see the Bunnymen achieving. He also idly wonders about where it all went wrong for the Crucial Three. Let's face it, of the three members Cope is the only one likely to mention the mythical band in a lyric. There's so many intimations of warfare in this song - Cope is smiling as he fingers the pin on a hand grenade, there's doodlebugs falling and he's watching "you" burn. There were a lot of references to warfare and the military on "Kilimanjaro" and this is a link back to that. Also don't forget that Liverpool was hit badly by the Germans during the Second World War, it could just be a metaphor. Whatever, the lyric is one of Cope's sharpest, spiking all those around him. Truly acidic. The irony is that by the time he was performing "The culture bunker" to British audiences in the summer of 1981 he was a bigger star than Ian McCulloch. It was "Treason" all over again. 

Once the song was written and rehearsed it was quickly added to the band's live set for the Spring tour of the US in 1981. From the available recordings it is already well arranged by the time of the first gigs on the East Coast.  It was mid-set, usually introduced by Cope as "A song about Liverpool". The structure pretty much set in stone, introduction from Cope solo on guitar into verse, chorus, verse, chorus, short solo section for an agreed number of bars, intro again into chorus then an extended jam for improvisation. There seems to be two different ways out of the improvised section - one is an ascending chord sequence (G to A to A# to B) sometimes started by Cope on his guitar, the other based on descending guitar arpeggios from Tate, based around a descending run from F to E to Eb to D (the same run heard on the introduction of "Made of stone" eight years later) which would sometimes be echoed vocally by Cope in his improvisations. This is how the song was performed live throughout 1981 but when it came to recording it for the second album in the Autumn of that year it needed some adjustments. 

For a start, the band's lineup had changed. Agius and Hammer were gone and Dave Balfe had returned on keyboards, plus the addition of the Teardrop brass section of Ted Emmett and Luke Tunney helped fill out the sound. The credits on "Wilder" aren't particularly useful for facts about who plays what on each song which will make my job a bit of a pain over the forthcoming blog entries. Who is playing bass on "The culture bunker"? In "Head on" Cope claims he played some bass on the album then in "Repossessed" claims James Eller played "all the best bass parts on 'Wilder'". Maybe even Alfie Agius played on it in an early session before he was sacked? Who knows? Anyway, the recorded version is expanded nicely - Balfe's synth work is far superior to Hammer's string synth wash, the unison of his and Tate's melody at the start of each verse is a great move. Tate's guitar weaves around the song beautifully - more evidence that he was their best guitarist - and he even slips in a morse code one note solo throughout the second half of the song in addition to his choppy half chords. The sharp brass blasts in the chorus add a nice touch back to the "Reward" era, while there's a wild trumpet solo where Tate's guitar solo used to be. After the final chorus the band jam around on the one chord for around 60 seconds as the song slowly fades out. Balfe's synths splutter and squeal, someone rings out a frantic cowbell, Tate throws out some choppy half chords, it could go on forever. A fantastic group performance, made extra special by some lovely production touches - the backwards chord going into each chorus, the bass dropping out in the second verse, the intermittent synth overdubs. It's a close cousin to what Talking Heads were creating on "Remain in light", layers on layers becoming a matrix of sound, and here it works perfectly.

The "Wilder" arrangement would become the framework for the Club Zoo era live version. Two recordings of this line up are available on the "Culture Bunker" boxed set issued in 2023. Balfe doesn't have the synth rig to make all the noises on the album but does use his Polymoog for a single note marimba pattern (that sound will appear in a later song in this tale) while allowing his Prophet 5 to play melodies and the glissandos, plus some divebombing doodlebugs in the second verse. Tate is in his element, the song gave him a chance to show his abilities and live he would take off into other worlds with effects boxes and some strange techniques - extreme string bending and whammy bar swoops, long sustained notes (maybe an Ebow?) and playing with feedback. New bass player Ronnie Francois locked in with Dwyer for an undeniably danceable rhythm section. And Cope was giving free rein to improvise. By the time of the early 1982 tour, "The culture bunker" had become the last song of the main set, stretching out to close to ten minutes, a chance to wig out and blow off some steam and leave the audience wanting more. Cope would drop in other songs during the end improvisations - sometimes throwing in "I can face the world now", a song written by Les Pattinson for his legendary imaginary band The Geoffs. 

By 1982 Cope knew the game was up. "Heaven up here" was the NME readers' album of the year, "Wilder" had been a commercial disappointment and his label were no longer interested, and yet he was still singing "The culture bunker" with an amazing amount of passion. For a visual taste of the power of the Club Zoo lineup, look no further than the April "Old Grey Whistle Test" concert, half an hour of old and new material with the band playing at their absolute peak. To close the set, it could only be "The culture bunker". I've watched this performance hundreds of times since I first bought it on a bootleg tape in the mid 80s and I'm still astounded by it. So many little moments... Balfe laughing as he makes his Prophet explosions... Francois and Tate dancing almost in unison... The trumpet solo... And yet Cope steals the show, the final few minutes are mesmerising live TV. (You can also see Cope trying to start the G - A - A# - B chord sequence right at the end) 

When the Teardrop Explodes contracted into a three piece for their final months "The culture bunker" was still their set closer. It sucked. Cope has pulled the song out for live shows from time to time, it was played on his 1984 tour to promote "World shut your mouth" and played amongst his most recent gigs just before COVID struck in 2020. Is there any rivalry between any of the Crucial Three? They all exist in their own worlds now - still creating new music for the fans and playing the songs which made them famous back in the 80s. "The culture bunker" isn't so much a place as a state of mind, the paranoia of seeing your former friends achieving what you are striving for. Away from the specifics of the Liverpool scene, it's a moment anyone could recognise in their own lives. You could say we hate it when our friends become successful. "The culture bunker" has a resonance well beyond its original genesis and that is why it is so well loved. One of the Teardrop Explodes' finest moments. 

* There is some confusion about when these auditions took place. It's clear that the new band members appear in the video for "Reward" as does Paul Simpson who recalls meeting all three  members at the filming of the video. Cope doesn't date the auditions but claims the "Reward" video was filmed around Christmas 1980. However the first mention of the new members in the music press is a news article in NME from 7th February 1981, a week after another news story about Gill and Balfe leaving the band. Perhaps the auditions took place around Christmas but the news didn't reach the press until the end of January? Even more confusingly, the recent "Culture Bunker" boxed set shows a photo of a demo tape of "The Culture Bunker" alongside other early 1981 songs. The date on the tape cover? February 1981.

** As mentioned in previous posts, I'm not convinced this session was made in any BBC recording studios. More likely demos made at either The Producers Workshop or the Stiff Records mobile at Bear Shank Lodge.