Crocodiles: 25th Anniversary Remastered & Expanded Edition [Extra tracks] [Original recording remastered]

The follow up ‘Heaven Up Here’ (also part of this series of digitally remastered Bunnymen albums) was enjoyable enough but I think the band were already, slowly, losing their way.

The inclusion here of the deliriously good ‘Do It Clean’ and the vitality and power of the four live tracks from the Shine So Hard EP emphasise that these early years were the peak of their output and make this the best reissue I’ve bought in years.

The production largely comes from Dave Balfe (Teardrop Explodes) & Bill Drummond (KLF), though Pride & Rescue were produced by Ian Broudie (Big in Japan, Lightning Seeds) back in Liverpool. Going Up is the potent opening track, building up from a wall of guitars to a pulsing guitar driven anthem- it's coincidental that The Stone Roses (1989) had a similar opening & that it was recorded at the fabled Rockfield studios in Wales. Stars are Stars, moving beyond the Bowie-isms of the Peel version, is an absolute highlight- up there with Ocean Rain & Pictures on My Wall as my fave Bunnymen track. Seemingly infinite who can but be blown away by those pulsing guitars & McCulloch's poetry "I caught a fallen star- it cut my hands to pieces..."? It has the same vocal style as the Kilimanjaro re-recording of Sleeping Gas- as if the lead singer is duetting with himself. U2's Boy is like the teen version of this- so odd that the Bunnymen aren't the biggest band in the world!

Pride does the teen angst thing ("daddy says, sister says, "D'ya mind if we laugh at you?") predicting such bands as Nirvana, Radiohead & The Smiths, who can not love the wild part where the guitars go into overload & McCulloch hollers "DO IT!!!!" Monkeys is even better, as great as anything by such peers as The Chameleons, The Cure & Joy Division, & again clearly an influence on the joys that were early Ride. The next album would use Monkeys very much as a template, though this song fills me with euphoria, where many of the Heaven Up Here tracks make me want to sulk & do Thom Yorke impersonations...The title track is another rapid angular slice of joy, "listen to the ups & downs, listen to the inbetweens...", classic post-punk stuff displaying Mac's ego, "met someone just the other day, said 'Wait Until tomorrow'...I said "Hey, what you doing today?- I'm gonna do it tomorrow!"-

Rescue remains a chiming anthem, that opening riff always mindblowing, as is the part where Mac wonders, "Is this the blues I'm singing?". Villiers Terrace has more keyboard on (courtesy of Balfe)& details that teen plain of hedonism and exploration, the "mixing up the medicine" & the way everything at that age takes on a mythic quality (or at least that's how I feel about the song/album!). Debut single Pictures on My Wall is re-recorded, one of the strongest songs in an album of the strongest songs; simply, you have to listen to it- if it doesn't blow your mind, check to see if a cortex has been dislodged! All That Jazz takes us back to the angular-guitar thing, a part of it even sounding a bit like Joy Division's Digital! The album proper closes on Happy Death Men (another Camus reference alongside The Fall & Killing an Arab: a Happy Death being the original title of the earlier version of L'Etranger), which stands out against the rest of the album, due to the trademark Teardrops-brass (Julian Cope's Head On reveals his irritation that it first made a Bunnymen record, rather than a Teardrops one!). A great conclusion to one of the greatest albums ever...

A wealth of bonus tracks are here- though why two versions of Simple Stuff & early takes of Pride & Villiers and not classic single The Puppet is beyond me? It seems that The Puppet has been largely written out of Bunnymen history, not being found on the Ballyhoo-compilation either- which means you have to fork out for an import of Songs to Learn & Sing or the Crystal Days box-set. Shame, as the tape version of this I grew up with had 'Do It Clean' listed as the second track, but was in fact The Puppet- so I miss it! Of course there is Do It Clean, another of the greatest Bunnymen singles- a pulsing surf-garage organ (reminding you of Camera,Camera or Better Scream)- very much their take on early Doors, who can not be blown away by the lines "I've been here there everywhere/here there nowhere/iszy bitzy witzy everywhere...I did it clean- know what I mean?" Such style! & it's nice to have the best version of Read It In The Books (aka Books) that McCulloch co-wrote with Cope- it's much better than the take on Kilimanjaro or the strange version Cope did in 1988 on Charlotte Anne's 12". The final bonus tracks stem from the Shine So Hard e.p. and see the early Bunnymen in their primal glory performing epic takes of All That Jazz and Crocodiles, along with two of the best songs from Heaven Up Here: Over the Wall & Zimbo (aka All My Colours).

Crocodiles remains one of the greatest albums ever, at this price & with these bonus tracks it's a must-purchase; even if it misses out The Puppet!

Of an apparently generous ten extras tracks (although this is testament to the brevity of the album’s original form) “The Puppet” does not appear. Apart from that criminal omission, fans can programme what I think is the best sequence, namely the second side followed by the first side with "Read It In Books" inserted immediately before “Pictures On The Wall” (which is not as good as the original single release.)

I cannot believe that I am the only person in the world to have listened to the album in the reverse order but in any event I feel wholly justified in believing, first, that the classic opening riff of "Rescue" makes a better introduction to the album than "Going Up"'s more drawn out opening and, secondly, that the blistering "Crocodiles" itself is a more climatic and complete album end than "Happy Death Men" whose fade segues perfectly into "Going Up" if programmed in the way I suggest. Try me!

The extras include the “Shine So Hard” ep in its entirety. Maligned by the band at the time, "Shine So Hard" shows what a fantastic live group the Bunnymen were and was a showcase for the versatile drumming of the late, great, Pete de Freitas. Of the remaining six tracks only three have not been released before and these are early versions of songs which appear on the rest of the disc in not particularly altered form.

These technical and value issues aside, the quality of the songs is beyond doubt. Les Pattinson’s bass was the most prominent it would ever be, the mood mature beyond the band’s years and, although not as brilliant as “Heaven Up Here” or “Ocean Rain”, "Crocodiles" announced the Bunnymen as the major force in the post-punk British rock scene.