I haven't really hard much about Echo & The Bunnymen lately, even though the band has stayed together (with numerous personnel changes) the better part of 30 years. Founding member Ian McCulloch has consistently stayed with the band. I remember hearing them in the early 80's when the music scene shifted into Post-Punk before splintering into Alternative, Indie, New Wave, New Romantic and on and on and on. Echo & The Bunnymen were one of the first to dive into the new genre, and in doing so influenced a number of bands who came on the scene after them.

It wasn't until the mid-80's that Echo & The Bunnymen gathered momentum in the mainstream. Prior to that they had good press and word-of-mouth status and they were much better known in their native UK than they were here. But they persisted and did quite well before hitting some snags and dissolving, and eventually resurfacing with new personnel and some direction changes.

Tonight it's a session they recorded in 1980, their 3rd for the John Peel Program at The BBC, on November 4, 1980.

Here's what they play.

1. It's Heaven Up Here
2. That Golden Smile
3. Turquoise Days
4. All My Colours Turn To Cloud

Kicking off the weekend with a revisit to the 80's.

(The Mighty Lemon Drops - sadly, didn't scratch the Hot 200 in the U.S.)

It's always interesting to see what lurks on the bottom shelf on a row of CD's you haven't looked at since 1998.

I almost forgot about this band, and it seems the rest of the American disc buying public did too at the time. The Mighty Lemon Drops were tough to categorize. Even their Wikipedia page lists them as an indie/college/alternative/jangle group (didn't realize "jangle" was an actual genre, but . . .) and there are vague references to a sort of 80's/90's Psychedelic resurgence a-la Echo & The Bunnymen, which they were most closely associated with sound-wise. In short, I don't think it was easy to actually categorize this band. And I suspect that's where their problem lay. The weird, and somewhat sick thing about radio airplay is that a band has to adhere to one or more of a specific category in order to be adequately listened to (in the minds of radio programmers). Forget that you can enjoy what a band is all about based on what they play and how they play it, but rather if it fits neatly into a category.

The Mighty Lemon Drops were around from 1985-1992.They enjoyed a moderate success in England but not so much in the U.S. with just one single "World Without End" making the College Radio charts in 1988.

This track, At Midnight, comes from their fourth album "Laughter" released in 1989 (the same year The Stone Roses released their first album). The group disbanded in 1992 but did a one-off gig in 2000. They were a good band with some great material that sadly went unnoticed by a lot of the record buying public.

Seems to be a recurring story.