Bunnyman: Post-War Kid to Post-Punk Guitarist of Echo and the Bunnymen

Will Sergeant - Memoirs #1

by Will Sergeant, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike (Editor)

Will Sergeant is a sonic master of the universe. - Courtney Love



This is the true story of one small boy, me, Will Sergeant, navigating the 60's and 70's, a woolly-back (hick) spawned one drunken night on the outskirts of a Nazi pocked and battered Liverpool, growing up with the spectre of WW2 still creeping about most adults padlocked minds. I trudge on into a piss wet 1970s, just as the pustules of teenage years approach popping point. It is a heady time of power cuts, strikes, flying pickets, bread shortages, skinhead gangs, IRA bomb scares, nuclear war fears, rock gigs, glam clothes, drowned motorbikes, explosives, dead-end jobs and the usual school lessons of chicken strangulation. With the help of music, I manage to navigate myself through the sinking sand of prog rock and into the safety of punk. My boots still muddy with a bad attitude, I head into the winter of discontent to become a post-punk trailblazer worshipped all over the world as a god. Well? An inventive and influential guitarist of some note at the very least.



Will Sergeant is a true original. -- Robert Smith

Will Sergeant helped me understand how to translate a psychedelic vision to rhythm and melody. Thrilled to read this! - Flea.

Will Sergeant is one of those people that music fans know is just great. - Johnny Marr

Will Sergeant will always be the perfect guitarist for the perfect band; no more, and no less. - Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins

Any great guitar band needed to have a Will Sergeant. The charismatic front man with his words and voice is all well and good but...without the blackness of the night the moon would not be killing. Will Sergeant was that blackness. He was also the confrontation, the no compromise, the purity of purpose, the beauty of simplicity. He was also always there, up at dawn to capture the first light coming in from the East. - Bill Drummond, The KLF

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Autobiography, Rock N Roll, Audiobook

330 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2021

Reviews

[Lissa Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a huge Bunnymen fan from day one, I was never going to not like this book. However, I soon realised The Bunnymen wouldn't be featuring in any major way, but that in no way detracted from an excellent biography. Whether you like music or not, or even know who The Bunnymen are, this is actually a fascinating story of a working class Liverpudlian kid growing up in the 1970s. Sergeant depicts my era, my childhood, my social scene, albeit from a Northern aspect and a differing family background. It's a story many of us can relate to and while it may not be the story of Echo & The Bunnymen, it is the crucial setting for the band's formation and Sergeant paints an honest, unflinching social commentary in a very conversational way. It deserves all the accolades it has received. Roll on the sequel!

[Gary Fowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Sergeant manages that rare thing with a musical biography of actually explaining the thrilling feeling of forming a band, travelling to gigs, hearing John Peel play your first single on the radio etcetera.
Not only does he give the reader a glimpse behind the curtain, he does so with humour and a fan-boy insight of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s music scene.
The first two hundred or so pages of this book are about Sergeant’s pre-Bunnymen years. This is the sort of thing that in most biographies I can’t waIt to get beyond. Not with this book though.
Hands down one of the best music biographies I’ve read. Roll on part two.

[Hugolane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good memoir. If the option were there I'd probably go with a 4 1/2. Like Peter Hook, who has written excellent memoirs as the bassist of Joy Division and New Order, Sergeant is a guy who probably never would have become an artist were it not for Rock and Roll. Born into a working class/lower middle class family in greater Liverpool in 1958, Sergeant gives a good glimpse of what it meant to grow up in dysfunctional family which his mother eventually fled, counterintuitively creating a new sense of peace in the household, even as Sergeant realizes she was the victim, and his father was abusive.

Since I am just four years younger than him, the story of his developing musical taste is familiar, honed first on what here in America would be classified as classic rock, but with predictably divergences from the US path, Roxy Music and Eno and Gong feature heavily and of course David Bowie, but also Dr. Feelgood, who I now realize were a big influence on Sergeant's rhythmic guitar playing. Yet none of this inspires him to learn to play an instrument, and it is not until about two thirds of the book that thanks to punk and connections made at the Liverpool punk club Eric's that he decides to take up a guitar. It is a very different story from the middle class bohemian drift of the other memoirist of the Liverpool punk/post-punk scene, Julian Cope. Sergeant comes closer to being the non-rebellious non-conformist Peter Guralnik paints Elvis to be than Cope, which seems very clearly class related. For example, Sergeant gets a job training as a chef at Liverpool's historic department store, and never really thinks of jacking it in until the situation at the store after being purchased by another company looking to cut costs.

While that social historical aspects of the book are interesting, Sergeant is at his best recounting his musical pleasures, and I wish there were more. Once he gets to music consuming age the chapters regularly mention a record of the era that meant something to him, and I wish he had done more with that, especially his description of the Velvet Underground is good. He is at his best though as an eye witness. His account of witnessing Joy Division transform from the boring punk band Warsaw to something revelatory is most evocative, as is his half page description of watching Modern Dance era Pere Ubu. His reminiscence of Iggy Pop performance at Eric's is also first rate.

As a fan of Liverpool post-punk from my introduction to it in 1980, Sergeant's version of the scene and the origins of the Bunnymen is rather different that what was long the received account centered around Cope. Cope plays a role here, and Sergeant displays none of the animosity towards Cope that Ian McCulloch has, rightly or wrongly. But Peter Wylie of Wah! Heat, and member of the idea of a band The Crucial Three along with Cope and McCulloch is not mentioned once. Also of interest is the development of their original repertoire. No surprise that "Read it in Books" was early, as was "Going Up." "Pictures on the Wall," while early only comes about when they decide to record for Zoo, and the notion that "Happy Death Men," "Monkeys" (albeit under a different name), and "All that Jazz" all preceded "Rescue" and "Crocodiles" was a bit of a surprise -- of course I wasn't in Britain to listen to the first John Peel session, so this won't be news to others who were there, or have made greater use of the availability of Peel Sessions than I have.

Finally, a few thoughts about this memoir in comparison to similar, Cope and Hook's Joy Division memoir. Hook and Sergeant are comparable, but Hook seems more comfortable with the written word than Sergeant, which doesn't exactly hurt his memoir, but it is more conversational. Cope's story is more effervescent, like the man he is, and like Hook definitely clearly comfortable with writing. That said, Sergeant knows how to leave us wanting more. This book ends, knowing they have a record deal, and they have found their drummer, but no word about meeting Pete DeFreitas or how they knew he was right for them, especially since the pressure to find a drummer in order to get the Sire record deal could easily have led them to have chosen anyone only to discover later the new drummer was not suitable. So there is definitely more to come. I'm looking forward to that.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

This opens up with a nice, breezy and easy tone and within the first chapter Sergeant comes across as an incredibly likeable man. He endured what was clearly a truly traumatic upbringing of violence, poverty and repression and yet seems totally devoid of self-pity or bitterness about it, although having little love for his tyrannical father and a sad dislocation with his mother and yet there’s a genuine light-heartedness which comes through.

We get a feel for that wonderfully fertile and creative scene in Liverpool and Eric’s from the late 70s and well into the 80s, which spawned so many great bands, fine tunes and classic albums. His use of the word “Bagsy” put a smile on my face and his experience of DIY juvenile antics with a Ouija board were close to identical to my own around the same age.

This comes with lots of cool photos, posters, stubs and all that jazz. Though I should have known that when it took around 130 pages before Sergeant leaves school that this was only the first part of his life-story. But this was good stuff.

[Aaron Puerzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a massive fan of Echo & the Bunnymen and a great admirer of Will Sergeant's guitar playing, I knew I had to read this memoir. It started a bit slow and meandering, but once it got to the music, it was an excellent and engaging read. Will's voice as a quiet but observant member of the late 70s Liverpool scene is so funny and charming. I would love to read his follow-up. Would recommend for any Bunnymen fans, and for post-punk fans in general.

[fran ☾ · Rating 2 out of 5]

sadly barely about becoming a band and writing music and more about 60s and 70s northern english nostalgia which i felt i already knew before this book. fun but nothing new.

[Ray Smillie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely for fans of the Bunnymen, the story of Will Sergeant growing up in the bombsite of Liverpool which took a fair battering during WW2. Very much into his music particularly prog rock bands, his record collection sounding almost exactly like mine. His tale takes you right up to the point where Pete de Freitas was ready to replace the drum machine. This is a story only half told and I look forward to the next volume.

[Dave Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recognised much of the 60s and 70s kitchen sink drama backdrop as I grew up in similar circumstances. We were never wealthy, but luckily never wanted for necessity. This is a tremendous, and detailed biography of the birth and early life of a bunny man. Read or as I did listen with the added bonus of Sergeant narrating. I couldn’t turn it off, and completed in less than 24hrs.

[Tony Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me back to the days of recording with the band I was in, at the little 4 track studio at open eye with Knoddy Knowler. Guitar going constantly out of tune and the fear and embarassment.

A superb read

[Javi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 2 of my musical read-em-or-lose-em project: Bunnyman by Will Sergeant

I am not the biggest fan of hardback books, nor of Echo & The Bunnymen. Obviously, I like both of them to an extent (being the fan of literature and post-punk that I am), but both make me feel slightly uncomfortable and for me, lack the charm of paperbacks and other, similar bands. Which makes it almost inexplicable that I would buy (let alone actively choose to read) a hardback autobiography of the Bunnymen's guitarist Will Sergeant. The behavioural scientists who study and catalogue my every move and decision would be baffled, were they not well aware of the high esteem in which I hold the opinions Andy McQueen, resident scouser and indie aficionado of Piccadilly Records. So yeah - I bought and read 'Bunnymen' despite some deep entrenched misgivings and doubts, based off Andy's recommendation. And now, long disclaim-ish preamble delivered, I can finally say that 'Bunnymen' was hands down one of the best music books I've ever read.

This is partly because it's more about the people and the times themselves as opposed to the music business itself. With a 'Shuggie Bain'-esque eye for Liverpool's industrial gloom and a conversational tone so assured that it kept me both entertained and jealous, Sergeant has captured the excitement and the horror of growing up, realising yourself as a person, and deciding to stake your entire identity and worth on your relationship with music. It finishes at the perfect moment for me so I doubt I'll read the inevitable follow-up - I am a Teardrops boy, after all - but this is Highly Recommended. Books!

[Chris Lowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a Bunnymen fan, you'll dig the backstory that Will Sergeant reveals in this memoir starting with the early, early days - PRE-Bunnymen. As a fan myself, I always love reading about the 5 Ws: When, Why, Where...did it all begin? I was hoping to get a little more story on the band and its tunes that it actually provided, but that may be revealed in his follow-up. Therefore, I shan't knock his decision to write it as it is.

[Gavin Hogg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating insight into Will's early life. He writes honestly and powerfully about his family and their dynamics. There's no love or affection and home and all seem emotionally estranged from one another. As a young person growing up in that environment and as someone so shy, there's something very inspiring in the fact that Will has developed the confidence and self knowledge to write a memoir like this.
He can remember events in great detail and there's a tense chapter about the time he almost drowned when he got his motorbike stuck in the sand as the tide came in.
The only thing that I didn't enjoy were the numerous asides to the reader which weren't needed. The book was entertaining enough without them and, for me, they interruped the flow.
Looking forward to reading the next volume.

[Alec Downie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice conversational glimpse into the Liverpool scene that produced Echo & the Bunnymen etc.

No life changing revelations but full of smiles and grimaces. I am assuming there will be a second volume at some juncture or maybe this is as in as, "Manchester" Sergeant gets.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good writer. Good read. Be forewarned that he spends a LOT of time on his early youth. Like most of the book. So if you want to know who he got into a snowball fight with in 1961, it's here! I jest, he's a good writer so it's okay and once he gets into the music, he's very specific about clothes and music and all the fun details. I hope we don't have to wait too long for Part Deux.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Or: Motherless, Acne-Ravaged Cook from the Wrong Side of the Scouse/Wool Line Finds His Tribe and Transcends the Gloom. When you’re famous for being in a band, it’s ballsy to end your memoir at the exact moment when you’ve only just jettisoned your drum machine and hired a human being. That’s it, that’s almost the last page, in 1979, with nothing more than a single and a Peel Session under Echo and the Bunnymen’s belts. Why? Because it’s not a book about the band at all. It’s a story of a world in which nobody of Sergeant’s circumstances was meant to get anything they wanted or more than the bare minimum of what they needed, but somehow he did - and even now, looking back from his 60s, it still seems like so much depended on serendipity and sheer luck to him, because perhaps it did. Perhaps all the culture that ever meant anything to you is the product of dumb luck. People with crap jobs go for a walk at lunch and turn left instead of right, and there you go, musical history made.

It helps that Sergeant is funny as hell. This is the kind of memoir you can’t write until you’re well into middle age and the perspective it brings. He somehow avoids self-pity despite recollecting a childhood that was horrible even by the brutal standards of postwar Liverpool. Much younger than his two siblings, he learns early on that his conception was a drunken mistake. His ex-soldier father, disturbed and likely brain-damaged from World War II, welds the council house windows shut and ensures his children live in squalor. Young Will Sergeant is a bedwetter shunted into the bottom stream at a school that serves its students primarily as a holding pen until it’s time for 16-year-olds to find dead-end jobs. Sergeant’s mother, tired of being a punching bag, walks out of the filthy and troubled home when he is 13. She goes no further than a few miles down the road, but he will not see her again until age 21, by which time his feelings for her are largely of indifference as the walls he put up to survive the dysfunction stop him seeing at the time that she, too, was simply trying to avoid being a victim.

With these long odds, you wonder how he made anything of himself. It starts with the small kindnesses of friends’ mothers who feed him, it goes on with self-reliance and growing confidence cultivated in hot kitchens and on motorbikes driven into quicksand, and finally it all comes to a head in Liverpool’s emerging post-punk scene, where if you’re a bit weird but self-aware, you can find others with the same sense of urgency to create something of your own. Sergeant regards himself as largely in the right place at the right time: here’s an appallingly-dressed and myopic singer who has just been sacked by his band for being too lazy to get out of bed for rehearsals held in his own flat, and here’s a bassist who decides three days before their first gig that maybe he should obtain an instrument and learn how to play it. In the background whirls Julian Cope, half conductor and half alchemist, plus names like Bill Drummond who will go on to put their own stamps on music in the 80s and 90s. Pete Burns is a terrifying record store clerk. You’re left with the impression that Eric’s was a uniquely magical place to be young, creative, and at a loose end in Liverpool for that brief bit of time that it was around.

Ian McCulloch had the mouth and the arrogance that real stardom requires, but turns out there was a hell of a lot of brilliant self-deprecating wit by his side, keeping his head down (literally) and creating the sound of Echo and the Bunnymen. You’re left wondering how the hell this odd pair managed to create alchemy for four brilliant albums, even if in later years it went (and, let’s face it, continues to go) so, so wrong. I’m looking forward to the next volume, which, if there’s any justice in this world, will be subtitled, “How I Survived My Frontman’s Ego and Neurosis for Forty Years and Counting.” It will probably put the nail in the coffin of their partnership but to be honest that might be for the best. But really, good for this man and the life he’s built for himself. Good for him.

[Keith Astbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whilst Ian McCulloch was undoubtedly the face of Echo & the Bunnymen, guitarist Will Sergeant has increasingly seemed to be the real talent in the band. It is surely no coincidence that the magic in their music has diminished over the years as his musical input has lessened (I have no insider knowledge but that's how it seems from the outside). And though he really was the Quiet One to his singers Mac The Mouth image, he always seemed like a really interesting bloke with his interest in sounds of a more experimental nature.

And so, to the book...well I was already aware that this was more of an account of his life growing up on the outskirts of Liverpool in the 1960's and 1970's than a Bunnymen history, so that was no surprise but is worth bearing in mind if that's what you want to read. Initially, this seemed like another sidekick book such as Johnny Marr and Dave Ball - musical heroes who had a great tale to tell but not necessarily a great writing prowess. But Will's voice gets more and more strong and confident as it goes on. He had a pretty shitty childhood which he describes with a complete lack of self pity, but there is also much to enjoy here, not least for those of us a similar age who will remember the bands and fashions and can identify with so much that Will writes about. The Eric's days are written about at length and provide a fascinating insight to that legendary club that I was fortunate enough to go to a couple of times. And the recollections of the early meetings with Mac (or Macul as he is referred to) are well worth reading!

The story ends with the Bunnymen looking at expanding their line-up. I managed to see them at the Chester Arts Centre gig in the summer of 1979 and Erics a few weeks later. These would have been among the last gigs they played with the drum machine - the Eric's one possibly the last. The Chester gig gets a mention here and there's a photo included which made my day as the double header with the Teardrop Explodes is undoubtedly still one of the greatest gigs I have ever been to.

There are a few annoying errors along the way that could have been sorted with better editing, but that's a minor gripe. I look forward to the sequel which will presumably tell of the Bunnymen's rise to fame and all that it entails x

[Jeff Dicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, and it is set up perfectly for a follow up. Will is a brilliant artist and musician who can actually write. One of my favorite things about his storytelling is the absolute absence of any pretention. Unlike many of the rock biographies I have read that love to dwell on the excesses of being in a band, there was none of that here. I don't know if that will come eventually, or if it ever existed with Echo & The Bunnymen, but it was a very refreshing change. Will's down to earth and humble personality were really evident in his writing, and I loved reading about how he crossed paths with many of my other favorite bands during his time at Eric's and for the gigs in Manchester. I am a bit saddened that I'm done with it, and will need to wait a while for the next book to be published. I hope it won't be too long as I love the subject matter.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Sergeant, guitarist/songwriter/founder of Echo & the Bunnymen, has written a candid, sometimes touching, and often humorous memoir of his youth and early adulthood. (Just a warning, the name "Ian McCulloch" does not appear until page 203 of a 327-page book). This is the story of how a "woolyback" from the small village of Melling (outside Liverpool), indifferent to school and raised in a dysfunctional family, discovered his “tribe” of punks at legendary Liverpool club Eric’s and eventually summoned the courage to form (with a singer, bassist, and drum machine) what became Echo & the Bunnymen. The book concludes with the band signing with Seymour Stein and Sire Records. (I hope that Will writes “volume 2”). This is a must-read for any fan of EATB or British punk/post-punk music.

[ANDRÉ PINHEIRO · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Sergeant surprised me with his wit and humor in this memoir of his life up to Echo and the Bunnymen adding a drummer to their line-up. I really related to his story, as it mostly occurs in the late 1970s, early 1980s, which was when I lived, as a teenager, in Sheffield, England. Saw the same bands, listen to the same music, recorded the same John Peel shows. Very good reading if you have this kind of background. Punk inspired many, and Will, as well as me, were just some. Enjoyed reading this. Now I wanna read the sequal.

[David Przybylinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was originally a little disappointed that this book didn’t cover most of the Echo and Bunnymen years, but after sitting on it a day, I really enjoyed what Will wrote.

He starts off from youth up through the begging of Echo & The Bunnymen. He does a great job of describing life just outside of Liverpool and his beginnings as a musician.

Great story - now I would like to hear the rest in part two 😁

[Markku · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a symphatetic book and I enjoyed his honesty and the lively descriptions of the Eric's scence and the early gigs he wittnessed. But while it reads very well of an Liverpool lad, I would have hoped that he stated a bit less of the obvious and got a bit further from the ground. Still, I enjoyed it and I hope there will be continuation of the incredible story. And, I have to say, I think he is one of the best guitar players.

[AJRXII · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, funny, brilliant stories. I'm gutted I never went to one of his book reading gigs now. Great to hear about the area I live in as well. But if you wanna hear some Scouse witt then this is the book for you. Not loads of Bunnymen stories but that's for another book no doubt.

[Sarah Ketelaars · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this. Would’ve been easier to read if my copy wasn’t missing the letters f & l every time they appeared next to each other in a word! Got a bit tiring reading about his musical in uences!
Typos aside it was an engaging read and I found him funny and self deprecating. Looking forward to the next volume, hopefully featuring all 26 letters of the alphabet!

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belatedly got round to Will Sergeant's Bunnyman: A Memoir (2021) and loved it. So much so that I'm pressing straight on with the follow up Echoes: A memoir continued . . . (2023).

Back to Bunnyman: A Memoir, it's a vivid, witty, and honest account of his life leading up to the band's initial breakthrough. It's great on his tough and challenging childhood and adolescence in 1960s and 70s Liverpool and its outskirts. Not that is in any way a misery memoir, it's all Will knew. His recollections are often witty and always honest. Like many kids he had to contend with shyness and social awkwardness.

Will's detailed recollections of legendary Liverpool club Eric's and the surrounding Liverpool scene provide are worth the price of admission along.

That said it's not all punk and post-punk, Will has a broad musical taste and was initially drawn to prog rock and plenty of out there music. It's opinionated and interesting.

This ends with The Bunnymen building up momentum and on the cusp of fame.

I can't wait to crack on with the second one.

4/5


Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and '70s, when skinheads, football violence and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things, a young Will Sergeant found the emerging punk scene provided a shimmer of hope amongst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of the Second World War. From school-day horrors and mud flinging fun to nights at Liverpool's punk club, Eric's, Sergeant was fuelled by and thrived on music. It was this devotion that led to the birth of the Bunnymen, to the days when he and Ian McCulloch would muck around with reel-to-reel recordings of song ideas in the back parlour of his parents' council estate house, and to finding a community - friends, enemies and many in between - with those who would become post-punk royalty from the likes of Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Teardrop Explodes to name a few.It was an uphill struggle to carve their name in the history of Liverpool music, but Echo and the Bunnymen became iconic, with songs like 'Lips Like Sugar,' 'The Cutter' and 'The Killing Moon'. By turns wry, explicit and profound, Bunnyman reveals what it was really like to be part of one of the most important British bands of the 1980s.

[Salem Hollst · Rating 4 out of 5]

The good rock biographies and autobiographies make you care about things you didn't think you cared about. I would put Lol Tolhurst's "Cured," Johnny Rogan's "Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance," and, now, Will Sergeant's "Bunnyman" in this category. I wanted to read these 3 books (at different times) because The Cure, The Smiths, and Echo & the Bunnymen are among my top 10 favorite rock bands. I didn't think I would care so much about a Bunnymen book written by Sergeant, as I tend to focus on frontman Ian Mculloch, but I'm so glad I read Sergeant's story--about his early life, not just the formation of his group. As I consider these three aforementioned books, I recommend "Bunnyman" and "Cured" over "Morrissey and Marr . . ." not because Sergeant and Tolhurst are necessarily better writers than Rogan (the bona fide journalist) but because they make their lives' stories more interesting than Rogan does.

Rogan spends far too long detailing Irish history and the lives of Morrissey's great grandparents long before ever mentioning the formation of The Smiths. Sergeant spends time describing his origins long before the formation of the Bunnymen, but he delights you with his writing, which is both comical and sad. He describes the damage that WWII has done to his hometown of Liverpool (he actually grew up in the nearby village of Melling) and to his father, who served in the war and later became an abusive alcoholic, compelling his wife to leave him. This dreary family life compels young Will to leave the home when possible to make new friends, slowly attempt to learn guitar, develop a love of music stores, learn about prog rock, glam rock, and punk, and find a home away from home at the Liverpool club Eric's. Eventually, he will form Echo and Bunnymen (so-named by friend Julian Cope) with Ian McCulloch and Les Patinson.

Sergeant tells a fascinating coming-of-age story without dragging on, providing just enough information to keep you engaged. The book ends with the impending death of Echo, which, as fans will know, is a drum machine. I'm looking forward to Sergeant's follow-up, "Echoes: A Memoir" to continue this story as Echo and the Bunnymen adds a real drummer to the group.

This is recommended reading for fans of '70s and '80s rock and punk, whether they're Echo and the Bunnymen fans or know nothing about them.

[Edoardo Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will Sergeant is a few years older than me and he played guitar in Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the bands that formed the sonic accompaniment as I sat in my teenage bedroom, drowning myself in teenage angst, ambitions and anxieties. At that age, music has a greater impact than at any other stage in life and the Bunnymen were one of the key influences in what I became. What’s more, I went to a lot of gigs when I was young and among those were some key Bunnymen concerts, including their legendary show at the Royal Albert Hall in 1984. So when I saw that Will Sergeant, of the fringe and the scowl and the jagged guitar, had written a memoir of his life as a Bunnyman, I wanted to read it – particularly as Sergeant wasn’t himself a particular hero. I would fight shy of reading the autobiography of my real musical heroes for fear that they would reveal the boots of clay, and the personal failings, that underlay their music. But Sergeant wasn’t Mac: he was the guy standing beside him on stage. It would be safe to read his memoir.

And indeed it was. This was an entertaining foray down shared experiences of growing up in the sixties and seventies: the bombed-out sites left over from World War II, the grey estates, the poor food, the general lack of supervision, the sudden crazes, from clackers to chopper bikes, and the appalling treatment by teachers in schools. It brought it all back.

Then Sergeant met the rest of the Bunnymen – well, apart from drummer Pete de Freitas, whose job was originally taken by a drum machine. It’s notable how things fell into place for the Bunnymen, who benefited from being in the right place at the right time, as well as interesting gossip on how the other Liverpool bands of the late 70s and early 80s, particularly how Julian Cope formed Teardrop Explodes.

There’s remarkably little rock ‘n’ roll excess – some desultory drug taking but really what comes through most strongly is how set on being cool Sergeant and the Bunnymen were – and how they succeeded.

It’s an enjoyable story that’s competently written, rather like listening to Sergeant reminisce at the pub.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Bunnyman so soon after finishing Revolutionary Spirit made for a fascinating comparison. Both books chart Liverpool in the late 70s and early 80s, both emerge from the same estates, streets, venues and creative circles, and both are filled with overlapping references to people and places - but viewed through entirely different lenses. Where Simpson’s book feels more impressionistic and fragmented in structure, Bunnyman follows a more traditional chronological path, making it easy to settle into Sergeant’s story and travel alongside him from shy, awkward teenager to member of one of the most iconic Liverpool bands of the era, Echo & the Bunnymen.

What surprised and saddened me most was Sergeant’s account of childhood. Beneath the humour, music obsession and creative energy is a deeply unsettling story of instability and neglect - turbulent parental relationships, his mother fleeing the marital home, and a young boy largely left to navigate life alone. There’s a quiet matter-of-factness to the way he describes it that somehow makes it even more affecting. Rather than being nurtured, guided and protected, he was left to find his own path emotionally and creatively.

The parallels between Sergeant’s and Simpson’s lives are striking. Both were shaped by growing up on new-build council estates on the outskirts of Liverpool. Both had fathers marked by their wartime experiences. Both found escape, identity and possibility through music - accelerated by punk, by the energy of late-70s Liverpool, and by the remarkable creative nucleus that formed around Eric's Club. Reading the books back-to-back highlights how interconnected these lives and scenes were; each appears at points in the other’s story, orbiting the same cultural explosion from different positions. It feels entirely fitting to have read these two books consecutively - together they create a richer, more human portrait of Liverpool’s post-punk emergence than either could alone.
3.5 ⭐

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book and was pretty disappointed when I finally secured a copy from the local library. Will Sergeant is the founding member and guitarist for Echo and The Bunnymen, a post punk alternative band from Liverpool. His genius guitar playing and creativity are an indelible part of my 20s when I was in a garage band. He managed to cobble together a sound that was bold and new after the punk revolution of the late 70s, but imbued it with a nod to 60s psychedelic rock. I was so looking forward to reading about the forming of the Bunnymen and their early years. Sadly this book doesn't really go into much detail. The first 200 pages are mostly about his unhappy childhood growing up in a working class area outside Liverpool. The last third of the book does include some interesting tidbits about the band. He ends the book at the point where they were just really breaking out in 1980.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was all over the Bunnymen - from hearing them on the Peel show, buying the shine so hard EP and onto gigs and the Crystal Day. The coolest of bands around in the early 80s. Will would appear on the smoke filled dimly lit stage, in the background, heads down, working on the opening chords of going up. McCulloch took centre stage with Les and Pete the engine room. Will showed little of himself then, a dark mysterious figure. So hearing from Will himself was a revelation, still dark, but funny, intelligent, honest and irreverent. It’s amazing how quickly the bunnymen shifted from a couple of lads in the bedroom, getting to grips with their instruments to getting signed up. I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this - he’s a proper old music head who can’t help himself going off on one about his favourite artists. That enthusiasm comes through so well. This is a biography beyond the detail of the bunnymen though - it’s a well written book about a time and a place that’s fascinating.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will Sergeant is easily in my top 5 guitarists. He probably cracks the top 3, honestly, so I was excited to give this a shot. In true Bunnymen fashion it's just kind of weird in a charming way.

My rating's what it is (ideally a 3.5 but we can't do half stars) because there are a couple of issues I have on a style and editing level. They don't outweigh this being a good and quick read, though.

It's probably for the heads, like most any memoir. If you're reading Goodreads reviews for an Echo & the Bunnymen member's memoir, though, I'm guessing you're one of those heads. Pick it up if that's the case.