The Killing Moon Bedbugs And Ballyhoo Rescue Echo And The Bunnymen

The Killing Moon Album: Ocean Rain (1984)
Bedbugs And Ballyhoo Album: Echo & the Bunnymen (1985)
Rescue Album: Crocodiles (1980)
by Echo And The Bunnymen

The meaning of this song is rather fluid, even to Echo lead singer Ian McCulloch, who wrote the lyric. "It sounds vaguer than it actually is... I never really tell people what the meaning is to all the songs because that surely spoils their journey. When they listen to something like 'The Killing Moon,' there are so many different ideas of what that is about. To me it's like to be or not to be moments."

The Killing Moon has had a rather profound effect on him. He added: "I've been on the moon that is 'The Killing Moon.' No one else has really been on that moon because I sing it as I wrote it. It's my moon now. Not the one up in the sky, but 'The Killing Moon' is my moon - I know everything about it. I feel it from day to day, but it changes all the time.

Every now and then and I go, 'Wow! That was like some kind of scripture for me, that song.' It doesn't mean it's about God, but it's my parable that I had to write for myself first, but it seems lots of people see 'The Killing Moon' as a special song."

The Killing Moon was recorded at Crescent Studio in Bath, Somerset. After catching a cold, frontman Ian McCulloch completed the recording of his vocals at Amazon Studio in Liverpool, where Pete de Freitas also completed the drumming.

Echo guitarist Will Sergeant, explained how this song came together: "We'd all been given acoustic guitars by Washburn and we were all playing around with them, so the album was heading to a more acoustic world. I was going over to Mac's house - we had a 4-track there and we were just coming up with riffs and chord sequences and stuff like that. 'The Killing Moon' was one of them, and it just sort of developed.

It was pretty different than the recorded version at the time. I think that the recorded version took it to a another level, really. It had some interesting sounds on it, like reversed autoharps in the choruses and things like that."

McCulloch (from Mojo magazine March 2012): "I woke up with that lyric, 'Fate up against your will,' as if God had given it to me in my sleep. Recently I realized what it is - it's that soliloquy, 'To be or not to be' - but it's even better, because I'm f---in' singing it."

The song's Middle Eastern-tinged instrumentation was inspired by a vacation that bassist Les Pattinson and guitarist Will Sergeant spent in Russia. Pattinson told Uncut August 2014: "Me and Will had been in Russia for a holiday, and there was this band playing balalaikas in a hotel foyer, really cheesy cabaret. But it was fantastic and we just started messing about and the next thing is we've got a chorus for 'The Killing Moon'. It was just brilliant."

Will Sergeant added: "Adam Peters came and did cellos and double-tracked it to make it sound like an orchestra. I reversed the reverb of the autoharp going in on the chorus chords so you get a big 'whoosh' sound. I got a Vox Teardrop 12-string."

David Bowie inspired the song's formation. "I played David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' backwards, then started messing around with the chords," McCulloch recalled to The Guardian. "By the time I'd finished, it sounded nothing like 'Space Oddity.'"

Ian McCulloch isn't humble about this one, sometimes calling it "the greatest song ever written." This is part of a publicity campaign of sorts. He told Songfacts: "If you're told something's great and something's worthwhile, people start believing it. That's why I started talking about 'The Killing Moon' being a great song lyric, and some people believe it now. I've always thought it was because it's a really good song."

This song is used in the opening scene of the 2001 film Donnie Darko, which congruently features a terrifying anthropomorphic bunny. It's also included on the soundtrack.

Guitarist Will Sergeant recalled to The Guardian in a April 2015 interview: "Years after it was a hit, we got an email saying this bloke wanted to use the song in a film, Donnie Darko, which we didn't think would go anywhere, so accepted a one-off £3,000. Then when the director did the director's cut he replaced 'The Killing Moon' with 'Never Tear Us Apart' by INXS. Aren't some people knobheads?"

"The Killing Moon" has proven quite soundtrack worthy. In addition to Donnie Darko, it was used in these movies:

Kill Your Friends (2015)
The Girl Next Door (2004)
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

It was also used in these TV series:

Billions ("Flaw in the Death Star" - 2018)
Red Oaks ("Memories" - 2017)
13 Reasons Why ("Tape 6, Side B" - 2017)
Scream Queens ("Handidates" - 2016)

The lyrics to Bedbugs And Ballyhoo is really just a series of images lead singer Ian McCulloch for the sake of wordplay. "I don't even know how the hell I made that crap up," he said in a Songfacts interview. "Maybe it is about imperialism, in a way, or the way people just cower when there's a bully. Or someone who's giving you something and you're down on your knees saying, 'Please, yeah, yeah, yeah,' and then, 'No, no, no.'"

The band recorded Bedbugs And Ballyhoo because they needed a B-side for their "Over Your Shoulder" single. They found a studio near Manchester and did it in a day. It started with a bassline Les Pattinson developed; Ian McCulloch came up with the lyrics, rhythm and chords. The entire band is credited for writing the track.

McCulloch refers to this kind of song as "gibberish and genius." One of its naysayers was Jake Drake-Brockman, who played keyboards with the band. McCulloch said: "This Jake fella, we were close, but I never trusted his judgment on anything because he had a hyphenated name and he was from the south of England - he was from a posh village. So, I never trusted his taste or what he had to say. He said, 'That song's rubbish.' He ridiculed it. And I said, 'No, Jake, it's about imperialism.'"

Bedbugs And Ballyhoo was first released in 1985 as the B-side of Australian and UK issues of "Over Your Shoulder." A new version was included on the group's fifth, self-titled album in 1987 and also issued as an A-side that year with various mixes.

Ray Manzarek of The Doors played keyboards on the 1987 version of Bedbugs And Ballyhoo. Around the same time, Manzarek collaborated with the band on a new version of The Doors song "People Are Strange," which was used on the soundtrack of the 1987 movie The Lost Boys. Released as a single, that song went to #29 in the UK.

An early Echo & The Bunnymen track, "Rescue" was the group's second single, and their first to chart. It gave them a huge career boost and remained one of their most popular songs throughout their career, played at most of their concerts.

In Rescue, lead singer Ian McCulloch is flummoxed, and is asking a girl to come to his rescue. It's a rather confused and desperate lyric, but the melody is far more upbeat. The band released a slower version on their 2018 album The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon.

McCulloch repeats the line, "Is this the blues I'm singin'" in the lyric. This is what he calls a "a non-rhetorical, rhetorical question," and is one of his favorite techniques.