To greet the 1990s, NME commissioned a photo shoot for its last issue of 1989 (December 23-30 issue) featuring Ian McCulloch, the presiding genius of Echo and the Bunnymen, in which he dressed up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Here’s the original spread, which appeared under the banner “Screen-Age Kicks”:
The pictures are an undisputed success, due in no small part to McCulloch’s utter lack of distancing camp affectation or irony. It’s almost as if McCulloch knows damn well that he’s gorgeous, so why not go with it? (Actually, about that. See McCulloch’s remarks on the shoot below.)
Two years ago Buzzfeed did a list explaining why McCulloch was the 1980s version of Kanye West. The list is essentially a collection of astonishingly confident, self-admiring quotations from McCulloch, as in “The Bunnymen are the most important band to ever put an album out. And the Beatles, maybe the Stones. I think we’re up there in the top ten greatest bands of all time.”
Maybe something of that attitude is caught in the photo?
For a “Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes” feature in the pages of Uncut twenty years later, McCulloch reminisced about the photo shoot—his comments are frankly hilarious and a little bit baffling (calling Judy Garland “a bit iffy” and a “weirdo”):
The NME were doing this thing—who do you wanna be? Obviously Bono would’ve plumped for the hunchback of Notre Dame. But I thought Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, ‘cos she looked a bit iffy. I thought, to get my own back at the girls on the bus who thought I had lippy on—and I knew at the time, I’m a better-looking girl than you are—let’s jazz this Dorothy up, give her some beauty, not the weirdo Judy looked. Mark E. Smith—whooh! Frank Black—I’d hate to see him doing a picture from Last Tango in Paris. It was down to me. And I did it well.
In 2011 the well-known someecards company concocted an ecard that poked fun at McCulloch:
“It was down to me. And I did it well.” As a reminder of what could have given Ian such a massive ego to begin with, here’s a hefty chunk of footage of Echo and the Bunnymen playing the Royal Albert Hall in 1983:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Echo and the Bunnymen rock Liverpool on BBC 2’s ‘Pop Carnival,’ 1982