Eric’s, The Musical

Mark Fisher reviews Eric’s, the musical currently playing at the Liverpool Everyman:

Very occasionally, however, you come across a piece of work that is so precisely targeted at your own demographic that you realise your reactions are likely to be entirely idiosyncratic. What little hope you might have had for critical objectivity goes out the window.

It happened to me this week in my home town of Liverpool with Eric’s, a musical inspired by the short-lived late-70s night club through which Ian McCulloch, Julian Cope and Pete Wylie passed before forming Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and Wah! Heat respectively. Although those bands all went on to produce hit singles, we are hardly in Mamma Mia! territory. Much of the material is downright arcane, especially given that many in the audience were not even born at the time….

Unless you spent your formative years listening to Wilder by the Teardrop Explodes, you are highly unlikely to regard Tiny Children (side two, track two) as a virtual showstopper. The significance of having Echo and the Bunnymen’s Rescue as a musical motif will be lost on most people, but to initiates such as me it’s as thrilling as it is weird. As far as I’m concerned, any show featuring a mash-up of The Story of the Blues and The Killing Moon can do no wrong, but I’ve no reason to suppose anyone else would feel the same way (although the show is going down well with audiences)….

And Alfred Hickling reviews it here:

The diagram that rock family tree creator Pete Frame drew up to illustrate the Liverpool club Eric’s more than usually resembled a bowl of linguine, connecting significant names such as Echo & the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and Dead or Alive to the more obscure Nova Mob and Those Naughty Lumps.

Cutting a clear dramatic path through this incestuous tangle of post-punk personalities is no simple business, but Mark Davies Markham has proven experience of turning the creative experiments of men with extravagant hair into successful stage shows: he created the book for the Boy George story, Taboo…

~ by Paul Badger on 1 October, 2008.