PETE DE FREITAS

FEATURES WorldMags.net PETE DE FREITAS

ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN’S

PETE DE FREITAS REMEMBERED, 1961-1989

Twenty-five years ago, the world lost one of its best and perhaps most unsung of drumming heroes. Rhythm celebrates Pete De Freitas, the creative powerhouse behind Echo & The Bunnymen’s classic 1980s albums WORDS: CHRIS BURKE PHOTOS: PHIL DENT/REDFERNS/PRESS/ARCHIVE

58

| AUGUST 2014

WorldMags.net

WWW.RHYTHMMAGAZINE.CO.UK

WorldMags.net

E

cho & The Bunnymen were British post-punk’s hippest band. Their songs were psychedelic, poppy, powerful, poetic, musically intricate yet accessible; catchy, but never obvious. They carved a unique path through an ’80s rock scene dominated by the likes of Simple Minds and U2, who they derided in interviews whilst in contention with five albums that increasingly hinted at megastar potential. But by the end of the decade their ship had hit rocky waters.

Singer Ian McCulloch had left to go solo, but the rest of the band stubbornly refused to give up the name and looked to hire a new singer. In June 1989, video auditions were arranged in Liverpool for a new vocalist to front the exciting new phase of The Bunnymen. But drummer Pete De Freitas never made it to the auditions. He died in a motorbike accident on his way up from London. He was 27.

The Bunnymen had formed out of a late-’70s Liverpool scene that boasted Pete Wylie (The Mighty Wah), Julian Cope and The Teardrop Explodes and Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes To Hollywood). The band began life as the trio of Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant on guitar and Les Pattinson on bass, with ‘Echo’ the

WWW.RHYTHMMAGAZINE.CO.UK

name of the drum machine that ticked away on a plastic chair for those early sessions. Once De Freitas got on board, however, their brilliance was assured.

Pete’s creative drumming powered the Bunnymen’s bright psychedelic pop and catchy yet intriguingly left-field rock. His playing was characterised by shimmering cymbal work, imaginative tom grooves, jazz-influenced brush work and, when called upon, hard-hitting power. De Freitas was one of the first truly inspiring sticksmen this writer heard as a kid growing up in the 1980s, during a time when the previous decade’s monsters of rock such as Bonham were actually a little uncool.

De Freitas wasn’t about the metronomic ‘2’ and ‘4’ of studio-perfect ’80s pop, nor rough-edged punk rock speed, although he could do both. He wasn’t especially showy or bombastic, though he hit really hard. As a person, Pete was intelligent, sensitive and musically gifted, a multi-instrumentalist whose drumming took a trio of talented Liverpool lads with a love of The Doors’ psychedelic rock to an entirely different level of awesome.

“Pete wasn’t your typical drummer,” confirms Bunnymen bassist Les Pattinson. “There were

WorldMags.net

no drummer jokes about Pete, because he was Pete De Freitas.”

STARS ARE STARS Pete was born in Port Of Spain, Trinidad in 1961. One of nine children in what would turn out to be a particularly musical family – brother Frank was in The Woodentops; sisters Rose and Rachel formed The Heart Throbs – Pete moved with his family back to England, to Goring-on-Thames, a year later.

Pete’s sister Angie remembers his formative drumming years: “As a teenager, as soon as he got interested in drums he’d bash things constantly, and he never stopped, ever,” she says. “From when he was about 13 and mum and dad bought him a drum kit. He was very musical with everything, he was a very good rhythm guitarist. His drumming was very natural, it wasn’t learnt, it came from the heart.”

Pete attended the prestigious Downside public school in Somerset with the brother of the Bunnymen’s manager Dave Balfe. At the age of 18, having got his A-levels a year early, Pete was sitting the Oxbridge entrance exam when he threw a curve-ball and auditioned for the Bunnymen, after

AUGUST 2014 |

59

FEATURE WorldMags.net PETE DE FREITAS

Pete de Freitas in action with Will Sergeant, Les Pattinson and Ian McCulloch

an invitation to do so from Balfe. He deliberately fluffed the exams, choosing drums instead.

The Bunnymen, meanwhile, found they needed a drummer when their musical ambition outgrew Echo’s limitations. Says Pattinson, “The chemistry worked but we were growing and the drum machine didn’t want to grow. We could find movement and ways of making it accelerate or decelerate and add dramatics to a drum machine, but then Pete came along and it was another gear we found.”

In the beginning, repetitive beats suited the band’s looping, psychedelic jams, but the Bunnymen already knew they needed a drummer to give their music the push it needed to take it to a wider audience, even before there was any outside pressure.

– and we liked the fact that we were different, we liked the fact that we had this amazing drummer from outside Liverpool. And the fact that he was kind of posh, we liked that as well.”

It was evident from the start that Pete would fit right in, not just thanks to his easy-going personality, but his playing ability was above and beyond the band’s own expectations of a drummer.

“We weren’t thinking of auditioning anyone else or anything,” reveals Will. “But to us when he started playing it just sounded amazing, dead inventive. So that was that. I remember just introducing him to girls that we knew, to persuade him to stay…”

“We figured the first thing was to get him to play along to songs we already had, and adapt his drum

“PETE WAS VERY MUSICAL WITH EVERYTHING. HIS DRUMMING WAS VERY NATURAL, IT WASN’T LEARNT, IT CAME FROM THE HEART” “Seymour Stein from Sire Records came to see us on a gig we did at the YMCA in London,” recalls Will Sergeant. “One of our very first gigs; we had a drum machine. He said he’d sign us if we got a drummer.

Thing was, we already wanted a drummer, ’cos we’d kind of exhausted the drum machine’s capabilities.”

Pete’s background might have made the drummer (known affectionately to his bandmates as ‘Taff’, because Goring-on-Thames might as well have been in Wales) an unlikely fit in the band. “He was sort of an outsider,” says Will, “but we liked that. We really loved that he wasn’t from Liverpool. Liverpool’s very much a village, everybody knows everybody and it’s very bitchy and it’s got the same sort of pool of musicians that are always cropping up in other bands

60

| AUGUST 2014

technique to the drum machine,” says Les. “Which was brilliant because we could have the things we wanted from a machine but with all the fills, and cymbals in different places. It brought the songs alive even more. From the first song we thought, bloody hell, this is brilliant! And he was good. He didn’t make a fuss, he just had a little wry smile on his face that confirmed to us he was part of the gang.”

ALL THAT JAZZ With Pete in the fold, the Bunnymen, under the management of Dave Balfe and later KLF ‘extreme art terrorist’ Bill Drummond, began to make waves and a debut album, Crocodiles took shape. ‘Rescue’ with its choppy guitar and melodic hook, up-in-the-

mix bass and Pete’s hard-hitting drums, complete with staccato snare motif, led the way as the album reached Number 17 in the UK album charts, to much critical acclaim. ‘All That Jazz’ was another bright moment, with Pete’s solid four-to-the-floor punctuated with well-placed snare and hi-hat accents and machine-gun snare, with a middle-eight replete with toms that build gloriously back to the chorus.

Second album Heaven Up Here (1981) further cemented the band’s critical reputation, as they explored a gothier post-punk sound with darker psychedelic overtones. It was here that Pete really honed his power and versatility at the kit against Sergeant’s guitar grinds and McCulloch’s tortured, almost desolate vocals.

“He was just very inventive, he didn’t go down the obvious route all the time,” recalls Will. “I had a bit of a thing where I didn’t want any cymbals on the album. I know it’s like a necessary part of drumming but it would just take up so much of the sonic space. He embraced that and went down the tom-tom route, he didn’t go, ‘Oh we’ve got to have cymbals,’ he was like, ‘What can I do that isn’t cymbals?’”

Without cymbals, Pete’s approach to ‘Zimbo (All My Colours)’ involved tribal tom grooves that give the track an almost spiritual feel; on ‘Over The Wall’ his playing involves a near-relentless flurry of fast tom and snare fills as the track ebbs and flows from a whisper to a drum-propelled roar.

The band’s first real commercial success came with 1982’s Porcupine, an album that saw the Bunnymen lighten up considerably with a brighter pop sensibility running throughout. ‘The Cutter’ is undoubtedly one of the ’80s best musical moments thanks to its Indian violin hook, while De Freitas’ insistent beat and rapid snare attack helped give the band their first Top 10 hit. ‘The Back Of Love’ remains

WorldMags.net

WWW.RHYTHMMAGAZINE.CO.UK

WorldMags.net one of Pete’s best moments courtesy of its clever tom patterns, and the angular, dancey ‘Ripeness’ has a tight, disco beat to anchor the choppy guitar.

GOING UP At the height of their success, the band lived together (minus McCulloch) in a grand but dilapidated house overlooking Sefton Park in Liverpool, along with the band’s roadie, drum tech and sometime keyboard player Jake Brockman, and Tim Whittaker, drummer with legendary early-’80s Liverpool band Deaf School. Pete and Tim would set their kits up and have day-long drum sessions involving congas, percussion and huge drum-offs.

As a band The Bunnymen were now a formidable proposition, with everything that critical and commercial recognition demanded. In Ian McCulloch they had a Smash Hits pin-up with the kind of scally swagger that Oasis would later adopt, and a great, unmistakeable voice; Will Sergeant was inventive as a guitarist, unconventional and psychedelic. Les Pattinson’s grooving basslines were the backbone of the songs, while in Pete De Freitas they had a skilled, articulate drummer who hit hard but could play with restraint and finesse, and together he and Les locked in as one of the finest rhythm sections of their day.

“Me and him would push our influence on a song to make it happen,” recalls Les. “Everybody in the band adopted that and thought it was a great thing… it was just how we saw the song and it worked so well that everybody just accepted it. I always thought I was a s**t bass player, and it was so easy to play to what he was playing, it was like having stabilisers on a pushbike, I knew what I was going to get.

“We could talk to each other through rhythm. I could say, ‘Pete, we should accelerate there and he’d say, ‘Yeah but I think we should save it for the third chorus,’ stuff like that. He was totally on top of it from that foundation view of things. And it just worked. We were young in our careers and we knew what we wanted. We didn’t think much about it, it was just really natural playing with him and knowing what we’d got the first time we jammed something.”

“Him and Les locked in completely which gave us freedom to drift about,” says Will. “You could go off into jams in the middle of songs and stuff, which really became a part of it. You could get lost with it.

You’d have the expected bit then go into this bit that was more freeform, like you didn’t know where Mac was going to go with a vocal or whatever. Pete and Les would just keep it all really solid underneath.”

Live, Pete was a perfectionist. Les reveals, “He would be p**sed off if he got something wrong. He’d show me his hands and he’d be covered in blisters and he’d be using surgical spirit to toughen them up.

The next day you’d be thinking, ‘Oh Pete’s coming up to this bit, he’s not going to hit it so hard… and he’d hit it harder. He’d just really push on all the time. We had a good relationship when we were playing live, we just had this place with each other where we knew what each other were doing on stage and it was something we didn’t talk about outside of playing live. It was just a lovely relationship. When Pete died and we eventually got another drummer I was trying to get him to play like Pete, and I knew that was impossible. People just couldn’t do it and I had to accept that, and I missed that.”

By 1984 the Bunnymen were ready to take on the

WWW.RHYTHMMAGAZINE.CO.UK

world. And when, with fourth album Ocean Rain, McCulloch in typical ‘Mac The Mouth’ fashion announced that this was the “greatest album ever made”, it wasn’t merely hot air. Featuring their most commercial tunes, lush production and all the benefits hiring a full orchestra can bring, ‘Silver’, ‘Seven Seas’, ‘Crystal Days’ and more brought forth the best yet from Pete. Now bolstered with confidence and years of commitment to perfection, he put in a drum performance that perfectly complemented the band’s most ambitious songs yet.

On the album’s best-known track, a typical left-field musical choice from Pete once again elevated the Bunnymen’s music above all else.

Though it only necessitated a straightforward beat to propel the beautiful, haunting ‘Killing Moon’, Pete chose to augment the luscious feel of the track by using brushes. This clever shift in dynamic approach, and indeed the way he applied all his rhythms to the epic orchestral arrangements of Ocean Rain, was typical of Pete’s ability to think in a broader musical sense. “He was dead inventive,” confirms Will. “He was always up for experimenting. Like on ‘The Back Of Love’ he did this weird thing where he put a low tom on the side of the hi-hat so he had to keep crossing his hands over – because there was no room for it anywhere else! He did stuff like hit the rim for effect… He could play guitar and piano as well, he wasn’t just good at the drums. And I’ve never seen anyone hit a drum so hard. Pete would go on stage in a suit or something and he’d come off stage and it’d be sopping wet. I’ve never seen anyone sweat so much! Quite funny, it was like he’d just had a shower or something.”

It’s hard to overstate Pete and the Bunnymen’s influence on the music that followed them. You can clearly hear them in the music of The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Killers, Bloc Party, Doves, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arcade Fire and even Coldplay.

The Manic Street Preachers’ Sean Moore recalls first seeing The Bunnymen on The Tube on their ‘A Crystal Day’ event in Liverpool in 1984, where Bunnymen fans were invited to join the band on a day out around their favourite Liverpool haunts before a gig at St George’s Hall.

“It started with a song called ‘Thorn of

DE FREITAS ON YOUTUBE

CHINA DOLL

Pete starred in the video to his friend Julian Cope’s ‘China Doll’, his movie star good looks perfect for the video’s ‘love and motorbikes’ theme. Song and video bring a tear to the eye even now. http://bit.ly/1mdCGqm

BEDBUGS & BALLYHOO

This jazzy, Joe Morello inspired track from the band’s final album captures Pete’s skill with brushes. http://bit.ly/1nNShE3

A CRYSTAL DAY

The Tube’s Jools Holland follows Pete, The Bunnymen and fans on their ‘Crystal Day’ at their favourite Merseyside haunts, plus an awesome gig at St George’s Hall. Pt1: http:// bit.ly/1hyyrKn; Part 2: http://bit.ly/1pQTvLH

NEVER STOP

The band at the top of their game. Stages were getting crowded with the addition of live strings and extra percussion. Pete’s at the centre of everything. http://bit.ly/1m9Rl5Z

ROYAL ALBERT HALL, 1983

A superb set in the grandiosity of the Royal Albert Hall, with plenty of good footage of Pete’s playing. http://bit.ly/SsGBbi

THE BACK OF LOVE

One of Pete’s best drum tracks, a superb tom groove that lifts the track way above the band’s contemporaries. http://bit.ly/1xbZLSY

Pete and the Bunnymen on tour in Japan

WorldMags.net

AUGUST 2014 |

61

FEATURE WorldMags.net PETE DE FREITAS Crowns’,” says Sean. “Pete was at the front of the stage, something I’d never seen before, busy knocking seven bells out of a simple kit, with brushes! Ferociously with metronomic precision, driving the music ever onward. I was mesmerised. I then went on to discover the previous albums Crocodiles, Heaven Up Here and Porcupine, which is still my favourite with the tribal brilliance of ‘Back Of Love’, and later that year with Ocean Rain and the wondrous ‘Killing Moon’. My fascination deepened and I decided I needed to see this live and so went to Bristol Colston Hall for the Ocean Rain Tour. They played ‘Nocturnal Me’ as the opener, another favourite with brushes, the set had trees with a great spectacle of light and I was instantly transported to a Paradise Lost and rock’n’roll was forever etched into my soul.

“After the show I went to the backstage door and saw Pete get on his motorbike in his leathers, looking like a ’50s film star, and roar off into the distance. My Drum Hero. A year later I started playing the drums and after that Manic Street Preachers were born.”

LOST AND FOUND Ocean Rain inevitably proved a hard act to follow, and personality clashes between Pete and Ian McCulloch’s ever-bigger ego were becoming an issue.

“He was great, Pete, because he wouldn’t stand for any s**t,” recalls Les. “Sometimes there’d be a bit of jealousy from Ian McCulloch – because he was good, Pete, and he was a good-looking guy and he was always with the girls and stuff like that. And Pete would always stand up to that, and because he stood up to it there was no real issue.”

However, eventually the strain began to show and despite, or perhaps because of, the release of a Best Of, Songs To Learn And Sing with a new single ‘Bring On The Dancing Horses’ (on which Pete’s beats sound a little processed), at the beginning of 1986 Pete left for New Orleans with his new band, The Sex Gods.

He’d planned to make a video and record music, but Pete discovered ecstasy and the trip turned into months of legendary round-the-clock drink and drug sessions and crashed cars. Meanwhile Bunnymen commitments meant the band had to soldier on without him.

Will remembers, “When Pete went off with his

Besides drumming, Pete’s other great love was motorbikes

he was just looking for that same excitement, that newness again.”

Says Angie De Freitas of Pete’s reasons for going AWOL, “I just think he went off on one. He just kind of lost the plot and got a bit fed up with the whole Bunnymen thing. Pete took drugs, but he also got a bit carried away with his fame too in a certain way.

He got carried away with the money. And he bought everybody. The whole Sex Gods thing, he just had about 10 ‘yes’ men around him because he paid for everybody. They all lived in a hotel and he was paying the bill. He blew all his money. The other Bunnymen bought houses and Pete didn’t have anything left. He blew it all on fun.”

Pete eventually came back, tail between his legs, to the band, although he was now on a salary rather than being a full member. He recorded the Bunnymen’s self-titled 1987 album, which included the hits ‘The Game’ and ‘Lips Like Sugar’. Pete’s finest contribution here was ‘Bedbugs And Ballyhoo’, featuring a clear nod to small group jazz with a sublime, swinging brush groove that recalls Joe Morello with Dave Brubeck.

But Pete had changed on his return to the fold.

“THERE WAS JUST A PURITY THERE, SOMETHING ORIGINAL HE HAD THAT PEOPLE ARE STILL TRYING TO FIND” mates to New Orleans, and we had a tour all booked we were trying to get him back – and even Bill Drummond went over there to try and get him back.

Bill wasn’t even managing us then, he just went as a mate. But we had to get another drummer in because we had this tour booked and Pete was out of the loop. We did the tours but they [Pete’s replacement] were nowhere near Pete, really. He never played the song the same way, Les used to get p**sed off – he kept changing things!”

“We were always looking to move on,” explains Les, “not just bash out the same stuff all the time.

Once the excitement of that had run its course I think that’s where [Pete] got bored of things and had a bit of a nervous breakdown through his career. I think

62

| AUGUST 2014

Says Will: “When he came back he was never quite the same, like some weird little spark had gone out, you know? Not quite Syd Barrett, but he didn’t seem to have the same happy-go-lucky thing. I think maybe we’d let him down by not waiting for him to get back, and going on tour with a different drummer. We did get him back in – me and Les were pretty determined to get him back.”

The band were on the cusp of cracking America at this point, and Pete himself was over the moon to be complimented on his drumming by his hero Ray Manzarek, when the Doors keyboardist produced the Bunnymen’s cover of ‘People Are Strange’, a hit from the Lost Boys film.

But all was not well in the Bunnymen camp. Ian

Pete de Freitas “looking like a ’50s film star”

McCulloch was set on a solo career, and parted ways with the band in 1988. Will, Pete and Les were determined to carry on, but then in June 1989 came the most tragic blow, when the drummer’s Ducati 900 motorbike hit a car head on, near Rugeley in Staffordshire, as he was on his way to Liverpool from London, where he was living with his model wife Jonson and their eight-month-old daughter.

While the Bunnymen carried on, quickly recording an album, Reverberation, with singer Noel Burke, and have enjoyed further success from the late-’90s with Mac back on vocals, the band have arguably never quite recaptured the spark that had made their five classic ’80s albums with De Freitas so important.

“If you put it together now, it wouldn’t work,” says Les Pattinson of the Bunnymen’s unique chemistry.

“We all had different ideas of what we wanted to be but it came together really well for some reason. And it was absolutely lucky in time and the evolution of it – it was just a big chemistry that worked.”

Finally, Les sums up Pete’s uniqueness as a drummer: “There was just a purity there, something original that he had that people are still trying to find. Something simple but played so well, and just in the right places – that was his quality, you know?”

WorldMags.net

WWW.RHYTHMMAGAZINE.CO.UK