Story of the Song: The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen

Keith Richards awoke one afternoon humming “Satisfaction”, and Paul McCartney famously stirred from his golden slumbers believing in “Yesterday”. Similarly, Echo & the Bunnymen’s vocalist, Ian McCulloch, opened his eyes to the perfect musical hook. The line that stuck was “Fate up against your will”. “I knew the tune in my head straight away,” McCulloch says.

He rolled back the sheets, stretched his fingers round an acoustic guitar and sang the words through. It turned out to be a five-fret job. “Lou Reed said that five-fret chords are the best in the world, and he was right,” said McCulloch. Reed’s band The Velvet Underground, along with Jim Morrison of The Doors, cast a long and inky shadow over McCulloch’s Liverpool gloom-rock band. This time, though, McCulloch was thinking more of Scott Walker.

He prepared what he termed the “meat of the song” and asked his bandmates over to his house. The bass player, Les Pattinson, wrote the introduction and the others – the drummer Pete de Freitas and the guitarist Will Sergeant – filled in their parts. The lines are punctuated by a swooning vibrato guitar and the brief lyrics are delivered with a Walker-like sonority: “In starlit nights I saw you/ So cruelly you kissed me/ Your lips a magic world.”

McCulloch described it as being about a “love affair” he had with destiny. “I always knew I was cut out to be in a band writing this killer stuff,” he claimed, modestly. With “The Killing Moon” he was not only fulfilling his prophesy but also admitting that his life was beyond his control.

The track was recorded at Les Studio Des Dames, in Paris, for the band’s high-watermark fourth album, Ocean Rain (billed, on release, as the “greatest album ever”). As a single it made the top 10 in early 1984, and the song has become a soundtrack favourite, appearing in Grosse Pointe Blank and the cult fantasy Donnie Darko – according to McCulloch, at the suggestion of none other than Courtney Love.

“It was the most beautiful and best thing we had ever done. It is the song of the Eighties for me,” McCulloch said, hailing himself as being “miles better than all those other divs who were called great songwriters”.