THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

My unadulterated love of music in (nearly) all of its many diverse forms has guided me through some dark and lonely times, whether indulging or lifting me out of them, and no bands music has quite done it like that of Echo & The Bunnymen. That slightly mystical touch of "otherness" that their best songs have, expressing itself through the holler and croon of Ian McCulloch and his unusual, often opaque lyrics that simultaneously manage to be bleak, self-doubting, and dark yet all the time reaching for the heavens: the angular, scything, resolutely anti-rock guitar playing of Will Sergeant, eschewing traditional chords and guitar solos in a endless quest to see what sounds he could tease from his instrument: and, in their first incarnation, the elastic, inventive and fucking GROOVY bass and drums of, respectively, Les Pattinson and the late Pete de Freitas. Nothing they've done since, together or apart, has ever topped that. My first introduction to the Bunnymen was

As 2004 dawned, my love of music became not just a passion, but a way to fill the hole in my life left by the unexpected loss of my Mum. There were some dark nights of the soul that year, and i increasingly tried to shut myself off from the world and bury myself in the sounds of whatever i was listening to at the time. Thankfully i had my new group of friends at work to stop me from sinking, and a whole new exciting explosion of bands to pick up my mood. Since the Garage Rock revival of 2002/03, a new crop of bands had emerged to take things in different directions, influenced by similar developments following the explosion of Punk in '76/77.  Post-Punk was the catch-all label for bands who took the energy of Punk and the Year Zero attitude in more individual and experimental directions, incorporating all kinds of genres into their varying sounds - Jazz, Reggae, Dub,  early Electronica, Metal, Psychedelia, Disco, World Music, Krautrock, even deeply unfashionable Prog - allied to a