Jade's Music Blog

"The album Heaven up Here was the Bunnymen at the height of their powers, and the eighth track All My Colours was its dark foreboding centrepiece. The relentless apocalyptic drumming that drives the track, (by the legendary Pete DeFreitas), combines with Will Sergeant’s atmospheric and wiry guitar lines to resemble something close to how you’d imagine the soundtrack of the end of the world to sound.

Though at the centre of the song all the way through, the second verse is where McCulloch really makes his presence felt; his lyrics here are, for me, an example of some of the very best lyric writing… “That box you gave me…burned nicely”. It’s a line that suggests a whole back-story of lost love and hurt with the absolute minimum of phrasing and content. 'All my colours, turn to clouds’ is another incredible line…basically suggesting: ‘all that’s good, evaporates and disappears’. Here, the subtle beauty of the verse lyrics, contrasts nicely against the repeated tribal and raw (and quite probably nonsensical) chorus line, ‘Zimbo’.

As a relatively recent Bunnymen convert, I’m still finding various versions of this track around, and my favourite is probably the live version from the 25th anniversary edition of Heaven Up Here; let’s do Zimbo, McCulloch says before they launch into it, with even more energy than the album version: no mean feat!

McCulloch once said that All My Colours was ‘the first song where we proved we could connect emotionally’, and it shows just how incredibly strong they could be when they did.

Strawhouses play Carling Academy Liverpool on May 13. For more information, see www.myspace.com/strawhouses.