Like all good, reasonable legacy acts, Echo & The Bunnymen have been doing some archive-diving the last little while and been posting live shows and performances on their YouTube channel (the one that says “Official”, the other one is apparently not official, hence it doesn’t say official). I’ll probably be raiding that for a while going forward, but let’s start with the live concert that exists as Lay Down Thy Raincoat And Groove, though I can’t find any kind of official or even bootleg official history of it.

It comes from the first date of their two-night stand at the Albert Hall in London in July 1983, on the Ley Line tour in support of Porcupine. The second night of the residence was released in 2009 as Live at The Royal Albert Hall, and the artwork that accompanies online images of the bootleg match those for the 2005 DVD Dancing Horses, that documents post-reunion shows. So… who knows. But the important thing is the video exists, is professionally-shot – likely for television broadcast – and is celebrated by the band themselves as follows:

“Lay Down Thy Raincoat And Groove” Some say the greatest ever Echo & The Bunnymen concert. Some say the world stopped spinning when the opening notes were played by Will Sergeant, only starting to spin again after the last notes of Do It Clean had been played. It was 1983, this is Echo & The Bunnymen playing live at the Albert Hall during the Ley Line Tour.

Echo & The Bunnymen @ YouTube

Interestingly, the quality of the video that the band have posted is not as good as another one that went up on another channel back in 2019.