A Shallow Madness

The Crucial Three
Origin	Liverpool, England
Genres	Post-punk, alternative rock, new wave
Years active	1977
Associated acts	The Teardrop Explodes Echo & the Bunnymen Wah!
Past members	Julian Cope Ian McCulloch Pete Wylie Stephen Spence

The Crucial Three were a short-lived band that existed for approximately six weeks in early 1977. They are nevertheless notable on account of the individual success of all three founding members: Julian Cope formed The Teardrop Explodes and has enjoyed a long and successful solo career as an author, photographer and singer, Ian McCulloch formed the very successful Echo & the Bunnymen, while guitarist Pete Wylie formed Wah! Heat (and various subsequent incarnations of Wah!) and enjoyed major chart success with "The Story of the Blues". In those early days, McCulloch sang, Cope played bass, and Wylie played guitar. A drummer, Stephen Spence, also joined at some point in their brief life.

The band formed in May 1977 and split in June 1977.

According to Cope, the three friends first talked about forming a band on McCulloch's 18th birthday, 5 May 1977, during The Clash's White Riot tour date at Eric's; "By the end of the evening, we were a group. It was all Wylie's trip. He suggested Arthur Hostile & The Crucial Three. Duke [McCulloch] said, 'Sod the bloody Arthur Hostile bit off, it's crap.' So we were The Crucial Three. Wylie went on about how legendary we would be, and Duke and I went along with him, as part of the in-joke."

Although they wrote and rehearsed a number of songs (Wylie claims they had four songs), including "Salomine Shuffle" (which was performed by Wylie in an abbreviated form at The Zanzibar in Liverpool in September 2007) and "Bloody Sure You're On Dope", the band didn't last long enough to record anything. They rehearsed in a garage with drummer Steve Spence and split up after a month but some other accounts mention rehearsing in Wylie's mum's front room. According to McCulloch, the band were "...just mates - we never did anything. We wrote one crap song."

Some of the band's songs have seen the light of day posthumously, most notably the Cope/McCulloch collaboration "Books", which appeared on both The Teardrop Explodes's and Echo & the Bunnymen's respective first albums (although the Bunnymen version is titled "Read It in Books"). "Robert Mitchum", another Cope/McCulloch collaboration, appeared on Cope's 1990 album Skellington. The song "Spacehopper" from Cope's solo album Saint Julian was also written during his time in the band, allegedly with some help from McCulloch.

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Wikipedia