Echo & the Bunnymen Never Stop – Discoteque (1983)
As CEO, Corey oversees the global PR firm Burson and its family of agencies. With a 30-year career spanning senior leadership roles at Google, Salesforce, Starbucks and Nike, to name a few, Corey brings a rare, cross-disciplinary perspective to the evolving role of communications in business and society.
Beyond his professional work as a communicator and CEO, Corey is both a passionate and accomplished music journalist with almost three decades of publishing in magazines like Rolling Stone or GQ. He is also the author of An Ideal for Living: A Celebration of the E.P. – Extended Play, an exploration of (surprise) the extended play format.
Long dismissed as a transitional format, the EP has repeatedly adapted to shifts in how music is made and heard, remaining relevant across formats and generations. In his book, Corey explores how the EP emerged, evolved and left an outsized mark on music culture. Drawing on conversations with nearly 50 industry voices, the book brings together a curated selection of the 200 best EPs ever recorded, using them as a lens through which to understand both the form itself and the changing shape of the music industry.
You can imagine our excitement when Corey agreed to join our Track Crush series—few people move as fluently between the worlds of global communications and music culture. His pick for today, “Never Stop” by Echo & the Bunnymen, is a non-album EP track released just ahead of the band’s 1984 landmark LP Ocean Rain. Corey calls it a perfect distillation of what makes this Liverpool band so enduring. In his own words: “the quartet captivates listeners with the dramatic combination of singer Ian McCulloch’s expressive and emphatic vocals (ranging from swoony whispers to crazed crooning) and Will Sergeant’s murky, atmospheric range of guitar-scape, a peppered psychedelic blend of effects, piling on reverb and delay and tone bending while cutting through with crisp, clear tones.”
For Corey, the song’s intensity and layered soundscape are mirrored in its words, a line that lingers long after the final note:
“The king is dead
And long live the people who aim above /
All the simple stuff never understood”
Listen(>)
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