Echo & The Bunnymen Play Regent’s Park Next Tuesday, Four Days After Their First New Album in Twelve Years

Echo & The Bunnymen return to London on Tuesday 22 September for the first of two nights at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, with a second show following on Wednesday 23rd. The Tuesday date is sold out.

The timing is deliberate. Apples For Isaac arrives this Friday, 18 September, on BMG, the band’s thirteenth studio album and their first set of newly written songs since Meteorites in 2014. Twelve years between records, and four days between release and the London shows.

Sitting behind the album is a loss the band have not tried to soften. Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer, played on ten of the eleven tracks and died during its completion. In their statement announcing the record, Echo & The Bunnymen called him a longtime friend of Mac who was integral to making the album, and signed off simply with love for him. His playing is all over a record he never heard finished.

Ian McCulloch produced it, and mixed it alongside Alan Moulder and Andrea Wright. Three tracks are already out, Brussels Is Haunted, The Light That Surrounds You, and Take Me By The Hand, which arrived on 4 September.

Brussels Is Haunted has been in the live set since 2025, well before the album existed, so the new material has been quietly road-tested in front of festival crowds for over a year. What has not been tested is how much of it makes the setlist now that people actually own the record.

Recent shows have opened with Going Up, All That Jazz and Rescue, moved through Never Stop, Zimbo, Over The Wall, Bring On The Dancing Horses, Nothing Lasts Forever, Seven Seas and Bedbugs & Ballyhoo, then closed on The Killing Moon, The Cutter and Lips Like Sugar. Expect that shape with more of Apples For Isaac folded in.

The band are in the country all week doing album events before they reach the park. McCulloch signs copies at Jacaranda Baltic in Liverpool on release day, Friday. The album gets played in full at Camp & Furnace in Liverpool on Sunday 20th with Jacaranda Records, then again at Rough Trade in London on Monday 21st, with a signing attached. Then two nights outdoors in Regent’s Park.

After that, nothing in Britain until Christmas. The Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow takes two nights, Sunday 20 and Tuesday 22 December, and resale for those is already running at around $87 to $99 on secondary sites. Beyond that the diary jumps to AMT Headingley Stadium in Leeds on 12 June 2027.

Anyone with a ticket for next week should check it for timings. No support act or stage times have been published for either Regent’s Park night, and the venue runs to a firm curfew given where it sits, so the evening will finish earlier than an indoor gig would.

The 23rd was still showing availability at the time of writing, which for a band who can sell out the Barrowland twice in December is probably not going to last the week.