Born on August 2: Pete de Freitas, the drummer of Echo & The Bunnymen, died too soon

Peter Louis Vincent was born in 1961 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Before he joined the Bunnymen in 1979, a simple drum machine served as a drum kit for the Bunnymen.

The son of a lawyer specializing in copyright law (a very useful specialty when discussing contracts with a label), he spent his childhood between the Caribbean and England. He then pursued a very Catholic education with the Benedictines at Downside School in Somerset. This was an anecdotal experience, as he preferred pounding drums to studying at university. Discovering the capital city of London at 19, his only dream was to form a band. In 1979, he replaced the overly rickety drum machine in the Bunnymen, a young new wave band born in Liverpool a few months earlier. It's safe to say that his colleagues Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, and Les Pattinson benefited from the change!

Always a little in the background, bassist Les watched the vocal-guitar-drums trio develop the Bunnymen's distinctive sound before his eyes. Pete De Freitas has never hidden his admiration for Budgie, the whimsical and inventive percussionist who plays the same central role as him in Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Until 1989, when he tragically died in a motorcycle accident, he recorded the Bunnymen's first five albums. "Crocodiles" (1980), "Heaven Up Here" (1981), "Porcine" (1983), and, above all, "Ocean Rain" (1984) still shine brightly in the band's recording hall of fame. Of course, the combination of these three strong personalities generated masterpieces like "The Killing Moon," but also countless tensions and a string of excesses, to the point, as he himself admitted, of endangering his mental health. "There were constant arguments, accidents, arrests (Ian once spent the night at the Leuven police station with Richard Jobson, who came to help him)... It was complete madness. Then I realized I was going crazy!"

Alongside the Bunnymen, and for a change of scenery, he discreetly collaborated with other artists, produced The Wild Swans' first single, and briefly founded another project, The Sex Gods, during the band's hiatus in 1985. When the quartet reunited in 1987, some of the magic had unfortunately vanished. Pete married that same year, and his daughter Lucie was born in 1988. Tragically, he died on June 14, 1989, in a motorcycle accident at the age of 27, while traveling to Liverpool from London on his 900cc Ducati. He thus joins other musical figures in the infamous "27 Club" (Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Jim Morrison, for example). His ashes are buried in Goring-on-Thames.

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo : © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Pete de Freitas with Echo & The Bunnymen on stage at the Torhout Festival (Belgium) on July 5, 1987