Psychedelic Furs: Feels Like The Furs Time
In 1977, During the so-called Summer of hate, yet another refugee from a London art college got fed up with silk-screening "advertising crap" and resolved at last to do something about his long-suppressed compulsion to sing his own words in front of his own group.No longer would he let the fact that singing was quite beyond him – that the best he was capable of was pitched snarling – stay him from his dream, for "Dylan couldn't sing, and Lou Reed couldn't sing, and Bowie didn't learn to sing properly until Station To Station." He and his younger brother, who he persuaded to buy a bass guitar, recruited a couple of pals and spent a year and a half playing the Velvets' ‘Sister Ray’, Iggy's ‘Real Cool Time’ and like two and three-chord classics in one another's rooms, and then graduated to parties, where "everybody would immediately leave the room when we began to play."
Undaunted, they began to sink their own money into hiring proper rehearsal rooms, and attained sufficient proficiency to land a Wednesday evenings' residency at a pub called Windsor Castle. Now when they played Jonathan Richman's ‘Roadrunner’, people not only didn't flee the premises, but brought their chums back the following week. Within a month, no mere pub could hold their burgeoning following, and they graduated to venues where people came to watch and listen first and drink second.
By the turn of the decade, with two additional members in tow, they'd been signed to A Major Label, brought their harsh, nearly anarchic sound to America, and been pronounced fab (if not Mrs. Fish) by all of your hipper rock critics. By the summer of 1981, they'd toured America a second time, partied with Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones, and released a perfectly astonishing album that is loud, at any volume and which contains beautiful, melancholy melodies and goosebump-inducing dissonances, infinitely touching vocals (how expressive that pitched snarling became!), and one of the most stunning single tracks of the decade to date in ‘Pretty In Pink’.
They are the Psychedelic Furs, and Richard Butler, the refugee from art college whose words and voice put them head and shoulder above the rest of the British gloom boom, recently welcomed one of his more ardent older fans to his home away from home to talk it all over.
His extremely johnnyrottenesque singing notwithstanding, Butler turns out to be neither surly nor contentious, as so many of his countrymen feel compelled to be in the presence of Americans with cassette-corders. Instead, he is amiable and hospitable, to the point of offering his caller both beer and cigarettes – even though, at the rate he goes through the latter, one might suppose that the fear of exhausting his supply would preclude his politely inquiring, "Smoke?"
He is no product of the bleak council flatlands of London's East End, but of suburban Surrey. "Don't make too much of the middle class thing, though," he warns. "We might have been surrounded by stockbrokers, but my father was a fervent communist.
"He used to play me Bob Dylan and Hank Williams and Edith Piaf when I was a kid. I liked Dylan and Williams from the start, but Piaf took a bit of getting into. I couldn't understand what the fuck she was on about!"
He rather sheepishly concurs that, from the tone of his vocals, a non-English-speaking listener might perceive rage and disdain as the two thing the Furs are most intent on expressing, and notes. "I suppose it's just down to my personality, but the stuff that made me want to have a band in the first place was Dylan's, which I always found very scornful, and Lou Reed's. Basically, I always found that I was made to feel cynical, bitter sorts of things much more than by the Beach Boys, if you like, or Crosby; Stills & Nash.
"At the same time, though, I'm much less cynical myself than I was just a couple of years ago. Perhaps it's just to do with getting older, but I find that I enjoy life a lot more now, that I'm not nearly as wrapped up in my own problems as I used to be.
"Maybe it's true that the general feeling of the first album is one of rage, but on the second it's more one of anger or sadness. What's the difference between rage and anger? Well, I suppose it's that rage is much more of an aggressive thing, whereas is anger is more inward. And a lot of it isn't serious. 'All This And Nothing', for instance, is sort of about the feeling you have when you've broken off with someone and you look at the roomful of stuff she's left with you. It's not a real hatred sort of bitterness.
"In future, it would be nice to write something more...positive, but I find it difficult to avoid sounding preachy. That's why I write in a sort of abstract way. You don't want to come out and bare all your deepest emotions. I think people are more interested in me and my girlfriend in Muswell Hill.
"We're going to have a new producer next time, because there'd be no feeling of adventure in going in to do a third album with the same guy, using the same instruments. I've been listening to the Beatles a lot – not snooping about in old psychedelia to see what I can rip off – and I'm keen to use celloes."
His old fan assumes that celli appeal to the first Fur because they make such a dolorous sound. "No, they don't, do they? Well, not always. Who was that band that did stuff like 'Mr. Blue Sky'? You couldn't call that sad-sounding."
Laboring under the misconception that, not yet a half-decade after punk, anything resembling a show-biz affectation might get a young group run out of London on a rail, their old fan expresses some astonishment at the largely old-fashioned – and quite marvelous – light show Los Furs employ in their personal appearances. "I've never enjoyed watching four guys standing there on stage, with the lead guitarist getting spotlighted every time he plays a solo," Richard explains. "And show business is right back in fashion in England – Adam & the Ants are still huge, and even Gary Glitter's making a bit of a comeback."
As for his own memories of the era after which he named his group with such uncharacteristic whimsicality, he says, "Sure, I took acid. Didn't everyone? But I was a bit too young to be really cool in that scene."
Of America, his most memorable experiences in which include being besieged by transvestites in Chicago and taking advantage of the nubile and alluring overly-made-up young women who surround English musicians in most other large cities, he notes, "In England, people tend to be very cool about everything, including friendship, whereas here it's much easier to meet people and enjoy their company.
"Of course, I can't imagine this country lasting much longer, not with the overconsumption that goes on here. At the end of a week in New York, where we had most of our meals sent up to our hotel rooms, we literally had drawers-ful of plastic forks and spoons and bits of pepper and salt and ketchup. That's just food, but it extends to everything else as well.
"And I don't like to put anyone down, but I do find American punk groups, especially some of the L.A. ones like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, pathetic." But they serve a purpose, his old fan notes, in that they keep violent young people off the streets – and on the dance floors, slamming into one another with fracture-inducing enthusiasm. "Well, that's great," Richard laughs, "but I guess I'm just not the sort of guy who enjoys going out and slamming into other people."
So behind the voice that makes even the most manly program director tremble with dread, his old fan muses, lurks a man who enjoys making new friends and who wouldn't dream of slamdancing. "Yeah," Richard agrees cheerfully. "I guess I really do sound quite a nice guy, don't I? Actually, I'm trying to sound like Mr. Nice Guy when I sing too, but I suppose I've smoked too much."
With that, the angriest-sounding young man in all of rock lights a fresh cigarette from what remains of the one's he's been sucking on, and bids his old fan a very pleasant goodbye.