The iJamming! Interview! Richard Butler
Tony Fletcher, iJamming.net, August 2001
LAST SUMMER I was asked by Sony Legacy to write sleeve notes for re-issues of the first three Psychedelic Furs albums, along with a newly-recorded live album by the recently-reformed group; it was suggested I interview frontman, singer and lyricist Richard Butler for background material and quotations.
I'd met Richard a few times over the years, primarily in New York, where his residence on the busiest block of St Mark's Place ensured he was a regular "celebrity" sighting, but we'd never sat down and got to know each other. And so, on a stunningly beautiful Monday in August, I took a road trip upstate to where he now lives with his lovely wife Annie and young daughter Maggie, and spent an extremely pleasant afternoon and evening hanging out and talking.
The Psychedelic Furs' legacy should be indisputable, but there remains something of a historical identity crisis over this most musically distinctive of post-punk bands. In the UK, I'm not sure the Furs ever quite got the respect they deserved, and this may well be because they broke through so quickly in the USA, initially with the single 'Love My Way' from the album Forever Now, and then, more famously, with the song that inspired the movie Pretty In Pink. Richard and his bass Playing brother Tim Butler moved to the States in all the excitement, and greater fame and fortune - though neither happiness nor critical acclaim - followed. The British largely wrote the Psychedelic Furs off as sell-outs to America, and the Americans have often failed to look back beyond the mainstream hits of the mid eighties to the early years when the band, especially in its original six-piece formation, was such a potent influence.
That's unfortunate. 1980s debut eponymous album The Psychedelic Furs is a masterful debut, and its successor, Talk Talk Talk remains a cult classic choice among hardcore fans and band members alike. And then 1982's Todd Rundgren-produced Forever Now, to quote my sleeve notes, "captured the Psychedelic Furs in thrilling transition, no longer obscure art-rockers, not yet international pop stars, but somewhere vibrant in between, immersed in the best of everything." There was plenty more great music to come, as legions of fans will testify, but these first three albums mark a period innocence and self-discovery to which they would never be able to return.
One odd thing I came away with from my discussion with Richard, something that hadn't struck me before, was the similarity between the Psychedelic Furs' history and that of Echo & The Bunnymen. Both groups rose from a British rock scene that thrived in the aftermath of punk; each band was simultaneously inspired by the new wave yet equally fascinated with psychedelia, glam and the Velvet Underground. The London-based Furs and Liverpool-located Bunnymen both made stunning debuts in 1980s that they followed, the next year, with commercially unconcerned, drunkenly recorded cult classics which many a fan insists is their purest work. Each found themselves nursing an American following, and each enjoyed a commercial breakthrough with their third album: the Furs more so in the States, the Bunnymen (with Porcupine) more so in the UK. And while their fourth albums consolidated this mainstream acceptance and delivered sizeable hit singles ('Heaven' off Mirror Moves for the Furs, 'The Killing Moon' and 'Seven Seas' from Ocean Rain for the Bunnymen), each band then peaked commercially with its fifth album.
Curiously, both the Furs' Midnight to Midnight (1986) and Echo and The Bunnymen (1987) have since been artistically disowned by the bands responsible, despite - or perhaps because of - their mainstream popularity. For the Bunnymen, American success precipitated an ugly break-up and a subsequent corruption of the group's reputation. The Furs kept working, releasing two more albums (Book Of Daysand World Outside) to diminishing returns before calling it quits. There are other considerable differences. Echo & The Bunnymen, having broken up after the five albums, reformed (properly) in the mid-90s and have since made three new records. The Psychedelic Furs only disbanded in the nineties, and despite successfully touring the States three times with their new formation, have yet to finish a long-awaited new studio album.
Still, it didn't need a marketing genius to figure that a co-headlining tour would be a crowd-puller in America. Although the two bands had, bizarrely enough, never crossed paths before – which may explain why Richard had a particular interest in my own experience with the Bunnymen based on my authoring that band's biography – they spent several weeks at the end of last year on the road together, each band drawing primarily from their 1980s hits for what was primarily a 1980s audience grown up.
But don't be confused by their shared on-stage affinity for shades. Richard Butler is a most different character to Ian McCulloch. Quietly spoken and remarkably unconcerned with rock'n'roll life, he cares little for sound bites, eschews controversy, and has long been sober. Maybe that's why he can reflect so lightly on the madness of the early years. And it may also explain why the Psychedelic Furs never enjoy(ed) such flattering press coverage; Richard just doesn't seem to care for playing the media game. He'd prefer to let the musical legacy talk for him. And talk talk talk it does.
It's taken me too long to get this transcript up on the web site. The label decided to go with the live album first, and I figured I'd wait until the first three studio albums were re-released before posting the interview behind the sleeve notes. Of course, by the time those albums were re-released I was in the middle of [my R.E.M. book] Remarks Remade, and since then it's been an ongoing matter of "I'll do it tomorrow". For now, I'm just posting the first half of our interview, which focuses exclusively on the first two albums. I'll put up the second half imminently – though you should be worried by my likely loose interpretation of that word. Please feel free to discuss anything about the interview over on the Forum; I know from past experience people get linked to ijamming! from group-specific web sites and engage in their debates back where they were sent from. Fair enough, but it's the connection of the dots that I love about music and culture, the way bands take the reins from those that precede them, hand them off to those that follow them - and often find themselves working on parallel lines alongside other contemporary acts. It's only when we look at it all in context that it truly makes sense.
We start off by talking about the infamous Sex Pistols show at the 100 Club in September 1976, along with the Clash, and the debut of Siouxsie and the Banshees, featuring Sid Vicious on drums and Marco Pirroni on guitar. All three Butler brothers attended that show, which has achieved mythic proportions over the years – and, apparently, rightly so.
Was it a life-changing experience?
Well the whole punk thing was, yeah. It's what got me into being in a band. Before that it was like, how the hell do you do it? And then after the Pistols came along, it was like okay, you steal some gear, you learn three chords and it's more about attitude than musicianship and you realized you didn't really have to be that good at it to get into it.
I think there's a tendency for people to see the Furs as being somewhat outside of punk, because by the time you made the first album, things had moved on.
Well we were part of the second wave, along with, I suppose, Echo and the Bunnymen and bands like that. Punk was like Pol Pot wanting to start from year zero, but I certainly came along with all this other baggage. I'd been a Bowie fan like a lot of the English people had, Roxy Music and the New York Dolls and all that sort of stuff. And Bob Dylan since I was a little kid too. And punk rock really showed the way that you could do it, that you didn't have to be a great musician. Before punk rock there was a big blur between being a fan and being a person who could actually do it, and that was incredibly exciting about it, and especially for someone who loved music as much as I did, it was like, "Wow, I can actually do it now." And there were club like the Roxy where you just said, "Can I book my band here?" And they said, "Sure, next Thursday night." And not ask any questions really.
Was that 100 Club gig with the Pistols your introduction, and what got you to that show?
I was living up in Leeds for a while and really wanting to get a band together, and I guess I'd bought the Ramones album because that was one of those albums that I remember coming out. And they [the Pistols] were supposed to play at Leeds, and we turned up and they never appeared there. So the next appearance they did make that I could see was at the 100 Club. I went down with both my brothers, they were both in the band at the time, or at least the idea of the band as it was then. I had never seen – and still haven't – anybody with that much direct charisma, that much confrontational in your face charisma, and for that it was mind blowing. Iggy Pop had a charisma and so did Bowie, all different, but that type - where you were almost afraid of the guy at the same time as enjoying it - was incredible.
But you'd already got the idea of the band in motion.
I remember sitting down with my brother and saying 'I want to put a band together, what do you want to play?' and I think because he figured bass guitar had only four strings, so it would be easier – and he was probably right! And my brother Simon could already play guitar a little bit and his friend Roger could play a little bit, and Duncan could play sax a little bit so we put a band together of people that could almost play.
Almost from the moment you put the band together people talked about the element of the Lydon sneer in your voice; given that you saw the Pistols back then, would that be subconscious, unconscious – or deliberate?
I don't think it was deliberate, or not consciously deliberate, because I still sing the same way. I think a lot of it is that when I push my voice to sing really high, it comes out sounding pretty croaky. Certainly it was an influence, but to what degree I will never know. He was certainly one of the people - him, Bob Dylan and David Bowie, were the three touchstones I had when we were making the first album, and being a band, I wanted to do everything that those people had done.
You mentioned earlier about Roxy and Bowie. It seems there's no real conflict between what you say your influences were and what other people heard in your music.
No, none at all. I think people made a lot more of Roxy Music because of the saxophone, than was actually there.
One instrument can do that.
Especially when it's as unusual as a saxophone.
The other group people did reference was the Velvet Underground.
Oh yeah, they were a big influence. When I was at art school, I was very interested in Andy Warhol, and I ended up doing silk-screen prints a lot of the time and I was very interested in that whole scene of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and then I got into the Velvet Underground and I got a bit disillusioned with painting because I wanted to be able to do what they were doing, and Bob Dylan too, with painting -and you can't really. You think that arts can cross over, but it's very difficult with painting to make that sort of visceral connection.
So essentially when the punk thing happened, it was like, "Ah, I can communicate through a band, because now there's an outlet where I don't have to have all the formal training."
I always thought that Bob Dylan had a very sneery way of putting himself across. It wasn't as aggressive as John Lydon, but it was sneerier, and cleverer.
There was a three year gap between you seeing the Pistols and recording the first album. Did it always feel like it would work out, given the changing of members and so on?
It was a very confused time. I was working at a silkscreen place in Barnet in North London. We weren't going at it gung ho, it wasn't a career choice. I was shocked when we got signed, I remember that. I couldn't believe when we were put on a retainer. The thought of being paid a living wage to make music. . .And we had done very little before that.
There was this pub the Duke of Lancaster in Barnet, we'd done it one week and they said "We don't want you back, you're too loud, and obnoxious." We'd record the third Velvet Underground album on tape and give it to them and say, "See, we've quietened down," and then go through the same thing all over again. And then we had this residency at the Windsor Castle, and by the fourth week it was completely full.
You were never so much a part of punk that the question of whether to sign to a major label or not came up.
No, not at all. The Sex Pistols were signing to major labels, the Clash were on the same company as us; we looked at them and John Cooper Clarke and thought, well that's a good company for us.
It took a while for the line-up to settle down.
John Peel was helpful to us back then as he was to a lot of people. We'd always had problems with drummers cause they were the least involved, and there wasn't a lot of money coming in, and they'd be sitting at the back of the stage thumping away so they weren't as interested and enthusiastic as the rest of us. The last drummer we got was Vince Ely who responded to a cry for help on John Peel, saying we needed a drummer. After he joined, I think we did two dates at the Music Machine. We did one show there with The Flies, cosmetic punks, power pop vibe, we were opening for them, we played and everyone left after, so they booked us back for a show of our own at which we got signed. Howard Thompson brought Muff Winwood down and we actually have it on tape, Muff leaning over Howard's shoulder saying "Yeah, sign them, sign them."
Vince and John were the last pieces of the puzzle.
Vince and John both came at roughly the same time. We got this girl to manage us, Tracey. She said "I'll manage you, I've got the right drummer for you, Paul Wilson. But if you take Paul you've got to take my boyfriend as well, who's a guitarist," who was John Ashton. So we said, Yeah, alright. That gave two guitarists.
I kicked my brother out, because it felt a little like The Osmonds, having three brothers, and then Paul left and we kept John.
And in terms of how Simon, your brother, felt about that...
He was going to University and studying electronic engineering and all that. SO he wasn't quite as gung ho.
Going back a step, was there a lot of music round the household?
Oh yeah. My dad used to listen to. . .Well, Bob Dylan he picked up on. My father was like this government chemist who was a raving communist and he picked up on all that - the blues we were listening to since we were kids, and Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan. He was bringing Bob Dylan home from when I was about 10 or 11. There was some crap in there too - Burl Ives I never cared for, Jimmy Reeves. But Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, Big Bill broonzy, all those were good. Art school was all about Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Roxy Music, New York Dolls out of that pretty much into punk rock.
The first recordings that came out were with Howard [Thompson, A&R Manager] and Ian [Taylor].
And Ed Hollis. We did some tracks with Ed Hollis that may just have been demos. He's since passed away.
Have they surfaced?
We were sent some demos from that period and they w ere fucking awful.
It wasn't uncommon for A&R people to produce so much in those days, someone would sign a band then go into the studio with an engineer and say I know what i want from this band. The two tracks that you did with Howard and Ian have definitely survived the test of time.
Yeah. I forget how we came by Steve Lillywhite but he had just done the Banshees and he was doing Peter Gabriel, but Peter Gabriel takes such a long time that he was moonlighting from Peter Gabriel. And he had either just done U2, or was doing U2. . .
What was the difference for you between having your A&R guy produce a single and then having someone like Steve Lillywhite, who's your producer.
Well we liked him, and he was very young at the time and he was kind of hip. His brother was in the Members, I think, and so we were all on the same page. It was fun. Steve was a great guy, had a great drum sound, and seemed to know what he wanted. What he said to us, which immediately put us all at ease – though we weren't that much ill at ease because we didn't know how it worked – he said, 'I just want this first record to be like a great live show. I don't want to push it in any direction.' He was very instrumental, in that I used to sing 'Sister Europe' very angrily. And I remember Steve Lillywhite getting me back in the studio and saying, 'Why don't you go down the pub, have a couple of beers, and when you come back I want you to sign it like it's three in the morning and you're talking on the telephone to someone. It was a good way of putting it, and it was a good way of letting go of having to feel like you're angry with every song. Which funnily enough, Todd Rundgren did later on with 'Love My Way'. That came across to him as an angry sounding demo. He said "Why don't you actually sing it, this could be a good single. If you don't like it, you can go back to the way it was."
Was there to any extent a defence mechanism at work? You might think, "I've written a really poppy song but I can't be seen as being really poppy so I've got to be angry with this?"
Well, given the times, yeah. It felt like 'This is croony'. But then I would go back to Bob Dylan, and I loved 'Sad Old Lady Of The Lowlands', so it wasn't that big a stretch to go back and say, well it doesn't fit in with these days, but it does fit in with other stuff that I like.
Your early lyrics were very oblique, very impressionistic.
I still like them to be oblique. Because I think that's where poetry happens in a way. I don't get Bruce Springsteen particularly. He will set out and write a story and it's basically a narrative, and it always sounds vaguely corny at the end of the day. 'Cos there really are no real truths to be told, and it's all in the way that you tell them. Bob Dylan always seemed very oblique, and I liked that way of going at it, where you could listen to something and say, 'Well what is this about? and is this because of that or because of this?' and it makes you think when you're listening to it, and it means you could use words to fit the music rather than writing a straight narrative. You can enjoy words more writing that way. Some would maybe argue that it's a lazy way to think about it. But to me it's more poetic - and ultimately more honest - to write that way.
I would say that if you're going to be more poetic, then just like a narrative you have to do it well to pull it off. You can't just pick eight words out of a Thesaurus and put them together. . .From the early days, what reactions were you getting to your lyrics? How did people take 'Imitation of Christ'?
Well there's a clothing company called Imitation of Christ now [laughs] – and they credited me as the inspiration. Whereas I stole it from a catholic tract written by
But that's one of the beauties of those days. For a first album it was like, "We'll take a snapshot of a band live, and just introduce them", there was far less of this "you have to have a hit".
Well, we had Muff Winwood [head of A&R at CBS] saying "We don't mind if there's a hit on this record, or if there's a hit on the next one, we'd like you just to keep getting better and better known a nd selling more and more records." And that was the ethos that allowed a band like R.E.M. or U2 to exist, or bands that didn't have an immediate smash hit, but built up a following by touring and making records.
It struck me while getting these notes together that your first two albums combined are what many people would expect out of a first album these days. You were given that breathing space to learn and progress, and there's a subtle progression between the first and the second. . . After The Psychedelic Furs came out in the UK, you did a couple of tracks with Martin Hannett.
We tried out Martin Hannett because I really liked the way that the John Cooper Clarke album sounded.
Rather than Joy Division.
I liked Joy Division, but it was more to do with John Cooper Clarke – another obvious Bob Dylan wannabe! So we tried Martin Hannett out but we didn't like it. It was too murky.
Was there any personal conflict there?
No, not at all. We just didn't like the sound of it. I think Steve Lillywhite at that point said, I'll never do two albums with the same act, and then he went and did a second album with U2. So we said "Hey, you said," and he said "Alright then, let's do it." Then later he heard us in Berlin doing 'President Gas', and he said "That song, I just want to produce that song," but we'd already decided to go with Todd.
The US edition of the debut album was different.
They thought 'Blacks/Radio' was racist, which on a superficial level you could think that it was. That was taken from an Andy Warhol quote. He was asked if he liked black people and as usual, he replied very tongue in cheek. "If it wasn't for the blacks in the south, my father's refrigerator business would lose down." I thought, "Wow that's a great quote" and used it and then people didn't see the irony in it.
When it was pulled was that a fight?
Not really. We loved the fact that the album was going to be released in America for one thing, and that it would give us the chance to come over and tour. We played at the Mudd Club, and got to stay in New York for five days which was incredible, after years of being a fan of the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, it was totally a different world, totally alien, incredibly exciting. And then we went back and planned to tour here. The American record company weren't really interested in us touring, nor were the English one, so basically we did it off our own bat. We came over in a van [not a plane?] and toured around like that, which did relatively well as club tours go.
The first album did very well in the UK, it was a top twenty album, and yet there was a perception that you didn't fit in in the UK. Did you have that perception?
We felt like journalists were very unkind to us – some journalists. And didn't get it, and accused us of ...well I forget what we were accused of being but it was none of it true and it kind of hurt. And England didn't have anything like...you couldn't get on the radio. It was very difficult to get on. Whereas over here there was a whole network of college radio, so you could get well known in a genuine underground way, which in England the only way of getting your music spread was MM and NME and Sounds.
I've always considered that the key difference between the two countries with their underground. The question remains, did you feel that you didn't fit in in the UK?
At the time we were very hip in a weird way, but at the same time English journalists, and English people can be very nasty, and it affected us in a way. I guess I was pretty thin skinned about it all, which I'm not anymore. I didn't feel like we didn't fit in, because we were doing well. But certainly it was exciting to be in America, and it very quickly became that we were more popular in America.
For Talk Talk Talk, I remember playing the Ritz in NY, and we had people queuing round the block to get in, and it was wow! This is for us? It was an incredible feeling. Whereas back in England we'd be playing Newcastle Poly, half full or something.
Did you stop to think why the Americans were taking to you so quickly?
No I never figured it out.
The Americans always appreciated "real" bands.
But England still did at that point too. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that suddenly England decided that anything with guitars was completely out the window, it had to be all synthesized. Then they came back to guitars later on in the 80s. I can remember guitars were very much frowned upon for four or five years.
When you came here and played the first dates, was America everything you hoped it would be?
Yeah, And more. It was exciting, enormous. But New York – the steam coming out of the roads, it was absolutely incredible. Late clubs, there used to be clubs you would only turn up for at two in the morning and roll out at dawn. You had nothing like that in England – in England it was a case of sticking a ginger wine in your last pint of lager to see you home!
There's a cohesiveness to Talk Talk Talk.
For most of the part they're better songs, it's better realized as a sound, and I think the lyrics are better as well.
They seem to move on a little bit from the pure poetry, or abstractness into something that's a little more narrative. You can read a story into Pretty IN Pink – as someone obviously did!
John Hughes' was such a horrible take on that story. So Hollywood. It's very weird to look in fashion magazines and see Pretty In Pink all over the place. Before I wrote that song I just liked the alliteration of it, the fact that it could mean someone could be pretty when she was naked, or it could mean something else. To have coined a phrase that has gone into public use is very odd. When I see it in a fashion magazine, or on the last tour the opening band dropped off a porn mag cos it had pretty in pink in there, and I think they're using it, it's passed into -not popular usage, because people don't say it to each other. But magazines like it.
A lot of people see it as their favourite album. With cult groups, fans often love the second album.
I think it's our best album. If I had to look back on all the stuff – as I've been forced to recently – I think it's the most solid album. But it's not an album that you can say, "That was our best album, let's go back and do that again". You can't imitate it, it was so much of its time. But I think it's a great record.
Was it easy to make?
No! We spent ages in John Henry's [writing and rehearsing]. I think we were in there for months solid, like six months, say from nine to five. We were booked in there daily five-six days a week for six months its seems. Our typical day would be, we'd arrive there around ten or eleven, hopefully not everyone would be there so we could go round to the pub, roll out of the pub when the pubs shut around three, with a few cans, and then work till about six or seven, then go back around the pub.
An average English work day!
Right. (Laughs.) Always with the hope that we would do more work.
You were in that classic position of having three years to write the first album and then just six months to write the second.
But it worked. Back then, people released an album a year. I would think we were being busy and then you'd look at someone like Elvis Costello who would release two albums a year.
The six piece band at that point, was it a very tight unit? Were you feeling strong together?
Oh yeah. Some live shows, I remember from the early days before we were signed, I remember hectic shows where we were so drunk from hanging out waiting to go on that our manageress would say "you're too drunk, take these" and it would be speed, so by the time we got on stage we'd be well in the mood to do these improvised long guitar-smashing . . . But we weren't doing that anymore even by the time we were touring the first record. By the time we got back from doing our first tours, especially of America, we were very much a band for the first time. Then it was down to, You've got to write another record. And given the times, where you brought out a record a year, there was a certain amount of rush attached to it, and so we went in and worked hard – I suppose – between bouts at the pub! That's why we were in John Henry's for so long. You come out of John Henry's when you've got an album.
And then it was quick to record?
We had a bit more time. Twenty one days seems something I remember.
There was more interest in doing overdubs now?
Yeah, and more weird percussive stuff, and more guitar weirdness. Which is where John Ashton really came into his own, because that's what he does best. He's not an incredibly gifted technically proficient player but he's very good at sounds, and that's where he first found himself I suppose.
By putting 'Pretty In Pink' up front on the album, there must have been a sense that that was your most commercial song to date.
I suppose it was. I could never pick one out. I think my favorite was 'All of This and Nothing', but there was a sense from the record company that that's what they would like to release from the album. They didn't do the sequence, and 'Pretty In Pink' [being the lead track] came from us.
Did you consider yourself a better singer?
No. I was less unsure than I was on the first record, because of the relative success of the first record. But I never really saw myself as a singer, still don't in fact. But I always thought, well Bob Dylan can't really sing, John Lydon can't really sing, it's not about being able to hit notes, it's more about having a sound that sounds like you.
Your voice seemed further back on Talk Talk Talk.
I don't know why I wanted it pushed back. I think the reason I would have given to the band and Steve Lillywhite was "I don't want it to be way out front, I want it to sit in there with the music and be part of the music," but probably there was a little bit of not being sure of how I was singing either.
You were saying for the first album that only a couple of tracks needed more than one vocal take. Were you more up for it now?
Oh yeah. And Steve had this system where we would put down the backing tracks, and we'd put a list on the wall of tracks where I needed to finish the lyrics, and we'd say 'okay we'll finish that one tomorrow.' And I'd go home and finish the lyrics.
To what extent would the other band members comment on the lyrics?
Never. Not at all. No one ever made a suggestion. No one ever offered a rhyme. It was just, Okay, that's your thing, get on with it.
And you were the same with the others?
No. We used to have serious arguments all the time in the studio, drunken brawls. There was a lot of that, a lot of drinking and a lot of fighting.
You're making a lot of references to the drinking.
Yeah.
It didn't seem uncommon. Bands went into the studio and got drunk at the end of the day
Or during the day!
Part Two
By the time you made the third album, two members had moved on. From what I'm getting from you, it doesn't seem like that it was in anyone's minds when making Talk Talk Talk.
No it wasn't. There was a hostility that was building between Duncan [Kilburn, sax] and myself. We had just finished a tour in Europe and as I remember we were on a ferry on the way back, and we were shouting and I was leaning forward and shouting at him, and as I remember he said "If you lean forward one more time I'm going to throw this drink in your face," and I said "If you throw that drink in my face, you're out," and leaned forward and shouted - and he threw the drink and he was out.
And that was one of those drunken things you didn't forget about the next day?
Well, there'd been a lot of differences between us. And when you're living/working in that proximity with someone they become far more exaggerated. So I came back - to New York for a while and said, I don't want to be doing that anymore. I called Les [manager] and said "I really don't want Duncan to be in the band." And Les came back and said "Well John [Ashton]'s agreed to getting rid of Duncan if you'll get rid of Roger [Morris] as well." Which I foolishly agreed to and shouldn't have done. Because there was no ill feeling between us.
Roger was an original member, whereas John had joined later.
And the funny thing is, I think that John had said, I want more space for my guitar, but on tours after that, we'd always have a second guitarist anyway because of the way he worked with putting so many guitars down.
So do we assume there was bad feeling between John and Roger?
I guess. But it's all a blur. I honestly can't remember, how it came about or why I agreed to it.
Have Duncan or Roger come back into your lives much?
Well, Duncan hasn't. He went off to work for Reuters and lives in Singapore. Roger I see every time I go to LA, he comes out and sees the shows and hangs out.
Something to be said about stripping the band down. You were then able to make a much more sparse album. There's a lot more space on Forever Now.
Well the band changed quite a lot at that point. Because of the way we argued and because of the way decisions were made, there was no clear cut leader. So the decisions were made like I said with lots of arguing and fighting - and that was the character of the band. Once you took those two members out, it became a very different sort of band. The alliances and decision making was much more cut and dried in a lot of ways. Sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing. I sometimes wonder what would have happened or how we would have sounded if we had been the same group of people. I don't think there would have been the radical change that there was with Forever Now. There would have been some sort of change but how radical it would have been I don't know.
So in terms of making these demos you're talking about was that partly because you're saying to yourself, we don't have the saxophone now?
The saxophone was a very difficult thing because you don't want it on every song and he wanted to play on every song. Because especially live, he's either standing there like an idiot or wandering off and having a cigarette. And I didn't want to have saxophone on everything.
And from your point of view, you said now we don't have sax on every song . . .
. . .We can be more selective about what we want to bring in, and choose instruments according to the mood of the song.
Being that you were down to a four-piece, was forever now any harder to write than Talk Talk Talk?
I guess it was easier to focus, rather than getting six people all in the studio at the same time, just starting up some riff that you latch onto and that you can write something to is very difficult. Whereas sitting in a room with John or Tim and writing something is a lot easier. A lot less complicated, a lot fewer people sticking their two cents worth or whatever. So it was easier to write in a lot of ways. Though we were gung ho about recording the album with Todd before he though the were; He said "I want to hear some more songs."
Whose idea was it, recording with Todd?
I think it was a suggestion of Vince's, our drummer. He was a big Todd Rundgren fan, and though I wasn't a fan, I did like the Patti Smith album and the New York Dolls album he had done. And the idea of recording in America was pretty appealing. And also, Steve Lillywhite had said at that point he would do two albums but he wouldn't do three. So we were at that point looking elsewhere. And also because we wanted to put cellos and things in. It was also to do a lot with the mood in England at the time. After the big punk rock thing - the purity of guitars and everything - music was starting to have more synthesizers in it. People like Soft Cell were interesting, so it was like, Okay, let's try and get somebody with a synthesizer to do some stuff.
With Forever Now, everyone said Todd Rundgren is the sort of person who'll sneak in and play things himself and he'll push you in this direction and he's very dictatorial in the studio, and we went in and everyone said 'Look what Todd Rundgren's done to the Psychedelic Furs, he's done this and this'. . .But when you listen to the demos we did for the album back in London before we even met him, there were cellos on it and marimbas. It wasn't that he pushed us in that direction, it was rather that we chose him because we needed up going in that direction and we thought,' Ah, Todd's a good person to use for that.'
You recorded in Woodstock?
Bearsville. Todd had a studio that was kind of in his shed in is garden.
When you talk about being excited to come and record in America, I imagine a band that's in its mid-twenties planning on going out in New York City every night.
And we wound up in Woodstock bored out of our minds! We had to be seriously reprimanded a couple of times by Todd for our behavior in the village. He pulled us aside one time and said, "You've got to be careful what you do around here, you've got to calm down, I want to finish this record and have it be a great record, I don't want you to ruin it by your boredom..."
And you took that on board?
I think by the time he said that we'd done the majority of the recording. And the mixing was pretty easy. As opposed to Steve Lillywhite, who would have us all around this huge desk and we'd be all lined up by the faders, with the marks on them, Todd would mix it all in the studio and then he'd say, "Come and have a listen". Then we'd say "Well, can we have the vocals up here and take the cello out here," and he'd say, "Okay, come back in ten minutes". So we still had the same degree of control.
Todd brought in backing vocalists for the first time. Were you up for that?
I wasn't that keen on the idea at first. He wanted to use Flo and Eddie who had worked with Frank Zappa and also done a bunch of stuff with T Rex. He was only bringing them in for a couple of days; he said "They're very quick workers, if you don't like it, don't use it," and it's hard to argue with that. So we tried it and liked it. They're on 'Love My Way' most noticeably. As soon as Todd heard 'Love My Way,' he saw that as being the single.
I was just about to ask that very thing. Because 'Love My Way' has that feeling of being a single from the moment you hear it as the second song.
But it's interesting how that came about. John and I were working together, and not wanting to go round to his place with no ideas – I'd supposed to have been working on a song which I hadn't done – so on the morning I was going round to his house I had one of those stylophone things and I had this "dadadadadadananananananan" just those two changes, I think I'd been listening to Scary Monsters, that must have informed it a bit, and came up with this vocal melody and all the words within the space of about an hour, and he absolutely hated it and didn't get it. We put it down and then Ed Bueller, a friend of ours, came round with his keyboard and put the marimba part on, it by which time John went 'wow, this sounds great now' and we sent it off to Todd who said 'well the vocals sound a little bit angry, why don't you try singing a little bit more,' and having been through that already with 'Sister Europe' I was like, Yeah, okay.
And maybe when you get a song that is, that naturally commercial, did that allow you to stay pretty hardcore on other tracks?
That might have been Todd's approach to it. But we pretty much gave our all to all the tracks and didn't approach one with any more intensity than any of the others.
The other song that really stood out was 'President Gas'. Partly with the melody, partly the lyrics and partly the way it went into that middle section with the cellos.
I had been listening to Stravinsky, the Rite of Spring, and I wanted to do something that had that same sort of chugging cello, so 'President Gas' was the song we decided to put that on. And the middle break just came kind of naturally. And that pretty much sounded like that when we took it over to Todd.
It was also quite notable because you had never been considered a political band. Was it conscious to be more up front?
No, not at all. It all came from the title. I didn't think, Yeah I want to be more narrative or I want to be more political at all, I was never that political again I don't think. It was just a one-off.
What else lyrically for you stands out on that album?
I always liked the mood of 'Sleep Comes Down' a lot, that was always very dreamy. 'No Easy Street' I also liked a lot. And there was a track that never made it onto the album, called 'I Don't Want To Be A Shadow,' which I always loved the feeling of as well. In those days it was always, if you've got ten songs you don't need anymore.
They tarted up the Forever Now cover for the American market didn't they?
I hated it. I cried when I saw it. I remember coming back from a convention in England at Torquay or something where CBS had their convention, and our manager hadn't shown us the cover for on purpose – because he didn't want me to be all pissy at this convention – and then he showed it to me on the train on the way back, and I actually cried when I saw it. Because I loved the Barney Bubbles cover that we had done. And I had worked on it with Barney. And to me it just seemed like the artwork for Forever Now was this horrible botched attempt at doing another Talk Talk Talk type album cover only really badly. (The newly re-issued album uses the British artwork.)
And it also played very much into that second British invasion, all those post-new wave synth pop bands that were hitting America, and it seems like that album artwork was done to put you very much in with everyone else there, whereas by rights you'd established your own identity or were ahead of other bands. A battle you couldn't win I guess?
Apparently by that time it was all cut and dried. Because I complained as bitterly as one can. England was certainly more adventurous with its packaging. With the first record we had Psychedelic Furs written down at the bottom, and the American record company wouldn't go for it, their argument being that you had to have it at the top so people could see who it was when they were looking through the racks. My argument was that people wold pull it out to see who it was by and by that point they had it in their hands. But they didn't buy it. (Again, the newly re-issued album uses the British artwork.)
Is there a way of summing up the three albums, almost like as different children?
[Thinks.] The first album was our introduction to our music and any kind of public. And our second album in a weird way is a goodbye to England. And Forever Now is hello to America.
Forever Now did do extremely well in the States, didn't it?
I remember being in Seattle and we were doing a record signing which was absolutely swarmed. We left by the back door and we had to have people from the store acting as bodyguards, and we were ushered into a limousine and shut the door, and there were girls literally clambering all over the windscreen of the car, and it was like being in the Beatles for a day. And pulling away and being followed by about twelve cars and having to run lights and do all these weird turns so we could lose them and they wouldn't follow us back to the hotel. It was just this very off change. And also we suddenly started getting a lot of girls. The front row with that record changed from being guys to being girls.
And what was that put down to? To what extent were videos playing a part?
'Love My Way' was getting pretty heavy rotation on MTV. We did a video for 'Sister Europe' with Don Letts, but how much exposure that got I'm not sure. Certainly by the time 'Love My Way' came out there was a lot.
How was your own reaction to going from a rock band to a pop band? The American market was changing quite significantly.
It was exciting again. It was a change which was great. Whether it was a good change we didn't stop to think about. It was just a change that had happened. It wasn't through planning, it had just happened and it was just exciting again. As opposed to making the same record again and again and again until people latched on, we didn't do that, I guess we had a short attention span.
You moved to America in '82?
It was around the time of Forever Now. We recorded Forever Now while here for six weeks, then went back to England. Pretty quickly after that came out we were back here touring again, and at the end of that tour, I said to Tim, "I don't particularly want to go back, I want to stay in New York." And he said, "Yeah okay, I'll stay here too, let's get a place." So that literally was our hello to America.
And you had fallen in love with New York anyway?
Certainly with New York. I was a big Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol fan. And it was like all that I imagined it would be. So I loved New York. I'm not so sure about the rest of America.
Did John and Vince move over?
John moved over five years ago... Vince never came over. We would go back and forth, We would send ideas back and forth. I would send stuff back with Tim. John would come over here sometimes and we would write stuff up here.
But it worked?
Not as well as all being in the same town.
Are the first three your favourite albums?
Yeah, but also the fourth (Mirror Moves), and the seventh (World Outside). We got horribly lost around the time of Midnight To Midnight. By the time we got to Midnight To Midnight we turned round one day and said, "How the hell did we get here?" I felt like I had come a long long way away from what my roots were, which was Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan and all that sort of stuff. We'd got ourselves out on a limb, unintentionally, and got too far away from what our roots were. I remember getting physically ill from Midnight To Midnight. I remember the moment it happened actually. We were on tour. And I was out on stage wearing a fringe leather jacket and I looked behind me and this huge hydraulic lighting thing came up that had three star shapes on it made out of lights, and it had the ramps you could run up and the hydraulic ramp along the back, and I remember thinking "what the hell are we doing?" I threw the jacket away that night and just dressed in a black suit for the rest of that tour. And then came off that tour and physically got ill. Every morning I remember waking up and thinking, "Oh my God" -it was that album cover with the hair spiked up and that plastic jacket – and thinking, Oh man, is that a mistake. Around that time I started getting very stressed, and my heart was permanently beating out of time. In England I went to a doctor and he said after all these tests it was very serious, it's atrofibriliation, and you need to take digitalis and come back in six months and see how that works. And it was only a doctor in NY who said No, I don't think it's atrofibrilation, I'll send you to a heart specialist, but I think it's stress, and sure enough it was stress. So I went to stress management.
It's so easy for journalists/critics to criticize – and someone should keep bands in check – but bands like you are on this conveyor belt, on a moving process, it's very hard for a band to halt it. You find yourself doing things before you know what they are.
Yeah. And changing your sound and trying something out. It's like tasting something and realizing you don't like it, but that tasting something turns out to be a record, that people are judging everything you've done before on. And everything you've done before gets thrown into the light of that record.
When the Furs broke up, it didn't seem to be one of those "We shall never back together again" type splits.
It was a very low profile break-up. It was never announced anywhere. But I didn't think I was ever going to do it again. It was like, I want to get on and do something else, I've done that for a long time, and it had gotten boring. It was a couple of years ago, I had been writing with a couple of people, for what I wasn't sure – another Love Spit Love album or a solo album, which I've always wanted to do - and Tim came around and said, "How many songs have you got?" and I said, about 15 or 20, and he said "Wow, that's a lot, you could do a Psychedelic Furs record as well." It hadn't occurred to me. I said "That's not a bad idea."
So he meant "as well as."
But it turned out to be "instead of." Though now of course we're still writing it because they want more involvement, they don't want to make a Furs record out of a bunch of songs that I wrote. It felt great going out and playing again, but it also feels very odd, in that ... It's very easy to be "Oh look it's a nostalgia act, it's nostalgia from the 80s." Because in a sense it is a nostalgia act, how are you not going to be? Because people are going to come and see you and they're going to be "I remember when I was going to school and I heard this song," so the only way to get around it is to go out and do a set of totally new songs.
Is that what you're thinking of doing?
Well that's what I'm very tempted to do at the moment. We came out and said, Let's play together again. We did a tour last summer and one this spring. Which was presenting people with what people would want to see if they were to see the Psychedelic Furs. Now I think the next step would be to go out and play new songs. It's a very difficult position to be in, because you've spent a lot of time writing these great songs and you've got all this great stuff to choose from, but to elect to do this to make a point is a very difficult decision to make. And at the end of the day, you want people to leave having had a great time. You want to please your audience. You don't want them to say "Oh man, they played this stuff and it sucked." Whether it does or not is conjecture. With the Furs, when we would play songs from Talk Talk Talk, they would clap for songs from the first record and then they would stand around for the new songs - even 'Pretty In Pink.'
Solo acts, they don't carry that baggage. You stopped for five or ten years as a band, so it's different.
I think we have to come back and say "We're the Psychedelic Furs, this is what we've done." Which is what we did on this live tour. You can't keep going on doing that because people are going to become bored and you're going to become bored. And then it strictly is being a nostalgia act. And I don't want to do that. I want to feel that I'm being creative. Also, within that being creative, it's also a mistake just to leap on what's happening at the moment. You have to get back to your roots and continue on.
Where are you at with the new studio album?
We've got a bunch of demos. Just writing.
When you were on tour, how was the lineup fleshed out?
Richard Fortus was playing guitar and synthesized guitar. So instead of having a synth player we had a guitars it do it - but a lot of people thought we were playing to backing tapes. And he played with me in Love Spit Love, so it was nice to have some continuation. And we had Earl Harvin playing drums who was with Matt Johnson.
What sort of audience? Many new faces?
Pretty much across the board. And I think that's because. when you're a young kid you want to get out and see bands. You might be curious about the Psychedelic Furs from a historical point of view or you caught up with them later. But certainly a lot of people coming out can't have been there when we were playing, but having said that there were people in their thirties and forties, and I'm sure, fifties.
If there's something to talk about here it would be the Furs legacy, and the fact that these songs have stood the test of time. When you write them, you're obviously hoping that's the case. What must be odd now is thinking "when we wrote them, we had no idea that twenty years down the line..."
...They'd be getting re-issued. And that there would be so many young bands claiming us to be an influence. Whether it would be Nirvana or Counting Crows or whoever, and being re-released by Sony Legacy which is quite prestigious. Wow, had no idea - those drunken halcyon days!
But flipping it round the other way, when you made those first three albums, did you think 'we just made a bloody great album, this is going to stick around.'
I don't know whether we thought it was going to stick around, but I certainly remember with Talk Talk Talk and Forever Now saying "this is fucking great," going down to the pub and collaring people and saying "You've got to come back and listen to our new record," and sitting people down and playing it to them, and just thinking "Yeah!." You can write a song and think, Yeah it's great, but you actually sit somebody concrete down and play it, it's like, No, this sucks. With someone else being there you almost put yourself in their shoes when you listen to it. And sitting people down with Talk Talk Talk and Forever Now, I remember thinking Yeah, this is fucking great.
You did reference your own songs. 'India' opens with Caroline, who is the girl in 'Pretty In Pink.' 'Heartbeat' turns into 'Heartbreak Beat.'
On the first album, I had a thing with the word "stupid." I had to edit it out. And then with Mirror Moves it was "star." And "rain" is always there, it's like "Come on Richard..."
On the second album, there were all these references to 'All I Really Want to Do'.
Bob Dylan has a line "I've been looking all over for a girl like you, I can't find nobody so you'll have to do." I liked the idea so much that I used it on Forever Now. "I've been looking all over for a girl like you, you'll have to do."
You used to walk around with a notebook, cataloguing ideas as they came into your head?
The first and second records in England, London. Go down the pub - like you do, and jot down everything. I remember losing one and I was gutted.
Then gradually it became more a process of going in the studio and writing a song from start to finish?
It became less intensive. Then you would record a record, go out on tour and when you came back it was time to start writing the next record. And then as that got less intense there was less need to be constantly writing lyrics.
Is there one lyric you're most proud of, as a parent? Is there one that said everything you wanted to say?
I think the song 'All Of This And Nothing' pleased me for that.
And you're mentioning that 'Ghost In You' goes down real well. Is there a song you get more pleasure playing?
No, on both these tours I just loved playing all of them. And the new songs. There's a new song called 'Wrong Train' which I really like playing. I hadn't sat around collaring people down the pub and bringing them back here and so I hadn't heard these records for ten years, so it was a lot of fun going out and playing them. It was like, I want to do another record with the Psychedelic Furs so let's do a tour and see how it goes. And then getting out there and going, "Wow these songs sound fucking great," I feel really proud of it.