The Psychedelic Furs: Which One's Psycho Derek?
And it came to pass that my good friend Pete Makowski's nose for the unusual in all things took him to the north London suburb of Wood Green sometime last winter, whereat he first heard the magic words. A typically curt phonebox communication ("Gotta go now. See yer in half an hour") from Pete delivered the news that he was off to see this band called the Psychedelic Furs rehearse, "just round the corner from you", and that I was welcome to go along. Now who could resist a name like that?
One or both of us didn't turn up, of course, so the winter of '78 slipped by with no further contact points; and the couple of seasons following, too.
Contact and conversion came a couple of months past. Arriving at Camden's Music Machine just after the group took the stage for their first headliner was to experience a great raucous din that was sheer delight to a pair of ears that had spent the previous hour or so suffering the conceits of an ensemble discretion forbids me to name — suffice to say this pretentious aggregation's knit-browed attempts at doing 'something different' were far ahead of both their musical and mental capabilities. What joy to slip from that frying-pan into the Psychedelic Furs' delightfully formless yet indubitably inflamed phantasmagoria.
It was no sell-out, this mid-week engagement, a headliner acquired more through the sheer bravura of P. Furs' manageress Tracy Collier than from any track record (or, to be quite brutal, proven entertainment or other related ability) on the band's part. Still, they were on last, and what vague suggestion of a crowd was there to witness the event were, if not exactly moved to rapture, at least entranced.
Psychedelic Furs swarmed all over the stage, a motely, manifold crew from their tonsures and tailoring to more mundane physical details. While not exactly a scene from Dante's Inferno, the sight of all these raggedy assed lost souls scrabbling around the gaunt, equally confused-seeming personage of singer 'Rep' Butler was, combined with the intoxicating thrum their assembled guitars etcetera produced, rather special. And rather crazy.
Personal bias entered into the warmth with which I received the mismatched crew fronted by the bloody-lipped Butler (make-up, it later transpired): the crude, inexorable central dynamo was simply one of the best Velvet Underground Mark 1 re-hashes I'd ever had the pleasure of sharing air with. What a lovely din!
Anything can be exciting once. That the Furs were more than a desperate hack's last straw, a whiff of refreshing chaos greedily snatched at on a particularly moribund season's worst evening was disproved when the second encounter, and then a third, uncovered a method to their rowdy madness. Yes, indeed, there was more going down here than one's favourite Velvets clichés being recycled with admirably suitable disrespect by a bunch of pop hooligans whose frontispiece resembled nothing so much as a slightly better fed, taller, less rodentially-boned J. Lydon.
The other almost too obvious to state allusion that was bound to connect in any averagely informed, UK-bred synaptic maze confronted with the Psychedelic Furs was to that other post-Velvets ensemble, Roxy Music. Inevitable and more, since here too was an undisguised fondness for tribal rhythms whose toppings included a gent on the saxophone (the golden curly thing they blow in one end) Poo-poo! Bigger thoughts are possible! Did Roxy Music sound like Jr. Walker and the All-Stars?
Three throws in the Psychedelic furriers' effervescent sonic miasma began to take none too formal but nonetheless distinctly recognisable shapes. It wasn't simply Butler's arms-out, heady limpy route and a neat, swiped title that endeared one to the group's 'Imitation Of Christ', for example; and there was that much and more to the wry perversions of their original 'We Love You'.
Other faves followed hot on their heels: 'Fall', with its rattling start, soaring curly gold thing and bubbling worderies; 'Flowers' alternately claustrophobic and rousing, heralded by a brilliantly re-taken snatch of 'Ostrich' guitar, with typically dream-driven imagery:
"There's flowers all around his feet/There's flowers in his heart/If you take the needles out/His body falls apart... His body is upon the wall/His teeth are sharp and white/He cut his face with razor-blades/And out of him comes... foul white light..." Where nightmares end, a lot of Furs songs are just about to get the countin...
The Furry diadem shines brightest (When's this stuff gonna start working? Old Tripper's Joke No. 2467b) though, in the haunting descents that make up 'Sister Europe', inarguably one of the things that's best, about the Psychedelic Fus, and — for what little it's worth — one of this scribbler's favourite songs of the '79 time-slice, not to mention being one of the fulcrums that recently landed the band their stall in the CBS stable.
Didn’t I mention that bit? Not surprising, things having moved at a fair old clip in Furs-land over the last few weeks. First there was the trouble with the old drummer. The trouble with the old drummer was he couldn't bolster sufficient bottle to give up his day job, something not unrelated, it's said, to the presence of an eager fiancée in the wings of his percussions.
A new drummer was found in the mascara'd form of ex-Straight Eight'er Rod Johnson. He didn't work out either. While Johnson was in the stool, however, the Furs got their first snifters of genuinely keen record company interest from Columbia's Howard Thompson, who caught them doing a Nashville Rooms on this reporter's (blush, blush!) recommendation and promptly went ga-ga, bananas etc. They were great that night, as it happened. Mr. T. promptly allotted the group some demo time, and shortly afterwards they landed themselves a J. Peel session (really very good indeed, grunt). Lights flashed, bells rang, and the Johnson tenancy came to an abrupt closure. A new, lasting replacement was found for the tubs, hooray.
And this is who the Psychedelic Furs are now: Butler Rep (Richard, everyone calls him) pens and emotes the verbal labyrinths; the guitar men are John Ashton and Roger Morris; Richard's brother Tim is on bass; the curly gold thing is handled on occasion by Rep.
A second interview was called for, a result of both the swift process of events (record deal, session for Peel, new drummer) and the high indecipherability quotient of the first. The Furs were rehearsing in Highbury, a stone's throw from where the old Sounds camp used to be. And, of course, the Furs all spoke at once. Some points came to light, however.
One springboard was the recent rumour that sooner or later there'd be no vinyl or electricity left — an inevitable collapse that could well happen faster than anyone expected (you don't think they'd tell us do you). So, like it or not, the Furs and bands of their generation could well turn out to be twilight's last gleaming for, harumph, rock'n'roll.
"It's only recently that anyone's even come up and said they liked what we're doing," said the younger Butler brother, Tim. "What we're doing now's not really different from what we were doing down the Roxy two years ago. And then people were just walking out."
"We're not doing it just to make records," Rep continues. "We're doing it because we really enjoy making up songs and playing them." Recent developments — the welcome arrival of a drummer they could all get on well with, the most important, aside — included a deliberate pruning from their set of too obviously influenced items. 'Fall In Love', for example, with its unmistakeable debts to Reed's 'Waiting For The Man' would either have to go altogether or be mutated beyond easy recognition. "We don't steal anything like as much as we used to," confessed a Psychedelic Fur, leading another to recall the time they played with "Who was it, the Adverts? X-Ray Spex?
"They were playing this really good riff, whoever it was, and we all just stood at the side of the stage and learned it and went off and played it right away. It was very punky. I don't think we even do it any more."
"But there was this thing in this magazine recently," says Tim Butler, "that said that 'Pulse' was like a truncated 'Peter Gunn' theme. And we'd never heard of it."
"Yeah," says John Ashton, in typically direct fashion. "Who the fuck's Peter Gunn?"
Things collapsed shortly after Makowski (for it was he) asked them which one was Psycho Derek.
I like this band a lot. Go and see them.