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...there’s always something going on, especially in this part of town – for instance last week there was Lou Reed, John Cale and Jim Carroll doing a poetry thing at St. Martin’s Church… it’s just much more open here.
ZZ: Did you feel restricted in London?
Richard: Well, no…cos I didn’t know what it was like to live in New York! Every so often I would go to the Camden Palace and it was very ‘so what?’.
ZZ: Did your enjoy your performance there?
Richard: No, I hated it! (laughs) it was horrible, it just didn’t work...but I knew people had done things to backing tapes, so I thought I’d try it. IT was a mistake, yeah, but only because I did it so badly. It should have been better.
ZZ: What did you learn from it?
Richard: To do it better next time!
ZZ: So what are your current plans?
Richard: We’re just writing at the moment – I’ve got a little Casio and a porta-studio, and we’re going into the studio with producer Keith Forsey soon for the next album.
Tim: Plus we’ve got to re-acquaint ourselves with John and Phill! (That’s guitarist John Ashton and drummer Phill Calvert who joined the Furs last year from the Birthday Party – both still live in London).
Richard: Yeah – Christ, we haven’t seen John for ages and he’s been writing songs too. I don’t know what sort of stuff he’s been doing, but I’ve been writing songs from drums up really, so I don’t know what it’ll be like when we put it all together. Probably on this album there’ll be more individual songs just because John can’t possibly collaborate with us while we’re over here!
ZZ: Has your music been affected by living in New York?
Richard: I think it will be, yeah – I like picking up on slang, and some American slang is great and I tend to listen to whatever’s on the radio – whether you notice it or not. You hear a lot of black music, all the breakers and that, though I find the rappers a bit samey after a while.
ZZ: Have you got any song titles yet?
Richard: Yeah, one of them’s called ‘Here Come Cowboys’ (laughs) which is about the macho-men you get around in an Italian neighbourhood like this. ‘The Ghost In You’ is another idea for a title.
ZZ: Is it harder to write now that you’re happy with your girlfriend – don’t the best songs come from misery?
Richard: Yeah, there is that...but also what happens, when you first start writing songs the subjects you want to write about are just there but by the time you’ve done three albums, you start getting desperate for something to write about! So I think you probably write about personal things more then, which is just as relevant.
ZZ: So do the newer songs mean more to you [ ?????? ] in Pink?
Richard: Well, they [ ???? ] people that I knew, so they were quite personal too. But I can be just having a conversation with someone and I’ll suddenly pick up on the way they say something, like they’ve got some great sayings over here...though I can’t think of any songs at the moment! Just the way people phrase things here is different, it’s interesting…I mean, slang is really poetic – like “cowboys” is such a great word for macho guys!
ZZ: Do you see yourself as a modern-day minstrel reflecting the time in which we live?
Richard: Yeah, it is a long time between albums, I agree – largely because we’ve been touring and we’re not the kind of band who can write on tour. Songwriting isn’t easy, we don’t find it so anyway! On tour it’s so hectic, especially the kind we’ve been doing where you just get out of the bus, you eat, get back on the bus and go to the next town.
ZZ: So how many
songs have you got ready for the new LP?
Richard:
Yeah, there are a couple...but whether we’ll use them or not, I
don’t know. There’s one we recorded with Todd that we didn’t
like the drum sound on, so we might re-record that, it’s called
‘Alice’s House’.
ZZ: Did you ever think of recording a new single in the meantime?
Richard: Yeah, we were going to do an EP, or we were thinking about it – but now we’ll be working on the new album.
ZZ: But you’ve admitted it’s been a long time since ‘Forever Now’ – what can you say to your fans?
Richard: Er…sorry!
ZZ: It’s been a year since you spoke to the English music press, so you’ve never really discussed ‘Forever Now’…did you regard it as being a new direction?
Richard: Yeah, kinda…it finished them off really – the first one was sort of rough and the second one wasn’t quite so rough. So it was what we’d been heading towards and we used more studio sounds instead of just bashing away!
ZZ: It seemed like a stab at commercial success!
Richard: Oh yeah – definitely. But it wasn’t really us trying to chase top forty success, no. I mean, why?
ZZ: I thought perhaps that was why you chose Todd Rundgren as producer, no?
Richard: Well, at first we wanted to use David Bowie because he gets great sounds in the studio – and Todd Rundgren was another choice, he came to see us at a gig and really enjoyed it. But it wasn’t “oh, Todd could do a really commercial album”, that wasn’t the intention – I mean, he doesn’t sell that many records now.
[ ???? ] arranged that in London before we [??] met Todd! We did some demos and sent them to him and kept sending him more until we had enough for an album. Then we did one track in the studio, which was ‘Sleep Comes Down’, which might be construed as Beatle-ish, but it wasn’t intentional. It had a trumpet on it as well, which sounded really like ‘Penny Lane’ – it was unmistakeable, but I wanted to leave it in…also the use of cello, we knew that people would say it sounded like the Beatles, cos they’re the only people to have used cello that I can think of.
ZZ: And Electric Light Orchestra!
Tim: Yeah – and they sounded like the Beatles as well!
ZZ: But there was more overt humor on that LP too – you’d always previously been called “morose” and “pretentious”.
Richard: Oh yeah (laughs) I never thought of us as morose and pretentious – I thought I had a sense of humor, but maybe it was too private. I thought lots of our earlier stuff had humor, but when people said “pretentious”, I never really knew what they meant. When I sit down to write some words, I just write and rewrite and cross things out until I think it’s good, then I stop. What is unpretentious? Do you stop before it’s good?
ZZ: Well, your lyrics certainly seem to be getting clearer.
Richrd: Yeah, I think they’re clearer now. Certainly on the first one it was more a case of just liking the words, liking the image they created and liking the way the words fitted into the music. For instance, ‘Sister Europe’ – at the time I wrote [??] I was going out with a girl who I [??] with and she went off to Italy. Instead of saying “my bird’s gone to Italy / [??] miss her” I tried to put over [??] being sad and low with images.
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