So Good So Far Psychedelic Furs Resurge
I never heard Midnight to Midnight, the 1987 album that had media types saying the Psychedelic Furs were washed up. (The Furs said, We fell on our faces with that one.)
And I wasn't going to hear it. Completism aside, I feel the way many people who read this mag probably feel: the Furs were brilliant and special on their first (self-titled) LP and their second, Talk Talk Talk. Thereafter (and their debut was a decade ago), only in flashes. By the time of Midnight to Midnight, the Rolling Stones producer-assisted disgrace, a lot of us were no longer listening. Meaning that the new Psychedelic Furs' album doesn't fall on a waiting world.
And yet, it deserves to. On Book of Days, a harsh society's waste of individual life, time, and effort is catalogued with a seasoned force and lilt that grows more impressive at each listening. On first hearing it a few weeks ago, I was excited. I called up the Furs fan who had plumped me in front of a speaker years ago to hear, "Into You Like a Train." She said, "The Furs have always had a lot of heart."
A lot of heart isn't your first impression on meeting Richard Butler, the songwriter/vocalist and central figure in the Psychedelic Furs. (He formed the band, fresh out of art school, in London in 1979.) Tallish, thin, with mussed hair and a bulky black sweater, he seems as close-lipped as he is thin- lipped; brainy in a suppressed way he isn't particularly eager to share, and suave, if suavity is a way of managing an encounter without wasted effort. He had barricaded part of his hotel room by quartering it off with a table for himself to sit behind. I didn't blame him. He didn't know we weren't there to compare Book of Days with the previous "sellout" album but with the band's early work.
Hoarse from a Los Angeles gig the night before, he answered questions readily, with brief hesitations. He laughed occasionally. It's a willing laugh, but mirthless in tone. Well, that figures: nobody ever said mirth was this man's game.
Butler's current interest in recording an acoustic album was about to be news to me. Assuming the typically thick, impasto'ed sound on most Furs' albums was inherent to the band's musical values, I started by asking about production-how, record after record, you always hear so many layers of noise in there.
The layered sound, he replied, "is down to John [Ashton, guitarist] as much as anyone. When he hears a guitar part instead of one guitar playing solo, he tends to hear things in layers of noise, to hear a sound which consists of more than one guitar, always... We may hear basic chords he hears it entirely differently."
Did that mean he does extra tracks? "Before, yes, he has done them himself. This time, when we were doing pre-production, we brought in another guitarist, Knox Chandler. John and Knox worked out all the parts. There were still some to be laid down afterwards, but the majority of it was done right in the studio. This album took only about six weeks to record... It's pretty much of a piece, pretty thematic."
"And what's the theme? Would you say it's melancholy?"
"You do get to a point where you wonder why you're doing things and whether what you're doing is of any value. Take "Torch. It asks whether to regret my past. Or if it's even worth worrying about."
"I liked the cello on that."
"She did a great job. Originally, "Torch' had electric guitars, it was an electric song. Then the way the cello track came out took the song into a whole different place."
"So you took off the electric tracks?" "Yeah. When we were mixing, we happened to put the drums up first, then the vocals, then the cello, and it sounded great... We stuck in electric guitar, then took that back out... then we pulled the drums out and put in acoustic guitars."
"And now, that song seems to signal a difference about this album."
Butler smiled, "I want to do more like that in the future. I've wanted to do acoustic songs for a long time. I think people want to hear them too.”
“Even MTV is starting an acoustic series, Unplugged."
"Are they really? This probably means we're heading into a low-tech decade. A friend of mine saw an Indian wood piece, it was carved with some- thing like, 'Live lightly on the earth.' I thought that sounded good for the '90s."
I wondered about the grim tales on the new LP. The title track, for instance, tells a story of decline, of inability to escape a gray, sad scene.
"Someplace like Salford (in Man- chester]," Butler agreed. "Wanting to get away, then by the time you do it's too late..."
I mentioned Salford band King of the Slums, fast and loud but with violin and a bit Pogues-y. The verse to the Furs" "Shine," I'd been thinking, has u Poguesian slow-marching swing to it..... I wondered if Butler liked the Pogues.
"I like the idea of them- Shane Mac Gowan, the idea of Shane MacGowan more than I actually like their music. But I really liked Fairytale of New York, that was brilliant"
"Jem Finer [of the Pogues] does something on your album."
"We wanted a drone kind of sound, and we decided a hurdy-gurdy was the way to do it. He played it on a couple of songs to give that background drone."
As for "Shine" I wanted to write something in waltz time. Tim (Butler, bassist) and I set up a waltz time on the drum machine and added some random bells and it seemed to have a great kind of feeling. I just started singing."
"You improvised that song?" "That's how the best ones happen." I was trying to imagine a song that elaborate, that structured, getting sung off into a backing track. "Most of our songs happen in one of two ways," Butler went on. "Somebody will sit down in a room-it's the way I tend to work with whatever instruments are around, and put something on tape that creates a kind of an atmosphere. Then sing into that. That's the way the slower songs tend to get written.
"Or else, we have the whole band in, right from the word go. Usually with an idea that John or Tim might have. This way tends to bring out the more up-sounding songs." Brief pause. "Which are the up-sounding songs?"
Butler gave his most affable laugh of the interview. "Rather difficult to spot on this record, aren't they? I dunno, I'd say 'Should God Forget' is. And 'Entertain Me."
And then there's "House," the video track. Most TV speakers muffle it. But played full blast the song-scourging a venal society where the trick is to "make promises pay"-surges intensely.
"Entertain Me' reminds me of an earlier Furs song." He nodded. We sat and thought about early Furs songs. There was never anything really punk about the Furs (we eventually agreed). Their songs were too slow-paced, and too romantically anti-romantic. There was the rasping, grating push of Butler's earlier vocal style, though. This has been superseded by a more flexible, melodic voice, taking more pleasure in the act of singing, yet still sounding edgy. It's very convincing on a mature song like the title track-an ages-of-woman lament ("Singing, don't forget me, boys") amid foaming dirge guitars.
"I want to do a solo album," he offered. "I think it will be soon."
"You have songs?"
"Ideas. Titles." He looked at me steadily. There seemed no doubt the songs would come.
He veered off into the past again. The band's label bio goes over the top stressing how sarcastic and snarling Butler was in the band's infancy. I never got that impression from the music itself. "The first Furs song I was hookedon was 'Into You Like a Train.' That song sounded harsh. It still does, in a great way. But the kind of harsh that is disappointed more than snarling."
"I think failed idealism can come across as sarcasm," he commented. "Anyway, I haven't changed. I'm still a frustrated idealist."
Not having seen their early shows, I wondered if those who talk of this pose might be picturing his appearance onstage. Butler laughed. I said I'd seen them here in 1984. "It was more like a stately dance. You moved in a real choreographed way..." "...Everybody told me that. It wasn't choreographed! It was just how I felt like moving."
"It was graceful. I figured you'd been studying some kind of Oriental move- ment technique."
He admitted that he'd studied T'ai Chi, "I actually started studying it not to be graceful but as a method of self-defense. Gradually I learned it would take years of study to defend yourself effectively. It's all about balance, and a slowness of movement that keeps you aware of balance."
"Are you interested in Oriental culture?"
"I don't know that much about it. I do have an impression of a certain valuable thing in Oriental thought- that it is counter to the stress here on individuality. It's my impression that in the East you spend your time learning from a master, the way I studied T'ai Chi. Then, what you know is what you learned, plus one small touch or ingredi- ent that you add, that is yours. Whereas in the West, you're supposed to start from zero and come up with everything yourself, be totally original. So competitive. So unrealistic.
"You can't be totally original. You work with what's there. You can only combine it differently. If you were to combine, say, the sound of the Beatles and the sound of the Beach Boys, you'd have a sound that would not strike people as very original. But if you combined James Brown and Stravinksy, people would go, Wow! Yet you'd have gone through the same process; it's the only process there is."
This question of the problematic nature of originality was on Butler's mind, and he came back to it later via the subject of art. For now I went back to the supposed punk or antipunk ingredient in the Furs sound- at least at the start of their career. "Both your bio and that Rolling Stone encyclopedia say the Furs started in reaction to punk."
"I don't know how much of a reaction it actually was," Butler demurred. "You don't come along and react. You make something out of what is already there; that's how it is, or else you're pretending. I used to like the energy of punk. And that probably is what got us doing it. But the music I didn't really believe in it. To this day I don't listen to punk records. I don't think it made for good records. I prefer to listen to something like Neil Young or Dylan or even the Doors."
Where the lyrics go by slower. And speaking of lyrics, why weren't they printed for Book of Days?
"I'm of two minds about that," said Butler. "When I buy a record, if it has a sheet I'll read the lyrics through. If there's a song I particularly like I'll get to know it. But I also like a record in which I don't know all the lyrics and things occur to me at different times. I'll probably enjoy that more over time. I like Bob Dylan for that reason listening to Dylan records and hearing things I didn't hear before.
"Or Michael Stipe... you don't know all he's saying, if it makes sense, or if it matters whether it makes sense. I don't think the Replacements print lyrics either. Camper Van Beethoven, another band I really enjoy-David Lowery doesn't give you lyric sheets.
"Also, when you print them, it's like you're trying to give your lyrics added importance. But they're just song lyrics, not poetry. And they're meant to be heard with the song. I sometimes don't like them being pulled away."
"That's perfectly true. But sometimes when you're listening and just getting a hold on a song, and you can't quite... On Book of Days, I think the song I like most is "Should God Forget," and I have a feeling it's kind of a metaphysical song about existence and nonexistence, and how you make this discovery that you don't actually have a claim to be remembered..."
He sat forward. "That's something that was obsessing me throughout the whole album! There isn't anything to be remembered for... I'm reading about Picasso at the moment-all the great claims that were made for him in his lifetime... If you look at his stuff now it already seems quaint and old-fashioned! While art by people like Jenny Holzer, I don't know if you know her"
"Those running lights in the Guggenheim in New York?" As described in the Village Voice, this exhibit sounded pretty riveting. Holzer strung messages in lights (like the news bulletins that go running around the building in Times Square) along the stacked-up tiers of the Wright-designed museum space.
"Yes. She uses words as art... I like the voice she uses. A kind of semi- authoritarian, slangy voice... Her work seems much more exciting. Things don't really last that well, past their time."
"Even if they last a hundred years, two hundred, that's not really very long."
"Right. And art works become less important. While music, especially, is made for our time, for now..."
True enough. And before packing up, I'd have to forget the next century and ask Butler about the coming year. "Will your solo album be different from Book of Days?"
"In a lot of ways. But some things I can't get away from... there are certain ways I do vocal melodies that come naturally; they're the way I do them, whether someone's playing an electric guitar or an acoustic guitar..."
"There's something circular about your songs."
"Also, there can be something quite fast going on and I tend to sort of singin
a half-time over it. I don't necessarily go at the pace of the music..."
"And sometimes you'll sing a few dissonant trailing-off notes over a more melodic accompaniment. It turns it a bit, so it can't be too sweet."
"Yeah. I'm enjoying singing on this tour. We've been doing acoustic versions of songs like "The Ghost in You' (from Mirror Moves) and 'No Tears" from Talk Talk Talk]. Last night we did 'Pretty in Pink' and Torch' that way. I really enjoy doing "Torch' live, It feels quite different to be standing on-stage with just cello and acoustic guitar. You feel very exposed singing it. I like that, being exposed. When the whole band is playing you've got a large noise you're part of-you're not featured. But when you sing something with an acoustic guitar, the words you are singing become more important. The songs become more fragile all of a sudden."
Just the word, I thought, as the tape machine thumped off. If Book of Days conveys a new rush of feeling, it may be because the Furs, with no loss of musical power, now feel their own fragility.