Tim Butler remembers the moment when The Psychedelic Furs – the band he co-founded with his elder brother Richard – first realised they’d made a big impression. This was in 1980, and they had just played a show at New York’s fabled Hurrah club when David Bowie and David Byrne burst into their dressing room, pretending to argue over which one of them would produce the next Furs album.
“Bowie said, ‘He [Byrne] wants to do it and I kept telling him he can’t, because I am!” recalls the bassist, revealing how the Furs broke their strict no-encores rule for Bowie – as you would – after he’d pleaded, “Go out and do another, just for me.”
Although neither Bowie nor Byrne produced the Furs – their schedules never aligned – the story reveals something of the band’s Herculean self-belief. “Maybe we should have waited for Bowie,” admits Tim. “But we had the punk attitude. ‘If he’s not ready now, we’ll do it with someone else.’”
After all, it didn’t turn out too badly – even without the high-end patronage of Bowie and Byrne. From their earliest days in the Surrey suburbs, the Furs’ aspirations were always on an international level. Good hair, high cheekbones, leather: a cool, photogenic style at the onset of MTV, their ascent in America began with their 1982 album, Forever Now, and was turbo-boosted when a re-recording of their song “Pretty In Pink” became a global hit. All the while, they continued to enjoy the attentions from rock’s senior dons – “Bowie came to see us quite a lot,” adds Richard Butler. “And there’d be people like Andy Warhol or Lou Reed. There was always someone popping by.”
Like many of their peers who emerged during the late ‘70s – Echo & The Bunnymen, The Sound, Comsat Angels – The Psychedelic Furs dealt in strange, foreboding atmospheres. Their best work articulates transitional emotional states. If weather is to be forecast in their songs, more often than not it will indicate rain; cigarettes are frequently smoked; love, meanwhile, is a quality to be pursued wistfully. A sample line, from “Sister Europe”, may give some indication of Butler’s more romantic, existential leanings: “Lonely in a crowded room/The radio plays out of tune/So silently.” Musically, early standards “Imitation Of Christ”, “Dumb Waiters”, and “Flowers” featured heavy drones, spiralling guitars, and wailing saxophone.
For The Psychedelic Furs, though, the long tail of their decline lasted from the late ‘80s through to their eventual, decade-long hiatus in the early ‘90s. However it ended then, the Butlers are pleased with how things turned out. Since they reformed, in 2002, they have enjoyed renewed focus. They have recently released their seven studio albums on vinyl, while over the summer they were the opening headline act at Robert Smith’s Meltdown. Perhaps most intriguingly, they are working on their first LP of new music for 17 years. “We’ve been writing songs all along,” the singer reveals. “I’m not sure what era of the band they sound like. They just sound like the Furs!”
“It’s the Furs... but for 2018,” his brother expands, confidently. It is, he confides, a long way from their earliest forays into music, playing in their parents’ living room, or on one occasion during a pub gig where they plugged in a vacuum cleaner on stage, an old Stooges trick. “It sounded like a wall of feedback,” Tim chuckles. “We retired that idea pretty quickly.”
Even at the start, the Furs were informed by a degree of chaos. “We’d drink a lot and get argumentative,” explains Tim. “If you listen to those early songs, there is an edge. But it came from small arguments, forgotten the next day.” The Butlers’ own relationship was – and is – the same. Tim claims to be baffled by the rivalries of the Davies or Gallagher siblings. “Short of killing the other’s wife or something, blood is thicker than rock’n’roll.”
The Butlers grew up in what Richard describes as an “argumentative household” in East Horsley, Surrey – sons of an atheist, Communist research chemist whose beliefs “caused him grief” in such a conservative suburb. Yet he encouraged them to question everything: sowing the seed for the discourses on capitalism, commercialism and romance that would later surface in Richard’s lyrics.
“Our father was a scientist, so he wanted to see evidence,” he explains. “’What is love? Is it a real thing?’” Their father also inspired them musically, bringing home a different album every Friday –
“Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, not stuff you’d expect in the stockbroker belt,” Tim explains – but their eureka moment was punk. After they saw a Melody Maker front cover photo of John Lydon at the Nashville Rooms, they travelled to see the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club on September 20, 1976.
“We were in the queue when the Pistols stumbled from a black cab,” remembers Tim. “Lydon had orange hair and a drape suit held together by safety pins. He walked into the club, sneering at everybody.” For two teenagers from a nice part of the Home Counties, the experience acted as a wake-up call. A band, of sorts, was formed – lineups consisted of “whoever turned up and had an instrument”. Roger Morris and Duncan Kilburn – school friends of their brother Simon – arrived with guitar and sax respectively. “It’s a good thing none of us had a flute,” deadpans Tim.
An early drummer, Paul Wilson, fled for the security of a job at the gas board, while Tim recalls the response of pub landlords to their early shows was routinely negative. “So we’d rename ourselves and go back with a tape of other people’s music and say, ‘We’re nothing like we used to be.’”
This ruse saw them through the first two years – and names such as RFK or Matt Vinyl & The Undercoats – before the band’s classic early lineup coalesced around guitarist John Ashton and drummer Vince Ely. Their influences – The Velvet Underground, Roxy Music – widening the band’s sound beyond punk’s three-chord chop, while Butler’s vocal delivery brought yet another element to the proceedings.
“Bowie was an influence, but not as much as people think,” the singer admits. “I come from South London, so I sing in an English accent, like Bowie. But Bob Dylan was a huge influence as well. When I sing certain notes it pushes my voice to cracking...”
The name The Psychedelic Furs, too, was chosen because it stood out from other, more combative punk monikers. “‘Psychedelia’ was a dirty word then,” Tim explains. “We wanted people to look at the name on a poster and think, ‘What the hell is that?’”
Their breakthrough arrived on stage at the Windsor Castle, a pub in London W9, where over four Wednesdays in early 1979 The Psychedelic Furs went from playing to friends to filling the venue. A slot supporting The Flyers at Camden’s Music Machine swiftly followed. “The place was rammed, but after our set everybody left,” Richard remembers. “We thought, ‘Wow, they came to see us.’”
A few weeks later, the Furs returned to The Music Machine as the headline act, and a recording exists of CBS executive Muff Winwood turning to his A&R man Howard Thompson between the songs “Fall” and “Dumb Waiters” urging, “We should sign them.” They were connected with Steve Lillywhite, who produced the Furs’ first two albums and who Richard credits with helping his band of “drunken louts” shape their sound. For the producer, the Furs’ singer was a star, while in John Ashton they had “an ideas person, one of the great guitarists of the period”. Lillywhite describes the first album Furs as “an almost pre-Radiohead-like experimental pop band rebelling against the ridiculousness of complacency like the Eagles and Supertramp”. For “Sister Europe” – an early classic – he asked Richard to “sing it as if it was 3am, as if he was talking to someone on the phone. It was a little clue that the Furs were more than a great boom-boom post-punk band.”
The songwriting process retains some magic, even after all these years. “John played most of the lead parts and I played mostly rhythm,” says Roger Morris. “Although this was not a set-in-stone formula. Sometimes there was a call-and-answer pattern going on, as in ‘Mr. Jones’. Usually these ideas were worked out during band rehearsals.”
“I barely if ever write in the first person,” explains Richard. “The songs aren’t about me. Characters would come out of my imagination. Back then, more than I do now, I’d have a little note pad with me and I’d write down when people said things that were interesting, or interesting puns. Things like that. I had lots of beer mats with things scribbled on them.”
After recording an EP with Martin Hannett – subsequently shelved – the band regrouped with Lillywhite for Talk Talk Talk. The producer describes it as an enormous step forward for the band, which is “unusual for a second album. But the harder songs were harder, the softer songs softer. Everything was sexy.
They’d been on the road, shagged some American girls and wanted to shag some more. I’ve only realised this in hindsight, but you listen to the lyrics and think, ‘God, Richard just wants to fuck.’”
The singer chuckles at the notion. “I’ve always been a monogamous person. I’d a girlfriend for seven years and remained faithful. I wasn’t living this hedonistic life at all.
“On Talk Talk Talk we had charts on the wall of songs that needed lyrics, so that was my homework,” he continues. “Other times I’d spent an afternoon in Muswell Hill library reading poets and writing lyrics. We recently put ‘She Is Mine’ in the set again. That’s a very jaded view of love and romance, but put in a very sweet-sounding way.”
Among the songs they wrote for Talk Talk Talk, the most famous is undoubtedly “Pretty In Pink” – which the band remember arrived after a long day in Hammersmith’s Nomis studios. John Ashton started absentmindedly strumming Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” riff and suddenly it morphed it into something new. “I had a vocal melody there and then and I wrote the lyrics that same night,” Richard remembers. Guitarist Roger Morris describes the band adding “bits and pieces. We instantly knew it was a great song.”
“Pretty In Pink” was a natural hit – but record companies struggled to break so-called “alternative” bands in 1981; even U2 didn’t score a proper hit ‘til ‘38. As a consequence, “Pretty In Pink” stalled at No. 43 and Talk Talk Talk itself was greeted with mixed reviews. Meanwhile, creative arguments were becoming more destructive.
Richard doesn’t want to create “bad feeling”, but he admits that he and saxophonist Duncan Kilburn never got on. Tensions erupted on a ferry after a European tour. “We were probably all drunk. I was arguing with him and leaning in, and he said, ‘If you keep doing that I’m going to throw my drink in your face.’ I said, ‘If you do, you’re out.’ He did and he was out.” Kilburn’s wasn’t the only sudden exit. Morris – whose musical relationship with John Ashton was key to the Furs’ early sound – suddenly told Richard, “I want more room for my guitar’. So Les [Mills, manager] said, ‘If you’re going to let Duncan go, then Roger has to go too, because that’s what John wants.’ So it became this weird deal. I certainly wouldn’t have fired Roger.”
However explosive the situation could sometimes be between the principals, what they created on stage and in the studio was something to be treasured. These qualities – energy, mystery, charisma – were evidently something their American fans responded to positively. “Most English bands dream of cracking America, but concentrate on Europe first,” says Tim. “But we sort of did it the other way round.” They decided to record their third album with a new producer, Todd Rundgren, in his Woodstock studios. He brought a different kind of approach to Lillywhite – a focus on the band’s already developing pop sensibilities. One song particularly caught Rundgren’s ear. “If you sing it rather than declaiming it, it could be a hit,” he told Richard.
“Love My Way”, originated as a two-note melody on Richard’s Casio keyboard, and while a marimba hook occupied the spaces left by Kilburn and Morris, Rundgren still felt it needed something else. “Flo and Eddie? Richard said, ‘Hell no, those guys from The Turtles?’” laughs his brother. “Todd said he didn’t want to use them as conventional backing vocalists, but as another instrument. We listened back and loved it, and we were, ‘How about using them on this track? Or this?’ Todd had cool off-the-wall musical ideas.”
The success of “Love My Way” – a Top 50 hit on both sides of the Atlantic – ushered the band into the mainstream. “I remember being mobbed after an in-store appearance in Seattle,” says Richard. “We managed to pull away and there were cars following us, and the driver had to lose them. It was like being in The Beatles.” Suddenly, they were being wined and dined by the likes of a “very chatty” Andy Warhol. After one gig, the artist asked, “Do you want to come to Mick Jagger’s party at Xenon? Can we take your bus?’” So Warhol got on the Furs’ tour bus, accompanied by the latest cover star of his Interview magazine, and proceeded to borrow her makeup.
Other such memorable encounters followed. On one occasion, John Cale not only supported the Furs but guested with them on stage. “He asked how he should play,” Richard remembers. “I said, ‘Remember “Black Angel’s Death Song”? Play like that.’ He did, and it was incredible.”
The band’s rise wasn’t an uninterrupted course, though. Vince Ely left by the time the band came to record 1984’s Mirror Moves; it left the band essentially functioning as a three-piece. As producer, Keith Forsey was enrolled – a man whose credits that same year also included Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, used in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. At the midpoint in the ‘80s, the films of Hughes captured the buoyancy and confusion of being young, where the misfit and misunderstood teenager aspired to wider acceptance but refused to compromise too much. IT was a sensibility the Furs themselves – who enjoyed Hughes’ benefaction on Pretty In Pink – would recognise. It was certainly a productive time for the band – ‘The Ghost In You’, ‘Heaven’...they’d come up with an idea and – boom – a song was there,” says saxophonist Mars Williams.
Lately, Richard Butler has found himself reflecting with renewed urgency on the trajectory of his band. Butler, who is 62, experienced the surprise recurrence of a heart murmur that he’d first been diagnosed with in 1987. At that time, he’d started feeling “like I had a sparrow flying in my chest” or being “in a plane when the engine suddenly starts spluttering... but it’s not like it was then,” he insists.
All the same, it brought back memories of a particularly dark period in the band’s history. 1987 marked the start of what Butler calls the band’s “unravelling” – a gradual process ran across a number of years, brought on by stress, exhaustion and the realisation that, after a period of great success in America, The Psychedelic Furs had lost their way creatively. “I was incredibly disappointed with myself,” Butler sighs. “We’d turned into something I didn’t like.”
The plan had been to record fifth album Midnight To Midnight with Daniel Lanois. But after one session, the producer told them to come back when they had more songs. “Of course, being the ego-driven young people that we were, we thought, ‘Nah. We can write them in the studio, like we did for Mirror Moves,’” Tim admits. However, when they eventually convened with producer Chris Kimsey, they were struck with writer’s block. “So, nine months and a million pounds later, we came out with an LP that should have been a lot better,” Tim sighs. “We fell for the image thing: big hair, ego ramps on stage, the drape coats you’re supposed to have. It’s the only one of our albums that’s dated, that doesn’t fit in with today’s alternative music. It’s what happens when you’re successful, which is fine if it’s a hit, but if not, watch out.”
All the same, Midnight To Midnight was their highest-charting album in America, taking them into venues like the LA Forum – a 17,500 capacity gig that made Tim so nervous, he didn’t want to leave his room. “I think Midnight To Midnight is a fucking great album,” insists Mars Williams, perhaps reflecting an American’s perspective. But the old punks in the Butlers hate it. Richard’s heart murmur only exacerbated their problems. At the time, he told John Ashton he wanted to leave the band, but the guitarist urged, “Don’t go on a low note.” The band recorded Book Of Days, “an LP consciously designed not to have a hit on it”, says Richard. “Very deliberately lo-fi. Surprisingly, the label seemed to roll with the punches.”
But after one more album – 1991’s World Outside – Ashton quit himself. “Differences of opinion, let’s leave it at that,” Richard says, discreetly. “He’s a good man, and a good guitarist.” (Ashton didn’t respond to request to be interviewed for this piece. But his new band Satellite Paradiso, whose album reunites him with Roger Morris, have played with the Furs). The Psychedelic Furs played their final gig in March 1992 at The Academy, New York, before quietly slipping away. “We wanted to do different things,” Tim explains. “Take time off, recharge the batteries. We were tired... of being The Psychedelic Furs.”
Today, Richard and Tim Butler have never been further apart. Richard lives in upstate New York, where both brothers relocated form London in 1983. Tim, meanwhile, moved to rural Kentucky 11 years ago, where he enjoys “a different kind of Americana”. Now, Richard confides, he is considering putting even more distance between them, with a move back to the UK – “to Cumbria, where my mother lives, or possibly Edinburgh, near where my daughter is at university. I’ve lived in the US longer than I was in the UK, but whenever I come back I still feel very much at home.”
The singer insists that, despite such geographical distance, he and his brother still enjoy a fluid exchange of musical ideas, much as they always have. After the Furs went on hiatus in the early ‘90s, the Butlers resurfaced in Love Spit Love; most successfully covering The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” for 1996 movie The Craft and TV show Charmed.
But it proved hard to resist the pull of the Furs for too long. On June 21, 2000, the band took the stage at he Jones Beach Theatre on Long Island for their first show in eight years. Today’s Psychedelic Furs are in rude health. They have just finished a 35-date North American tour. It’s a mixed crowd, with parents bringing their children along, which they like. But while their sets pay homage to their best-known songs, the Butlers very much have their eye on the future. There is a new guitarist – Rich Good – from their old stomping ground in Surrey, and new music on the way. Both brothers agree they feel more like a band. They are even so comfortable in their own skins that Morris has been able to forget what he calls “30 years of water under bridges” and occasionally rejoin his old bandmates on stage.
“Without any pressure from record companies, it’s fun again,” Tim considers, revealing that they have 10 new backing tracks recorded, with more set for September. “It’s been a long time and we’re not going to outsell Justin Bieber, but the challenge is to produce something that is both up to date and can stand up with our back catalogue.”
It’s a view shared by his brother. “I feel very lucky to be still making a decent living from something I love doing,” he says. “I’ll take it! It’s a wonderful position to be in.”