Is there anything else left to be dumped on, is the question. Sifting through the debris of the latest episode in rock-culture cannibalism, there’s every indication that soon there’ll be no leftovers available to plunder. Ska has already, successfully, been placed as two-tone. Mod is mod, again. Reggae is the Police, the Clash and whatever gets through the BBC. Pop is anything and everything with a straight beat and a hint of a tune . . . and over on the other side Public Image, Talking Heads, James Chance et.al are growing ever more adept at filtering adopted idioms through the distorted frame of their own neuroticism.
And then there is psychedelia, the acute embarrassment of the Seventies, still nursing its bruises. It’s already been pointed out, by someone who remembers more about the period than crushed velvet loons in Jackie, that the contempt reserved for hippies by the early punk elite was based on a very real fear that they, too, would turn out the same. Broadly speaking they have, and in half the time it took the Sixties to divide between those who took the money and ran and those who stayed behind to catch the downswing of a very nasty paranoia.
But there will always be the Velvet Underground to hide behind: artists with dirty fingernails, psychedelics on the streets, where it counts. The Psychedelic Furs are very big on the Velvet Underground. Some of them are big on James Chance and Public Image, too. Although it’s still closer to being a slogan than a way of life, the Furs are promising to be “the psychedelic band of the Eighties”.
“We had some c---, some guy from the States who produced Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship, call us up and ask to produce our album. We told him to fuck off.” Richard Butler --- Butler Rep to his publicist --- demonstrates how an American producer who worked with Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship should best be told to fuck off.
Butler is the vocalist, lyricist and most belligerent member of the Furs. We’re sitting in the office of CBS, to which the band were signed last year to a five-album, five-year deal, a few hours before the final Furs gig with Iggy Pop. The tour hasn’t been seen as a great success; too many seated venues, inadequate sound checks and an Iggy Pop audience had meant a cold, indifferent reception on many of the dates.
Butler’s bad temper, which turned out to be untypical, had also been fired by listening to a test pressing of the band’s debut album, produced by Steve Lillywhite.
“I don’t like being so produced. We were offered Lillywhite and we thought he’d be okay, but it turned out he wasn’t. We did the album around Christmas, which was ridiculous anyway, and he’d come into the studio culture-shocked from working with Peter Gabriel, who’s the world’s most boring person.
He pauses a moment. “The album is still fucking brilliant, though. Most critics are a load of c—k and probably won’t realise that until it becomes a collector’s item in five years’ time of so”.
The talk, and his language, leads to sexism. Butler is vehement.
“I’m not sexist. I like girls, they make me come. They suck my cock”.
Fine. See you later.
Contrary to first impressions of there being a young Stalin in the ranks, the Psychedelic Furs exist very much as an individually-willed democracy, which causes any attempt at tying them down to a collective viewpoint to dissolve benrath a mass of contradiction. Put another way, the guitarist is a Marc Bolan fan.
It has also made the band’s development --- from a three-piece of Butler, his bassist brother Tim and sax player Duncan Kilburn to the present six-piece --- necessarily slow and tortuous.
In the early days, songs would extend into Grateful Dead-length drones, sustained by endless, often uncomplimentary improvisation, before being brought to a ragged, unrehearsed close. It achieved their ambition of providing as antidote to punk, but left record companies and non-cultist audiences unimpressed.
The songs themselves have now been pared down to four or five minutes, which quite ingeniously sounding like epic dirges. The credit lies, perhaps, with the two guitarists, John Ashton and Roger Morris, who churn out open-frame chords in a hypnotically circular motion, undeniably Velvet Underground-influenced but still the band’s most distinctive component.
There’s still an element of improvisation, carried by the band’s insistence on leaving the songs open to spontaneous adjustment. The result is that for a gig to be “successful” it has to hit on the right collisions between accident and structure, which for relatively inexperienced musicians is no easy feat.
And which may be one reason why, hard as I’ve tried not to, I find the Furs spectacularly boring when they drift away from they can do into what they want to do. Besides which, even when they’re playing to order, the dark, dismal shapes of their least tuneful and well-structured songs seem pointlessly remote and sexless; trenchcoat music for the new depression rather than psychedelic moods for the moderns.
Which may, conceivably, be the point.
Richard Butler began his career as an art student. He tells me this some days later when the Furs are rehearsing for a forthcoming Peel session.
He got into art through music, and music through art. The catalyst on both counts was Andy Warhol, a hero. “I’d been doing like conceptual pieces, which was what they taught in college. I hear the Velvet Underground and that led me to Andy Warhol. After that I started working in Pop Art.”
Butler now believes that art is dead, replaced by rock music as the arena for outrage, mass communication, and fame. He moved in for a slice as punk was spilling into the headlines, though his heart lay in the Velvets, the Seeds, Love and the other psychedelic bands. He hated the Pistols and the Clash.
“They did give the band a focus point. We said we don’t like that so we’ll go in another direction. The whole thing seemed negative. Can you imagine living in a world designed by Joe Strummer or Johnny Rotten?”
No. But weren’t Warhol’s soup cans similar to Strummer’s tower blocks, in the way that both took an obvious, populist image to make money?
“Warhol had a philosophy about why he was doing it. Strummer said this is real, this is the way kids are living, which is a load of bollocks. Anyway, Warhol was a genius.”
Butler takes an almost obsessive pride in his own lyrics. He writes all the time, compiling notebooks full of random images and ideas which are strung together in the songs. Very Sixties in construction --- a welcome back to the streams of consciousness with hidden meanings --- and, he hopes, very contemporary in content.
“I just write about things that happen every day, about everybody’s position in things and how people should think more carefully about other people’s positions.”
Are people learning from this?
“I’m not sure. It sometime seems I’m trying to say something to people and they are not listening.”
Perhaps they don’t know what you’re talking about.
“That could be. The lyrics I’ve been doing are a little obtuse, a bit ambiguous. What I want to do on the next album is use a more narrative approach, be a little more specific.”
About what?
“About the way things are and how they’re going to get worse. It’s just so tense now with fights everywhere. I see it getting worse in five years, the National Front on one side, the left-wingers on the other and everyone else in the middle.”
We started talking about psychedelia, which on our previous meeting Butler had insisted, several times, was the motivation behind the band. He took LSD a dozen or so times at art school, he recalls, and had an “awful really terrible” time on each occasion.
“I don’t see that acid and psychedelia were ever that related,” he adds.
This is a relief. The thought of listening to the Furs on anything stronger than lime juice is appalling.
“I think that what we’re doing with psychedelia is that same thing as James Chance is doing with funk and Public Image with dub, though we’re all entirely different.
So far, so-so. Richard Butler seems as unsure as I am about his ideas, to the extent that he regularly disappeared to the toilet with a question and came back three minutes later with the answer.
Next week the band’s debut album will be in the shops. It’s front cover catches the Furs in Devo-ish day-glo graphics. The back is a straight pastiche of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable still on the Velvet Underground/Nico albums.
The next train to schizophrenia leaves in 1969 and 1980.