Psychedelic Furs: The Flowers Of Evil Are In Full Bloom...
"We're in love with beautiful chaos, we're love with flowers..."
The Psychedelic Furs. Talk about putting your cards on the table. Does it make you think of fat-gutted hippies in beads and headbands cooing on about love, peace and blooms before shattering the boredom-barrier with eight hours of guitar spaghetti? Or does it thrill ya, make your spine tingle as you recall a dim, lingering spirit of '67 and true musical anarchy as characterised by the ground-breaking acid rock of Syd Barrett-dominated Pink Floyd, the seedy forbidden gardens of Marc Bolan and John's Children, or the dark nightmare cacophony of the Velvet Underground and Nico? Maybe you're too young anyway, and just see it as a dismissable era when everybody came on like Steve Hillage (I was only 12). Hang about...
"The Psychedelic Furs are in the vanguard of what's going to happen in a few months time. It's the Mod era at the moment. They'll last another six months then as soon as everbody gets fed up with it they'll look for something else. The Furs have got a head start. They've got twelve years to go on." – Les Mills, personal roadie, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
That could well happen. I mean, at the moment, the Music Press and loads of London Kids ('77 still reigns elsewhere) are immersed in homages to 1965. Back then it had about a two year stretch before the yanks inflicted their new craze – already press-dubbed “Flower Power.”
The Small Faces swapped their pill-popped ballroom blitz for 'Itchycoo Park', and another trend for the Music Biz to suck dry. So will our current media Mod obsession blow out and soften up for the next – this time the next-in-line from last decade's circle.
Though it'd be fun while it's going, I hope not really, cos if there is a psychedelic craze, three guesses who'll be blamed or credited, just like the Jam are now, in fact. Still, it's obvious the Jam'll come through the Mod mania. The Furs have the individuality to ride whatevers gonna come their way too.
They're no bunch of hippies. The music is wild, rampant, atmospheric, dynamic and full of startling power. Not a sitar in sight. It's the spirit of attack and abandon they've got in common with the most outrageous of the acid-rock groups, plus the drama and barrage of '66 Velvets, Low-time Bowie and Idiot Pop prong the sound with 80s sheen. But their main attributes are their own devising (So what am I on about all this hippie stuff for? Only that someone's gonna predict another nasty short-lived craze when they write about the Psychedelic Furs, so it might as well be us, and I'd hate to see a group this good buried under a heap of superficial fashion-scouting).
I'd say it was only in the last few weeks that the Furs have really knitted together, learned to live with their differences and work as a group. That sounds a bit Boy-Scoutish, and I don't wanna play John Noakes, butin the few months I've known 'em, it seems the band's internal make-up and different tensions, encompassing their management too, have changed day by day. All that seems sorted out now anyway, and once the latest problem is surmounted – getting a new drummer – they'll be off the turd-strewn bumpy road and onto the escalator.
It all seemed okay the day they were gonna play the biggest gig of their lives at the Zigzag Tenth Birthday Party at the Venue. But faces got lower and lower until the truth dawned – Paul Wilson, the drummer, was not gonna turn up. Apparently, he was working, though he got his parents to say he that he'd been in a carcrash. Conscientous lad, always thinking of other people!
So as I write (June 10, 1979), the Psychedelic Furs line up like this: Rep Butler (though we all call him Richard) (vocals); Tim Butler (bass); Duncan Kilburn (sax); Roger Morris (guitar); and John Ashton (guitar).
I first saw the name earlier this year on a poster in Wardour Street, advertising a gig at the Africa Centre, Covent Garden, with the Vincent Units and Banks of Dresden. Then Les started telling me about 'em, how they were the first band to come along for him since the Banshees, who are also fans. He was helping them with hustling and readying at the time, together with manager, Tracy, John's other half.
Les introduced me to Richard, Tim, John and Tracy at the lig following the Banshees Rainbow charity gig. The singer was propped against a pillar, engaged in animated conversation with a geezer who looked like a bit of a non-descript version of himself.
"But I think we are living in an age of consciousness", protested Richard's opponent. Casting the incredulous arch-eyebrowed look I usually reserve for such old bollocks, I noticed it was only David Bowie.
Just then, Richards younger brother Tim staggered up, clocked Bowie and boomed, "Can't fucking act can ya?" The thin white one went home, but a week later was to be seen in the audience when the Furs played the Pegasus Club, Stoke Newington, "He didn't speak to us".
Two weeks later, same place for a piss-up after the Only Ones gig, and the Furs gang were once again in evidence. This time the target was a very stoned and unbothered Peter Perrett. Richard was ruffling PP's hair and proclaiming his lyrics to be superior. I made a mental note that I would have to catch this lot as soon as possible!
That opportunity came the night the Furs were s'posed to open regular live sessions at Billy's club, off Dean Street, Soho. It'd been postponed from the previous week cos the club wasn't finished decorating, and when me 'n' Robin got there they were still sploshing emulsion and sawing planks!
Farce level was further enhanced by the owners deciding not to let anyone in who looked even remotely punky (even me, Robin and Les, who'd just spent a profitable hour in a pub having been mistaken for the Police by tourists had a job!)
The stage set-up was ridiculous, giant pillars obscuring the band, messing up, messing up the sound, but still an undeniable greatness was seeping through.
They start with 'Sister Europe', which is slow, brooding and building. After this pulling opener, the pace lifts and through songs like 'Pulse', 'Dumb Waiters', and 'We Love You', the Furs stream to the thundering climax of 'Flowers', and 'Chaos'. Don't really know what I was expecting, but there is so much going on in this music, ideas which bubble about before exploding into their own assertive bit of the drama, that it's difficult to grasp first go. Alright, so there are shades of Velvets and Roxy flying about, but don't any group which whips up dark, relentless walls of sound get numbered with the Velvets, and isn't orignal use of the saxophone an automatic Roxy-imitator brand on yer buttocks. A Furry attitude seems to be to take your instrument and use it any way – conventional or otherwise – to hot up the sound at large. So sometimes Duncan'll just be growling under it all like a vacuum cleaner full of four inch long bull elephants and Dog ("Roger's silly name") often favours a snakey roar, meandering between the bottom floor of Tim's pulsing bass and the top storey of John's piercing, discordant barrages and Richards voice. He's the main visual presence – pretty still for his bits, but stalking the stage impatiently while he's waiting to come back in. Richard also has a penchant for lying down and crawling around the rest of 'em's legs. There were drums too, and hopefully there will be again.
This was the Psychedelic Furs' (MM obviously hadn't been reading their gig guide – Psycho-Furs?!?) first gig after a month lay off while Richard visited his girlfriend in Italy. They weren't too happy – hardly the best conditions to ease back into playing.
So they were looking forward to the Music Machine the following Tuesday, scene of an earlier triumph. When I arrived, a soundcheck was getting laborious as the PA showed its limitations. Tony, the sound man (he's been on willing loan from the Banshees every time the Furs gig, and not for the money) tried and eventually something approaching a reasonable sound was achieved.
Richard thought up the name Psychedelic Furs two and a half years ago, a band had started a few months before.
Tim: "Richard was writing lyrics and said 'do you wanna get a band together., and I said 'I cant play anything', and he said, 'what do you wanna play?' 'Bass?', and he said 'Well, buy a bass then, learn to play it, and you can play in the band'."
Richard is 26, Tim is 20. There's a middle brother, Simon, who was in the original band, but left for a steady job as an electrical engineer. Duncan and Roger would come round to the Butler home (East Horsley, near Leatherhead, Surrey) and join in the sessions, but inevitable moaning neighbours forced a temporary suspension of group activity.
About 18 months ago, Richard, Tim, Roger and Paul Wilson, then doing his first drumming stint with the Furs, got serious enough to make a demo. Sporadic gigs followed last year and Duncan, who was, and still is, working for Reuters news agency, came back in. They went through drummers like a tube of Smarties.
Meanwhile, John was recovering from a short spell in a staggering Unwanted which played two last gigs. He heard the Furs demo on his birthday – "I wanted to get pissed" – and it was enough to suck him in. Paul Wilson was back in again by now, and the line up looked relatively stable, so late '78 the Furs set to work for six weeks, writing and rehearsing, and emerged with "a spanking new set".
Duncan: "We took our set apart and reassembled it properly".
The new Psychedelic Furs (who were nearly called the Refrigerators) burst back onto the world on January 30 at the Rock Garden. Over the next three months they did over 20 gigs round London (and one in Norwich) and built up this buzz which is magnetising fans and A&R men every time they play.
The Furs minus Paul, Tracy and a few fan/friends (and a roadie for the night who's in an awkward spot seeing he's barred from the Music Machine) are sitting round a table, drinkless, when the barman hands back 60p from a fiver. I wish I hadn't said it.
Still, wetted at last, we kick off obviously with the moniker and it's connotations.
John: "Sometimes people think we're a hippy band".
Do you attract hippies? "No, not at all," replies Dog, quite belying his name in his well-spoken way.
Richard comes in: "A lot of people have got the wrong attitude towards psychedelia. I'm taking a psychedelic attitude and putting it in a modern way. That time, it was all just saying 'peace and love, man', accepted that that was your attitude, there's a way we're putting it over. It doesn't have to be put over in a very peaceful attitude. You can't be passive about anything that you want to put over. You wanna be aggressive.
"The thing you've had about 'Smash some cunt in the face and let's be anarchists', it's not about that at all. The lyrics are about being responsible really, and they're about thinking about an attitude. It really is a 60s attitude to me. I mean, love and peace is obviously an ideal. I wouldn't like to go to heaven, if there's such a place, and get whacked over the head with something, have some cunt jumping on me and kicking me in the face..."
Dog: "1967 was a great time, there was such a lot going on. The punk thing's never been positive, it's always been a fashion."
Richard: "There were people involved in the 60s who had positive ideas, and were very involved in it, but the same hasn't happened with punk. You cant just just walk up to a punk and say, 'Ok, what do you believe in, what's really right?' "
Dog: "If we were trying to recreate the 60s then I'd give up now, because there's no way we're going to do that. We're not trying just to go back and do that kind of music. The music that we play isn't anything like 60s music, it's a totally different sound in a totally different environment."
Richard: "The lyrics aren't 60s lyrics, but they're 60s ideas in the 70s style. They were good ideas, now let's be a bit more positive. That's what I feel..."
So don't get the wrong end here. It's not a Flower Power revival show we're dealing with, theres no traces of hippy sluggishness, the Furs seem to be after using some ideas from a misused era to create something new and startling today. It was hard to transcribe a tape of six people, a jukebox and a herd of goats all making noises at the same time, and in cold print, more difficult to put it over. But you do at least see that the Psychedelic Furs are not run-of-the-mill, they align with no-one and boredom they exude towards most other bands, and Music Biz, is not arrogance of an unpleasant kind.
I don't wanna slant this piece towards anything which can be later used against the band by other quarters (we all need something we can lean on), so next we talked about the songs, and as the sets been carefully constructed for maximum effect, we thought a blow-by-blow run-through would be a good idea:
'SISTER EUROPE': Richard: It's basically about my girlfriend, who I've been going out with for years. She's in Italy at the moment."
'PULSE': John: "'Pulse' started as an A..."
Eh?
"Someone said 'Dog, play on A' and it just sort of went from there..."
Richard: "The first verse is about styles, everybody dyeing their hair, all about fashion. The second verse is about religion. The third verse is saying people like you do that. This is the pulse...everybody, when they're young, is a Commie."
'DUMB WAITERS': John: "I wrote it with Rick Cooper, who used to play bass in Roxy. I got to know him through Tracy. I had different words...I had the tune and Richard wrote the words for it. It's a bit surreal – I think they tend to make people use their imaginations really. The way we never play a song the same. It never means quite the same. I guess people relate to it any way, make something out of it themselves."
'IMITATION OF CHRIST': Richard: "Well, it's about people imitating Christ, I guess (shriek of disbelief)...There's a verse about a gay guy getting screwed, amd another one about a guy getting beaten up in a bar. It's all the way you end up, whether you're getting beaten up or screwed. You always end up like this (spreadeagled). But I mean, it's more than just a position, as well."
'FALL IN LOVE': "Just a sex thing."
'WE LOVE YOU' (Not the Stones '67 drug bust classic, Furs classic): Richard: "When we got the name, the Psychedelic Furs, we started thinking how we actually believed in the Psychedelic thing. The hippies used to say 'We love everything'. This is just listing the things that you have to say that you love in order to say that, and when you put it down like that, it becomes ridiculous. You've gotta love everybody who does shit on everybody else, and people who drop bombs, and pretty things."
'BLACKS': Richard: "That actually comes from a quote by Andy Warhol. Somebody said, 'What do you think of the black people?' and he replied, 'Oh, I love them, if it wasn't for the blacks in the South, my father's refrigerator factory would close down.' The song's built around the quote."
As if to dispel any doubts about the title, Duncan adds, "It's not in any way controversial, there's no message." (So calm down).
'CHAOS': Duncan: "That's two songs that we've been doing for some time, linked together."
Yeah, what happens is they play one 'Chaos' – a storming anarchic barrage, drop into 'Radio', followed by 'Flowers', then plunge headfirst into the second 'Chaos', which is exactly what it sounds like it could be. Not even a beat here now.
Tim: "On the first 'Chaos', me and the drummer keep up a beat and everybody else does the chaos. On the last one, everything just goes wild."
Dog: "I think what we're trying to do is play some bits more straightforward to make the chaos stand out even more."
That's it. Sometimes there's encores – 'SHOES' – "about Oxford Street" – and 'SEX', about hand rearing and outfitting terrapins in skin-diving outfits around Surrey.
It's pretty obvious that very soon the Furs'll sign, and for them it won't be soon enough to get all these songs into quivering vinyl so they can do something new. Now I know you've heard this before, but the Psychedelics certainly don't want their creative drive snuffed out by Music Biz rituals. They wanna maintain a Banshee-type control, and already share a similar level-headedness, apart from wild little extremes like insisting on getting pissed, waiting till it's dark, then jumping in the air for our photo session!
Of course the group's attitude to signing varies. Richard is obviously of the ego mould which spawned temperaments like D Bowie, L Reed and I Pop, while Dog, who works in a book shop by day, couldn't give an orangutan's fart.
"He just wants to do the music" explains Richard, "he doesn't want to be involved with any of the business."
"There's been a conflict in the band about it in the past" adds John, "the make-up of the band has been taut, there've been personality clashes. The point is, we've got to learn to live with each other."
"You've got six people who are thrown together" throws in Duncan, who's just got a round, "there's no way that they can be naturally compatible, there's bound to be clashes. If there weren't clashes, then it wouldn't be constructive."
How do you feel about being compared to the Velvets? (Furs join a not-very-exclusive club who include such diverse bedfellows as The Stranglers, Television, Monochrome Set, Only Ones and Burl Ives).
"That's cool," answers John surprisingly, "they've slagged off the Only Ones for years cos of that."
Richard don't really mind: "'Cos if someone asks you what you're like, you've got to say something. That's the hardest thing to answer. You have to say the nearest thing you can think of, the Velvet Underground. Then somebody comes along and says, 'oh, you sound a bit like Roxy Music'. Oh yeah, we sort of do. Velvet Underground and Roxy Music, all the comparisons."
John: "I guess there's a lot of things in the music not so apparent. It's more apparent in the studio, not so much on the stage. We're getting a sound, we're used to each other playing...Now we're starting to expand, as opposed to just playing songs. It'll be pretty interesting to see what will happen when we get into a studio."
Dog: "We really like the set we're doing at the moment and we want that on tape."
With their depth and potential, I think the Psychedelic Furs will survive any fads. Like New Musick...
Duncan: "I don't think the sound's changed much since we were doing it in that room. We're still aiming for the same sound, and in two years there's been things going on around us, so I don't think we've been influenced by anything."
John: "We haven't deviated from the original sound, just added to it. I don't like the clever, arty groups, The Pop Group are crap. It's unbelievable, he sounds like Norman Wisdom!"
So there's quite a lot of improvising? "I don't improvise," replied Richard, whose Mum had just turned up to see the gig, "with the way I sing, I just improvise lyrics. As long as in the song you've got a basic structure, then on a vocal cue it can go out of that structure and then with the vocal cue coming back, everybody can then jump on it and be back in the same structure. That's more the way we're working numbers now so people have got a choice to do what they want. At certain times, it's like total improvisation for a few people in the band."
Duncan: "We wanna make it weird in certain parts. We try and do that with the facilities that we have at the moment. It's a drag that some of the bits still sound like guitars, etc, because we're doing our damndest to make it sound completely different.
"As far as saxes are concerned, I'd like as many gadgets as you can get. For that sort of instrument, if you're gonna be a solo instrument, you might as well be as weird as you can possibly make it."
This is the first group for all the Furs, and apart from John and maybe Richard, probably the last. But that's not as ominous as it sounds. As the gigs get more frequent (though not the ZIGZAG party), and the sound gets better (though not that night's Music Machine gig), the Psychedelic Furs are, perhaps unwittingly, enjoying themselves and getting stronger.