The Ghost In Them
The skeleton in the Psychedelic Furs closet - namely their critically maligned yet commercially successful 1987 album Midnight to Midnight- still keeps original members Richard Butler, Tim Butler, John Ashton awake at night rotting in swollen coffer and moaning about selling out. Back in London in 1978, they developed a rare and truly unique sound and got comfortable with the respect that went along with it. That is, until to Midnight. That embarrassing disaster of an artistic dry period misinterpreted by longtime fans as proof that they were only it money- a wound that still stings today. “You gotta write things that you can put out there and be proud of.” warns vocalist Richard Butler. “Also that you gotta love what you’re doing.”
The good news is that these days, Psychedelic Furs love what they're doing again. Having recently missed their eighth album, World Outside, a bright and brainy action of songs reminiscent of their groundbreaking early work, they claim the band's primal energy is once again alive and well. "The original spirit is basically the excitement of making music," says Butler "And I think once you lose the moment, that's very difficult to hide.”
As they shake the last tenacious rumors about their seemingly commercial motives, the Psychedelic Furs no longer have anything to hide, and admit they care about how they're perceived. Over the year, they've demonstrated their hypercritical tendencies by way of lyrics. But what's surprising is that they’re also highly self-critical. In fact, they still get so nervous before concerts they choose opening numbers according to whether Butler's will quaver. It's no wonder that he a few bad experiences with overproduction and mainstream musical directions they found themselves searching for the grittier wounds they pioneered 13 years ago, recapturing them on 1989’s Book of Days, and again on the new release.
World Outside weaves seemingly conducting instrumental lines into a familiar Furs’ wall-of-sound, only this time around the arrangements more toward refined cello and keyboards than they do toward jagged guitars. What could have resulted in a cacophony was cleaned up and organized by producer Stephen Street (of Smiths fame), who unfortunately rendered the album a touch too glossy. World Outside also represents the band’s patchworky lyrical style, with jumbled phrases adding up to myriad heartfelt distillations.
In person, the original Furs are visibly uncomfortable talking about themselves, be coming much friendlier and more animated once the tape recorder's turned off. But on World Outside, Butler does little else but talk about himself, and his all-too-common experiences with relationships. Previous albums contained love songs but the lyrics on songs like "India" "Pretty In Pink," and "Love My Way" always seemed more like social commentary than social disclosure. Butler justifiably feels that he's revealed himself on the new album.
"I think you expose something about yourself every time you write something, really," he says carefully. "You expose what your fears are, what your hopes are, what your disappointments are, what your beliefs are, what your beliefs aren't, how you live without faith. You know, all those questions that bother people all the time. Bother me all the time, anyway."
Lately Butler's most profound concerns center around God and love, both of which he's lost his faith in. "Religion is falling apart these days. People want religion and people need religion- I want religion-but there isn't one to be had because we've outgrown it. And the same thing with romantic love. You feel like there must be some solace in the ideals of romantic love, but then when you have some experience you realize that what you were led to believe isn't all true. A relationship is a very difficult thing to take on, yet pop songs still fill us with the idea that romantic love is gonna solve all your problems. And they always use the word 'forever,' which there's no such thing as.”
"All I'm trying to do in my songs- which I feel is more positive- is find out how to live without those kinds of fantasies, to live with the reality that you go through life alone. There is no God looking out for you, and you're not gonna go to heaven when you die, and there is nobody else in this world that you're gonna blend with forever," he says, spitting out that last word, "and life isn’t gonna be running slow motion across beaches holding hands.”
So how do you live your life knowing that you're going to be alone? "You come to terms with it and try to and value in things as they really are. And there's a lot of value in things as they really are. I don't think it's a totally pessimistic message."
Luckily for Butler, he's been able to buffer himself with a couple of longtime companions his brother, bassist Tim Butler, and guitarist John Ashton. They're obviously very comfortable together, when Ashton and Tim Butler walk into this interview late, Butler keeps talking, giving them a glance so casual you'd think he'd seen them only moments earlier. And they continue to let him do the talking.
Though the Psychedelic Furs enjoy working together these days, back when they recorded Mirror Moves and Midnight to Midnight the Butlers had moved to New York City while Ashton still lived in London. So co-writing consisted of shipping audiotapes across the Atlantic Ocean. "That was pretty unsuccessful," says Butler. "A large part of the writing had to be done in the studio, with ideas that you'd come up with by yourself. It worked with Mirror Moves, but with Midnight to Midnight, it kind of came unstuck and we lost direction. It just didn't work chemistry-wise. We're a band that works very much as a group of people." That group now includes keyboardist Joe McGinty, who joined in 1987, rhythm guitarist and cellist Knox Chandler, who became a Fur in 1989, and 1990's addition, drummer Don Yallech.
Now that their lineup is more concrete, the Psychedelic Furs are happy to be able to concentrate on what originally motivated them to form the band. “I love externalling things, seeing something of myself outside of myself.” says Butler, "and making her people feel things that I feel.” In that case, he should be delighted with World Outside which, more than any of previous albums expresses complex emotions. Sometimes the result is a combination of colorful images that don't coalesce into one overall meaning but that’s fine by Butler. “I don't think songs should have an obvious sense. As soon as you establish exactly what a song means, it loses an emotional weight somehow. The basic truths in songs are always the same truths reiterated, and it's just the way you tell them that's important.”
Dreary London, 1978: Punk rock spawns the Psychedelic Furs who cop the anything-goes attitude by playing 20-minute jams of Iggy & the Stooges and the Velvet Underground while the rest of the city spews out obligatory two-minute thrashes. Even their band came out punked the punks, the word "psychedelic adopted in opposition to the anti-60's climate of the the time.
Though Butler had gone to school to study painting, the punk rock movement inspired him to ask his brothers Tim and Simon to form a band. “I’d always been a big music fan, but it never seemed like something I could do. Bands on TV had what seemed like millions of pounds worth of equipment. But then around the time of punk rock. people were getting up on stage and just playing, and they were saying, "You only need to know three chords and you can write a song. And you don't need all this
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