Another Step Up The Revolutionary Ladder
Richard Butler seems a little removed from the day-to-day cares of being in a rock band. The Psychedelic Furs, which he has fronted since its inception in 1979, have gone from being one of a slew of British "new wave" bands that came along at the dawn of the '80s to being one of the few that has stood the test of time. With the release of “World Outside”, the Furs have taken another step up the evolutionary ladder, and even though half of the Furs are new (drummer Don Yallech, keyboardist Joe McGinty and guitarist/cellist Knox Chandler), Richard Butler is still joined by brother Tim on bass and John Ashton on guitar. This Saturday, November 16, the Furs will play the Empire.
Produced by Stephen Street and the band, “World Outside” has a stripped down sound that makes it one of the most powerful Furs' albums in recent memory. "Basically," Richard Butler says by phone from New York, "we just wanted to get in and not have too much production going on. We wanted to get in and get out of the studio as quickly as possible, because we spent too long in studios before. All the enthusiasm goes and the spark goes when you spend too long on something," he continues. "So we just wanted to get in and get it as natural sounding as possible. We wanted to have the band base, which meant that the band was playing live in the studio, and then do overdubs on top of that. It had more of a live feel to it."
Butler is reminded that countless other musicians have said the same thing about wanting to get "a live feel" on their albums. He agrees that it's part of the challenge of going into a recording studio. "The only thing that dates records, really," he explains, "is the studio techniques you use. Like in the '70s, a lot of bands were using those kind of drum machine sounds. You listen to a lot of those records now, and you hear that drum machine ticking away and you immediately think of the 70s. Whereas somebody like Neil Young, you can hear one of his really old albums, and you think, 'That sounds pretty good.' Musicians will always walk into the room and play, and if that's what you're recording, then that's not going to sound dated."
Coming at the end of the '70s as the Furs did, Butler finds the current wave of nostalgia in fashion and music for that decade as particularly curious. "There are a lot of people looking at the '70s with nostalgia now," he says, "and I just think it was a pretty shitty time for music. "It got kind of interesting at the end of the '70s, but the '70s, as a whole decade, was pretty sterile. I think that's why a lot of bands in England at the moment are looking back to the '60s. All of those bands like Ride, Blur and My Bloody Valentine and the Stone Roses, they're all looking back to the '60s, because the '70s were so f**king sterile."
As one of the original bands of what critics called "the post-punk movement" in England, the Furs scored big with their self-titled debut album in 1980. Songs like "India" and "Sister Europe" broke through the post-disco and hard rock chaos of that time to capture the ears of an American audience starving for something fresh and new. Throughout the '80s, the Furs were consistent sellers of albums like Talk Talk Talk (1981), Mirror Moves (1984) and Book of Days (1989). “World Outside” continues the band's penchant for keeping a steadfast and loyal audience happy.
"We were toying with the idea of not having any title at all," Butler says of the new album, "and just having a tambourine on the cover. I wanted it to be referred to as 'the tambourine album,' but the powers that be wouldn't go for that. They were saying, 'No, it's too difficult for people to order it and all that.' But I was into the idea of having an album without a title."
Although Butler has lived in New York City for the past eight years, he doesn't feel that living there has influenced his music. "It would if I'd uprooted and picked a whole bunch of musicians," he explains, "but I think you take your personality with you wherever you go. That's what I write from. I don't directly write about walking down the street and who I see and what we see and all that kind of stuff. I don't make references to shops or taxis...not too much anyways. I think your concerns are the same wherever you go," he continues, "and they're not really tied to place. If you're an introverted kind of person, you're going to be introverted whether you go and live in Japan or Australia. If you have any kind of beliefs, you're going to take those beliefs with you as well. They're the things that I write about: belief or lack of belief or wanting belief."
