The Story of The Psychedelic Furs by Jo-Ann Greene
It was the Psychedelic Furs’ first gig…well, maybe gig isn’t quite the right word. But it was a show of sorts, even if it was only playing at a party. Besides, a new band has to start somewhere, and where better than in front of friends?
“We set up in the living room, and nobody was really interested. Then we started playing ‘Roadrunner,’ and people walked out and shut the door on us. There was only about two people left,” bassist Tim Butler laughs at the memory. “That wasn’t a very auspicious start!”
No, indeed it wasn’t. But it just goes to show that the reading of omens is best left to oracles. For inauspicious start or not, the Psychedelic Furs went on to become not only one of the most ground breaking bands of the Postpunk era, but the defining sound of the ‘80s as well.
In an age lit only by the embers of Punk’s glory days, and littered with derivative second wavers attempting to resuscitate the dying flame, the Furs offered a bright light of hope. Forged in the fire of punk, but honed by their love of the Velvet Underground, the group’s sound was so unexpected, so unique, that to this day, no other band has ever seriously attempted to copy them. But all that was still to come, first the nascent group had to learn how to play.
“The band was my and Tim’s idea,” singer Richard Butler begins. “I asked Tim what he wanted to play, and he said bass, because he figured it was easier to learn, as it only had four strings, and he was probably right. We roped my brother Simon in as well, he played guitar… badly. Then he brought in his friends Duncan [Kilburn], who wanted to play saxophone, and Roger [Morris], who could already basically play guitar.”
“Simon probably played better than Roger did initially,” Tim laughs, “but Simon didn’t want to get into the band proper, because he thought it would be like the Bee Gees or something. So, he went off to university, and we carried on.”
Original drummer Nick Sealy was a friend of Richard’s from art school, and completed the line-up. The six-piece, then five-piece, rehearsed furiously at the Butlers’ home in Leatherhead, Surrey.
“When we first started out, it was friends getting together, bashing around, learning to play instruments,” Tim continues. “But of course, it’s everybody’s dream to be in a well known rock band. Especially back then, with the ‘everybody can do it’ attitude. It was funny actually, because you listen to the Pistols’ album, and they’re all good players. The whole punk thing was anyone could get up and play a song, but it wasn’t true! Joe Strummer had played for like five years in a pub band [the 101ers]. It was a pretty stupid ethic in the first place, anybody can do it.”
Well sure, if you think about it, it is pretty ridiculous. But the Furs thankfully didn’t think about it, at least not back then. They were convinced they could do it, and not knowing any better, they did…eventually. But by the time the group felt ready to start gigging, club owners had wised up, and were a bit more selective about their bookings. Gone were the days that a band which formed on Monday, debuted live that Thursday. However, the Furs were clever, and came up with numerous guiles to get around dubious bookers.
“If they wanted to hear a demo,” Richard laughs, “we’d play them something we’d taped off a record that they didn’t know, something very hip, so they didn’t have a clue. Then we’d play, and they’d say, ‘We’ll never have you back again.’ So, we’d go the next week with a tape of…I don’t know…the Velvet Underground’s third album, and say it was us. We’d say we’d gone acoustic, and they’d book us back. Then we’d turn up and do exactly the same thing,” he bursts into guffaws.
“We also got gigs by changing our name,” Tim jumps in. “We’d play certain gigs, and they’d say you can’t come back, because you’re too loud. We’d go back with a different name, and say, ‘hey, we’re different now, we’re not as loud.’ Then we’d set up anyway and play just as fucking loud! So we didn’t get very popular with quite a few pub and club owners.”
Needless to say, the Furs gigged only sporadically throughout 1978. During the year, Sealy left, and Phil Snow joined. When he quit, the drumstool was filled by Tommy…whose last name is forgotten. But his exploits live on.
“We did one show at the Rock Garden [in Covent Garden, London] opening for Zane Griff,” Richard recalls. “We were in the dressing room after, and Tommy came in very pleased with himself. He’d managed to wrench this big plug that carried all the wires off the back of the deck, so that Zane Griff couldn’t actually play his set. He said, ‘People will leave here remembering us, this is a great thing!’ And I remember we were all pissed off and thought it was very unfair. And all the time we thought we were going to get lynched…but nobody ever realized.”
Tommy left soon after, to be replaced by Jean Paul and his guitarist roommate Dominic. “They did like one show with us,” Tim recalls, “and then they went back to France. That was our attempt at being European.” And their last names are history as well.
Next up was Paul Wilson, and accompanying him was guitarist John Ashton. “I played in a band called The Unwanted for about ten minutes,” Ashton begins, “I played only one show, I think, but we did a lot of rehearsing and hanging out, and their drummer was Paul Wilson.
“The Unwanted went into the recording studio, and Paul never showed up, so that was a pretty disastrous session. We made a recording I believe, but it wasn’t very good, and that was the end of that. Two or three weeks later, the doorbell rang, and it was Paul. He said, ‘Oh yeah, I couldn’t make it, I had something to do, but anyway there’s this band, The Psychedelic Furs, and they’re looking for another guitarist. I’m going to go rehearse with them in two weeks time, here’s a tape, check it out.” So I did, and I really liked it.
The rehearsal coincidentally fell on Ashton’s 21st birthday, November 30, 1978, but by then, he’d gotten cold feet. However, with considerable prompting from Wilson and Ashton’s girlfriend, Tracy Collier, the guitarist was convinced to go down and try out.
“I met them all, listened to them rehearse a bit, went out and got some beer, watched them rehearse a bit more, got some more beer, then I think I couldn’t get anymore beer, so they asked me to get up and play, and I did. That night, Richard came back to Tracy’s and my flat, and asked Tracy to manage the band. That following Saturday, I went to see them play at the Green Man [in London]. Much drinking followed, and I started rehearsing with them the next week.”
“So, he thought he was wanted?” Tim jokes. “Is that why he turned up at our rehearsal with a guitar? We did wonder!” He bursts into laughter. “No, no, actually it worked out well, we were jamming around, it sounded good, so hey, we were loose and ready for anything at that time.”
Regardless of whose behind the scenes machinations these were, Collier or Wilson, The Psychedelic Furs were now officially a six-piece, with a manager to boot. Collier was already established in the London scene, with numerous connections to clubs and labels. But as far as she was concerned, the band were still crap…crap, with admittedly great potential. And so the next two months were spent rehearsing…and rehearsing…and rehearsing even more.
They needed to, as their early shows were shambolic in the extreme. The view from the audience was especially disorienting; in an age when the best new bands still slammed their songs down in three minutes, with gaps between numbers so you could clap, gob, or heckle, the Furs would simply plug in, start playing…and not stop, until they were ready to walk off the stage. If they did halt, it was either to have a quick band meeting, onstage in full view of everyone, or because something had gone wrong, although not even broken strings seemed to bother them that much. They just kept on going and going and going.
“I think the reason the songs went on forever is that we didn’t have very many of them,” Richard chuckles. “They told us we had to play for half an hour, so we’d just fill it out with different noises, carry on ranting, breaking things, just really filling out three songs to fit half an hour. It was a good idea in a way, we liked the idea of having them all segue into each other, and we were probably afraid to stop in case people didn’t clap,” he bursts into laughter. “We wanted to get done and get off.”
That was on the good nights, then there was the rest. “We’d play each song for about 15 or 20 minutes, until we got bored with it, and we’d just stop, walk around talking to each other, then start something else,” Tim recalls. “We’d do early soundchecks, then get drunk out of our minds, our manager would give us blues to wake us up, so we’d go on speeding our balls off, and who knows what happens. If you can remember those days you weren’t in the Furs!”
Future Goldmine writer Dave Thompson wasn’t in the Furs, so he has clear recollections of an early show where a new member was added: a hoover [Angloese for a vacuum cleaner].
“I’m not sure if it was the sound of the hoover, or the sight of it, that made the greatest impression. But bands didn’t do things like that; they went onstage with their guitars and keyboards, diddley- diddley, that’s our song. And then there’s the Furs, plugging in the vacuum, switching it on, and it was wonderful, just this dense, cacophonous roar which was louder than anything else on the stage, but kind of undulating, until it sounded like they were really playing it, and the other instruments were weaving around it.”
“Oh no…the hoover?” Tim cries with disbelief. “We thought it would be really cool, because we’d heard that Iggy Pop used some appliances, so we thought why not record a vacuum cleaner? But, of course, all it did was sound like the bass was feeding back.”
Collier was determined that the Psychedelic Furs could do better. And so it was a much tighter band that debuted at the Moonlight Club, in London, on February 13, 1979.
This was followed by shows at the Music Machine, and then a six week residency at the Windsor Castle. With Collier behind them, the Furs were now playing the hippest clubs around, the Roxy, Billies, and the Nashville included. There was also a memorable show on March 9, at London’s Africa Centre.
“John and Roger got so drunk before the show, that they were propping each other up,” Tim laughs. “Joe Strummer and Mick Jones from the Clash were there, and they went up to Richard afterwards and said, ‘Hey, you’re good, the bass player’s good, but get rid of the guitarists, they’re totally out of their trees!’”
Thankfully, both guitarists were able to stand up on their own at a show later that month, at the Moonlight Club. Nick Tester, from Sounds, was there, and walked away quite impressed.
“While psychedelia is an influence (especially leaning on the Velvet Underground), they don’t simply return to the form, but return it with their own updated colours and character…fast, assertive, and rumbling rhythms dart deep beneath the strains of Duncan’s sobbing, weeping sax, and Richard’s yearning vocals.”
“We were definitely different from what was around at the moment, those sort of conveyor belt punk acts,” Tim elaborates. “I guess people were looking for something different, that wasn’t three minutes at break-neck speed and nihilistic. And there was us pretty much writing songs onstage; everybody in the band just jamming, because nobody really knew how song structures worked. In the end, everybody wanted to be in the limelight, so we tended to have a wall of melody. We’d come to a screeching halt, and I’d be D tuning the bass while playing songs. It was just weird stuff, and I guess people liked it; they were so eager for something new.”
ZigZag certainly was, which is why they invited the Furs to play at the magazine’s tenth anniversary birthday party, held at the Venue in London, at the end of May. Besides the obligatory liggers and ZigZag journalists, the audience was filled with any number of rockstars past and present. The magazine, or more specifically journalist Kris Needs (now a name techno remix master), was an early Furs supporter, and even the disaster which would unfold at the Venue didn’t blunt his enthusiasm.
“Surprised to say,” Ashton mournfully recalls, “Paul never showed up to that gig. We waited, waited, and waited, and as time got closer, we knew he wasn’t going to come. John Lydon was in the audience, and he was all pissed off because he’d come to see us. ‘Just get up there and play!’ And we said, ‘We can’t, we don’t have a drummer!’ ‘Well, we did it.’ Well, I’ve never seen you without a drummer! [Nor for that matter has anyone else, guitarless yes, but neither the Pistols nor PIL ever performed minus their drummer.]
Wilson initially claimed he’d been in a car accident, but the band soon learned the truth; he’d been working the night of the show. Soon after, his girlfriend gave him an ultimatum – her and a steady job with the local council or The Psychedelic Furs. The drummer chose the former.
It was a surprising choice, as the band were now getting quite a buzz, and it wasn’t just the Clash and Lydon who were fans. “It was a close knit scene back then,” John continues, “we knew the Banshees, they were actually at our show at the Music Machine back in February, so we had a lot of support from the hip.”
Including Radio One DJ John Peel. His show was built around up and coming, cutting edge bands, a description that perfectly epitomized the Furs. Thus, in July, 1979, the DJ invited the band to record the first of many sessions for the BBC. In these early days, the Furs also recorded a session for Mike Reed and another for London’s commercial station, Capital Radio.
Wilson was replaced just days before their Radio One session, with ex-Straight Eighter Rod Johnson. He proved wildly unpopular with everyone, partially due to his musical taste, which leaned heavily towards the new wave of British heavy metal bands like Girlschool. He lasted one rehearsal, during which “Fall” was composed. And he played the Peel session.
“After we recorded the session,” Richard recalls, “Rod was leaving, but he’d forgotten something and walked back around the corner, and Roger flipped him off. Well, he didn’t come back again.”
Tim swears the offending gesture came from Kilburn, but in any event, it was certainly clear that Johnson’s services were no longer required. As if he didn’t already know! The rest of the band had earlier asked Peel to announce over the air that they were looking for a new drummer.
When the session aired on July 30, 1979, it was a revelation. “I think we developed very quickly between doing those live shows and the Peel session,” Richard claims. “We’d written some more songs, and started getting more serious. When we first went out, it was almost like, not an image we were presenting, but an attitude. Songs almost came later.”
The Furs performed four songs: “Imitation Of Christ,” “Fall,” “Sister Europe,” and “We Love You.” The first number was particularly telling, and is a very different version from what would appear on the album; even the lyrics are changed. The melody is traded between Kilburn’s saxophone and Ashton and Morris’ guitars. Haunting in the atmosphere, the Peel version is slightly more upbeat and poppier than the album.
“Fall” was already full fledged even at this early date, only the orchestration was later slightly altered. Interestingly, within the middle break of the Peel version is a definite guitar nod to the Banshees, which would disappear by the time the Furs recorded their album. Gone too was the searing guitar ending which sounded just like that experiment with the hoover!
“Sister Europe” was even more complete, this epic of atmospheric yearning, with its trance-like rhythms and repetitive guitar riffs, needed only higher production values to emerge in all its glory on record.
“We Love You” rattles along like a train, an uptempo celebration of love objects from film stars and rock stars to labels and TV. The Radio One version is much faster and poppier than their later recording, with even more saxophone. All in all the Peel session was a smashing success.
“I remember having a party around at John and Tracy’s listening to that first session,” Tim recalls. “We were so excited.”
And they had good reason to be, for not only would the broadcast bring a new drummer, ex-Photon Vince Ely, but a record deal as well. Besides announcing the band were in need of a drummer, Peel also stated they were unsigned. Epic A&R man Howard Thompson could barely believe his ears, so he caught a show at the Music Machine soon after, and that was that. By September, the Furs were signed to Epic.
With the advent of punk, demos were no longer a requirement for a band to get its foot into a label’s door. Which explains why the Furs weren’t shopping for one. Richard recalls that the group had entered a Wimbledon studio and tried recording one, but nothing much seems to have come of it. As far as he was concerned, the Peel session was their demo.
London shows with the Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen followed, surely a postpunk extravaganza if there ever was one. “I guess we [all three bands] were considered at the forefront at the music that was coming out of punk,” Tim muses, “the more kind of trippy, psychedelicly, but still with energy. Plus [Joy Division frontman] Ian Curtis used to come down and see us a lot.”
Initially, the Furs went into the studio with Howard Thompson and Ian Taylor, and from those sessions “We Love You,” “Pulse,” and “Flowers” emerged. The former two songs would respectively grace the A-side and flip of their debut single, released on October 16.
A few months later the Furs changed not only managers, but labels as well. “It came to a point that the people at CBS were more into the band than at Epic,” Tim explains. “So we went to the head of the company and asked if we could transfer to CBS and work with these guys who were more motivated. Howard [Thompson] signed us to CBS, he had a lot to do getting us over there.”
In November, the band returned to the studio to begin work on their debut album, with producer Steve Lillywhite in tow. “I think Steve Lillywhite did a great job with us,” Richard enthuses. “When we first talked, he said he wanted to make a record that sounded like us playing a great live show, and that’s what we went ahead and did.
“That’s a great thing for a producer to do, especially when you’re a young band in the studio. You don’t quite know what producers do, how it all works, and if you get put into the wrong hands and get overproduced, you can come out sounding very slick. If you don’t know how it all works, you could just think this is how it always happens. Then six months down the road you realize that’s not how it always happens. We were very lucky in a way, because we were very naive.”
In February 1980, “Sister Europe,” backed by an untitled instrumental, was released as a taster for the new album, and the Furs went off on a short tour opening for Iggy Pop. Then it was back to Radio One for their second Peel session. This time they recorded only three songs, “Soap Commercial,” “Susan’s Strange,” and the old Bertolt Brecht chestbeater “Mack The Knife.”
By now, with the constant gigging and rehearsing, the Furs had finely honed their sound and style. Both “Soap” and “Susan” would change little between their radio and album versions. Both, of course, would have an edgier and rawer sound, but that was only to be expected.
In March, the Psychedelic Furs eponymous album was released, featuring four different colored covers. “Even though we were playing minimally back then,” Tim begins, “we were playing minimally in interesting ways, which made it sound more complicated than it was. Our songs were a wall of simple melodies, hummable melodies. Not that you can hum ‘India,’ I don’t think I’ll ever be at a bus stop and hear someone whistling ‘India!’”
Maybe not, but the Psychedelic Furs wasn’t a pop album in the typical sense. Brooding, hypnotic, yearning, bruised and bruising, the record was showered with melancholy melodies that shifted between the band members, an avalanche of solos, riffs, and atmospheres. It was an extraordinary debut, and it’s lost none of its power over the years.
However, the album did seem far removed from their anarchic live shows, the exception being the medley of “Blacks” and “Radio.” Together with the closing “Flowers,” with its own cacophonous conclusion, this was the closest the Furs came to replicating the live sound on album; the nearest, perhaps, they’ve ever come to recapturing the sheer ecstasy of their earliest gigs.
For a little under seven minutes, the band break into long jams, then come together for the chorus, which was lyrically built around an Andy Warhol quote, “If it wasn’t for the Blacks in the south, my father’s refrigerator company would have closed down.” Richard used this as a jump point to rail at the idiocy of racism, and much else besides.
Up until recently, the song was unavailable on CD. However, it was included on the Furs’ boxed set Should God Forget: A Retrospective (Sony Legacy). With the album’s release, the band returned to the stage for some out of town shows, including a memorable one on March 14, 1980 at Eric’s. That night, they and Wah! became the final groups to perform at this Liverpool landmark, which had launched the careers of Echo & the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Pete Burns, and many more.
“In Northern England they were cleaning up towns,” Richard recalls, “and the first thing they did was close down the rock clubs. After our show, we were offstage in the dressing room, and these four guys came in and said, ‘Nobody move, we’re going to search all of you.’ We thought they were joking, so we carried on laughing. Then they said, ‘No, no, we’re not joking, we’re police officers,’ and they pulled out their badges. I stood up first and said, ‘Can you do me first, because I want to go to the bar and get a drink.’
“Unbeknownst to me, the bar was full of about 100 policemen, they’d turfed everybody out, and were actually destroying the place. There were those round tables bolted to the floor, and they were pulling them up, pretending to look for drugs underneath. As if anyone would unbolt a table, hide some drugs under there, and bolt it back down!
“They told me to empty my pockets, and I did. Then one of them said, ‘Okay, what’s this then?’ and put a matchbox in my hand, and said, ‘Let’s have a look at this.’
“He opened it up, and it had some grass in it. So, I was actually planted with drugs by the police! I was thrown into a meat wagon, along with a bunch of other people in handcuffs, and the next day there was a protest march, protesting the closing down… more like the destruction… of Eric’s.
“In the end, the case was dropped because the police didn’t present their evidence, I guess they felt sorry for me.”
Well, not sorry enough to leave you alone to begin with.
“I think it was because I was a bit cocky that they picked me, me saying, ‘Do me first.’”
In the midst of this legal entanglement, the Furs went into the studio with Martin Hannett, known then for his work with Joy Division.
“We went with Martin Hannett, because we liked the production on John Cooper Clarke, not for Joy Division, we never cared for them,” Richard corrects. “We were just trying out producers, because Steve Lillywhite had said he never wanted to work with bands more than once.”
“I guess we had that dark sound that Martin liked,” Tim adds, “well Joy Division was a very dark band, they made us sound like the Monkees. We did some good tracks, but when I think of Martin Hannett, I think of a cloud of pot smoke sitting behind the console!”
The Furs recorded four songs with the smokestack: “Susan’s Strange,” “Soap Commercial,” “So Run Down,” and “Dumb Waiters.” The latter two would be rerecorded for the band’s next album; the Hannett versions remain tantalizingly unavailable. The first pair replaced “Blacks/Radio” on the US album.
“I think the whole reason why the US didn’t want to use ‘Blacks’ was for the Warhol line. People were constantly asking, ‘What’s this? Is this racist or what?’ And Richard would say, ‘No, Andy Warhol would say it as a way of poking fun at that whole thing.’ I think that’s one of the reasons though that CBS decided to replace the track. Plus they probably wanted to have more US friendly, melodic songs, as opposed to some avalanche of melody.”
However, the song’s omission, coupled with the record’s resequencing, virtually emasculated the band and its true sound. Soon after the American release, the band also crossed the Atlantic for their stateside debut: two nights at the oh so hip Mud Club, in NYC.
“We were flown over and put up for six days, which was great, as it was the first time we’d been to America,” Richard enthuses. “It seemed like an incredible luxury to be flown over and put up in a hotel.”
Well it is! But that fact only increased the misery of their stateside tour in the autumn of 1980. “We came back over against CBS’ wishes,” Tim explains. “They said, ‘Don’t come over, there’s no market for you yet.’ But we came over anyway, and paid for it mostly ourselves.
“But of course it’s fun, because you’re doing what you want to do, and you’re lucky that you’re able to do that; be touring America, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. The first time in America, it was ‘oh my God!’
“We toured around in a nine-seater minibus for five months, by the end of that, we were picking up college stations. Then, of course, CBS came to us, took us out for a meal, and begged us to go on a Talking Heads tour. We’re like, ‘No, we’ve had enough, we want to see our girlfriends.’
“‘What do you want? We’ll pay for your tour bus, we’ll get your girlfriends over, whatever it takes, we think you should do this tour.’ So finally, they were starting to get behind us. And we did that two week tour.”
“All I remember is it being very hard to work,” Richard concludes. “I remember it being very tiring, and a lot of very long rides.”
And even with the tour over, there was no rest for the weary. To welcome them home, John Peel invited them back for another session. Surprisingly, they didn’t perform their upcoming single, “Mr. Jones,” opting instead for three new songs, “Into You Like a Train,” “On and Again,” and “All of This and Nothing.” Later that February, their single arrived in the British shops. Pulsing, driven, and dripping with emotional tension, “Mr. Jones” proved how adept the Psychedelic Furs were at turning impossibly dark, claustrophobic numbers into pop songs.
In April, the group followed that up with “Dumb Waiters,” the first of their singles to make its way into the national chart, coming to rest at number 59. Ashton calls the song a “real stomper,” an apt enough description, although more accurate would be a song that wants to give the listener a good stomping; it’s thoroughly menacing.
Intriguingly, a limited edition of 500 copies of the single were packaged with a special playable cover, where Richard introduces brief excerpts of songs off their forthcoming album. On April 21, the band nipped back into the Radio One studio for yet another Peel session.
“I think by that time we were pretty much living with John Peel,” Tim quips.
And in May, their second album, Talk Talk Talk arrived; it was less than a year since their first. During that time they’d done two Peel sessions, a US tour and released two singles, another would follow in June.
Much to the band’s joy, their new album was produced by Steve Lillywhite, even though he’d sworn that he’d only work with a band once.
“I think he made two records with Peter Gabriel, or was it U2?” Richard asks. It was U2. “After he’d done the second, we approached him again and said, ‘Look, you did two records with U2.’ And he said, ‘You’re right, let’s do another one.’ So we did.”
“Talk Talk Talk was our best album for me,” Ashton enthuses, “it definitely showed a band that had been playing together for a while, and had honed itself to the point where it had created a unique sound. Whereas the first album…some of the songs had existed in one shape or form for a while, the next album was all written with everybody in the same room at one time or another. For that I think it’s the best journal of a band in progress that I can think of.”
“Where we came from was the three minute ranting, overdriven punk song,” Tim adds. “And we took that energy and mixed it with a lot of our influences, which were the Velvet Underground, early Bowie, Roxy Music. [The band had taken this to the ultimate visual extreme, by parodying the back cover of the first Velvet’s album on their own debut LP.] So we had melodic songs with power, which I think starting in the ‘80s, a lot of alternative bands carried on from that. A lot of the bands in the ‘80s were, dare I say, sterile, especially lyrically. Richard was a big fan of Bob Dylan’s lyric writing, which isn’t so blatant or preaching like U2 were, it had more than one meaning to it, other people would say artistic, and that’s what Richard did.”
The album opened with “Pretty In Pink,” which perfectly illustrates Tim’s point. In many people’s view, this is perhaps the best darkpop song ever composed; a perfect guitar riff, sublime keyboards courtesy of Kilburn, and an unforgettable melody made this song a classic… with an enigma attached. After the final verse, Richard goes into a bit of a rant, but it’s so low in the mix, his words are barely discernable. Fans spent hour after hour desperately trying to work them out, to no avail. The mystery remains to this day.
“You know I’ve long forgotten, and if I could remember, I wouldn’t tell you,” Richard laughs. “The whole idea was a kind of rant buried in the mix, so people would be going, ‘What, what, what? What’s he saying?’
“The thing is, I knew that one day I’d end up listening to it and wondering the same thing! I think it begins, ‘All the favourite rags are worn, and other kinds of uniforms, that Kitty you are really free, a case of individuality,’ and then I lose it. Well, we all need a bit of mystery.”
In fact, that’s not how it starts at all! But these lines do kick off the abbreviated ending to the 1986 rerecording. So, the mystery remains.
Amazingly, “Pretty In Pink” was written in all of 10 minutes. “The rest of the guys had gone to the pub,” John recalls, “and Richard and I were just hanging out in the studio for some reason. I was just playing the riff, and that just came out, Richard started singing, and there you have it.”
The song, which was also the band’s next single, was accompanied by an exquisitely romantic video, with a beautiful girl in a pink Edwardian dress floating from room to room in a deserted house, except for the odd pink accoutrements lying about.
“We certainly helped the sale of pink clothes worldwide,” adds Tim, “although we’re still waiting for the check for that! The whole thing is, it’s about someone that’s naked. You’d get people coming to the shows dressed in pink t-shirts, it was totally above their heads.”
Not surprising, the video reinforced that misinterpretation.
“Yeah, but I think if we’d done a video that translated the lyrics and had it played on MTV, we’d have been run out of town!” Confusion over the lyrics withstanding, “Pretty In Pink” proved just how far the band had progressed over the last year. “We had learnt more how to write songs,” Tim agrees. “That album is still aggressive and passionate, which the first one was as well, but the songs are more sculpted, more song-like, they’re not jams. Things like ‘India’ and ‘Blacks’/’Radio’ you go into a studio and jam them. Whereas on Talk Talk Talk, we spent some time actually formulating the structures. Once we had the structures, then we said, let’s go for it, did two or three takes of each one, and that was it. So, it’s got the aggression of the first album, but moving towards the melodic sort of songs that we peaked with on Forever Now [their third album].”
“I love the first one too,” Ashton agrees, “I love a lot of things about it, like ‘Flowers,’ but the second album I felt I really drove headfirst in and got lost in it. We’d all become friends, did a lot of hanging out, and that’s how Talk Talk Talk became the album that it is, because we all got on really well, musically it just somehow locked all together.
“It was such a diverse set of songs, that all kind of had a sound, from ‘She Is Mine’ which brought it down to a more personal, poppy level, to a song like ‘Into You Like A Train’ which is full tilt charge. We were highly prolific, everybody had ideas, and it worked well. Steve [Lillywhite] had become seasoned in the studio from working with a lot of bands over the last two or three years, we got him while we could at that point. So it was a really good mixture, he was up and coming, and so were we.”
There certainly was a diverse mixture of tracks, which ran the gamut from pop to driving protopunk, swinging from the yearning beauty of a song like “She Is Mine” to the careening “Into You Like A Train.” There was still a denseness to the sound, but this time around the production moved a notch higher, and the sonics were sleeker and more sophisticated.
“There was a bunch of things involved in that,” Richard explains. “The time that Talk Talk Talk was made, it was immediately post-punk. You tend to be affected by the aggression that was around, the hostility you’re feeling towards what’s happening, all these things like being planted with drugs, they kind of make you hostile,” he chuckles. “So there was a hostility that came from outside as well. It was very much us and them.”
At least as far as the outside world was concerned, this should no way suggest that it was all lovey dovey within the band however.
“The thing about the band,” Ashton elaborates, “was you had to have an argument to have anything accomplished; that was what the chemistry was all about. It wasn’t like a leader telling the troops to do this, that or the other, or like a team. Everybody was in there putting their two cents in, and making little alliances with one or other. And the alliances were always changing.”
“Yeah, he’s right,” Richard laughingly agrees. “I can remember making Talk Talk Talk, and it being all rowing, fighting, and drinking. When I say drinking, I don’t mean we were a dissolute band, the music we were making was the most important thing. We all believed passionately it should be a certain way, and we all argued passionately for that certain way. The result that you got on Talk Talk Talk was six people arguing and fighting every inch of the way for a common ground. It’s what made the music so busy, such a wall of sound, and so much going on, because everybody wanted input on it, and kind of got it.”
"We used to start out a rehearsal date at the pub drinking." Tim adds, "then we'd go to the rehearsal studio and have a few more beers, which would loosen us up. Then we could start jamming, we'd hook onto an idea, and then start arguing about it. Of course maybe that's where the aggression of those songs came from - gritting our teeth and staring at each other angry - so we'd play more aggressively."
But these kind of passions can be dangerous, especially within a group as hard working as the Psychedelic Furs. Which is why Morris and Kilburn quit upon returning that summer from their European tour. At least that was the story at the time. In interviews, Kilburn proclaimed loudly that he couldn't stand Richard's ranting anymore.
"My ranting?" Richard guffaws. "Anyway, it wasn't true, they didn't quit, they were fired."
"The European tour was disastrous in some ways," Ashton elaborates, "because the band at it's best was this powerhouse of fun and frivolity. We'd have drinking competitions for gawd's sake and stupid stuff like that. The drinking competitions became a way of life, and it was who could do more than the next person.
"We had next to no tour support, and a tour manager that just didn't sit too well with the band. It made for a really bad mixture of too much drinking, too much partying, and not really concentrating on being professional, we were having too much of a good time.
"There was a lot of arguments, and they culminated with Duncan tipping his beer over Richard's head on the ferry. And that was it for Richard, he couldn't handle it anymore."
The next day Richard called Ashton, and the two agreed Kilburn was out, and Morris should go as well. "Unfortunately," Ashton mourns, "that was one time that two people over the telephone, as opposed to a bar full of people, had a conversation, that really sealed the fate of the rest of the band. We're all to blame for that though, equally irresponsible, no one really owned up to it, and nobody actually could undo it, although we could've done.
"Everybody went along with it, thinking everything would be fine, and in a way it was. In the real big picture though, it stank I feel awful about it, and it should never had happened. We thought we were together, but we weren't. The thing got thrown out by not thinking, not being honest, not looking into the future."
"I sometimes wonder what it would've been like if they'd stayed with us," Richard muses. "It was stupid... it was just a stupid argument basically that got out of control."
"It was a very, very bad decision all around," John agrees. "And that in a way, for me, and for a lot of people was really the beginning of the end. Even that far back, once it was split, it was a different beast altogether."
Tim, in contrast to his brother and Ashton, states, "Who knows in retrospect what would have happened? I think what did happen was pretty cool. I don't think it affected us that much. If we hadn't got rid of them, we wouldn't have had the space in our songs to have things like cello and other instruments. We'd have been stuck with two guitars and a sax player who couldn't really play, although he could come up with some nice lines. But who knows if we would've progressed as much as we did after they left, it's hard to say."
After their departure, Kilburn returned to his old job at the Reuters news agency, while Morris formed Castle Bravo. Eventually, he moved to the States, and the last he was heard from, in late '89, the former Furs' guitarist was living in California and working in the movie industry.
"When it first happened," Tim continues, "we thought, 'Oh my God, we've got to do an album, there's four of us, what the hell are we going to do?' But I think as we edged into Forever Now we became more confident. We were forced to evolve into a much more melodic bass playing style, which was cool for me, because there was more room. John and I both had more room, which helped, which forced us to rethink our playing styles."
The band were also rethinking their sound. Having done two albums with Lily- white, they now felt it was time to move on.
"We wanted a change by then," Richard explains, "we'd already established that kind of a sound for the band. After we'd done those records, a lot of bands were coming out that were starting to sound like that. So we figured let's go somewhere else, let's make an album with somebody that nobody would expect."
The Furs initial choice for producer was David Bowie, a very early supporter of the band, who'd even been at their Pegasus gig in London, back in the winter of '79. During the Talk Talk Talk tour, the thin white duke had come down to a few more shows and hung out a bit, but for whatever reason, it didn't work out.
The next choice was Todd Rundgren, a name pushed to the top of the list by Tim, who was a big fan. The decision was made and arranged before their tour was finished. Thus, when Lillywhite saw a show in Germany during the Talk tour, and impressed with a new song, "President Gas," offered to break all his rules and produce their third record, the band refused. Rundgren it would be.
"Rundgren liked us," Ashton laughs, "but of course he didn't know what he was letting himself in for when there was four of us instead of six, something which I think took him a little by surprise when we arrived."
As shocked as he was at the unexpected size of the group, Rundgren had an even bigger surprise in store for the Furs. Playing through their pre-production tape, the producer announced, "I'm not hearing a whole album's worth of songs yet." Well, of course not. The Furs were used to entering the studio with a few rough ideas, then jamming their way into an album's worth of material. That's how songs like "India" were composed, and how the group worked best. What they didn't do, they explained, was.
"Well, I do," was Rundgren's tart reply. So, over the next few months, the group carried on writing and sending the producer songs, until finally he decided they'd enough for a record. Then they went into the studio, it was now Easter, 1982.
"Forever Now was a strange time," Ashton recalls. "It was the first time we'd recorded out of England, there was a different producer, we were a different band, we were meeting all the crazy people in Woodstock, and just getting into a different mindset all together. Richard, Tim and myself were hanging out a lot more, Vince really wasn't a big part of our family at that point, he tended to keep himself to himself.
"It was a memorable album for all of us l think. We were able to joke Todd as much as he was able to joke us, and we all got on pretty well. Before, we all used to gang up on each other, now we all ganged up on Todd!
"I'd had some bad arguments with him, where I got really drunk assed and obnox- ious, but he'd always forgive me. I'd look back on the times with him, and, after the fact, I'd always learn something. Todd had this way of making you feel okay for being a dick. He's talented in more ways than people realize! He was Gary [Windo]'s long suffer- ing friend, Gary would always bounce in and annoy him, so he palmed him off to us. So I always have him to thank for knowing Gary"
As shocked as he was at the unexpected size of the group, Rundgren had an even bigger surprise in store for the Furs. Playing through their pre-production tape, the producer announced, "I'm not hearing a whole album's worth of songs yet." Well, of course not. The Furs were used to entering the studio with a few rough ideas, then jamming their way into an album's worth of material. That's how songs like "India" were composed, and how the group worked best. What they didn't do, they explained, was
Rundgren roped in a number of friends to provide whatever additional instrumentation and backing vocals were needed. "Todd brought in Flo and Eddie to do background vocals," Ashton chuckles, "they really were a hoot, they were great, they just did a brilliant job." He also enlisted cellist Ann Shel- don, and horn players Donn Adams and Windo. Both Sheldon and Windo would join the group for the ensuing tour.
(So would keyboardist and future Suede producer Ed Bueller, who'd been performing live with the Furs for some time now. He continued touring up until the Midnight To Midnight era, which, incidentally, is the only record he appears on.)
For Tim, the whole experience was even better. "Forever Now is my favorite album out of all of them. I think it was the peak of our psychedelicness. We picked our name to be against all these punk names like the Stranglers, the Sex Pistols, Venus and the Razor Blades, some of our biggest influences were psychedelic, so finally on that album we got psychedelic. I just thought the use of the cellos, the horn section on some parts, were so great. And I just enjoyed working with Todd, I'd been a Todd fan before that, and he's just a real character. It's just fun memories, as well as the music, it's just fond memories of that time."
In July, 1982, the first taster for the album, "Love My Way," was released. It was a bittersweet pop song, memorable for it's lush keyboards and xylophonesque melody line, later used to equally great effect by the Thompson Twins.
As Richard recounted on the "Interchord" track of a subsequent promo 12-inch, the song grew from two notes he'd been playing on his Casio. Out drinking the night before, hung over the next day, and in need of some- thing to play Ashton, the two notes stuck, and the lyrics came tumbling out. Appar- ently the guitarist was far from impressed, but Richard loved the song, and upon release the band found themselves with their first American hit.
"Love My Way' was a point when I really noticed the change," Richard recounts, "all of a sudden there was a lot of girls in the audience. While we were touring, we did an in-store in Seattle, and when we came out, we were actually mobbed. That was when we thought, 'Hey! We're becoming more popular,' which was a very strange feeling. Then we got into the limo and started back to the hotel, and the driver said, 'Hey guys, we're going to have to take a detour here, so we can lose some cars following us.' We thought, 'Wow, this is very strange."
Even stranger things were to come, like Ashton producing the Sisters of Mercy's first hit single. Over two weekends that summer at Portadown Studio, the guitarist oversaw the recording of "Alice," "1969," "Floorshow" and "Good Things." In November, "Alice"/"Floorshow" was released, and soared to #26 in the independent chart.
But what was Ashton doing with the Sisters anyway? Well, it seems hard to believe now, but in their early days, the Furs were just a whisper away from being labeled Gothic. Many of the postpunk bands had a dark sound, that a couple of years on coalesced into the Gothic movement. It wasn't just the Banshees and Joy Division, but the Furs and the Bunnymen that also tread amongst the musical shadows. All are today considered precursors, or at least influences, of Goth. Certainly no one found it bizarre at the time when Andrew Eldritch declared himself a Furs' fan.
And although Eldritch removed Ashton's name from the single, both bands' fans were well aware of the latter's contribution. The Sisters' official fanzine Heartland wrote, "Both songs were enhanced by the more experienced production techniques of John Ashton he taught Eldritch how to combine a crisp production which makes the song more listenable whilst losing none of its original power or feeling." ng none of
That quote could also sum up the new Furs' album, Forever Now, which arrived in September, 1982. Perhaps Tim was right, and Morris and Kilburn were in some ways holding the band back.
Contrary to their past records, the horns on Forever Now were tight, professional and slick, while Ashton easily filled the album with his guitar. Without six people clamoring for their own contribution, the song structures were automatically tighter, the parts still simple, but done to perfection. Ashton's solo on "Love My Way", stirring for all its simplicity, or the riffs and leads on "Yes I Do" are good examples, as is Tim's excellent bass on "Only You And I" and "Run And Run." Ely's driving percussion also provided an strong link to the past.
But a song like "Danger," slated as the next single, reflected just how much the band were evolving. The staccato beats, ominous edge, and horn accents, all wrapped around a threatening guitar riff, was even further removed than "Love My Way" from the old Furs.
Rundgren's keyboards provided the depth that normally the band would have filled out themselves. But it was precisely there that the shift down to a quartet was most notice- able. Tim refers to their early sound as an avalanche of melody, as most songs found space for every member to carry the tune at some point. Now it was really down to Ashton, with the horns only on occasion having the lead, and Rundgren's lush keyboards taking the rest.
Whether or not one agrees with Tim that Forever Now was the Furs moving into psychedelia, or into more accessible pop, in either case it was a radical change. Listeners loved it. In the US the album went gold, and in the UK gained the band their highest album placement to date, number 61, and remained in the chart for 32 weeks.
"I remember getting home to London," Richard enthuses, "and Tim and I were playing it all the time. We'd go down to the pub during lunchtime, get somebody drunk, drag them home and tell them, 'You've got to listen to our record.' These poor people were probably bored out of their minds, but we made them sit and listen."
However, what Furs' fans flocking to their shows saw onstage was a different band than that which recorded the album. In reality, the group was now reduced to a trio, as Vince had left back in August.
"I don't think Vince was really into touring," Tim states, "he was a bit of a delicate thing. That's why he quit."
"When it was six it was the perfect mix," Ashton elaborates, "when it was four it became a little distraught, that's why things went the way it did, and Vince left. Before he'd have started arguments and just stood back, and watched the fireworks, he loved that. He wanted excitement, he was winding everybody else up, and I was his perfect foil for three albums." He chuckles at the thought.
"I think he was just too prissy for Richard in some ways, and he had totally different taste in music from the rest of us as well. He also thought we all drank too much. Too crazy, too strenuous, after a while of living life party find it difficult to make a sane decision, so it's easy to get pissed off with the whole thing. Maybe that's what happened with him."
In his stead came Phil Calvert, formerly of the Birthday Party. On October 10, the new look Furs were heard across Britain, when their show at London's Hammersmith Odeon was broadcast by Radio One. P this month, the band did several other shows, some with the Sisters of Mercy opening. Then, at the end of October, the Furs new single "Danger" arrived.
Another change of line-up occurred was the close of their American tour later that fall. Due to visa problems, saxophonist Gary Windo was not able to leave the US. He recommended an old friend, Mars Williams to the band, and for the first leg of their American tour, the Furs now boasted two saxophonists, as Windo helped to break Williams in. At the time, the latter was a member of The Waitresses, and joined the Furs merely for their Australian and New Zealand dates.
"The first gig I ever did with the Furs by myself was in front of 30,000 people at the Sweetwater Festival in Auckland, [New Zealand]," Williams recalls. "It was amazing! I get pumped up, totally hyped, it was at night, and on the hills everyone was holding torches. It was unbelievable! So that was a rush. We had the best time, the most fun. Everyone was partying, we were wild and crazy, we were trashing dressing rooms, it was a blast. We really got along well, and became really good friends."
"We toured with a cellist [Ann Sheldon]," Tim laughingly adds, "and we had to buy the cello its own seat on the plane, because she used to have tickets with A. Cello written on wouldn't put it in the baggage hold. So we it instead of a name. Plus we got to share the extra meal... all that lovely plane food!
"That whole tour was cool at the time, because I can't think of many bands that would tour with a cello mixed into a maelstrom of guitars and stuff. With the older songs, we actually had interesting ways of adding the cello into it, which updated them. And that sort of a shock value, people would come to the show, and they'd see a seat being set up at the front of the stage, What's happening down there,' and see someone walking on with a cello, 'What the... ?""
From the Pacific, the Furs returned to the place, but Williams continued to join them States for more shows, with Windo back in onstage on a few of their East Coast dates. The Furs' tour finished just as The Waitresses broke up.
"We were feeling very awkward about the situation with Gary," Richard recalls, "because we liked Gary. But we came back to America, and then we were going to Canada, which Gary couldn't do either, and so it just became.... We liked Mars as well, he's a great player, so we kept him."
At the end of the tour, Richard and Tim decided to remain in the states, while Ashton returned to England. Needless to say, this separation created its own set of problems. "I think if Tim had said no, I'd have gone back," Richard states, "but we were talking, and I said, 'I'm not particularly looking forward to going back are you?" He said not really. So I said, how about staying over here then? He said, 'Okay great, let's get a place So we did."
"I was tempted to stay," Ashton states, "but my girlfriend at the time was pregnant with my daughter. Things being what they are over here with the health service, I opted to go back to England. I was living in Tunbridge, the working class burb of Tunbridge Wells. That's where my girlfriend's parents were living and my daughter was born there. So, they were in NY, I was in Tunbridge, it was a strange mixture.
"Richard had met a new gal, and he was very together with his life, he'd changed it around completely, and was clean for the first time in many years, and began to see things very differently. He began to write or co-write more accessible songs with Tim, like 'Ghost In You,' 'Heaven,' and a bunch of others. I was living in England at the time, I was doing my thing, they were doing theirs. And that was the sum of the parts, and the way they came together was the way they came together.
"It certainly made writing a lot harder," Tim agrees. "Richard and I would write a song and send it to John in England, and he'd send tapes over to us. Then we'd get together every few months either over here or over there, that probably contributed to the length of time as well as we were on both sides of the pond."
"The whole thing of writing songs became a lot slower, Richard concludes. Instead of taking a year, it took two years, three years."
As the Furs began gathering together new songs over 1983, their impatient British label tossed out the "Greatest Original Hits" EP which comprised both recent and older songs "Sister Europe," "Dumb Waiters," "Pretty In Pink" and "Love My Way." At least it gave the fans something different to play in the interim.
Finally the band were ready to record, they proceeded into the studio, and promptly dismissed Phil Calvert.
"He was actually fired on the recommendation of [producer] Keith Forsey," Tim confides. "We were rehearsing for Mirror Moves, and Keith said to Richard quietly one day. "We could do this album in three months, or we could still be here in six months with that drummer. So Phil was unceremoniously dumped, which with hind- sight, I think we're all a bit ashamed of doing.
"The reason was I think Keith Forsey had a thing against drummers, because he's an ex-drummer, so he likes to be in control of the bottom end of things. Most of the stuff he records with drum machines, I think even on albums like Billy Idol's Whiplash Smile and Rebel Yell he did a lot of the drums on drum machine. Then he'd get Tommy [Price] to come in and redo things."
Tim's perfectly right, as Mars Williams, who guested on Rebel Yell confirms. Forsey did all the drum programming on Mirror Moves as well, with Price brought in for live. drums. All of which makes Forsey sound an improbable producer for the Furs, who regardless of all their continuing difficulties locating a permanent drummer had dismissed the idea of replacing them with a drum machine.
"We weren't into drum machines," Richard insists, "yeah, it would have disposed of the drummer problem, but it also would have disposed of a lot of the excitement as well. We wanted somebody that could go off and play something really godawful, and drum machines would just sit there and go 'goo-kih-kih, goo- kih-kih.' That wouldn't have sounded good with the hoover at all," he bursts into laughter. Fair enough, but then why would they want Forsey to produce?
"He was just a name that came up," Richard answers. "We weren't picking people for what they had done, but for what they were like. He seemed excited by it all, was good to be around, and seemed to be in agreement with us, so we hired him."
"We were happy with Mirror Moves," Ashton concludes. "It was a very slick album, poised for success, and the record company cocked it up. I remember at the very end of the tour one of the guys from the [US] label coming up and going. We fucked up, we promise we won't do it. We handed it to them on a plate, we couldn't have gotten more pop if we tried.
"There was an A&R guy from Texas, who spent two weeks strutting up and down trying to pick a single, he couldn't figure o what it should be. We told him it was 'Heaven,' and he picked 'Here Come Cowboys.' So there you go. We'd already done a video for 'Heaven'... I don't think he lasted long."
The "Heaven" video had been shot March, 1984, at a disused bus garage Willesden, London, where the band the entire day being sprayed with water. In between takes they'd run in front of aircraft heaters to try to stay warm. It was a battle, and the trio all came down with losing colds. "Heaven," however did well in Britain and slid into the top 30.
But it was the flip that received the most attention, a "NY Remix" of "Heartbeat," which had already graced "The Ghost In You" in the US. That did really well in dance clubs," Tim recalls, "but it was a bit of a departure from what we were used to. "Keith said, I want to do a dance remix of this. And we said, 'A what? Dancing what's that? Oh, it's a cross between disco and pop, you jump up and down and then do the odd John Travolta move. And he played us some dance remixes and then we said, "Go for it. It's amazing what you can do when you use drum machines."
Meanwhile, Tim Pope, the director behind "Love My Way" as well as some of the Cure's best videos, set off to shoot "Cowboys," Pope was a long time fan, and was often to be seen, videocam in hand, filming their early shows. A groundbreaking director in every sense, for this song Pope decided to film in the American south. His footage of rodeo riders and evangelical preachers was probably very impressive. But we'll never know, as the preachers, infuriated at the way they were portrayed, took out an injunction on the video, and it was subsequently banned. The single didn't even chart
By the time the follow-up "Heaven" arrived, the momentum had been lost. So, an album aimed directly at the US market barely made a blip.
"Mirror Moves I think is the only album out of all ours that you could actually put a recording time on, as being recorded in the '80s, Tim notes. "The other albums sound like they could be recorded now, but with that one you say: production technique 80s. It still sounds like a good album, but you can pigeonhole it in time. It was definitely radio friendly"
Indeed it was, which is why it was so shocking that it didn't do better In Britain, at least, there was some explanation; two thirds of the hand relocated to the States, them as just another commercial American and some of their early fans now dismissed act. But by rights, the US should've lapped them up.
"Heaven" and "Heartbeat," on which from the pulsing dancefloor friendly Williams' saxophone particularly shines, to the pure pop of "The Ghost In You," natural progression from "Love My Way" Mirror Moves was chock-a-block with song tailored for club and radio play. Even "Cowboys" had a strong dance beat attached to its catchy melody. But the album was still diverse enough for moodier tracks like "My Time," the softpop of "Like A Stranger," or darker numbers like "Alice's House" and "Highwire Days."
For the ensuing tour, the Furs added a second guitarist, Mike Mooney, who'd also worked with Echo and the Bunnymen. As for the drummer, the band's initial choice was Tommy Price, who'd briefly left Billy Idol, but by the time they'd contacted him, the drummer had returned to the fold. Keith Forsey however, still had Idol's own short- list, and on it was Paul Garisto, who turned out to be just what the Furs were looking for.
For nine months the band played auditoriums across the world, and even ventured to Japan for the first time. By the time they finished, the group were badly in need of a break. It would be five months before they began working on their new album, Midnight To Midnight. It wouldn't appear until 1987.
"You hear about people getting writer's block," Richard says, "and you think, come on, I only write lyrics. It's not like I was writing a novel. But I did, I just kind of dried up for ideas for a while. I think it really shows on the record... I think it's the worst album we ever made, I think we lost direction a bit."
Ashton leaps to his ex-bandmate's defense, shouldering part of the blame for the long delay.
"It really was a very difficult time, we spent a lot of time together, but we weren't really working together. Whatever I came up with was too rock, whatever Richard came up with was too much of a rewrite of past stuff, and never the twain shall meet. That writer's block, it works both ways. I wasn't coming up with what he wanted to hear, and certainly he wasn't coming up with what I wanted to hear either. I guess our main problem was we didn't have a sound anymore. We were able to do whatever we wanted to do, but what we really wanted to do was all get into a room, start playing, and this magic would happen, and it wasn't happening."
"One of the most destructive things that happened to the band was Richard and I moving over here, and John being over there," Tim adds. "That definitely slowed things down, and the music played over here, as compared to the music played over there, it made a bit of a gulf between where our heads were coming from. Starting with Mirror Moves we'd sort of painted ourselves into a musical corner, and it was very hard to break out of it."
And in the meantime, the bills kept piling up.
"For me it was fine," Mars Williams recalls, "because I was getting paid a salary, so if they wanted to go to a studio in England and write.... Or they'd rent a farm that had a recording studio, and have people cooking for us, and that's how they'd write."
"Yeah well, Mars and Paul were lucky in the fact that we'd put them on a retainer," John notes, "and without us realizing it, that and a bunch of other things, really drained our resources, and we ended up being really in the hole. The whole machine had become a bit of a dinosaur, and everytime we wanted to resurrect that dinosaur it cost a lot of money. You had to justify it, the clock was ticking, and it wasn't as carefree and simple as it had been before. But nonetheless, we really didn't care, we just sat around watching videos, hanging out, and trying to figure out what to do.
"By the end, there was a lot of stuff that never saw the light of day. A lot of stuff got reworked, but eventually when we went in to record that album, and we had some really good raw material working which got really smoothed out."
By then, the Furs had already done some smoothing themselves, during a short tour of the Mediterranean in March, 1986. Their first release of the year however, wasn't a taster for their new album, but a rerecording of "Pretty In Pink."
"The whole thing happened because Molly Ringwald was a fan of the original song," Tim explains, "and she asked John Hughes to write a movie script around that song. But they didn't quite grasp the concept, she wasn't even called Caroline in the movie!" But why was it rerecorded, the first one was perfect as it was?
"The reason they gave was on the original the guitar was slightly out of tune, which evades me, it doesn't seem that drastically out of tune. Maybe that was just the excuse. I've listened to that track, and I can't hear it myself, but I'm tone deaf," he bursts in laughter. "Maybe they wanted to clean it up a bit sonically for the movie. If they'd just said that, 'sonically it's just not usable for a soundtrack,' but they went round about it. They should've just said the original record- They should've just said the original recording sucked! So, we go back into the studio and spend two weeks on one track."
The song was slowed down, with driving percussion and clearly defined keyboards replacing the primeval swirl of the original. It didn't hold a candle to it.
"Yeah, the original has more aggression, it just sounds freer," Tim agrees. "The second one just sounds sterile, which is probably to do with the production. I guess the more into the '80s it got, the more polished the production became. If people want to go back and listen to the original, most would prefer that. The only control we had was to say we'll go in and rerecord it, and not someone else."
Ashton is a little less dismissive. "At the time, we thought, let's remake it, let's do the best we can. We got to be creative with it, and tried to be as on about the whole project as possible. It was fun, we just did it. Hey, we were in the movies, we were popstars, I remember playing to 7,000 people around that time, so...
So, that August, they played to 10 times that number at Glastonbury. And finally, a taster for the new album appeared, "Heartbreak Beat." An obvious successor to "Ghost In You," but with a bigger sound, it accented by Williams' saxophone and a was much slicker sound.
When Midnight To Midnight finally appeared in 1987, the change in sonics was evident. While Mirror Moves was a psychedelic dance album, the new record was '80s stadium rock. The production was incredibly slick, Ashton's guitars were much bigger in sound, and a second guitarist, Marty Williamson, was also brought in. The drums were huge, while Jon Carin, now a member of Pink Floyd, provided most of the keyboard atmosphere.
Today, none of the trio have much good to say about the album. Richard admits to liking it initially, but would dramatically change his opinion within a few months. Ashton was equally unhappy, only Tim states that he regrets nothing musically, only the presentation of the record and the subsequent tour.
"I think the problem was, we went in with so few song ideas," the bassist explains. "I think [producer] Chris Kimsey had more of an influence, and for us this is our most normal rock'n'roll record. It's a guitar orientated classic rock sound."
Richard elaborates, "We specifically to each other, and we were all pretty much in agreement, that we thought that the album had been over-produced. John had always felt that we should've gone with Chris Kimsey's mixes of that record, but originally I, and I believe Tim too, felt they were too muddy. But it was a better record the way he mixed it.
"Anyway, we went to Steve Thompson and Mike Barbiera to remix it, and they actu ally made it sound much too clean, very slick. It wasn't that way the way Chris Kimsey had mixed it. Wow! I wonder if those mixes still exist? Put the album out again," he stops and laughs. "Well, with the benefit of hindsight, we decided that the Chris Kimsey mixes were the one's we should've gone out with."
Of course, everything looks different with hindsight, and the record did slip into the American top 30, the only Furs' album to accomplish that feat. At the time, it seemed the next obvious step from Mirror Moves, still keeping a foot in the dance clubs while branching out into the stadium rock sound currently sweeping America.
In a way, it was the Miami Vice of albums; glossy, sleek, with expensive tastes and impeccable style. And in it's day, that certainly wasn't a bad thing. The musical showmanship was superb, the production unbelievably clean, while the songs were equally strong and filled with great melodies. Yet... yet... you could literally imagine the Furs onstage in a much too trendy Miami hotspot, while Crocket and Tubbs chased their quarry through the Armani suited crowd. And that image was a million miles removed from a dive like the Rock Garden, and a band who dared drag a hoover onstage because just maybe it would sound cool. Somehow the Furs had apparently turned into a group that was all style and no substance.
"We believed in it when it came out," Richard begins, "but it wasn't until six months later being on that tour and thinking, 'Wow, I hate this, it just seems like rubbish.' I didn't like the whole glamour aspect of it all, I got very depressed. There's nothing like being halfway through a tour and realizing you don't like it. I don't like the lighting, I don't like the places we're playing, I don't like this record. So it was a very tough time.
"I woke up one day just hating everything about it. I woke up hating the way I looked on the album cover, thinking 'God that looks stupid.' And I hated the idea that people would buy that record and think that was what we were about, and not that it was just a part of what the band was about. I worried myself so much, that I started really stressing, and my heart began to beat arhythmically."
The doctors didn't know what to make of this. Richard underwent tests with a halter monitor, which proved his heart was beating out of time, but it didn't explain why. One doctor in England even wanted to prescribe him digitalis.
"It was doing it constantly on that tour, and I thought I was going to die. I'd be walking onstage sometimes, and my heart would just... it feels really strange when your heart does that, it feels like you've got a sparrow flying around in your chest, it's really strange. And I would think I was going to die, because it's a pretty good workout being onstage.
"So at the end of the tour, I came back to NY, and went to my doctor here. He did all these tests and said, 'Well actually you've got a heart murmur, but I don't think that's anything to do with it, I think what this has to do with is stress. And I suggest you take some stress reduction classes.
"So I went to stress classes, and it turned out I was just stressed about the record, just generally stressed. As soon as he told me what it was, and I went to a couple of classes, it went away, and knock on wood it'll never come up. It was a total over reaction, after years of working with a band, believing that you'd done great work all along, to suddenly wake up and think that you've made a hellish mistake; that's kind of what stressed me out.'
Ashton was also reaching breaking point, which culminated in a huge, drunken fight with his girlfriend, which ended with him putting a fist through a glass framed picture. He did serious damage to his left hand in the process, which put him out of commission for the next six months.
"So much was resting on that album, and we pandered as best we could," he explains. "But we were still rebellious with what we were doing, and it manifested itself in ways that were perhaps not so obvious. We went out and became this huge sort of rock band culminating in the big hair, shiny suits, all that kind of crap. We really weren't being true to ourselves. Whereas bands like REM, The Cure, or maybe even U2 had swept the world, we felt we had fucked ourselves over, just because we didn't have our direction together as well as we could. So we paid the price for that.
"I went through this period of denial of who I was, what I was, what I'd become. I know Richard did the same thing in NY, kicking himself, looking in the mirror each morning saying I can't believe I made Midnight To Midnight, I can't believe I went from that to THIS."
"Which is why after that tour we had a serious re-examining of where we started out and where we wanted to go." Tim states. "And we almost called it a day around about that period. We decided to strip it back, and go back to natural sounds, no synthesizers and stuff."
As a direct reaction to the overblown Midnight To Midnight era, the Furs' next release was the single "All That Money Wants." Both that, and its flip, "Birdland" was recorded in Woodstock with Smiths producer Stephen Street, who captured the band's earlier live sound. Both songs were included on the greatest hits collection, All Of This And Nothing.
By this time, both Mars Williams and Paul Garisto had left. Williams moved to Chicago and into a myriad of guest spots with industrial bands, as well as forming a number of his own critically acclaimed avant garde jazz projects. Garisto went off to join Iggy Pop and never returned, he currently plays in the Big Apple band Drag Mules. The only remaining sidekick was keyboardist Joe McGinty, who'd replaced former Thompson Twin Roger O'Donnell at the tail end of the tour, who himself had stepped into Bueller's place. O'Donnell, of course, went off to join The Cure.
Once again, the Furs were drummerless, and then one day, Richard walked into the CBS office and bumped into Vince Ely. Since leaving the group, Ely had moved behind the boards and produced a number of seminal bands from the '80s, including the first Ministry album, With Sympathy. At the moment, however, he was between projects.
And as Ashton tells it, "Vince felt differently because he wasn't doing anything, and Richard felt differently because we didn't have a drummer. So, Richard asked how he felt about coming back, and Vince said yeah. Which is how it should be."
For the guitarist, Ely's arrival was a bit of a godsend. "I was breaking up with my longtime girlfriend, the mother of my daughter Sophie, so it was a difficult time for me emotionally. But Vince being back made it all a lot better. I decided actually to somewhat clean up my act, and I then met my wife. So it went from very bad to very good during the space of that album.
Things having worked so well with Stephen Street on the single, the band hoped things having worked so well with to use him for the album. But it wasn't to be as the producer had other commitments. However, Dave Allen was available and keen, and the Furs liked his work with the Cure.
For once, the group seemed to all be in agreement, Book Of Days was to be much more lo-fi than their last few records, the orchestration simpler, in fact everything about the album was to be low key.
"We went into Sony and said, 'We want to make a record, and not have any singles on it," Richard explains, "and they said, 'okay, fine. They were always pretty good with that. They let us do this record, they released a single, but they didn't work it very hard, no pop single push. [However, the same can't be said of their UK label, who littered the shops with limited edition variations of their 45s. And that kind of answered that, I thought things had kind of evened out, were a bit more even keeled."
"Making Book Of Days was a hoot," Ashton recalls. "Vince was back, and he was taking the piss out of everybody, making up corny jokes. It was a very coherent album, it was a very inventive time, I think it was the most inventive time we'd had in a long while, and we were trying a lot of things out.
"We just started jamming together more, our songs became darker, we were still watching a lot of videos and drinking, or not drinking, depending, and just getting into making music again. We went back to Rak studios, where'd we recorded our first two albums, so that was kind of a seminal thing."
"To me," Tim states, "Book Of Days' production was a little too cloudy. In fact, I'd love someday to remix it, because there's some very strong songs that are a return to the Furs basics, but I think the production lets it down. Still, I think Dave Allen brought us back to sounding English. Oddly enough the producers we'd used on-the two previous albums were English as well, but Keith Forsey had been over here for a while, and Chris Kimsey was a global type producer, he'd done stuff with the Stones, so he was more into the American side of things."
"It was a very strange period, Book Of Days, maybe it should have been our last album," John muses. "It had all the good things about the band in it: the songs, the sonic feel, the kind of yearning. Richard was going through some changes in his personal life, and that was reflected. I had undergone a lot of personal changes, and I felt much more in tune with Richard for the first time, in a long time, and I believed that things were on the up.
"I remember having table tennis matches with Richard and him saying, 'I think this is our best album.' And I said, 'I think it's pretty good, but I think we can do better."' I'm always like that, I think we've got more, more, more. I was very up on it to start with, there were certain songs I really liked... but I can't even listen to that album now to this day. I just felt it was not the highpoint I was expecting at that time, Something was missing, and I couldn't put my finger on what it was,"
It's hard to say what, for in actuality, Book Of Days was a showcase both for Ashton's magnificent guitar work, which ofttimes edged into Gothic grandeur, and Tim's equally impressive bass playing, with Richard's vocals a wonder to behold.
Perhaps the problem is in the mix, if the drums were cleaner the record would've a bit more of edge, the only possible thing lacking, for musically Book Of Days was their strongest record in years. The band had indeed rediscovered their past... and were now about to unearth some old problems.
With the album's release, the band embarked on a tour, minus Ely, who decided, yet again, that he wasn't built for roadwork. In his place came drummer Don Yallech, and a second guitarist, Knox Chandler, an old friend of Gary Windo. The label kept to their agreement, and didn't pressure the band with a big press build-up for either the album or its single, "House."
"We needed to get our heads together," Tim explains, "get some sort of sense over what had happened over the past few years."
A return to the John Peel show in February, 1990, was yet another reminder of where'd they'd started, and how far they needed to return. And to prove everyone who thought that the acoustic ballad "Torch" was inapt for the Furs, they proceeded to play not just an unplugged version of that, but "Pretty In Pink" as well!
Regardless of Ashton's pessimistic view of Book, the band seemed to be finding their equilibrium. The guitarist moved over to the States after the tour, and into an apartment in the East Village near Richard and Tim. The three, joined by McGinty, all hung out, and it seemed as if the old days were back. Ashton set up a little studio in his apartment, and the band began rehearsals, and recording demos there.
"We actually ended up actually using part of the demo for 'Until She Comes' on the next album," the guitarist explains. "We took the drums, which were drum machine, and looped it in with real stuff and the original acoustic guitar, and made the song."
But these halcyon days were to swiftly come to an end. It began in the studio during the making of their final album, World Outside, and accelerated during the tour. Although Tim vehemently disagrees, both his brother and Ashton believe that it was Morris' and Kilburn's long ago departure that were the seeds of their final destruction.
The band's internal dynamics were greatly altered at that point. Once, there were six very distinct personalities feeding the band and its music: "who gives a fuck" punk Morris, sarky Kilburn, wind 'em up and watch 'em argue Ely, mood swinging Richard, middle ground Ashton, and class clown Tim who sees himself as falling between the rest.
The problem was the Furs' chemistry and creativity was dependent on their internal arguments, that spewed into the jams from which most of their music emerged. Reduced to a three piece, part of the chemistry was still there, but the arguments would obviously reach a new dimension with less people taking part.
The solution might have been for the Furs to find permanent replacements. In a way, Mars Williams, who stayed with the band for seven years, almost was. Certainly all three of the original Furs respected his musicianship, and liked him personally, but they never quite considered the saxophonist a true Fur. Drummers and keyboardists seemed even more inconsequential, certainly not in the musical sense, but as part of the inner circle. Thus the trio remained trapped in a band too small, yet filled with sidemen that came and went, who were forever alternating the dynamics between the original members.
The Furs thrived on disagreement, but what sane sessionman is going to chance heated arguments with his employers? Ashton in some ways compounded the situation. Over time he'd begun to believe that the Butlers would stick together, at least on the big issues, and thus became less and less willing to put forward his own opinion.
"The whole thing that used to bug John was that he thought that because I was Richard's brother, I was necessarily on Richard's side," Tim concurs. "When it came down to the big decisions he thought, "Oh they're brothers, they're going to go with each other.' I don't think he bothered to bring up a lot of his deeper thoughts about things, because he thought he'd get shot down. But it's kind of his fault that he never brought up his ideas on things, he thought it was going to be one-sided."
And he's absolutely right, that's precisely what did happen, and exactly what Ashton has assumed. The problem was that the guitarist, seemingly the most sensitive of the Furs, ended up getting the wrong end of the stick entirely, totally misunderstanding many of Richard's own views.
Or at least that's how it appears now. Sadly, the guitarist has not spoken to either of the Butlers in several years. There was no big bust-up, just a drifting apart, with Richard and Ashton in particular left with regrets and misunderstandings.
The pair were thus interviewed separately, with Ashton's falling between two talks with Richard. To each of their shock, their opinions were virtually always in agreement. "He said that?," was a constant refrain, and has left both rethinking the past and their assumptions about each other. But as the new decade dawned, those assumptions were about to destroy the band.
"Vince was gone, again," Ashton begins. "Now there was Donny [Yallech] in the band, so there were three Americans [including Joe McGinty and Knox Chandler] and three English guys. It kind of got into this scene that I really didn't feel comfortable with it, and I think it showed; performing, playing, being, everything.
"I had just totally changed my life around, given up drinking, drugs and everything, and I went straight back to it during that album, fuck this, I guess I needed the excuse. I just wasn't happy with the album, something about it was so squeaky. It was weird, I enjoyed making the demos, but not the actual album. Although I did enjoy working with Stephen Street again.
"Knox and Richard had struck up a real friendship, and Knox in a way is a much more technically superb guitar player than I am. I guess I felt a little jilted and jealous, it was very hard for me to make my thing happen when I felt I was being overshadowed a little bit. So therefore when it came to doing the album, I'd almost lost interest in it. It was like, yeah, whatever.
"I know that we all had a part to play in that, I know that everybody wanted the best that you could possibly be, as you do. But something was missing, the in-jokes were personally, I was just kind of over it, I felt getting a little too much to handle, and I just felt I was getting shunted further and further out.”
"You don't notice things as they're going along," Richard takes up the story, "but certainly towards the end of the Furs' career I missed the fact that I didn't feel like it was a band anymore. It felt like three members of a band with a bunch of other people. And that wasn't the way it started.
"That started with Midnight To Midnight, because even with Mirror Moves, it was still the three of us. We didn't use a drummer, so it felt like the three of us were a band, and we were in there as a band. I missed all those impassioned, heated arguments, because it meant there were a bunch of people around that all cared about it.
"With Midnight To Midnight we brought in different musicians, and from then on, they all felt like something was... it had all become watered down somewhere. I couldn't put my finger on it, and I still can't."
Tim takes another angle entirely. "I think partly because of our laziness, and our refusal to promote Book Of Days as it should have been promoted, I think people started to forget about us. Then we decided, 'Hey, we're going to make a great album,' which we did with World Outside, I think, and we were gung ho for doing the whole interview, touring, video thing.
"I think it was almost like coming again from the first album to Forever Now. If you say Book Of Days is the first album again, then World Outside is like a Forever Now, so from then on, we could've been on a healthy course. But things happened, and there you go, that was the last album.
"But, I think by then we'd lost grip of our audience, so when it came out and was lukewarmly received. Even though it got great reviews, I think we saw it as a slap in the face, the audience saying we don't want you anymore."
The album certainly was under appreciated. And Tim's analogy also holds very true. While Book Of Days was a return to their trance-like dark roots, World Outside, as Forever Now had done before it, moved in a much more pop direction. The songs were much more diverse than their last album, incorporating hints of the Orient, strong, haunting melodies, swirling atmosphere, and even a nod to the bigger rock sound of yesteryear.
All in all, World Outside boded well for the future, and upon its release, the Furs set off on what was to be their final tour, which ended in NYC.
"The very last show," Ashton enthuses, "our long suffering tour manager, Martin Cole, who'd been with us virtually non-stop since 1983, secretly got Mars [Williams] and Gary [Windo] to come and play without us knowing. At that point we weren't using saxophones, just Joe [McGinty's] keyboards, it was pretty sad. So, all of a sudden, there they are. What a brilliant way to end! That for me was the highlight of my time."
Sadly, Windo died of an asthma attack a year later, a tragic loss to the music world.
But how, why, and when did the Psychedelic Furs call it quits? No announcement was ever made, there was no obit in the music press. It was only with the advent of Richard's new band, Love Spit Love, that fans began to realize the truth. There's no simple answer to the question, and in fact, the trio all give very different replies, all of them in contradiction to each other, and sometimes to themselves.
We begin with Ashton's version.
"For me, the ensuing tour just confirmed things, and made it even worse. I had a conversation with Richard a few weeks before the end of the tour, and asked, 'Do you want to do another album?' And he said, 'Oh yeah, yeah, sure. Definitely, but I want to do my own solo album first.""
Coming off the road, Ashton kicked back and took some time off. Tim invited him to join a project he was putting together, Feed, but John said no, thinking it would be a good thing for Tim to do something all on his own.
It didn't quite work out that way. Tim kept Yellech at his side, and enlisted two local NY musicians, vocalist Chris Robertson and guitarist Keith Otten. The latter he met when he went into the studio to produce Otten's band's demos. The group played some shows around town, before taking a hiatus.
Meanwhile, several months elapsed, then Ashton called Richard's new manager, Richard Bishop, and suggested the Furs do a small tour to pay off some of their debts. To his horror and shock, he was told, 'Richard has no intention of ever doing anything with the Furs again."
"I don't want to call John a liar," Richard insists, "I would never do that, but I'm sure it didn't happen that way. I get a bit foggy about how it actually happened. But, by the end of the tour, I already knew what I was going to do. I just didn't feel excited by the prospect of beginning all over again with the Psychedelic Furs. I just decided to call it a day, I think I did that quite soon after we came off tour, it wasn't like an age went by.
"Tim, John and I had been together for so long, we'd just worn out what we had between us. Maybe if we'd been with Duncan, Roger and Vince, it would have felt more like a gang, but it had kind of lost that feeling. I kind of knew what any other records in future would sound like. I wanted to work with somebody where it would be different, that I would be surprised by, it was just becoming boring. I'm sure that they felt exactly the same thing. So I decided to go form another band."
You just didn't get around to mentioning that to Tim or John.
"No, it's not like I didn't tell them. At that point I was hanging out with Tim all the time, he was living over the road from me. So it's not like he didn't know what was going on.
"In fact, he was involved in the writing of songs for Love Spit Love. But he didn't know what they were being written for at that point, and nor did I. And eventually I just decided that these were songs for a new band, and he was 'Okay,' and we carried on writing songs together."
So, in actuality Richard hadn't made the decision to leave at the end of the tour. And in fact, later in the interview, he contradicts himself further, stating it wasn't until Richard Fortus moved to NYC that he decided to form Love Spit Love. But this shouldn't be seen as Richard attempting to duck the question, as his recollections were very foggy throughout the interview. Drummers were a blur, tours equally so. So, Tim's turn.
"The whole antagonism between Richard and John sort of reached a peak, and they needed some breathing time. Actually we were on the tour bus at the end of the tour, and we were talking to the manager about maybe taking a break after, do a few other things to get away from being in each other's back pockets for 13 years or whatever.
"I think Richard, more than John or 1, just thought it was time to go out now, rather than wind up playing to 200 people at small clubs. Go out on top, as opposed to right at the bottom again. I think toward the end of that tour there was a feeling going around that this was it. There was never actually a date where we came together and said after this that we're going to quit, which is why I feel who knows what's going to happen down the line."
Well, that doesn't really answer the question either, so we return to Richard and the final days of the tour.
"It certainly wasn't anything to do with bad feelings between any of us, that wasn't the issue. It wasn't like I came off the tour and said, 'My God, I can't stand those guys." It wasn't that at all. I'd wanted to do something different for a long time now.
"The first time a solo album was mentioned to me was around Forever Now, and I said, 'No, no I'm too involved doing this. Then, there was "Heartbeat" and so on, and as time went by I thought if I want to do something different, now is really the time I should be thinking about doing it. If I don't do it now, I'll definitely be with the Furs, and I felt that I don't want to do that I want to do something else.
"I started thinking about guitarists I wanted to work with, and I started writing with Knox Chandler. Then I thought, 'You know what Richard, this really isn't the way to go, you're going to end up with another Furs' album with the secondary members,' which is kind of ridiculous to do. So, the only guitarist that I could think of, who really struck me as good, and that I liked as a person was Richard Fortus."
Fortus was currently playing in Pale Divine, the support group on the final Furs' tour, and living in St. Louis. "So I called him up, and said, 'I want to do another record, I don't know what it's going to be yet, but would you like to have a go at writing some songs.' He said 'Yeah, I'd loved to give it a go."
Initially, Fortus would fly out to NYC, crash on Richard's couch, and work on songs with Richard and Tim. Eventually, however, Fortus moved to the Big Apple, and as the writing continued, it eventually became clear to Richard that he was writing material for a new band. Except that Tim didn't want to join. The bassist had decided to pursue engineering and production, began taking classes, and was soon concentrating almost exclusively on his coursework.
He did stay to record Love Spit Love's eponymous debut album however (Imago 72787-21030-2). The band line-up was completed by drummer Frank Ferrer, an acquaintance of Fortus'. The quartet entered the studio with producer Dave Jerden, and came out with an album startling in its aggressive power. From the opening thundering chords of "Seventeen," there was no doubt that Love Spit Love was a world apart from where the Furs had left off.
The most obvious difference was Fortus' bright and brash axe work. No matter how melancholy the melody, the guitarist always created an air of optimism. And nobody familiar with Ashton's sound could imagine him playing the Led Zep "Lemon Tree"-esque riffs found on "Green!" Nor would an oompah/country/music hall kaleidoscope like "Jigsaw," have ever found a home on a Furs' album.
However, some links to the past remained, from the "talk talk talk" lyric in "Superman," to several songs in the second half of the album which harkened back to the Furs.
"It's very difficult to pin exactly what's different on it," Richard explains, "because I was and still am the same person. I'm kind of a pop writer in some ways, but I'm not going to go out and make a Spice Girls record. I'm more pop in terms of the Rolling Stones, bands like them. Richard Fortus can sit down and say, 'Hey I've got these four ideas, what do you think?' Maybe one of those will immediately suggest a melody, and I'll just start singing along with it, and then start writing words. And that's exactly the way it was with the Furs.
"The kind of music that triggers me to do something is likely in some ways to be similar, it doesn't matter who is it. Some things obviously bend in a very different direction, I don't think 'November 5' [from the second album] would ever have been written by the Furs. Maybe 'Jigsaw' too, I'm not sure, and 'More Than Money' [also from the new album]. I would say the real difference is Richard Fortus, more importantly than anything else."
Tim also remained a connection with the past, but he didn't want to tour the record, and for that Lonnie Hillyer came in. Love Spit Love headlined their own tour in the fall of '94, then during March and April of 95, supported Live. Halfway through those latter dates, the group's label, Imago, went under. "We weren't panicking about jumping onto another label so quickly," Richard laughs, "especially after what happened to Imago."
Instead the band started looking for a bassist and writing new material, as well as contributing a near note perfect rendering of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now" to the Craft movie soundtrack. Dave Jerden had initially suggested ex-Indian Chris Wilson for the tour, but the timing was off for the bassist. However, his name now came up again, and at that point, he joined the band.
Eventually, Love Spit Love had an album's worth of songs, and their manager began talking to labels. Maverick were particularly interested, and sent the band into the studio to record a three song demo. After hearing "Believe," "Long Long Time" and "Fall On Tears," they signed the band in early summer last year.
By then, for Richard, Love Spit Love had the feel of a real band, and the difference for him is evident on the latest album, Trysome Eatone. Richard and Tim have, however, continued collaborating, and one of their songs, "It Hurts When I Laugh," is included within.
All in all, the new album takes far more chances than the first, and has a much edgier sound. Raucous songs rub shoulders with a twangy ballad, indie rock meets pop, and "November 5" explodes into a creativity arguably not seen since the days of "Blacks" and "Radio." There's a seething, roiling aggression across many of the tracks, some- thing Richard seemed to have left behind with Talk Talk Talk.
"Yeah, I think Talk Talk Talk is a very aggressive album, it's not aggressive in a rock'n'roll sense, nor in a heavy metal way But the one track that made me sit back and think 'God, this sounds like me around the early Psychedelic Furs was 'Sweet Thing. That sounds like me singing on Talk Talk Talk."
But it was an even earlier sound that was used for the movie The Artiste Basquiat, in which Richard has a bit part as a peasant. A snatch of "India" is featured in the film. Bizarrely, the song is credited to Richard Butler, Tim Butler and John... Butler!
Since the Furs split, Ashton has searched for what to do next, guesting on several other bands' records along the way. In 1991, he appeared on Kristen Hall's Fact and Fiction album (Daemon/Sky 7/5053/2), on the track "Empty Promises." He turned up on Mercury Rev's Boces (Columbia CS 5170), on the track "Méth Of A Rockets Kick," in 1993. The guitarist also toured with 10,000 Maniacs' John Lombardo and Mary Ramsey, and even contributed a track to a Spanish tribute album to Suicide’s Alan Vega.
Ashton's been involved in production well, working with the LA group Silence, the English band Filled With Dreams (now renamed Honey Head) and the ex-pat Brit Ally Rogers. Currently, he's involved with two local NY bands, Red Betty and Ornamental. During this time, the guitarist has been demoing his own material, although a new deal has yet to materialize.
Tim, meanwhile, is still taking engineering courses, and thinking about resurrecting Feed. This would involve finding a new guitarist and drummer, as only Chris Robinson remains.
The bassist also kept busy selecting tracks for the Should God Forget boxed set (Richard and Ashton were consulted as well), and playing through tapes, circa 1983, for an upcoming live album.
Should God Forget offers up some great rarities for Furs' fans. It features for the first time on CD "Blacks"/"Radio," two Peel session songs ("Mack The Knife" and "Soap Commercial"), a previously unreleased alternate version of "Alice's House," as well as a selection of live tracks, including a recording of "Imitation Of Christ" from their 1983 Pasadena show. The rest of the set compiles songs from each of their albums.
In fact, this boxed set will be the fifth Furs' collection that Sony has released in the last decade. There was the All Of This And Nothing greatest hits collection offered up in 1988. The following year, Relativity put out Crucial Music -The Psychedelic Furs Collection, a rather strange mixture of singles and album tracks. A better buy was Here Came The Psychedelic Furs B Sides & Lost Grooves, which compiled b-sides, remixes, a couple of live cuts and the odd demo. Finally, the import racks recently sported The Radio One Sessions, an all encompassing collection of the group's BBC career. And so, in the end, the Psychedelic Furs legacy lives on, even if the band itself has come to a d close.
"If it was a close," Tim declares. "If it was, it was definitely a sputtering close. We could've done something like The Cure, 'this is our last tour, come and see us,' one last blaze of touring glory, but it did just sputter. If it was a close. Who knows, if John and Richard get to a stage where they can actually talk to each other, we might get some kind of action on the Furs' front."
"Tim said that!" a shocked Richard exclaims. "He must have been joking." No, he wasn't.
Richard pauses for almost a minute. "I don't know, nothing's impossible down the road, but I would say it's very unlikely. I can’t imagine it being so... but, you never know."