Playing With Fur
Guitarist John Ashton of the Psychedelic Furs reflects on playing, cracking the States and chipmunks in his bath.
Hammersmith Odeon, scene of the
Psychedelic Furs' rehearsals for the next four days. All around
roadies scuttle about PA and lighting rigs like they're assembling
some bizarre three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Guitarist John Ashton:
"It's like a kind of circus, really, being on tour. I remember
them from when I was a kid — all the vans coming up, getting the
gear out, set up the big top..."
So are you the
ringmaster with the black top hat, cracking the whip?
(Laughs)
"No, I think we're more like the performing dogs. The ringmaster
is out there in one of the best seats!"
The Furs as a
live phenomenon now are far removed from their early performances.
These days you get the real thing, a real performance — they use
glam as a vehicle but have turbocharged the engine, so you get little
kids reaching out for them as if by touch they could commune with
that power, that energy. Similarly, it seems natural that they should
all live in America, as if that country is the nub of their
masterplan for world domination. However, the Psychedelic Furs'
machine is made up of real people, surprisingly enough, with Butler
at the steering wheel and Ashton on the accelerator. Correspondingly,
like any other machine a lot of directions aren't dictated, they just
sort of find themselves:
"It wasn't really a
conscious thing to concentrate on America, it just seemed like the
obvious thing to do at the time. People over there liked us for some
reason; partly the image, partly the music, plus I think a lot of
them really liked Richard's words. I suppose they took what we did as
Rock music, which is what it is in a way. Over in Britain it felt
like everybody was wearing paisley shirts, playing jangly guitars.
Maybe we weren't poppy enough, I don't know."
To most
people the prospect of cracking the United States would be a
nightmare, but the Furs seem to have found their own place in the
American Dream.
"America's supposed to be a really
difficult place to crack, but in a lot of ways it's more open,
because there are all the specialist and college stations. People are
really clued up there, they'll go out and look for things, they don't
wait for it to come to them.
"In Britain, I think the
Furs are regarded as a great band in retrospect: it's probably due to
bad timing. What we're going to do this time, our master plan, is to
do a few warm-up dates here, then we're finishing off the new album
at Bearsville in Woodstock and doing a college tour for around two
months, then when we've finished we'll becoming back to England and
hopefully at that time we'll be really good, play with a bit more
conviction. With luck this time we'll be able to arrange a single to
come out at the sametime!"
The new album has been
recorded at Powerplay in Zurich and Hansa in Berlin; that's the place
where Bowie spent so much time feeling alienated, maan, but
considering he's just come back from fairly close encounters with
armed representatives of the Warsaw Pact, Ashton seems unscathed.
Apart from the nervous tic, hysterical cackle, and meat cleaver that
is. Anyway, they've still got to go back to the last outpost of the
Western Way to finish the guitar parts and Butler's singing.
"I
think the new album's going to sound more expensive, but there should
be a bit more fire to it as well; the last two albums were maybe a
bit smooth. This time it feels more like a band; we've got a real
drummer and I can spend more time getting more attack on the guitar.
For Mirror Moves we couldn't spend much time on that because we spent
so long on the songs and the arrangements in the studio. Keith
(Forsey, best known for producing Flashdance) had a lot of influence
in the writing stage. We'd come up with a few riffs and ideas and
he'd come up with a beat for them on the Linn drum. That way we came
up with something that sounded contemporary, but I don't know, maybe
it was too big a departure for some people. We got caught in a Catch
22 situation with The Ghost In You; it was too commercial for some
people but in other ways not commercial enough. Plus some people
think we're a bit grim. Steve Wright calls us Grim Rock!"
It's
obviously not as much fun as you'd think being in a successful band —
fancy having to worry about what Steve Wright thinks of your records.
So do the Furs try and tailor their songs for a specific
audience?
"No, not really. Occasionally Richard says
'We should do something a bit more like this, la la la, or we should
do something that's 120 beats per minute'. Richard's the one who
reads Cashbox and Music Week. I do feel a certain agony about it,
that you can fall into the trap of making music for a certain market
instead of just making music."
Market considerations
didn't play much of a part in the early Furs career, though.
"At
the time, when there were only six of us, there was no real sense of
direction — that was quite a good thing in a way. Really, at that
time we were just a bunch of drunkards. Everything's a lot more
workmanlike now," he added regretfully.
"We
write a lot of songs on Portastudios at the moment. I live in Kent,
so I send stuff into the office and they send it to Richard and Tim
in New York. It's really nice, after you've been in Manhattan on
overdrive all the time, to get home and dust off the 16 track. It's a
Fostex — we made enough money after the last tour to buy ourselves
one, and I'm the only one who knows how to use it! We don't really
need it. I think for writing the odd song the Portastudio still
reigns supreme — it's like the old adage, if George Martin can do
it..."
Talking technically, you wouldn't think the
Furs are the kind of band to spend a lot of time poring over a
Fairlight monitor, but you'd be wrong.
"We did use a
Fairlight, one of the early ones which was quite tatty, but we did a
deal with the guy that owned it that we'd flightcase it up for him —
we used it for about six weeks, I think. That lead sound on The Ghost
In You — we call it the Chipmunk in the Bath sound — was done on
a Fairlight. We had a lot of grief with that, I remember; if we tried
using a sequencer all the sustain would disappear — it was all done
by hand in the end."
In earlier days, the Furs spent
as long on an album as your average balding technically-wired PhD
would spend programming a jaw-harp into a Fairlight. The first album,
with Steve Lillywhite producing, took around 10 days to record and
mix:
"Steve Lillywhite really left the songs alone,
he'd notice things and say turn that bit around, bring that bit out.
Todd Rundgren, who did the third album, just used to say 'Well, how
do you want this to sound, I can make it sound big, I can make it
sound small. Sixties, what do you want?' and then we'd go 'We dunno,
what do you think?' Chris Kimsey, who's producing the new album, is
really wonderful, he's got a real heart. I'm really happy about this
album, if any of the others were classics, then this one definitely
will be. Chris reckons it'll be so popular we'll have problems
keeping up with it all!"
Those are the kind of
problems that most of us dream about, too. As I take my leave, I
ponder over the impression that the Furs wish they could write songs
like Billy Idol's. You might well think they ought to kneel down
every night and give profound and heartfelt thanks that they can't.
All the same, if they've survived Noo Yawk, Cashbox, Fairlights and
Linn drums with their essential Furness intact, maybe we can still
sleep soundly at night.