Exile On Main Street
"Between the idea And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow..."
TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
"Isn’t that brilliant? Isn't that just f***ing brilliant, I mean, whenever you go into any project, no matter what it is, you want it to be great. It's almost as if you have to believe it's gonna be great to have the strength to go through with it. But you always fall short of your dreams. There arrives a point of realisation. I now say, 'The next record is gonna be great, it's gonna be brilliant, it's gonna say all I've wanted to say in a record'. But I know it won't. I know that it will somehow fall short. That's the worst part of making a record, the realisation of failure."
"Between the conception
And the creation Between the emotion And the response
Falls the shadow..."
The Psychedelic Furs' "Book Of Days" is a great album about the impossibility of making a great album. It's also about the futility of the concept of greatness in the face of the fact that we all end up dead. And, beyond even that, it's also about the liberation of facing up to that futility, the triumph of ploughing on with life regardless. It's an album about learning to cope without hope, about facing up to disillusion, about recognising that, self-deluding as they are, dreams work.
This is typical of Richard Butler, a diagnosed hypochondriac with a weak heart valve who admits that, since he gave up drinking five years ago, he is, as Boswell, Dr Johnson's biographer used to say, "too much given to thought". Butler is a willing exile from England who spends his days in Greenwich Village, New York, refusing to divorce art from life. Just as the hypochondriac in him loathes the imaginary frailty of his body for denying him his rightful immortality and yet loves it most dearly as his only tenure on life, so the artist in him hates his work for never matching his imagination while cherishing its shortcomings because he knows full well that, if one's dreams were ever really fulfilled, there would be nothing left to live for and life would become an irresistible falling off from the pinnacle.
"You've gotta feel you're something special," he says with a self-deprecating smokey laugh that vigilantly keeps pretentiousness at bay. "It's in-built in all of us that we feel we're something special. But the time arrives for... I dunno...maybe even all of us... Are the people who achieve massive success really any better than the people that don't? Y'know, you go in with all those dreams about what you can achieve and what you should be. Each person thinks of himself as an island and a special one at that. But there comes a time in your life when you have to turn around and go, 'I'm not. I'm not special. Why am I? I'm living in this row of houses like that one and that one looks the same too'. The only thing that's special is feeling that you're special, y'know." Other people wrestle with their demons. Richard Butler plays chess with his.
"Book Of Days" is the Furs' seventh album if you count "All Of This And Nothing", the compilation LP they released last year. It's a return home of sorts. Their eponymous debut LP glamorised iconoclasm with a brattish glee, "Talk Talk Talk" mutated their wall of sound into a wall of melody, "Forever Now" adorned the persona of the weirded-out crooner with a warped somnambulism, "Mirror Moves" was marvellous and shiny and very commercially up and then came "Midnight To Midnight" which was.. empty. Butler had nothing to write about, nothing to say and, even as he spun pirouettes in his studded designer leathers, he felt sick to the soul of himself. It made him ill. People were stopping him on the street, congratulating him. He was the darling of MTV and yet every morning he woke to self-hatred. Would that Jim Kerr had been so honest when it mattered. Too late now.
Time healed the sickness but it took nearly two years for Butler to dispel that hollow feeling, to tunnel through the black cancer of depression to a point where the future seemed stronger than the past. "All That Money Wants", a single recorded with Stephen Street, served notice that Butler was fit to question again and, when Street was unavailable, the Furs turned to Dave Allen who works closely with The Cure, to produce "Book Of Days", an introspective, taking-stock sort of an album which refuses to render any single that easily and is deemed most suited to a low-key tour.
It's the Furs' most personal LP to date, Butler accepting that disillusionment is as good a place as any to work from. It's not just a reaction against the empty bluster of "Midnight To Midnight", "Book Of Days" has a positive, autumnal melancholy all of its own. Butler says it reminds him of rain running down a window pane and we both agree it'll never match "The Beach Boys' Greatest Hits" for summertime fun. This is what happens to a man when he lets himself down and finds all his heroes wanting.
Picasso, who Butler says he believed stood astride this century like a colossus, has been revealed by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington in her book "Creator And Destroyer" as a cruel and pathetic old man shit scared of dying, using young nubiles as a hopeless way of maintaining his waning masculinity. And Dylan, who Butler once worshiped as an inspired mystical cynic, is now revealed as a sad recluse stumbling around in a sentimental void, grasping at one religion after another in a vain attempt to achieve some spurious salvation.
"I think it's healthy to let go of people you look up to, it's healthy to realise they're just f***ing human beings. You think people hold big truths and you think there are big truths to be found but it turns out that there aren't big truths, there are just the same little truths that you suspected all along."
Butler says I'm way too generous with the word "genius", that I pepper it around my reviews when, really, there aren't any geniuses to be found. I say Prince. He says all he sings about is sex and God. I say what else is there but singing about the angst of not having sex and not having God? That gets him for a moment. Well, it would, wouldn't it?
Butler listens to The Cocteau Twins, R.E.M., Derek And Clive and Leonard Cohen. We agree that Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and Love's "Forever Changes" are the only two albums that are indisputably great, the only two we can think of in four days that stand the test of time. "Books Of Days" is obsessed with time. Whether it's the title track where a woman ages in a grim Northern town always fantasising about leaving or "Torch", which Butler considers his most autobiographical song ever, the album is concerned with time going by. Most records unconsciously adopt an attitude, we are either time's masters or time's slaves.
"We're all the slaves! It's like Martin Amis says, "Time is something that makes you look like and feel like shit. Hahaha."
But the album doesn't say, "Help! I don't know what to do about it".
"No, it doesn't. If there is a triumph, it's a triumph of acceptance maybe."
It seems to say all we can do is make the best of it. "Yeah, very English. How boring." Butler and I have both discovered that time weighs heavy once you give up drinking- there's so much of it to fill, so much of it to think in. "Book Of Days" is an album about thinking, about having the time to contemplate, about realising contemplation is pointless but doing it just the same. It's an album about trying to make sense of the fact that, whether you believe your emotions set to music are a useful barometer other people because we're all basically the same or whether you believe we're all totally alien to one another and all the words and notes are just pissing in the wind, you haven't any choice really because all you have to offer is yourself.
Butler believes it's worth telling people it's worth going on even though it's not worth it because he's gained succour from other people's work telling him the same.
"I read an interview with Bob Mould where he was talking about how frustrating it was trying to write things and how small he felt in everyday life. He was saying he sometimes felt he almost had to apologise if he walked in front of somebody and how he sometimes felt like he was dying... He sounded like he was a perfect hypochondriac and it was great to read that. I felt like writing the guy a letter and saying, 'Out of all the interviews I've read, thanks for giving me one of the few times when I could say, "F***, somebody else feels like that'!
"Because, at that moment, there I was doing the same thing-tearing my hair out, feeling ill from the f***ing stress of it. It was just great to read somebody else going through it, as if to say, 'It's not so bad, I feel like that too. You'll get through."
Butler's been a Psychedelic Fur for about a third of his life now. Doesn't he ever wish he could escape, disappear?
"Not really. I'd have to be something. It's not that I wanna be an artist or I wanna be a musician, it's nothing that self-conscious. It's just that I find myself thinking about things and thinking about ways of saying things and writing them down and thinking about painting and what would I paint and how would paint it? I want to make something. It's just an urge I have. Whether it be doing a drawing or carving something out of a chunk of wood or whatever..." Why?
"I don't know."
Is it a latent desire for immortality?
"No, not at all. I really don't care about having a mark. I mean, who really does leave a mark and how important is it if they do? It's like worrying about what my headstone's gonna be like- I don't care whether it's a f—king mausoleum or a shitty little grey headstone or nothing. I really don't care."
So you don't want to be remembered?
"No. It's just wanting to externalise something."
So you couldn't conceive of an existence where you had no means of expression beyond conversation?
"No. I'd rather be a bad artist than no artist at all. There's something liberating about making something or writing something that I can't get any others way. There's something fascinating about it. Y'know, you put something down and then you improve on it and then you mould it around and it's you down there, y'know, part of you and the way you think and it's almost like a revelation to yourself. You're showing yourself to yourself in a way that you can't when you look in a mirror and you can't, really, when you talk to other people because that's reactions- somebody will react to what you said and you'll react back and what you are gets lost in an interaction whereas, when you make something, it's almost perfectly you in a way."
Is it important that what you make has meaning to it?
"Yeah. I feel it's a cheat if it doesn't, though I often enjoy things that don't." Does it have to have a purpose? “I don't think so. I mean, if I couldn't make records or I couldn't paint, I think I'd still write things down on bits of paper and stuff them away in drawers, so the purpose isn't the motivating factor. A purpose is something that would maybe be invented after the fact. I would be making myself out to be more charitable than I am if I said, 'Yes, I want to bring some of the suffering of my life home to other people to show them it's not so bad'. Hahahaha. That would be absolute bollocks."
Does making records make you feel a better person?
“Oh yeah, definitely. I wake up liking myself in the morning."
Does it make you feel like a worthwhile human being?
“Yeah. Most songs are about relationships but "Book Of Days" is about how everyone's always really alone. “Yeah, that's one of the basic truths isn't it? I think relationships are there for purely selfish reasons, I don't think they're altruistic in any sense at all. They're there because people don't like being alone. They're there because you need somebody there."
Do you resent needing somebody?
"Yeah, and I think, more than a lot of people I know, I need somebody around. Relationships are like people huddling together when they're scared and yet I can't stand to be alone because I judge what I am off other people, by their reactions and stuff. And when I'm left alone, when I've lived alone, I've found that I'm almost going crazy some of the time."
Unlike Robert Smith and Siouxsie and others he's been compared to, there is nothing remotely romantic about Butler's disillusion. There is none of the gothic allure of darkness, nothing of Nick Cave's junkie embrace of oblivion or Shane MacGowan's alcoholic amnesia. Butler just says happiness is fleeting, misery is permanent. That's it.
“I wouldn't put it as dark as that. You often see people walking around depressed. Everybody has periods of depression that can last days, weeks, but you don't get anybody elated for days. I mean, you'd look a total idiot walking around laughing for 24 hours wouldn't you? It seems happiness is a more fleeting emotion than...thoughtfulness or a quiet time."
So you're saying the normal human state is not a happy one.
“Yeah. I just tend to sit there and turn things over in my head..."
But you don't frame yourself as the little lost man battling heroically against a hostile universe.
“No, because that's myth-building and what I'm trying to get to is the truth. I don't think this album is by any means the truth I'm trying to get to but it's a step in the right direction. I think the biggest struggle is what do you do when you take life down to just the nuts and bolts? What is it? The smaller things in life become more heroic. I still find the heroic attractive in some ways but I find people leading everyday lives are far bigger heroes than some f***king pop star on a drug binge because he can't handle his depression and his f—ing money. I mean, that's pathetic, not heroic..”
"And all of us have to come to momentous decisions in our lives. I mean, we're all preparing for our deaths throughout our entire lives and the moment before you confront your own death is a momentous occasion." Assuming you're granted the luxury of confronting it and endowing it with your own symbolism rather than being hit from behind very suddenly and unexpectedly by the Number 6 from Streatham.
"Yeah. Life is just something that is put upon you that you can't do anything about and it's incredibly beautiful at times. Out of the void you exist and you're faced with this thing that... I don't know what it is in your heart that just explodes with the beauty of everything. But those times are worth living f***ing years of shit for. There's something precious and so sad about it. Those times that we live for, those times when some light breaks through and you're actually laughing and you feel like everything's gone off your shoulders. You look at that and it seems so small you can almost cry over it sometimes."
What are your perfect moments?
"Last year I woke up one morning and sat at the edge of my bed and it was... hard to describe. It felt like there were no moral constraints, there was no moral weight on me at all. I felt I could go out and get anything I wanted and do anything I wanted and my life was absolutely my own. That was a great moment but it lasted about five seconds, y'know, then it just kinda flaked away.”
"Sometimes when I'm driving... I love going down to the South West, New Mexico, round there and sometimes I have times when I'm driving and playing something on the stereo and round the corner is something that looks so beautiful that everything else just disappears and there's just that moment and the music and what you're looking at, just driving, going nowhere, coming from nowhere particular.”
"There was another time, years ago, when I was looking at a painting by Picasso of a mother leaning over a kid taking its first steps and the look on the kid's face was so stupid and the way it was painted looked so monumentally clumsy that I found myself laughing. That was a moment when everything seemed to crystallise and become really clear. Just sometimes when you're laughing with people, when you're having fun, everything's given over to this feeling that comes from your stomach. That's what I call a perfect moment."
Talking of perfect moments, Butler tells me this great story about John Ashton, founder Fur and lead guitarist. John's at Nell's, this New York club, and he goes to the bog. There's a huddle of black guys in there, all talking at once and John recognises the neck on one of them. The guy with his back to him is Mike Tyson.
So John walks over, taps Tyson on the shoulder and, as the great man swings round, says, "Ol' Frank Bruno gave you a run for yer money didn't'e?" Tyson stares at him for a second-the kind of second in which your life flashes past like it's supposed to just before you drown-then bursts out laughing. "No way man!" he shouts. "I whipped his ass!" Now is that a perfect moment or what? And, because this is a zen kinda feature, here's an imperfect moment from the world according to The Psychedelic Furs, just to balance things out cosmically you understand.
Tim, Butler's brother, founder Fur and bass player, lives near The World in Alphabet City where you can't walk a block without being offered crack at least a dozen times. Last week when we were there, there was a riot going on, cars and rubbish burning in the streets. Tim gets anti-white slogans sprayed on his door but he stays put because the area's supposed to be becoming gentrified. It looks like downtown Beirut to me.
Anyway, not long ago, this cop was trying to infiltrate a crack ring in Alphabet City and negotiated a deal on Tim's street. Now what the cop didn't know the dealers knew is that the rulebook says a cop isn't allowed to taste narcotics unless it's a life or death situation. So the guys with the crack suspected the cop was a cop and offered him a taste. He evidently didn't think it was a life or death situation and refused. They blew his face off, right there, on Tim's street. Bummer.
Why should a young man who is pretty healthy and has a really nice place to live and a good job that allows him to express himself and travel pretty much when he wants to be so convinced that life's so f***ing horrible? “Just an awareness that it's absolutely purposeless... and being Godless I think. I hate to put too fine a point on it but I think being Godless counts for a lot. If you're even remotely religious, it's a place where you can put a lot of things away whereas, if you're not, everything, ultimately boils down to
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