KISSING THE PINK
"MR and Mrs Formaldyhide, you have won tonight's star prize; a brand new Lincoln convertible with oak interior, cocktail cabinet and an in-car microwave…”
"Turn that TV crap off!" A voice from the dressing room bellows. "Here's a recent Top 40 hit for all those cheerleaders at North Luddite High. It's called "Pretty In Pi…”
"Turn that radio off!" the nasal voice orders once more. The transmission ends, the conversation begins. The voice belongs to Richard Butler; the surroundings to America. Or perhaps it's the other way round. But let's cut the crap.
What've you got Richard?
"King of spades.”
Beats me. That entitles you to Question:
Number 1: Where are The Psychedelic Furs going?
"Beats me," he says wearing a face like thunder and a smile like ice. "To be honest, I can't remember where we've been or where I'm going. Today it's Boston... I think."
(The History Lesson…)
Two hundred years ago Boston had a tea party. It was a time when disaffected Americans dressed up as indians and shoved Englishmen's tea over the side of ships. Then disaffected Englishmen dressed up as Americans and started drinking the Atlantic. Then disaffected indians dressed up as tea and threw the English and the Americans overboard. Everyone declared war on everyone else as soon as they'd dried off.
More tea Richard?
"No thanks. I've lost the taste for it now." These days no one seems prepared to learn from history. Nothing is going up the charts just that some records are going down faster than others. The Furs have climbed hard. If ever there was a band that deserved mass appeal but were destined for the confines of cult isolation it was the Furs. Then, one day, in a far away land called Los Angeles, a wizard called John Hughes decided to use a four-year-old song called "Pretty In Pink". John Hughes was the keeper of the Golden Key and he gave it to Richard saying: "It worked for John Parr and Simple Minds. It'll work for you." The door opened, the fairy tale ended, and reality began.
"The last time we toured here we were riding high on the crest of a wave. People were saying that Richard Butler was going to be a huge mega- star by the end of '86." What happened?
"We were out of the limelight for too long. People thought we had disappeared. We've been on the road for almost a year now just to remind people that we're still around."
This is the third section of the fourth leg of the second phase of their world tour - a tour that suggests that the road is just an endless detour on the highway of life.
"I get bored with a lot of it, and fed up when I can't get my laundry done. When you're on tour, you get totally spoilt. Hotels are booked, meals prepared, taxis ordered, baggage carried, everything is done for you. When you get home (New York) you're continually looking in the mirror to check you look okay just to go to the shops. I couldn't even be bothered to make tea for myself at home. You completely lose track of time and place."
There's a time and place for everything (Even The Geography Lesson).
In Massachusetts most cars now carry a different catch-phrase on the licence plate. "The Golden State" has been replaced by the words "Live Free Or Die". No one would tell us if the other three lines of dialogue from "Rambo" will be used as well. A man could get himself arrested for asking such questions. He could face prison for questioning such answers.
"That's not difficult to do here," Butler comments ruefully. "Last time we toured I was charged with indecent exposure!" Flash-back: Richard Butler awoke one night on the tour bus which was parked at a truck stop. The rest of the band were at the bar, so he decided to call up his girlfriend. Unfortunately he walked into the stop wearing only a pair of socks and a trenchcoat and proceeded to flash at his brother Tim. "I thought it was just a joke and went off to make my call. The next thing I knew I could see these cops arguing with Tim. I thought they were going to arrest him. Then they came over and dragged me out of the booth leaving my girlfriend hanging on the telephone. They handcuffed me, made me spend a night in the cells, and charged me the following morning. No sense of humour these truckers..."
Question Number 2: Where are the Furs going? "I don't know. There's something very vulnerable about this band. Perhaps that's why we've become so popular over here. We make mistakes. We make huge ones. There's still something petulant about us. Perhaps we're continually reverting back to our childhood. I definitely think we're not world-weary and still very naive. I still don't know what all the gadgets they sell in the sex shops on 42nd Street are actually for!"
Beats me. Who turned the radio on? "Professor Lexdorf of the University of Ohio failed to appear in court today on charges of indecently assaulting two of his students. Lawyers said he was still too depressed to testify..."
On first hearing, the Furs new album has been tailor-made for the American marketplace. It has the right sound that wide-screen middle-age bulge that makes mountains out of minuets. Simple songs for simple minds?
"It's not that calculated, honest. I think, lyrically, it's more accessible and musically it has. more bits than 'Mirror Moves'."
The sell-by date on the cover may have expired. "You get to the point when you ask yourself, "What am I doing this for? Am I going to be an Artist with a Capital A, or am I going to communicate? If I wanted to do the artist bit I'd have to stick to my guns all the time, but I think now it's more important to communicate, to reach more people. But I still can't bear candy-floss. It's not as though 'Midnight To Midnight' is the only direction the Furs will travel."
Question Number 3: Where are the Furs going? "We're mixing lyrical clichés with dance riffs, yet there's always a twist underneath. If I wanted to write abstract lyrics like those on 'Talk Talk Talk' I still could. But it's like going on holiday- you don't want to visit the same place two years running. I got fed up with people thinking we were too obscure and describing me as a pretentious bastard. I like songs to sound optimistic but I can never actually sing an optimistic song. Even 'Heaven' is packed with depressing images," he laughs roundly. "I'm a definite pessimist but no longer a manic depressive."
I'm still not convinced that Butler could write lyrics like "India" or "President Gas". I'm not sure if he still has the hunger, the desire, the desperation. He has stopped having bad dreams. This could be significant later. "State monetary officers in Florida have confirmed reports that 80 per cent of all paper money returned to banks last year contained traces of cocaine powder.”
People still love the Furs. I'm one of them.
"People love a cult band. Now we've gone out of our way to create more of a spectacle. I don't particularly like playing stadiums, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my life being Mark Smith from The Fall. I've done all that already and it was time for a change. Next year we may change again. After Live Aid, rock music stopped being anti-establishment (if it ever really was) and has now become an alternative establishment. I don't think we're part of either movement really. We're too detached.
Richard Butler may be imperfect; he is not yet impervious to suggestion. Yup, I like him a lot. He is still a cauldron of confusion an incomplete lattice of contradictory ideas. I like him a lot. He's just like you and me.
"I suppose we're the counterpoint that makes the point." Richard understands the mechanics of pop. He knows there's a difference between Rock 'n' Roll and rock 'n' roll. He knows that one is master, the other masturbation. Perhaps he knows too much. On Tuesdays and Fridays he has trouble remembering which one is which. It's Boston therefore it's Wednesday therefore tea is served. "I want to communicate something more," says Butler, combing his hand through the hair gel. "I'm just not sure what it is. I think we are still relevant to what's happening at the moment. I sometimes wonder how relevant popular music is at all. Does it ever change anything?" Socks perhaps, twice a day.
"I'm not sure how I'll feel if I look back on my life when I'm old and all I can say is that I brightened up the odd three minutes on the radio. In a hundred years' time people won't remember any pop bands. The only people that will go down in history are Walt Disney and perhaps Warhol and Picasso."
And yet...
"And yet there's no other job in the world where people applaud you every three minutes. I'm just an applause addict. There are times, particularly during 'Highwire Days', when everything sounds so massive and I'm singing as hard as I can and feel THAT big, and the audience can see me and they feel THAT big, and then everything seems worth it. All the hotel lounges and endless airports, everything is worth it just for one song."
Cometh the hour; cometh the man. The applause in the arena sounds like a tower-block being demolished by giant woodpeckers. Rock 'n' roll is the only entertainment where people clap before anything has actually happened. Perhaps this is relevant. Perhaps it's the relief that passes over an audience when they know something is about to happen. It does. After "Cowboys" after "Heartbeat" after "Shock" after "Heaven". I'm convinced. The Furs are still there still living and reliving those highwire days with splinters of pain and joy, precious yet precarious. I feel THAT big. I'm wearing stilts.
Strings of pearls are thrown onto the stage closely followed by the odd bra and stocking as Butler pirouettes with his top half with all the elegance and precision of Michael Jackson. The bottom half looks more like a club-footed Bette Midler.
"That's my ambition this year," he confides. “To get my bottom half to move like the top half.”
More trinkets hit the stage, including several credit cards! Only in America!
Question Number 4: Where are the Furs going now? “Canada."
What about England? (The Alternative Geography Lesson.)
"Soon. England has a very strange attitude to success. If you make lots of money, it's deemed to be in bad taste. In America it's everything. America celebrates money, England is embarrassed by it. I don't consider myself to be part of either country though I live over here. I certainly haven't got one of those poxy stupid transatlantic accents. I'm just one on the outside -I see things through other people's eyes. That's why people think I'm cold. There's even been criticism from people inside the band that I'm always one step removed from what's going on. around."
What were you saying?
He may be slightly divorced from the here and now, but Richard still knows that reality is the only place to buy fresh doughnuts. This may be important later.
Right now Montreal. (The Anthropology Lesson.)
The only difference between the Boston gig and the Montreal concert is the lack of tea, the disappearance of the lingerie, and the appearance of a few hundred teenage girls at the backstage door. The band beat a hasty retreat leaving Richard to sign his way through the throng of expectant faces, phantom desires, and clandestine hopes. Richard says he has even started autographing his own cheques by mistake.
David Attenborough has claimed there are two species of North American fan. The first is the part-time astrologer ("What star sign are you Richard?") and full-time space cadet. The second imitates the exact behaviour pattern of the lesser- spotted Mongolian mongoose on heat ("How long is it Richard?"). The only way to tell the two apart is to place a male mongoose in front of both and see which one foams first.
Back at the hotel Richard looks worried. No fresh doughnuts today? "They always ask if they can kiss you. You have no idea what that's like for a hypochondriac like me! I keep worrying that I'll get something contagious." Despite having a steady girlfriend for the past three years, Butler still had to submit himself to an Aids test in order to obtain any life insurance. The test was negative (sigh). The sex appeal certainly seems to be positive (more sighs).
“It all started on the last tour. We started off as very much a boys band, but now it's over half girls. I used to jump into the audience, roll around and generally have a good time. I tried doing that in Portland last week and had the scare of a lifetime. I made it about four steps into the crowd before being mauled by swarming teenage girls. My mike was grabbed, I couldn't move my arms, one girl was trying to stick her tongue down my throat, while three others had their hands down my trousers. That's no exaggeration. My balls have only just recovered. These people don't mess around. They go straight for the main event."
"I think sex is something that's basically quite cruel. When you're actually screwing there's definitely a violence attached to it. We're only just removed from the beasts. I'm sure most people wouldn't tell their partners the fantasies they have while screwing.”
And the other main event?
"Yeah, love is more important. I ask myself whether love is something magical or simply a need like hunger. You get hungry, you eat. You need love, you fall in love. Love basically exists because people need company badly. I do. I go crackers if I'm separated from my girlfriend for too
long"
The pathway to health is littered with good intentions.
"We owe the invention of the arts to the deranged imagination: the caprice of painters, poets, and musicians is only a name moderated by civility to express their madness."- St. Evremond Act V Scene II.
"Saint who?"
Butler has always flirted with insanity with the idea of insanity as a sign of creative genius. Then one day, after completing "Forever Now," he visited a friend, spent the night plane spotting, spotted a plane carrying the A Bomb, ran for cover, fell asleep, woke up jabbering about a backing track, and wept a fair bit. The next morning he was told that it was all delirium, and he had been up all night playing Scrabble. None of it was true.
"At that point I realised I really was going mad. All those years of acting eccentric and mad and it was finally happening. I thought I'd feel like a genius or something. Instead I got very frightened and just wanted my mum to take me home!" At this point he was just a piece of paper away from being committed and spent the next two years serenading fire hydrants with an accordian before eloping with a tank of Manhattan lobsters. At this point Richard's girlfriend became somewhat concerned. Richard recovered, packed up drinking, stopped taking any drugs and the lobsters were granted an annulment..
Now he has exchanged possible greatness for positive goodness - a barter of necessity. If he had kept boozing, snorting, and puking he wouldn't have been around to talk to me. I'd be all alone in Canada. And that would've been a greater pity than trading the insane for the inane.
Butler is neither.
"Dr Arnold Ecklegrundheimer Jnr yesterday announced that biologically speaking, life and death are really the same thing. Death just lasts a little longer.."
(The Other History Lesson.)
The Furs now find themselves part of tradition. Having spent years out in the middle of nowhere ripping off style and movement that seemed inappropriate to appropriate, Butler has developed his own style a motion that has been documented in the performance vocabulary.
"Now I find bands ripping me off!" he says with indecent indignation. "I used to get so pissed off with all the people who used to say I ripped off Bowie. I ripped off everyone!" Their position is now established, if not near the centre of the establishment.
"Seeing Bowie in the audience in Australia mouthing all the words to 'Love My Way' was quite a buzz. We actually sat down and jawed with Iggy a while ago whereas, when we supported him, he was venemous - we blew him off stage using his own stunts! No wonder he got upset."
Question Number 5: Where are the Furs going? "You mean I've watched my heroes getting old and fat and ineffective and history will repeat on us. I think I'd get bored before we become dinosaurs or anything. Part of me is already. looking around for other options."
Options like film. Butler has already been offered a part in some vampire movie and may also be involved with John Hughes' planned movie on the life of Modigliani. The world is his lobster. Just like on TV.
Question Number 6: Where is Richard Butler going?
"I've started to turn a little more to religion, or at least I'm keeping an open mind. It's probably because I'm getting older and am scared of dying. Religion only exists to make sense of a world that is totally without reason. I've not become a Buddhist yet though!"
It's late now, not too late. Butler can't yet complete the lotus position. As we leave the bar, a group of students arrive back at the hotel after an all-night clubbing crusade. One looks up at Richard, freezes for a second, then shrieks and collapses to the floor like a three-legged cocktail cabinet. "Oh my God, it's him! It's really him!"
She's right. It's really him - Richard Butler - a man who can now look into a mirror without flinching. He has learnt the art of artifice of the chameleon. As the girl's tears clear, all she can see is a 13th Century Ming vase with post-nasal impressions scuttling into the elevator.
Question Number 7: Where do the Furs go now Richard? "Up."