Psychedelic Subversives
Endless estates of red box buildings flash past the window as the van's cassette machine mocks a tall, grey cluster of chimney towers standing, stupid and erect, no longer useful, no more polluting, just a sore on the landscape, waiting there to tumble. Scott MacKenzie sings "San Francisco": "There's a whole generation/With a new explanation"...
Richard Butler looks up from the latest in a long line of pathetic whist hands and shouts: "Don't you just believe it man! God, how all those hopes were shattered." As if offended the tape cuts off mid-sentence and speeds on through manufactured chunks of rock 'n' roll history. This is 1967 BBC-style; an absurdly nostalgic attempt to endow twenty-five years of pointless pop with some small, scant social relevance.
"See Emily Play", "Hi Ho Silver Lining", "Itchycoo Park" — the very peak of the psychedelic single and there's Richard again, knocking back a lager and laughing out loud: "Under dreaming spires'...
What's that mean?" So much for the Psychedelic Furs' unfounded reputation as lunched-out, time-warped loonies, their conduct, like their music, a largely misunderstood comment on, rather than endorsement of, the memories their name evokes and, judging from the mayhem as the van hits downtown Manchester, a timely reminder, if ever one was needed, of the decline of Sixties standards and ideals this band grow more callous and cynical by the second.
We stroll into the empty Poly hall as tonight's support, the abysmal Wasted Youth, are sound-checking, running through a typically shallow, sycophantic slice of imitation Velvet Underground and suddenly Duncan Kilburn confides: "I remember seeing the Velvets at some university years ago and, afterwards, on the way to the dressing room, Lou Reed brushed past my arm ...I didn't wash for a week!"
The Furs seldom lose sight of their sarcasm so when they do it's weird, revealing six very different individuals with one thing in common, an abiding preoccupation with the sounds, styles, sins and, most importantly, the failed expectations of the Sixties. For them the subversive spirit of psychedelia is still so important that, in order to recapture it's disorientating vision, they spent their whole debut album violently thrashing the genre. They call it out-weirding the weirdos. Now '81 sees a new album, a new tour and a positive new outlook; the record in question, "Talk Talk Talk" (the title's intoned sarcastically), capitalising on the Furs' original strengths while shunting them in a financially imperative more commercial direction.
"There's more melody in the new one" explains Richard, "it's more cohesive lyrically, and more cohesive production-wise. It's a grown-up version of the Psychedelic Furs if you like, all about relationships, all disillusioned love songs. I didn't do it consciously, it was a real surprise to me but the complication with this album is there's no final statement. It's not saying love is a thing you shouldn't believe in, all it does say at any one point is you shouldn't believe in the word love to mean what you're told it does, you should work it out for yourself.”
"The first album seemed to be hitting out at very diverse things," he continues, an articulate, intelligent talker who will bend your ears all night if he finds you on his wavelength but will arrogantly dismiss you if he doesn't. "One minute it was hitting out at commerciality and the next it's religion. I was obviously feeling more like slagging things then though it's not a very positive attitude. "Now I think it's more positive in that I'm trying to look at things from every angle. It's not saying 'I've got a point of view which is right', it's just trying to examine things from lots of different sides.”
"I think the best thing you can say in lyrics is for people to think for themselves and work out things for themselves in their own way. The only thing music can do is open peoples' eyes up a bit, that's what I've always enjoyed about rock music. Nothing rock has ever done has changed me politically; it may have influenced me when I was very young (his father, "Very left wing", played him Dylan, Piaf, Aznavour, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams...) but it doesn't really change things. "I mean the Clash for instance, I don't wanna knock 'em, bless their souls but all that political sloganeering... I don't think it changes anything cos if Dylan couldn't change things in the Sixties with the following he had and songs like 'The Times They Are A 'Changin' then no one can."
This ambivalent nature, sarcastic scorn, and nostalgic sorrow for defeated idealism
lies at the very heart of the Psychedelic Furs and their increasing concentration on the plight of the individual in direct wilful contrast to the cheap shots afforded by 'worthy' political trends or cliched industrial angst partially accounts for the British music press's pompous indignation at their every progressive step.
That and the fact that they're not ashamed to admit a currently unhip affection for the mighty Stones of the middle Seventies. Live, like tonight, they can rock you, regale you, make you feel good, make you feel mad, make you want more.
Richard's brother Tim, on bass, wrap-around shades and basin Beatle fringe (very young Lou Reed), combines with quiff-topped drummer Vince Eley fuelled on vodka and lime, and the switchblade guitar attack of John Ashton and Roger Morris to create a pulsing, piercing wall of sound through which Duncan bobs and weaves his seductive sax and Richard croons in an exhilaratingly cynical deadpan croak.
The music moves me more than most, makes me smile at it's spirited sarcasm and the lyrics...well, they're something else. One "Pretty In Pink" or "So Run Down" means more to me than a dustbin full of critically lauded Curtis or McCulloch ditties. "On the first album" explains Richard, "I realised that to create a mood the lyrics didn't have to be narrative.
"You can string together a lot of words like black, car, glass, neon and they'll tend to make a depressing line just because of the implications. In the same way you could put sun, flowers, grass, picnic (laughs) or whatever in another line and that would give you a sort of up feeling. It's not actually done as a cut up because I don't like that way of working, I think William Burroughs' books are the worst I've ever read in my life. It can work though, it can create a mood and that, after all, is what we're trying to do."
Richard's fascination for the sounds, meanings and power of words stems from his days at art school where, completely obsessed with Andy Warhol (the mad Manhattanite once drew him a banana), he painstakingly made gigantic block prints out of arbitrary words just to judge the effect: "Then I thought, 'what the hell am I doing putting them on posters? Even if I make it as an artist, I'm still stuck in galleries whereas if I do music at least I'm reaching a lot of people." Artistic and earthy, debateable and danceable, The Psychedelic Furs are after your mind but if they don't get it, your footwear will do.