Atom Heart Brothers
(first half missing)
crosswords and entered that dubious arena of pure pop clearheaded The Butler sow the salvation of the Furs in simplicity..he was sick of all the cult-on-the-edge stuff, he wanted to matter where it mottered most, in the charts, in the kitchens of suburbon bungalows, on MTV. An inspired manoeuvre to infiltrate and double-cross or a manifesto to disguise a sell out of ideals? It's too soon to tell and yet it's been two years since the sublime melodies of "Mirror Moves corried us swooning over some of the blushing lyrical banalities.
Two years is a long time in pop, I tell Butler, and he gets well agitated. Of course it's de rigeur for us to mock those who have crossed over and submerged themselves in the great American vacuum ond it's not mere jealousy that leads us to despise Simple Minds Locking history, hung up on commodity as some feeble substitute for a culture barely built and crumbling on genocide, the Yanks, we all know, have no taste whatsoever, no conception of the ideas that make pop work. In short, they wouldn't know something hip if it didn't ship a million.
Butler argues against this but he would, wouldn't he? I wonder what the young Richard in the pink frock coat with the pipecleaner crouch and pop's most svelte pout of arrogant disdain would make of his arguing the case for such a bankrupt culture. But, Christ, this nostalgia won't do Butler may snorkel now and his sole vice may be smoking too much instead of snorting and getting smashed but his ambitions for The Furs have barely changed from the early days. He still seeks to make music that "resonates" through life, that touches something. Music that has a use.
In a good-humoured row over Chinese duck he gave up red meat some time ago we ascertain that Butler laughs a good deal of and with Sigue Sigue Sputnik but still looks to Dylan and, recently, Prince to "resonate". He wishes he'd written "Little Red Corvette", for him a true, timeless classic, and likens Sputnik to an episode of "Dallas" "They're like Victoria Principal in a bathing costume. Attractive but it doesn't resonate. Uh, well maybe," he chuckles, maybe Victoria Principal in a bathing suit would..er..resonate"
As for New York dulling his sense of awareness, he counters that The Furs were always flamboyantly anti-fashion from the name on, they did their utmost to belittle the taste-mongers. But, I counter, that anti-hip thing was only another weapon in their artillery, only another trick in their bid to be the hippest band in the world. And, for two or three minutes, sometimes, in my room, listening to any of The Furs albums, they achieved it.
So what will fuel the new one when it finally emerges from Hansa, incidentally on old Gestapo whorehouse reputedly hounted by the ghost of a murdered intruder Well New York, he goes out a lot oned, now, to tackle the embarrassment of turning up at a party stone cold sober and recalls a brilliant meeting with Lou Reed when both were sipping Perrier's too shy or shocked to come to one another's comfort.
He's also met Warhol, one of his real heroes. It seems our Andy turned up backstage at one of The Furs gigs and grobbed Butler claiming that “Mick and Jerry are throwing a party..let's go!" Butler, somewhot taken abock, boorded the bus with Andy in tow and set out for the venue only, on arrival, to be whisked off quick so the others couldn't join him Too salubrious by for for the rest of the chaps, of course, but it was only when Butler was being dragged across the dance floor by the hand that he realised what a fruity fellow Andy was. It shocked him, he says. All that cynicism and yet so naive!
His greatest regret, though, still remains being unable to tum up of the Factory one Saturday morning to help do some Warhol prints because the bonds were playing out of town "Imagine it," he says, "Me helping Warhol to do his prints!"
His other major preoccupation, it seems, is mortality. An avowed and admitted hypochondriac Butler has lately had great course to question how much time he's got left. First there were the palpitations ignored by his doctor. Then there was the tole of Chris Kimsey's wife who was involved in a terrible auto accident, lost so much blood she was declared DOA and yet remembers leaving her body, floating obove the ambulance, every detail including the nurses' names until she had to make a decision whether to die and join the ecstatic light or give it another go. The way Butler tells it, Sheehan and I are shivering
And then there's Chernobyl. Butler says he didn't even know about the extent of the disaster for almost a week after the Ruskies almost waved goodbye to the earth's core but, when the news reluctantly filtered through, he recalled the change in the weather, the two massive blasts that shook the hotel so fiercely that even the concierge called the police, and the rain soaking his hair and skin.
Maybe there's a song in there. Maybe there's just suffering but, while we think about packing our wellies and brollies and heading towards Glastonbury, seven hundred miles to the South West, directly downwind of Chernobyl. Richard Butler sips tea and contemplates cancer.
