Inside The Outsiders
Steve Sutherland strokes the boisterously bored backstage at the Riverside Studios, another band waits anxiously to put the(ir) record straight (in the charts?). Out front, in the shabby arena, ageing jobsworths pass the time 'til their pensions shuffling lenses and swapping headphones while "The Old Grey Whistle Test's" fresh- faced presenters rehearse their desperately forced spontaneity.
Turning to Mark Ellen - the new boy; pudgy cheeks, grandad shirt, puppy dog eyes, very BBC-David Hepworth exudes all the charisma of a Thunderbirds puppet as he stammers through his intro.
"The first thing you should know about the Psychedelic Furs," he quips with all the grace of a drowning man, "is that they're not remotely psychedelic. None of them has ever worn a paisley kipper tie or sent away for a mail-order kaftan...
Since January 1977, when Richard Butler and his brother, Tim, took to improvising wild words and sounds in pubs, they've had to put up with piffle like this.
Their chosen name has served as a source of derision for some and a bold inspiration to others, a brilliantly obvious bone of contention often betraying it's very intention.
Tonight, for the first time ever in five weird years, the Furs (as they're often conveniently called), have the opportunity to by-pass the bias their monster has bred and play three songs from their new "Forever Now" album to the nation's large, living-room audience.
And yet, here's this Beeb lackey lazily dredging up prejudice with lines unfit for "Seaside Special". “It's okay," Richard Butler laughs insincerely, "anybody who talks that much can't talk sense all the time. He's probably just not very bright - which is nothing to resent somebody for.
"See, my idea of what's psychedelic is personal in a way - we used the tag at the beginning because there were bands with names like the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Razor Blades all saying that Sixties music is irrelevant which I don't think it is at all. The name was my antagonism towards how narrow-minded punk was - I mean, it was supposed to be anarchistic but it didn't leave enough room for creative anarchy and no way was punk as creatively anarchistic as I'd say psychedelic music was.”
"My relationship to psychedelia is a strange one which is very hard to describe - that's probably why it hasn't been cleared up before... so...I think anything is psychedelic that opens up your head, whether it be the Human League dance mixes or Stravinsky's 'Rites Of Spring'. It's anything that puts you... somewhere else...”
The reasons why the Psychedelic Furs have failed to reap the deserved acclaim over here that America - through the college radio circuit - is currently lavishing upon them, the reasons why they haven't sold the number of records that fans like Paul Weller and Duran's John Taylor are convinced they should have sold are complex but crucial. Deliberately exposing the cowardly insecurity of the music business, purposefully avoiding categorisation, the basic problem is that the Furs mean too many things to too few people. Their name suggeste they're psychedelic, their look suggests something else.
... Pouting and preening his hair in a backstage mirror, Butler play-acts the prima donna: "God I look gorgeous." he sighs with extravagant ecstacy. "If you could translate looks into money, I'd be a millionaire.” "Yeah," nods guitarist John Aston wearily, "and you'd be broke again by the morning"... ...
The Furs' attitude to the many, not wholly mistaken, accusations of narcissistic indulgence and glam revivalism that habitually dog their every development is much the same as their attitude to everything: amused acceptance.
"I like looking at pictures of beautiful people," admits Butler, unabashed, "which is part of the attraction of Bowie for me really. "Musically he never struck me as being that important up until 'Low', 'Heroes' and 'Scary Monsters' but it was the whole look that was effective. Influence-wise though, I don't really know I mean, a lot of people have said I look like him but it's not as if I said 'Oh, I like David Bowie' and ran off to have plastic surgery. Bowie's attraction was his ambivalence - it was great because it made you reassess sexuality. Jagger too, though not quite to the same extent- I mean, he was never beautiful in the same way that a woman is beautiful— not my type of boy!"
He laughs like a drain at his self-conscious outrage - the same sly spirit, incidentally, that led him to dismay a writer from 'Smash Hits' who bored him last week by feigning expertise in wearing girls blouses.
"I've always admired people with a bit of ambiguity be it sexual or literary or whatever. I mean, I've always admired Bob Dylan in that he didn't like to be pinned down.”
"That, I suppose, is the history of the Psychedelic Furs in a way that we've always wanted to be ambiguous. It's not straightforward pop music, you can't say 'this means nothing, it's harmless. There's always a suggestion that there's something deeper behind it. We don't want people to be able to pigeon-hole us."
The sound of the Bluebells, attempting to perpetrate another Beatles revival, drifts in through the door from the studio. "Let's all wear John Lennon caps pushed back on our heads and lousy jeans that don't fit then we, too, could be Haircut 100," Butler sneers. "See, we've always been on the outside, we've never been the actual instigators of a fashion because we're not a very fashion-conscious band that's not first on our list of priorities. Maybe I'm a bit too old, maybe a bit too aware, a bit too socially-conscious maybe. I don't know, I certainly wouldn't say that we were out of time- definitely not. I think what we're doing is very much in time - you can take influences from anywhere”
"Strange, the whole thing about fashion. Things get faster and faster and revolve more and more. It's like the global village idea of Marshall McLuhan only applied to rock in a way that I never thought would happen. You get a mod revival, then a skinhead revival and they're happening faster and faster... and cover versions in the charts.”
"It's like periods of art; when Picasso and George Braque invented cubism, if you like, that made them famous for 20 years or more, then it got to people like Rothko and Pollock who were famous for a period of 15 or ten years...um, they both died - that's an unfortunate example. But, anyway, then it gets to Warhol, whose heyday was only a period of about six years and nowadays the important artists
are getting a shorter and shorter lifespan.”
"The same with rock - the media concentration is such that you get chewed in, everybody knows it by heart, then you get spat out again. It's fascinating to watch. In a way that's why I like to keep outside of the fashion thing, so we're not gonna get chewed up and spat out that quickly because we're not ever gonna let anybody get their finger properly on us."
How the Furs remain immune to the rampant ravages of each increasingly disposable fashion is not so much by ignoring them - that implies a rigid, immobile uniformity of opinion - but rather by an open-minded adoption of the communicative strengths of each one; an ever- evolving process of assimilation and reappraisal.
True to the unconsciously motivating conviction that to stand still is to admit defeat, "Forever Now" is as much a radical, though not gratuitously magpie, departure from it's predecessor "Talk Talk Talk," as that album was from their debut a fact which makes Butler warily proud.
"One absolutely lousy reviewer said there wasn't a difference at all," he complains, "but of course there is. We used far more melodies as opposed to rhythms, the lyrics tend to be a bit more cohesive and less wildly surrealistic and the last album was basically songs about love whereas this one isn't, this one's about. ...personal freedom?
"I mean, 'Love My Way' is a song about sexual freedom and a political song like 'President Gas' ...I suppose if you're hitting out and saying 'Don't believe in anything', then you're hitting out for personal freedom."
"Forever Now" also profits from a switch in production techniques, Steve Lillywhite's "sort of live, muddy, distorted wall of sound" usurped by Todd Rundgren's more sympathetic, eccentric approach. "We had a meeting with him before we made the album," Butler enthuses, "and he said 'Listen, I can make you sound like Meatloaf, I can make you sound like Patti Smith, I can make you sound like Hall And Oates, I can make you sound like anything... I need you to tell me what you want."
What they wanted, they got. The liason was so successful that the relationship could well continue, Rundgren himself being so delighted by the offspring that he's been playing the album over the PA in it's entirety before his recent live shows in the States.
The Furs, now, are a new band too. Saxophonist Duncan Kilburn and guitarist Roger 'Dog' Morris quit before “Forever Now" was made, complaining about Butler's "ranting" and arguing bitterly
over sound and approach. Drummer Vince Ely left just last month, making way for Phil Calvert, late of anarchistic Aussies The Birthday Party to cancel his wedding down under and bring to the band an essential musical and personal cohesion.
But, throughout their many and varied changes, the Furs have remained refreshingly constant to an inexplicit ideal, a caring core unblemished by the greed of the industry. Perhaps this is because, unlike almost any other band you care to name, the Furs were born more from an adventurous art education than a thirst for pop success.
Butler's art college training brought him, first, into confusion and conflict with the trash art of Andy Warhol before he gradually fell under the spell of the Velvet Underground and his own massive Burroughs-like canvasses of cut-up conversations took flesh in the form of free-wheeling performances. They eventually crystallised into the insanely cluttered songs that became the Furs' first album.
Butler is scathing of his early methods now, though the theory, he insists, still holds good. I remember him telling me in a previous interview that he liked the idea of Burroughs' books but finds them irritating - even impossible! to read. In much the same way, he now admits that the notion of the Furs is often better than the actuality.
"Your ideas always run slightly ahead of you," he insists "so by the time you get any one album out, you've shifted and you wish you'd done things differently. That's why I carry on. I'd hate to get to the stage where you release an album and think 'that's good", that's great'. If that happened I'd kick it in the head."
Crumpled in the back of a crowded cab, the adrenalin of performing three brief numbers turning bad inside him, the fatigue of waiting eight hours to do so slowly taking toll, Richard Butler stares blankly out the window at the lights flashing by the North Circular. Stupidly, probably, I attempt conversation and ask if there's anyone interesting working in the same Pentonville studios that the band are using to prepare for their forthcoming tour.
"Who's interesting?" he snaps. Part of the Furs' appeal - as much as their (as opposed to fashion) style, as much as their individualism - is their aggression, an exhilerating sarcasm that not so much mollycoddles past pop as tortures its ghosts.
"Sarcasm, in a way, is a result of disillusion," Butler tells me next day. "I mean, you can't help but be sarcastic when you're faced with disillusion on every side. Probably our sarcasm stems from all the ideals that we had in our youth being totally shattered but I would add to that by saying that somebody who is sarcastic, who is a 'cynic', is ultimately an idealist or else he wouldn't be sarcastic. I'm an idealist, that's why I'm sarcastic- because I can't see it happening and I can't see any way for it to happen."
Butler will admit that touring Britain bores him as readily as he'll let on that performing in front of any audience - even the Whistle Test dummies - terrifies and excites him. "I'm an introvert pretending to be an extrovert on stage," he says, adamant that it's not a pose.
"How can it be? When you do a song, you have to encapsulate a lot in a very short space of time and your language has to be very strict so when it gets to that intensity, then maybe it comes out that I'm generally bitter or sarcastic but I think it's pretty much all me.”
"I mean, I've written songs that I can look at and I still don't know quite what they're about because they're a bit too abstract. I don't like to talk about my lyrics too specifically, I wouldn't want to talk about individual lines because it might take away somebody else's interpretation which is as valid as mine."
"Forever Now" is lying around in the CBS office. The cover is black and quoted clearly in bold white type are the following Yank accolades: "The lyrics, like the performances, are uniformly arresting, the work of a splendid imagination". Chicago Sun Times. "Richard Butler is clearly the most charismatic British rocker to emerge since Sting" Baltimore News Americans.
"The Psychedelic Furs are possible the most important band of the Eighties" Night Rock News. The final quote reads thus: "Don't believe what you're told ..." Richard Butler.
Butler laughs when I tease him with it.
"I always appreciate humour whether it be in music or paintings. Generally, if you ever get humour in any - in inverted commas 'Art', it always tends to be quite wry. I mean, Bob Dylan had a very wry humour and Picasso. I can't think of many jokes that aren't, in a way, cruel you laugh at Charlie Chaplin falling over and being punched around and you laugh at him slamming the door in the fat man's face. Maybe it's a way of getting rid of some pain? Lenny Bruce is a perfect example... and Tony Hancock...committing suicide. Being a comic must be the hardest job in the world."
And being a Fur? Christ, you know it ain't easy. In a way, the Furs' antagonism owes as much to Lenny Bruce's politically poignant black humour as it does to Dylan's protest or Jagger's arrogance.
"Not in an obvious sense," argues Butler. "Rather than say I'm left or right wing, I think you can work out politics from the inside.
"By the time I'm probably, 50, I'll be political because I'll have been able to say 'well, that's wrong and that's wrong' - It's just a matter of finding your own way. That's what's important about the band, making music that can possibly change the way somebody looks at life. For instance, it's trendy when you're young to sing about a generation gap and write songs like 'My Generation' as if that generation is any different, whereas I think it's more valid to look realistically at the fact that one day you're gonna be part of the generation that you're putting down."
The Psychedelic Furs attempt to affect the way people look at things much like Dylan's "Don't follow leaders" is simply saying "Don't take anything for granted" and, hopefully, "Old Grey Whistle Test" will do for their reputation what their music does for me afford an opportunity to reassess certain situations, whether the rethought conclusion is radically different or not.
Like the Birthday Party, the Furs stimulate without letting on what to do with the energy. Unlike the Birthday Party, they're easy to listen to. Butler, as always, agrees up to a point. "If the way of achieving commercial success is to be like Toto Coelo doing 'I Eat Cannibals' on 'Top Of The Pops', then I don't want commercial success. "Then again, I don't want to be like Nick Cave whose aim, if he wants to be objectionable, is ultimately to become more and more unpleasant until nobody wants to listen, to be lying in the bath singing 'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!' as "The Birthday Party” should be important but they'll never do anything as worthwhile 'Magical Mystery Tour'. The aim is to reach a dividing line which all the great artists of our time have done the Beatles, Bowie. ..sometimes I'm dubious the Psychedelic Furs will ever get there... but I'm trying...”
I know the answer, but for the sake of the feature, I wonder if the effort's worth it, if, assuming we only get one life each, Butler spends his time wisely? "That's not an assumption, that's a fact." He laughs. "My mother's always asking me why I don't get a proper job but I think I'm using my time quite well.”
"It depends what you feel the purpose of life is, if there is any purpose? I think... partly... to make yourself as open as possible... as accepting as possible... as..eh. ..I've gotta think about this... turn that tape off..."
