The Chemistry of Compromise
It's well past midnight on a cool, November Friday in Los Angeles as the Psychedelic Furs, resplendent in their best black leathers, stroll jauntily down Broadway. Ten minutes later, they wander by again, wearing the same leathers and the same smiles, past the same darkened shops. Then, after a brief discussion, the band traipses back up the block, and repeats its street-savvy swagger.
This has been going on for the better part of an hour now, with no immediate end in sight. It isn't that the Furs are fascinated by this particular block; the band is making a video for its new single, "Heartbreak Beat," and director Jim Shea is determined to get his street scenes right. Unfortunately, in addition to choreographing the movement of the five musicians, eight extras and his camera crew, Shea also has to contend with unplanned cameos by street people wandering oblivious through the action.
This segment of the shoot finally takes just under two hours, and results in about three and a half seconds of the actual video, none of which features the band.
No wonder rock stars look so haggard.
It's shortly after five the following afternoon, and Richard Butler, lead singer and founder of the Psychedelic Furs, is lounging in his suite on the top floor of a posh Beverly Hills hotel. The subject is videos, or more pointedly, how anyone can stand the tedium of making them.
"I guess the only thing that keeps you going is that so many people are going to see it," he says wearily. "More people than will see any one concert. And in spite of the boredom of doing it, and in spite of the fact that you feel an absolute fool...." His voice trails off. Richard Butler, after all, is a man who understands the chemistry of compromise. On the one hand, the Psychedelic Furs are one of the brightest bands to have risen up through the second wave of British punk, combining some of the ragged fury of the Sex Pistols with the spare pop sense of the Undertones and the artier instincts of Bauhaus.
On the other hand, the Furs are facing the reality of having a shot at the mainstream that is, at this point, largely dependent upon that most fickle of audiences, trendy teens. It was the trendy teens who eagerly glommed onto the band's fourth album, the Keith Forsey-produced Mirror Moves, and who decided to check them out on the strength of "Pretty In Pink," a 1981 album track that unwittingly provided the title and theme for the film Pretty In Pink, John Hughes' wavo Romeo And Juliet. It didn't matter which port of entry the fans took; the fact of the matter is that the Furs are currently hipper than INXS, hotter than the Cure, and poised on the brink of a major commercial breakthrough.
Consider the band's summer/fall tour of America last year. Despite the fact that Mirror Moves was two years old and that its successor, Midnight To Midnight, wasn't due until late January '87, the Psychedelic Furs did land-office business, not just at the college dates that have long been their bread-and-butter, but at outdoor amphitheaters as well. In fact, the Furs were specifically cited in a Rolling Stone story as being one of the few bands on tour last year to escape the summer concert-ticket sales slump.
But there's a big difference between exciting an audience and pleasing the camera, and that's what's eating Richard Butler about the previous night's work. "I mean, I'll dance around onstage when I've got the band there and it feels like it's working," he says, "but doing it in front of the studio full of technicians and extras and whatever, it's just not my bag.'
Is the problem having to manufacture enthusiasm on cue? "Maybe enthusiasm's always manufactured," he hedges. "I don't know. I mean, there are times when you're on tour and you've been traveling all day and you really don't feel like doing a show, yet you psyche yourself up. And once you get out there, the audience is behind you, and you don't have to fake it any more."
The power of rock 'n' roll comes through regardless?
Butler grimaces. "To believe in something like rock 'n' roll..." he says, his words trailing off in a shrug of incredulity. "Rock 'n' rollers believe in rock as a myth," he says. "Somebody like Bruce Springsteen will extol the virtues of it as a way of life, almost, and I just don't see that as a way of life. I don't feel that as a way of life."
Well, then, how does he feel about rock 'n' roll? "Just as a means of expression," he says flatly. "But without being too arty. Because what I would call the arty kind of rockers, I don't like that as well. I think it gets too airy-fairy and pretentious. I fall somewhere in the middle. I like the music to have some balls, but on the other hand, I don't like it to be completely ignorant, or stupid, or inane. Inane more than any- thing." Hearing him say it, it's easy to get a sense of just what about rock makes Richard Butler passionate. Still, the question remains: Just what does he believe in?
Forming the Psychedelic Furs was Richard Butler's idea. "I guess all that came out of the punk-rock time," he says. "I mean, it's a cliché, but it's really true that when you looked around at the musicians that were going around in the mid-70s, like Genesis and Yes and ELO and all that crap, you didn't feel like making music.
"Well, it's not like you didn't feel like it," he says, backing off a bit. "It's just that it didn't seem possible. Those guys were always fond of telling you how much their synthesizers cost and how they approached music, and it sounded very complicated. It felt like you couldn't do it. When punk rock came along, it showed people what was important about music. It wasn't how many notes you could play in how many seconds, or how many chords you knew. It was just what you had to say, basically, and a bit of rebellion and spirit." Punk was also a reasonable alternative to the boredom and hopelessness endemic to English adolescent lives back then.
Like most Londoners his age, Richard Butler was irresistibly attracted by the energy and promise of punk, for not only did it provide a means to shake off the rage and frustration of day-to-day life, but it provided an attractive alternative to the dull gray countenance of the English establishment.
Richard didn't need punk to show him the lesson of questioning authority; for that, he already had his father. "He's communist and atheist, a very radical old guy," Richard says of his dad. "He spent all of his life working for the government, and he likes the idea of sticking your finger up to the establishment. I probably owe more to him than I know."
Not that the living was especially easy in the Butler household. "It certainly wasn't anything like being brought up in a regular kind of family," he says. "It was hell at times. I remember having a nervous breakdown at about seventeen. It was just craziness in the family. I didn't come out of a broken home, but it was near as dammit."
Nonetheless, Richard not only stuck it out, but built his band there. "Richard said, 'Do you want to form a band?" recalls Tim Butler, three years Richard's junior and the youngest of the Butler brothers. "What instrument do you want to play?" Simon, the middle brother, already played guitar, so Tim decided "it was going to be between drums or bass, and I couldn't afford a drum kit, so I went for bass."
"He figured bass was easier than guitar 'cause it has less strings," cracks Richard. “I found out it's not," deadpans Tim. In truth, though, the early band owed more to middle brother Simon than to Richard or Tim. "It was just messing around with a few of his school friends," says Tim of the band's initial line-up. "The original guitarist [Roger Morris] used to go to school with my other brother and the sax player [Duncan Kilburn]. We started messing around in the front room at home, and we got too loud to be in the front room and moved into a rehearsal hall-not seriously, just to have some fun."
Eventually, says Tim, the band decided, "Hey, why not have a gig?' And it went from there." It was about this time that the nascent band became "the Psychedelic Furs," a name Richard devised in opposition to the "harsh, violent" names of then-current punk bands. There was also a distinct 60s sensibility, if not outright psychedelic edge, to the band's sound then. "In our first five or six live gigs," recalls Tim, "we used to do 'Real Cool Time' by Iggy Pop, and stuff like that. Used to jam out for twenty-minute songs. Which was quite revolutionary for that time. It was all three-chord thrashes then, so it took people by surprise. We picked up a following quickly doing it, so they obviously wanted it.”
Somewhere along the way, Simon dropped out, leaving the early Furs in need of another guitarist. This is when John Ashton entered the picture. Although born a Londoner, Ashton grew up in the Midlands, which wasn't a terribly exciting place to be in 1977. "I was bored with what was going on,' he says. "I decided to go to London and seek my fame and fortune." Ashton "must have hung around London for a year or so" before finding any musical companionship, and even that proved disappointingly temporary. Things changed, though, in late 1978, when a friend turned up one night with a tape and news of a band in need of a guitarist. "It was the Furs, the original Furs," Ashton says.
"It was my birthday, I was twenty-one that night, and when he came 'round, I didn't want to go out. He persuaded me to go, and we went along to a dingy little studio. I listened, and liked what I saw, liked what I heard. Got up, had a play with them, and they asked me to join the band. A few nights after that I went to see their first show, and it was all the things I was into-Iggy & the Stooges, and the Velvet Underground, along with all the more contemporary bands. What I saw in the Furs then was a cross between all that and say, the energy of the Pistols, so for me it was the perfect thing." There was also a burgeoning catalog of originals, as "India," "We Love You," "Imitation Of Christ" and "Blacks/Radio" [off the British version of the first album] were all in band book by then.
After Ashton joined, the line-up was finalized by the addition of drummer Vince Ely. The Furs "rehearsed for about two months, and did our first show in January '79," Ashton says. "By September '79 we were signed to CBS/Columbia, and by November, we were in the studio recording our first album."
It was quite a creative period for the band. "I'd say that fifty percent of what I heard on that first tape is there on the first album," claims Ashton. "We'd written a few things together- 'India,' 'Wedding Song'-but I think the whole sound of the Psychedelic Furs evolved around that year.'
This was the "stupid" period of the Furs' development, with that particular adjective cropping up repeatedly in the band's lyrics. "I remember reading a review where somebody'said I'd used 'stupid' thirteen or fourteen times on the first album," laughs Richard. "I really didn't think twice about it. I liked the sound of the word-it was good and negative, which is what I felt like at the time."
Still, Richard insists that "musically, we weren't very together then. I don't think the record company signed us on musical abilities at all. They came down to see us at the Music place was sold out by word-of-mouth. They saw the amount of Machine, which holds a couple of thousand people, and the people there, and thought, 'Wow, these guys sound good, they look good, the audience seems to like them, so hey!" He laughs. "It was a good time to be a band and get signed. The business didn't understand punk rock at any point, and all of a sudden they didn't know what to sign. That was when they signed some of their most interesting things."
No sooner had the ink dried on the contracts than the Furs were in the studio. The group cut its first single, "We Love You," with the team of Howard Thompson and Ian Taylor, and then teamed with Steve Lillywhite for their first album. Working with Lillywhite brought out the best in the young band, in part because the fledgling producer had the engineering know-how needed to capture the raw pulse of the Furs' guitar-and-drum attack, but mostly because he was open to the spontaneity that unleashed the band's creative instincts.
Ashton vividly remembers one particular session. "We had recorded a version of 'India,' and were looking for another song for the album," he relates. "The sax player was playing this riff, and Steve Lillywhite said, 'That's a great riff there-you should build a song around that.' So they did. "We started with Vince laying down this bit, and then it just came, like just not thinking about it." The result was "Wedding Song," one of the strongest efforts on the first album. Still, The Psychedelic Furs had its failings, among them Richard's capricious approach to pitch. Steve Lillywhite later complained in this magazine that Richard's vocals were "really, really bad, and I think it's my fault because I didn't push [him] enough."
But Butler disagrees. "What actually happened was I refused to go in and do 'em more than once," he says. "I'd often be drunk and just go in and do it when the time was right. And that would be it. I'd say, 'Well, look, I meant it that time, and I don't care whether this moment was out of tune or that one sounded too harsh.' I felt like I meant it when I sang it and that's what was important. I guess, really, it still is, and I don't regret that I did it. The fact that it's difficult to listen to is something else again," he laughs.
The Psychedelic Furs did quite well, entering the British charts at number eighteen while building an impressive buzz on this side of the Atlantic. The Furs made their first foray to the United States in the fall of '80, arriving in advance of a domestic release of the band's debut.
Nonetheless, the show I saw, at the 9:30 Club in Washington, was packed. The audience was eager, and the band didn't let them. down, unleashing a sort of controlled chaos that quickly had the club throbbing.
Backstage, it was clear that this band was going places. Not only were the Butler brothers already talking about a follow-up to the band's debut, but Richard did his best to act nonchalant while explaining that David Bowie wanted to produce the group's second album.
As it turned out, Steve Lillywhite wound up producing Talk Talk Talk, the band's second album. But rather than fall into any sophomore slump, the band had grown quite a bit. Musically, the Furs had become amazingly confident. The driving pulse of the early drones had been refined into the efficient torque of "Into You Like A Train" and "Mr. Jones," while the band's punk melodicism had grown into the gruff charm of "I Wanna Sleep With You" and the concise majesty of "Pretty In Pink."
Then there were the songs that sounded utterly unlike anything that had come before, like "Dumb Walters," an arch, complex tune that evoked the Berlin Trilogy Bowie without openly aping him. Add in the gentle "She Is Mine" or the haunting "All Of This & Nothing," and it became eminently obvious that the Psychedelic Furs had reached a new musical maturity.
Lyrically, though, the band had headed into equally unexpected territory, for in place of the sneering rage of the debut, the new songs seemed positively sex-obsessed. "I remember when I came up with the title 'Into You Like A Train,' they said, 'You can't do that, you can't write that song! People will consider it sexist,"" laughs Richard. "Exactly the same thing happened with 'I Wanna Sleep With You.' That kind of got my back up, and I thought, 'Well, why the hell not?"
Of course, given the band's new-found celebrity, it was tempting to assume that the sex lyrics were the result of an influx of new wave groupies, but Richard regretfully insists that wasn't the case. "I guess we were a boys' band for the first couple of albums," he says. "It was on the Forever Now tour that we started getting girls at the front, and it's just happened now that we get young, screaming girls at the front-which I thought would never happen." Stardom, however limited, had its cost.
"There was a lot of feeling. We'd just burnt ourselves out; we hated each other." Simon's old school chums, guitarist Roger Morris and saxophonist Duncan Kilburn, ended up in one camp, with Richard, Tim and John in another. (Drummer Vince Ely managed to avoid the fray entirely.) Eventually, push came to shove, and Morris and Kilburn were de-Furred.
"I see Roger once in a while," says John. "He always felt that it was Richard who didn't want him in the band any more. That's not quite true- and I think he understands more so now-but we got into a situation where, not being that experi- enced, there was a lot of general conflict in the band. We had a really shitty tour of Europe which just blew everything out. Richard phoned me up one night and said, 'I can't go on like this. If you want to carry on, great, but I can't work with Dun- can and Roger any more.' And I said yeah, all right. That was the beginning of it."
With their line-up reduced to a quartet, the Furs began work on their third album. Once again, the band considered getting a celebrity producer- Ric Ocasek of the Cars said in the fall of '81 that he'd do the album as soon as he finished work on his own Beatitude-but the Furs ended up recording Forever Now with Todd Rundgren. Once again, the band broadened its horizons. With Morris and Kilburn gone, they used session players for the sax and keyboard parts, and even added a cellist for several numbers.
But it wasn't so much the instrumentation as the sound and sensibility that set the album apart. The music, thanks to such touches as the dreamy "Sleep Comes Down" or the ominous mix given "Only You And I," underscored the Psychedelic as- pect of the Furs' moniker, while the lyrics, from the oblique gay undercurrent of "Love My Way" to the overt politics of "President Gas," showed that Richard had more to offer than mere wordplay.
At the same time, though, Forever Now gave the Furs a more polished and commercial sound, putting the band closer to the mainstream without actually compromising its aesthetic. Still, it proved a rather tentative step.
"Forever Now was an interesting direction," assesses Richard. "We were interested in working with Todd and getting some psychedelic-type sounds, which he was good at getting. But having done it, to take it any step further would have meant us sounding like ELO, which was something I couldn't see. I like the cello in 'President Gas,' but if we extended that sound and involved it in more stuff, there was a danger of sounding like all of these bands we hate."
Forever Now gave the band its first American single of any consequence, "Love My Way," a song Richard describes as having been "written about a girl with a gay relationship." But it also cost the band drummer Vince Ely. "He felt that he didn't really want to deal with us any more on that level," shrugs Ashton. "I guess we were assholes in those days. We used to drink a hell of a lot, and he was one of the straightest-probably the straightest. He just decided to pursue his own career, so it was then down to the three of us for the next album.”
Of course, Richard, Tim and John could hardly manage a tour by themselves, so in order to facilitate road dates, the Furs fleshed out their line-up with drummer Phil Calvert (who dropped out before the tour's end), saxophonist Gary Windo, cellist Ann Sheldon, and a string of keyboard players. Thanks to Richard's tremendous charisma, the group had its moments onstage, but between muddy stage sound (which Richard blamed on the difficulty of amplifying the cello) and an unmanaged repertoire, the Furs were as likely to frustrate as to elate. Part of the problem was a matter of personnel, for the lines between real and fake Furs had been pretty clearly drawn. As Richard said at the time, "We explained to all of them when they started playing with us, 'Look, for the moment, you're sort of session musicians." Needless to say, none of them appeared on the next album, Mirror Moves.
By this point, the Furs were floundering. With only three members in the permanent line-up, the band was unable to work out its material in rehearsal as it once had; complicating things still further was the fact that Richard and Tim had moved to Manhattan, while John stayed back in England.
As a result, the songs for Mirror Moves were assembled by mail. "John, living in England, will write tunes that are basically just drum machine and guitar," explains Tim, "and then sends them over to me and Richard, who write drum machine, bass and rough vocal. And then we exchange them. Every now and then, we get together in a rehearsal studio and do up proper demos. Then we sort of split up again."
It's an impersonal way to work, and it carried over into the making of Mirror Moves. With producer Keith Forsey at the helm, the emphasis in the studio was on precision and polish, qualities the Furs had flirted with, but never fondly pursued. Tim recalls the agony of laying bass parts to Forsey's Linn-Drum patterns. "It was just me and a drum machine in the studio," he says. "I like working with a whole band in the studio- you get more chance to jam out. There's a paranoia when it's you and a drum machine; it's like, 'I can't leave a gap here, because everybody's watching me from the control room.”
"In retrospect, it was very sterile," agrees John. "We'd never go in as a band, we couldn't say, 'Hang on a minute, try this.' You follow that guy, you follow Forsey, you feel very alone. It's not quite the same as a bit of eye contact, so you know when the accent's coming and you anticipate each other. There was a human element missing. It didn't have the bollocks, really.”
“I think we did want to be more accessible," says Richard, "but I think we went too far in a way. I kind of missed the edge of John's guitar on that album. Nonetheless, Mirror Moves was easily the band's biggest selling album, giving the Furs enough momentum to move into auditoriums for good. Then, after almost a year on the road behind Mirror Moves, the band was approached by director John Hughes, who had developed a film script around a song from Talk Talk Talk. It was called "Pretty In Pink."
Coming on the heels of Mirror Moves, Pretty In Pink seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to push the Psychedelic Furs into the mainstream. Thanks to the success of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Hughes was seen as having a direct line into the American teen psyche; add in the fact that Pretty In Pink had been created expressly for starlet Molly Ringwald, and the film seemed like a sure shot from the start.
Never mind that the script wasn't exactly an adaptation of the song. Richard diplomatically suggests that "the girl I had in mind was a bit more down-market than Molly Ringwald." Tim is a bit more blunt. "Pretty In Pink' can be seen as being pretty in the nude, in the pink. You can read different ideas into it, and John Hughes read his own ideas into it." But having the song's sluttish Caroline transformed into Ringwald's brainy, nonconformist Andy wasn't the only com- promise made; the Furs ended up re-recording the song for the film.
“They wanted the song, and we didn't want to use the original because we thought it was out of time," says Ashton. "We thought we could actually make a more up-to-date, more contemporary version. We weren't doing anything at the time, and it was a chance to go into the studio, so we took it. Whether it was the right thing or not, I'm not sure."
Richard is. "We thought we'd go in and try and do it better, which we failed to do," he says. "The original song had a spirit about it, an attitude that can't be bettered. It wasn't about clean playing, it was about attitude. It put the attitude over perfectly.' Even if Pretty In Pink was something of a failure musically, it did wonders for the band's profile. Not only did the Furs suddenly discover themselves playing to hordes of "screaming girls wearing hot pink in the front rows," as Tim put it, but there was new interest in the band's back catalog. "If they come and see us at a gig and like the material," explains Tim, "they'll go away and buy the rest of the old albums.'
Still, the whole Pretty In Pink episode seemed something of an awakening for the band. True, they were hotter than they'd ever been before, with ticket and album sales at an all-time high. But the price-the musical and aesthetic compromise that accompanied the band's breakthroughs-was getting higher. That left the group facing a tough choice. Should they become completely commercial, or should they try to recapture the music's original spirit? As far as the Psychedelic Furs were concerned, there was only one answer: Do both. For starters, the Furs had to get back to playing like a band.
“We were very committed to making it more a band feel for the new album," John says. Tim adds, "This one was more fun, because we had a whole band together for the rehearsals. We had rough ideas, and we'd go in with the whole band and mess around. That's why it has more of a live, flowing feel than there was on Mirror Moves.
And it was indeed a band now. New Yorker Mars Williams, a former Waitress who added the saxophone parts to Mirror Moves, is now a full member of the band, as is drummer Paul Garisto. Both spent the last two and a half years on the road with the Furs, developing not only a feel for the music, but a genuine camaraderie. “It feels like a band now," Richard says enthusiastically. "Mars' contribution and Paul's contribution can't be underestimated. The way the horns work against the music- I haven't heard anything using horns quite that way, and we owe it to Mars. It's very individual, very much the Psychedelic Furs as they are now, and I'm proud of that."
John enthuses about how much recording as an ensemble has helped the Furs. "The demo for 'Shadow In My Heart' is not a million miles from what it is on the album," he says. "There are also things that happened very spontaneously. You're riffing away with Paul, and there it is. It's a song. The rest of the band walks in, and there you go. There was one we called 'Mafungo,' but it's now 'All Of The Law.' What we're doing is building it back up again, with musicians we're finding that it's cool to play with. It's turning full circle again."
Even Richard, who doesn't play an instrument, manages to be part of the process. "In this band, I'm a catalyst," he says. "If I hear a good drumbeat, for instance, I say, 'Yeah, let's try something with that drumbeat.' John has his ideas, and Tim will have his ideas, and Paul and Mars, but I tend to be the one who will pick through them all, and say, 'Well, this goes with this, and I don't like that so much.' Kind of like an editor.”
"This album has a lot more rock feel to it than Mirror Moves did," concludes Richard. "Mirror Moves was an album we had to make but looking back on it, we thought, 'How do we want this one to be different?' We decided we wanted more edge." At the same time, the Furs have hardly forsaken the commercial side of things. For instance, "Heartbreak Beat," which opens the album, manages to deliver the dancefloor potential only hinted at by "Heartbeat," the dance track from Mirror Moves. Yet through it all, the album maintains enough aggression to mitigate its occasional soft-focus pop ploys. In all, it's a great piece of product, and it's easy to understand the band members' enthusiasm. Yet somehow, Richard still seems a bit unsure about the success he and his band are so actively courting.
“In a way, it's kind of like, 'What do I want to sell a lot of records for?" he asks. "Is it because I want to make a lot of money? Or is it because I want to get through to people? It's a double-edged sword. I think the best rock music is always like a balancing act. On the one hand, it's all very well to be poetic and individualistic or whatever, but if you're writing in a garret or something, it's not worth doing. You're not getting through to anybody, and you should be a communicator to some extent. You could call that commercialism, or you could say, 'I want to get through to more people. I feel I have something to say.”
They both mean the same thing. "These days, it's getting increasingly harder, with the radio formats being like this. You have to say, 'I'm going to go for it wholeheartedly,' or 'I'm not going to bother.' You don't have to like what you do yourself, but you have to believe in it." And Richard Butler believes.
THE FURS' FAB GEAR
The guitars favored by this band are built by Joe Zon, a manufacturer described by bassist Tim Butler as "a guy from Buffalo who custom builds 'em for us." Aside from looking cool with its big green Mirror Moves star against a red background, Tim's Graphite bass is exceptionally light. "It weighs seven pounds," he says, "which is less than a Steinberger, but they look like a normal bass. If you pick up any, normal bass after carrying those, you get bass player's shoulder.' In addition to Bartolini pickups, the Zon bass uses a Schaller bridge and tuning machines.
Tim's studio bass is a Status, "which is pretty new on the market. I know Mark King uses them, but he's like the only person I've seen use them. It's pretty amazing- you just plug it in, and immediately it's got a great sound, especially for in the studio." On both basses, he uses Rotosound round wounds, and his amps are by Trace Elliot. "Onstage, I've got three 4x10 cabinets and a 1x15." His sole effect is an old MXR flanger.
John Ashton plays a pink Zon Stilleto. "It has Bartolini pickups, two Bartolini single coils and a humbucker," he says. "It's a really nice-sounding instrument, it's a graphite neck." Although he uses a Kahler tremolo, "I'm actually now starting to play around with Floyd Roses, I like them a lot. "I've got one on a guitar at home, called a St. Blues; it's the same sort of shape as a Strat, but it's made by a company called St. Blues, from St. Louis. And that just has one humbucker in it."
His strings are .009's to .042's, Ernie Ball Super Slinkies, while his picks are Shark Fins, an oddly-shaped number that offers three different picking edges. "They're made in Sweden. I really like them because they don't break, they're really easy to hold. They don't even really wear down that much, they just get lost."
His amps are Mesa Boogies and Dean Markleys, with a Dean Markley 100-watt head-"I think it was an RM-150"-and separate pre-amp. "The rest are Boogies. I found a really nice Mk. III in Berlin, and I've been using those." Aside from one cabinet loaded with Electro-Voice speakers, his amps drive Black Shadows. Effects? "I have a Pete Cornish board, which I'm really pleased with." No wonder. In addition to the typically handy Cornish switching, the rack includes a Crybaby wah-wah, a Boss com- pressor, "which I'm going to change for an MXR Dynacomp," a Boss analog flanger, a Digitech programmable distortion, and a Yamaha SPX-90 and REV-7, although the latter is used mainly for studio work. Rounding things out are a Roland SD-3000, and a Lex- icon PCM-60.
For his demo work, though, Ashton has been relying on just the SPX-90 and a Scholz Rackmount, both the Sustainor and the Chorus/Reverb with a Korg DDM-110 drum machine, "which I'll probably end up giving away because [bandmate Mars Williams] has got one of these Roland 550's, great sound, much more fun. If you can get good sounds you have much more fun.'
