Tripping With The Psychedelic Furs
I swallowed the tab and wandered into the slimy streets of Soho. The thick greyness of a humid and polluted London summer evening engulfed me as I pushed through the crowds and into the backalleys of sex shops and rock and roll haunts. Here and there garbage was piled all over the narrow footpaths. I stepped round some and thought of the first time I encountered the Psychedelic Furs. The scene flashed before me...a dark late-night club in Covent Garden, a hole where the bored go to bore themselves with bad bands and fuzzy beer.
It was late 1977, and anything could happen. The P Furs oozed on stage with blank faces. One was called Dog-another lost punk. The others just looked like normal misfits. A gangly bass player had a caricature of himself for a face, a sax blower had monster-movie eyes. They struck up a miserable drone which lurched unsteadily into an aimless, tuneless mess, it was horrible. Then there was a singer who made a ballerina’s entrance as the drone mounted. A baggy brown suit flapped on his flimsy frame, his bruised ankle bones poked into a pair of tattered tennis shoes. His dirty hair was bent back to reveal the uneven bones of his face which threatened to poke through his thin cheeks. Dark shades, of course. He leered pathetically and contorted his scrawny body in convolutions of grotesque lust. He turned his back to the audience and hunched over his broken microphone stand, presenting an obscene view of his bent bones and he couldn't sing a note. He ranted stupidly in a monotone grow.. this was Richard Butler, and I was on my way to see him. But I lost my way in, the long narrow runners of streets. I walked faster and faster in any direction in increasing agitation. Finally stumbled upon the pub. He wasn't there. I half expected him not to turn up, the pathetic sod. I waited outside..
Two years later, I saw the Psychedelic Furs play again-Saturday night in Camden Town, the P Furs were now headlining a big, tough punk club. And packing it they’d built a following. The band now included a new drummer and an extra guitar. Some people were saying they were good, but I thought they were all just fools sucked into an imaginary revival of psychedelic music. The band still wore the same collective expression of abstract blankness, but the sound they played could put you in a trance: the beat was even and sure, the guitars and sax rang out in echoed layers. The dischords and distortion were still there, but they were under control. The singer had the same act, but it was now fired by the sting of self-assurance — the pathetic posing began to look almost sinister. The voice was the same gruesome groan, but now it flowed along the mono-melody with power and purpose. “Innn-di-a-ah" he drooled over and over, often lurching his hunched frame accusingly at the audience as if this word was their tault. They loved it…
I checked my watch, but the time didn't seem to mean anything. The street seemed a bit unsteady, so I went inside to sit down. I peered around the crowded pub, checking the faces. But there were so many of them to check I became too confused to look. I sat down and another memory rushed over me, a crowded gig and the DJ spinning a slow spiral of a song with a delicious echoed sax motif that drifted into someone growling the oddest fractured images of lost love- the P Furs "Sister Europe" was a great single.
I was startled by a pale pink face close to mine, grinning nervously and introducing his girlfriend in a shaky voice. Richard Butler indecisively picked us a table in the corner, we stumbled through a bit of a chat and a round of drinks. He was fatter almost healthy looking, the sharpness of his face seemed to have been grown over. No shades, plain clothes. He devoured his beer as if he needed it. I bought him another. He hunched in his chair too, but the self-confident leer was gone. The voice was quite humble, the opposite of his assertive singing tones.
“When we started the whole thing was punk rock and we wanted to make it different so we called it the Psychedelic Furs. Also our roots are more in psychedelic music, really early Pink Floyd, the Seeds, the Doors, Velvet Underground, 13th Floor Elevators.. all that sort of thing. But we've obviously been influenced by punk to some extent, cos there's an amazing amount of power coming out of our music— we just put the two things together.
"We started about four years ago and we were awful. I was at art school, but I was more interested in rock than I was in painting. You can't say anything with a painting. My brother Tim said he'd play bass, and this guy called Dog played rhythm guitar. Initially, it was only thrashing out realty basic things, 'cos that's all we could do. For every two months rehearsing, we'd have a drummer for two weeks. They’d leave because they were so disgusted that we couldn't play. I’d always wanted to be a singer- I used to listen to Bob Dylan a lot, and then the Velvet Underground, and I just thought yeah, it would be great doing' that, to have all that behind you and make up any words you wanted, say anything you wanted. I don't think about style- I just do it. I can’t really sing. It's a style like the whole band.. with its limitations. The music that we want to do sets its own limitations.
“I used to just make up the words all the time and do anything l wanted but then we recorded. We were saying that we didn't want it to freeze the songs, but then when we played them people would sing the words and you feel like a real cunt when you are singing something completely different, a different melody and different words" I looked around as he talked, and the pub walls seemed to swell in and out as the noisy chatter flowed against them. The wallpaper swirled around in its pattern.
"We weren't aiming for success or thinking we were going to make any money out of it. It was the only sort of music any of us were willing to do. We wanted to make it up for ourselves, really." His face seemed paler and more blotched, his mumble more of a murmur amid the clatter of bawdy voices and clinking glasses. I was losing track of things, but Butler was saying the P Furs were surprised when their debut LP entered the UK Charts at #14 ..he supposed it was bought by "misguided-people.”
“No no, I don’t know who bought it, they're all sorts. We’ve got a lot of punks coming to see us, which is weird cos it's not punk music. I think we slowed it all down …no, I don’t know why we've been successful, I don't know who likes it, I don’t know why they like it, they just do. I enjoy it, and a lot of other people do. Why do they buy the album? If it makes them depressed, then they enjoy being depressed, it's just different sorts of enjoyment. I like to think we are making a soundtrack to England ..London.. the only things we know about. If I get around the world and see other things, I know that I will find out I don't like the way London Is. I will want to get out of England definitely because England is depressing place. The crowd of boisterous drinkers looked uglier and uglier, the bar more squalid, battered tables were covered with slime of spilt beer mixed with cigarette ash, they were repulsive.
“I’m angry about whatever the song's about. We Love You is sarcasm because you can't the old attitude… the old hippy thing was let everything be alright. All that putting flowers down guns at Kent State University, and all that business, it doesn't work. I mean ‘I’m in love with the nuclear bomb' — it’s taking the piss out of it. I’m attacking that philosophy. I resent it. I think it's a pathetic attitude to have. There is a modern psychedelia …at least think there is, but I don’t think it will be called psychedelia. It would be nice if it involved psychedelic drugs. Anything that opens your head up is good.” My head felt as though it had been split open, my brains were hanging out, I stumbled slowly to the bar and saw the pudgy drinkers in a new light— when the opened their mouths to guzzle their beers, their faces seemed to crack horribly from ear to ear.
“I think people should be allowed to be anything and do anything they want. We are just fighting for that basically. It's a happy thing to be fighting for, but it's very depressing the way it sounds. We're anti-violence band, but I’ll condone anything outside of that." His bleat began to fade into the cacophony of noise that is the real soundtrack to our lives. He says he's on "the other side of anarchy." “Anarchy isn't social turmoil, it isn't violence. When you think about it, an anarchist society would have to be the most responsible sort of society you could have. People would have to care about each other, see what each other are doing... all the fun things. When the punks went on about anarchy it was absolute bollocks, you know. They thought it was punching somebody in the face and damaging things and breaking things. It's not about that. You've gotta be more aware, you've gotta be more responsible for it to work. You can't have a society where you can rape and loot and all this business... a proper anarchist society is where people think about other people, but they control themselves."
I clutched the arms of my chair and gritted my teeth: Butler's fantastic hallucination of psychedelic anarchy is rooted in the tragic trap of acid's overwhelming unreality. It's as stupid as LSD itself. “With a bit of thought i think the world could be organized so well.it could be a great place but it's not 'cos people make it ugly... London is ugly and New York is uglier than London. 90 percent of the people that come to see us are pathetic they don't think... they don't see anythÃng further than their own noses.. it’s disgusting. I looked at Richard's nose, and it swam around in my vision. Suddenly there was a hole in his face instead of a protrudence, and his eyes were set on the ends of balls of flesh which poked out In front of his forehead. I wanted to leave, but I was paralyzed, and his voice drifted on.
“I think the world in general is a great place... I love it.
I love living. I believe in living... the important thing is just living…
living is a very important thing and I think it’s beautiful. The voice had
stopped and I was out in the street. I stepped back over the same pile of
garbage, that had now become a mountain.