THE FUR HOARSE MAN OF THE APOCALYPSE
Still crawling around some imaginary New York gutter,
RICHARD BUTLER has gathered his terminally pale and moody PSYCHEDELIC FURS
together one more time. ANDREW COLLINS is bewitched by tales of big city hell
and not-very-much-excess. Fur-tive prey.
Richard Butler is 36 years old. He is one year older than
rock'n'roll. Always has been, in fact. And he looks well on it - in the circumstances.
Wasted. That's the preferred image of Richard Butler we
nurture, isn't it? He's led the gloriously nihilistic Psychedelic Furs for 12
years. Went to the States in '82 to record their third album with Todd Rundgren
in Woodstock, and emigrated a year day later. Butler now lives on 8th Street,
St Marks, New York, above a bookstore. People say 'hi' to him in the street.
He's been an MTV mascot, done that; he's continued to put out edgy, discordant
rock records and he still sounds as though the throat lozenge is a foreign
country to him. Frogs, in fact, actually complain of having 'a Richard Butler
in the throat'.
Thus, stoking up on the ragged glory that emanates from his
tortured larynx, the shadowy, disillusioned love-hurt relationships that lurk
inside his tortured brow, and the eternal rock'n'roll Valhalla reflected in
those sunglasses after dark- we label Richard 'Psychedelic Furs' Butler the
Wasted Rapscallion Of New Wave, The Croaking Man Of Rock. Born just one year
later in leafy Kingston, and he could've been rock'n'roll.
"I think I'm perceived as somebody who took massive
amounts of drugs," Butler speculates, when faced with himself, "which
really isn't true. I drank a lot for a while, but I gave up eight and a half
years ago. I haven't had a drink in eight and a half years! And I really don't
miss it. And sex. I haven't really taken advantage of that either. I'm pretty
monogamous.”
I am ready to drive a truck into the ambiguity gap in this
claim, but Butler heads me off at the pass. "In fact-ABSOLUTELY monogamous!"
As the Psychedelic Furs song 'Forever Now' goes, "He isn't very honest/But
he's obvious at least".
He might croak, Richard Butler, but there seems little
chance of him croaking just yet. All dried out, and much less battle-scarred in
the flesh than you might wistfully imagine, his only visible concession to the
Keith Richards/Peter Perrett/David Bowie Rock Waxwork lifestyle is the chain
smoking. Hell, he even gave that up for two years - but work on the latest Furs
album necessitated a nicotine re-think. Puff puff puff.
Dressed down in the very same Breton striped shirt from
whose dampened armpit one thousand Ocean Colour Scenes were grown, Butler is
only marginally more threatening than his On The Buses namesake. Perrier is his
poison. Guarded is his chosen response to questions about sex, sweat and
nastiness.
Is he inspired by the low-life, I enquire, re- running 12
years of gently confusing songs about illicit trysts, trash, power/corruption,
seamy cross- dressing, blasphemy, police brutality, ordinary madness-does dirt
drive him?
"Well," he wriggles, "I like downtown New
York better than uptown." Bah. What a cop-out. This is no more revealing
than expressing a preference for Brixton over Belgravia. "I could never
live uptown. It seems like there's more ideas going on downtown."
It would be easy to write Butler off as a cross between
Quentin Crisp and Lloyd Cole, the gawky Englishman in New York, seeking
sidewalk credibility by living in his favourite Brando/Woody Allen movie (New
York must be full of Greenwich Village Idiots saying "gas"), but his
credentials are strengthened somewhat by a loyal eight years' service. Of his
hometown, Somewhere Near Guildford, he says "There's nothing to make me go
back there". And you believe him.
"The thing I like about America is the distance. You
can get in a car and drive for days and days, whereas, you drive for a day in
England and you reach the end. You have to turn around and come back." But
what of this romantic caricature we foster of the creative emigré genius,
sweating away up in his bare-floored New York garret... "I have got a
garrett at the moment-but it's the first one I've ever had! Hahahahahaha!
Richard Butler, more Cliff than Keith Richards, lives in a
country where he does not carry a vote; he is on a perpetual work visa. That's
him all over. Just doing his job, ma'am. He's a waste of a good corpse, really;
a mere imitation of Christ. But he looks well on it. In the circumstances.
"John Ashton (Furs guitarist) decided to move to New
York last spring, and he lasted about ten months. His next door neighbour got
murdered, stabbed seven times and left lying in the hallway of the building
until halfway through the next afternoon. He had a friend of ours, Steven,
staying with him, and he walked through the front door and had a gun put to his
head. John thought 'This isn't for me.”
NYC is, however, for Richard Butler, and his bass playing brother
Tim, who now lives, quite literally, across the street. That the two sibs,
together with Ashton, have remained tight through 12 years is a key to the
Furs' death-defying longevity. That 1979's eponymous debut LP stands up to
repeated plays today is testament to the substance of their early post-punk
promise. The albums that followed, at roughly one every two years, were
generally imbued with as with a similar twilight attraction. Guitar-pumped
insights into a modern world under constant strain from the push and pull of
conscience versus lust. 'Talk Talk Talk', the second LP, was New Wave at its
least anemic; as viciously critical of the commuter belt as, say, The Kinks, as
overtly sexual as '70s disco, but as it as ferocious as The Only Ones.
'Forever Now' from 1983 was the storm before the lull, still
gritty, still upset, this time (aptly) looking to America for its targets. The
killer track 'President Gas' holds even truer today than it did at the time.
And then came the disappointing 'Mirror Moves', which fell foul of dapper
production and (aptly) gave the Furs their first Top 40 hit, the over-vague but
poppy 'Heaven'.
And then the Americans bought them. Brat pack auteur John
Hughes wrote an entire film around their '82 flop 'Pretty In Pink', which,
flattered, the band re-recorded for the occasion and sent hurtling into the
Billboard charts. There they were, the Psychedelic Furs, on MTV, singing a song
about a lonely prostitute over bubblegummy images of Molly Ringwald in a
fuchsia Prom dress. Very strange. Very 1986. The outcome of this world-class,
erm, misunderstanding was not good: it was the LP 'Midnight To Midnight', an
avalanche of shite smothered hopefully in hair gel.
"It's far enough behind me now to admit it was a
mistake and laugh about it," Butler admits, not laughing. That was your
made-for-MTV album. "Yeah, but more than that, it was empty. Lyrically the
weakest, clichéd, and I hate that. I couldn't write. Writer's Block sounds a
pompous thing to say when you're only writing ten four- minute songs, but
that's what it was." Although Midnight To Midnight' took six months to
make, did you actually put less of yourself into it? "Somehow, there was
less of me there."
Welcome to the whole of Richard Butler. Play a tape of the
new (untitled) Furs album-their seventh-to a Furs fan, and you will be assured
that the band are currently all there. The dance element that was always
present is perhaps a a little more defined, but not in any vulgar way. The
taster single 'Until She Comes' (again laced with the sex that Butler doesn't
like to talk about) is a work that can happily use 'Midnight To Midnight' as cat
litter.
The stand-by Butler symbolism is still in there- flowers,
colours, wearing "someone else's clothes", the "world
outside", rooms, etc. He laughs his booming, nervous laugh when I hit him
with this observation, and refuses to admit that he read too much DH Lawrence
as a kid. "I use metaphors instead of facts," is as far as he will go
into this lyric seminar.
Butler is very much the reluctant star. After 12 years of
stardom-that's cult and mainstream, often simultaneously, folks - you wonder
why he's so straight, so reasonable, so protective, so dull. If you're on some
kind of sleaze safari, Butler's a poor catch. He's still making exceptional
music, and for that we must be thankful, but he's far from the shoot up, drink up,
f-up that ought to inhabit the Furs’ twilight world.
He's got plenty of time for today's whippersnappers: "I
like the sound of all those records-Ride, Blur, My Bloody Valentine-I like
seeing bands with guitars in, making a noise, because around the mid-'80s we
were being castigated for having guitars because it was unhip! So he's come to
terms with his role as Tortured Guitar Noise Guru Stroke Uncle, but, pray tell,
was there a point, around 'Midnight To Midnight, when Richard Butler could've
gone horribly wrong and ended up in the gutter?
"Hahahahahahaha!
I don't know whether I'd have ended up in the gutter exactly-I'd have probably
made a solo record!" An equally nasty fate, eh? "Well, actually, now
you come to mention it, I am supposed to be making one at the end of this year.”
Don't do it.
