Whips -N- Furs
Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs is handsome, austere, commanding, distant, mystical, and awesomely self-possessed. Right? Wrong. Sure, seen from the stage the frontman of this most odd of post-punk survivalists looks every inch the perfect narrator of his disdainfully cynical pop putdowns. But when he's introduced to you in the basement of his publicist's offices your first reaction is "is that all there is?"
And as the conversation meanders on, you could be forgiven for thinking you've ended up with the assistant drumstick roadie rather than the great and mighty leader of a band who are, after all, one of the few to have come out of the post-punk scrum both solvent and relevant. They've neither turned into coiffured cocktail rockers for the Compact Disc set or ended up playing the endless round of tiny grimy gigs hoping desperately for a second bash at the big time.
Seemingly effortlessly, they've climbed steadily from their roots in the Roxy and the Rock Garden via the bog standard John Peel sessions and major label (in this case, CBS) interest, but rather than become a British curiosity they took their gear and their chances across the Atlantic, playing clubs, then halls, then stadiums, and finally they're doing very nicely indeed in the USA, with films being written around their songs (the recent Pretty In Pink), their singer being asked to appear on compilations alongside Sting, (last year's Kurt Weill tribute) and their concerts making them friends and money every time they care to leave their New York homes.
Last year they even took a year off, a move which most bands on the tour album single tour treadmill would dismiss as suicide and it didn't bother them a bit. All of this smacks of some super brained mastermind directing them with a calculatingly brilliant strategy in his pocket and a great deal of charismatic genius on his side.
Richard Butler is the leader of the band, and he appears to be nowhere near any of these things. He looks pasty faced and rumpled even midway through the afternoon, and his husky, slightly nasal voice is worsened by his continual nervous lighting of cigarettes. Though he now lives in New York, he still retains a good portion of a London twang. He admits to being surprised by their success, he makes no bones about not liking some of their albums very much, and he says if he was the only songwriter in the band it would be awful.
And he also gets chronic stagefright. So much for the calm, aloof charisma that he radiates from the stage at each gig. According to him, it's not that he moves with a dignified slowness, it's just that if he moved fast he'd fall over. "I get really bad stagefright," he said. "I get really nervous just thinking about doing some gigs. Like the Glastonbury Festival. That was the largest gig we played in England. "I was a complete nervous wreck before we went on. But it has been worse. Once in Toronto I was sure somebody had spiked my drink with acid or something because I was seeing things. I moved my hand and suddenly I saw about thirty hands... I was terrified. But it all stopped as soon as I got on, so it must just have been nerves.”
"I don't think I'm a natural performer. It's not like I'm an extrovert or an egomaniac, I'm a very insular, nervy kind of person. I have to, kind of put myself in another place when I go on stage. It's easy to do in one way when you've got all the music blasting away to become somebody else, someone vain or whatever. But I'm not really like that as a person, so I tend to be incredibly nervous before I get on and incredibly jangled when I get off.”
"I think it's important to be a poser on stage I'm definitely a poser. That's what I like to see when I see a band, I like to see a poser. I don't like to see somebody just standing there in a jean jacket and a pair of jeans. In the early days of the band I used to roll around on the floor, jump into the audience, all that sort of thing, because I wanted people to watch. Whether they thought "that guy's a jerk" or whatever, as long as they watched it was OK.
"I'm not that great a dancer, I'd never go to a disco and dance or anything like that, so I just have to work out some moves that seem to work and stick to them. When I get a move that feels good and looks effective I remember it, and eventually I work out what I should be doing during a large proportion of the set. I got a letter recently which said "I liked your dancing but my boyfriend hated it, he thought it was too choreographed". I was quite flattered that anyone would think that.”
"However, I do do the same things a lot. I remember when we play 'My Time' the song before would end and I'd walk back to the drum riser and then take a diagonal to the corner of the stage and then I'd sing the first verse walking to here and then I'd do this... it makes it easier, in a way, if I feel nervous to know exactly what I should be doing and then I can work almost on autopilot until I calm down a bit.”
"My voice is pretty shaky for the first few numbers. On the last tour we were opening with 'Love My Way' which is a bad one to start with because I have to actually sing. If it was an uptempo rocker I'd stand a chance, but on that, quite often I'd be really shaky. A couple of numbers in I'm OK, but at first...”
"My voice is quite alright, though, generally. Some people think I'm in real danger of losing it because it sounds a bit husky, sort of rough, but that's naturally the way I sing. My speaking voice is like that, too. Our producer on the last album, Keith Forsey, reckons I might have nodes on my throat. On some notes I actually hit a chord because of all the things happening in my throat. But it's not worth doing anything about it; I can sing smoothly if I want to. I just don't choose to most of the time. I mean, I've had colds and lost my voice I can remember talking my way through one show but I've never had problems with my voice. Touch wood."
Quite a few people in the CBS empire must be doing that at the moment in the hope that the next Furs album gets finished in time for its (vague) September release date. They can wish all they like, but at the moment nobody can be sure, because the band's methods of working are pretty haphazard, to say the least.
"We cause producers endless headaches," confessed Butler cheerfully. "Chris Kimsey, who we're working with at the moment, says that he's never worked with a band who are quite like us. It's not that we don't know what we want, but we try things every possible way round. We come in with a tune and it takes us week after week to get it down because we try it with the bridge this long, with this drumbeat, with this bit on, with that bit on, we try slowing it down... and we try all these different ways until we're perfectly happy with it.”
"We're also very undisciplined. That's another thing Kimsey says about us one day we'll come in and be right on the ball, the next we walk in and it's like we're from Venus or something. I think it works like that; some days you're really inspired and, other days you are just dry, you just get on with the donkey work. It's not every day that there's inspiration flashing around the place, and it can take just a very little thing to lift everybody off, like someone'll put down a really simple drumbeat and then all of a sudden someone else puts some real killer guitar over it. All of a sudden everybody will be going "yeah, all right! My turn next!" and it'll work like that.. . But other days that spark just doesn't work, nobody gets it at all..
"It's a very time-consuming process waiting for it to strike, and it's a hell of a worry, but it seems to be the only way we can work. If we were to go in and put the songs down straight they'd just end up standard rock songs which I'm not into at all. The first album we did that on was 'Mirror Moves' when we walked in and told the Producer, Keith Forsey, 'yeah, we've got about eight songs written'. We actually had about two and a few ideas, bits and pieces, which we put together in the studio. There is an incredible pressure of time and money on you, but it does seem to be the best way to work. They're really straightahead rock songs that we start with, and they would stay like that if we weren't able to get into the studio and mess around with the technology, try different things out."
The Furs are these days a three-piece songwriting core, who employ other musicians to tour or record with them. Richard Butler, his bassist brother Tim and their guitarist John Ashton are now the Furs. But when they started there were six of them, ending three years ago with a drastic band slimming course. Richard is convinced it was the right thing to do. "I'm not sure, if we had stuck with six people in the band, whether we'd still be going. I'd be terribly frustrated trying to take it in different directions, whereas as it is the options are open to get a different drummer in, or a different this, or that..."
So why not just go solo? “That clash of opinions is what makes it the band. If John had exactly the same tastes as me, it wouldn't be the Psychedelic Furs, that's for sure. It would be hell. When I write things I tend to like them very structured and not off-the-wall. I like this to be happening here, and that there, and everything to flow very smoothly. Without the edge that John adds, I think I'd end up hating my own songs. Also, a lot of the best songs tend to come of these weird riffs. that John comes up with. They're not quite what you'd expect and so I tend to react to them differently vocally.”
"Like 'Heartbeat', which is one of my favourite songs now. That was like a rock song and I just couldn't get along with it at all. But John did all these things to it, tweaked it about, and at the last moment I twigged and stuck a vocal on it. It was done the day before the album was due to be taken and mastered actually... I always leave the vocals to the last minute anyway, but on this one I had to stick it down in two takes, and then John came up with an idea for the horn parts which we slapped on, and then it was gone!”
"We always do vocals last, anyway. That's another thing that drives producers silly. We always start with a riff, never a vocal line. People have told me that it's a very unusual way to work, but it's the way I'm used to working. The track is built up from the bottom. Someone from the record company came into the studio recently and listened to some of the backing tracks and said 'how are you going to put a vocal on that? There are already so many other melodies going on? But I'm kind of used to it. I'm probably my own worst enemy, it's probably the hardest way to work, but that's the way I've always worked.”
"The thing is, if you start with a basic sequence of chords that sounds good, you can do anything at all with it. You could probably take the chords from a Motorhead song and do a reggae version of it, an MOR version, a punk version, or whatever. Once we have got that, we play with it until either it ends up as a song we like or we chuck it. Only once have we done a song from scratch twice that was 'Alice's House' off 'Mirror Moves'. We recorded it originally with Todd Rundgren to go on 'Forever Now' but we didn't like the way he did it. and we did it again with Keith Forsey. For some reason, that song was just a bastard to get recorded, even the second time round. We nearly didn't put it on 'Mirror Moves' either, it was such a bastard to get done."
Talking of bastards, the band didn't have an entirely easy ride from the critics, particularly early on. Then, many were fond of comparing the Butler voice to an offspring of Bowie & Rotten. “Maybe, yeah, I was influenced by Lydon at the beginning," he said frankly. "But we've got a very similar vocal tone, which doesn't help matters. As a performer he's one of the most charismatic guys in the world, but songwise I can't get along with him too well these days. His albums are always interesting to listen to but they're not albums I'd play again and again.
"As for Bowie, people overestimate the influence he had on me. Years ago, when I was a kid, I thought he was great but now I can take him or leave him. I certainly don't feel like I'm influenced by him now.”
"Funnily enough, I did an album of Kurt Weill songs last year, where everybody was asked to do one track each. So they got in touch with me and I said I'd like to do 'Mack The Knife' because I'd done it before, on a B-side years ago. But they said 'Sorry. Sting's got that one, but what we have got is Alabama Song' and I was kind of dubious about that one because a lot of people before had said 'you sound like David Bowie' and I knew Bowie had done it before. So it was like the acid test doing that, but I don't think anybody could say my version sounds remotely like his, so fuck 'em."
That project was definitely billed as Richard Butler rather than The Psychedelic Furs. Has any more bandless Butler been contemplated? "I'm not sure. I would like to do some sort of project at some time ... maybe. When the band became the three of us I considered doing something on my own for a while I was going to do an LP at one time, but I'm glad I didn't now. There was talk of doing it with Sly & Robbie this was years and years ago, before they'd started doing all that stuff with Dylan and so on and I was going to do a lot of covers, say, an Edith Piaf song and an Amanda Lear song. I'm glad I didn't do it, because it's not the album I'd like to be representative of my tastes now.”
"But you can do anything with a solo album, whereas with a band you can't. If for instance, I wanted to do an album of beatbox stuff with those big sampled drum sounds and go for that kind of scene, then, well, Tim can't play that kind of bass and it would be really phony to try and push the Furs in that direction. It's not what we are as a band. Maybe I could see myself writing lyrics and singing to that kind of stuff because I'd still be Richard Butler, I wouldn't be turning black or anything.
"Mind you, that's just an example. I like Run DMC and stuff and I was listening to that Janet Jackson the other day was it done by the Def Jam guys?, and it sounds fucking great. I was driving into the city from Long Island the other day and it came on and it sounds THIS big, you know, MASSIVE. You listen to a lot of rock tunes. and they pale by comparison. I'm not really into what she's done on it vocally, although even that is interesting, but the sounds on it are incredible.”
"But I'm not saying that's what I would do as a solo album that's just an example. To be quite honest, I've not mapped out my long-term future, I'm just taking things an album at a time. To be quite honest, when we started I didn't see us continuing this long. I'm still surprised by our success. We're not exactly multi-platinum record sellers, but I never expected any success at all. If it had never taken off I would probably have gone back to doing silkscreen printing. That was what I was doing before this."
And with that, the awesomely majestic leader of the Psychedelic Furs pulled himself up to his full height and turned towards the door. "Excuse me," he said. "I must really have a pee."
