The Psychedelic Furs: Come In, Sit Down And Take The Weight Off Your Cheekbones
Q Magazine 7/1991
Some British rock musicians move to America to make their fortunes; others go to avoid sharing them with the Inland Revenue. Quite what the Psychedelic Furs have been doing over there, though, is something of a mystery. They decamped from the domestic post-punk community's department of noisy guitars in 1983, shed half their staff, adopted a more hummable style and have become increasingly difficult to get into perspective from this side of the Atlantic ever since.
The fortune-making initiatives — which seemed to be progressing with radio-friendly smoothness around the time in 1986 that the American film director John Breakfast Club Hughes selected ‘Pretty In Pink’ as the title and theme tune for another of his blockbuster teen movies — abruptly stalled a year later. The Furs' first international Top 20 hit in1987, ‘Heartbreak Beat’, proved also to be their last. The largely unremarked1989 album, Book Of Days — in which the desire to make a fortune gave way to their original impulse to make a racket — sounded like a grim prelude to early retirement.
But it wasn't. The Psychedelic Furs' new album, World Outside, muddles the CV still further on account of being by far the best thing they have recorded for at least eight years. In what for them amounts to an historic compromise, the Furs have finally mediated a settlement between tunes that are hard to forget and arrangements apparently designed for the hard of hearing. And Richard Butler, the vocalist whose charismatically melodious croak has preserved the band's sonic identity during all their various musical re-fits, is probably about as happy today in New York as a self-confessed introspective hypochondriac can ever get. Happy, that is, in a relieved sort of way.
"Don't know," he apologises, reclining on the sofa of his younger brother (and bass player) Tim's artfully elegant Greenwich Village apartment. "Commerciality never was an aim of mine and we never were a pop band." To help keep his voice in recognisably Fur-like condition perhaps, he is smoking the first of several Marlboros. In most other respects, however, Richard Butler comes across as a far more mild-mannered and diffident character than the rasping and imperious lounge-lizard-with-attitude he projects on his records. Like the other two founder Furs, he seems as aware of the group's past failures as he is proud of their achievements.
"Once we lost that original barrage of sound, then we definitely started to lose our direction. A lot of it was quite conscious and I can accept it as a necessary mistake; it's just the price you pay for trying different ideas. Basically, we decided we wanted to work with good producers and musicians. And I don’t think now that musicianship is as important as the basic chemistry of having a bunch of people who are friends, making a noise together."
This sociably rowdy manifesto provided the Psychedelic Furs with their jumping off point in 1979. The band formed after Richard Butler, then at Epsom Art College, realised, like many an art student before him, that painting was a comparative bore. "I was listening to Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground while I worked. I didn't like anything else at all at that time. And I noticed that painting just isn't that visceral. I've never stood in front of a picture and felt like laughing or crying, whereas music does that to me all the time."
Modern artistic principles well to the fore, Butler started assembling lyrics out of fragments of overheard conversations, an abstract technique which has since been refined into a Furs trademark. Then he and brother Tim applied a similarly random approach to the recruitment of musicians.
"We wanted a lot of noise and we just asked people we knew, What do you wanna play? So Duncan (Kilburn) went off and bought himself a saxophone. When we started we used to get compared a lot to Roxy Music because we used a sax, but it wasn't like that at all. We just did what we did, making up songs as we went along on stage, playing songs like ‘India’ for 15 minutes. We weren't looking over our shoulders. People always want to make sense of chaos," he adds wisely. "And they always do."
Luckily for the Psychedelic Furs, Howard Thompson at CBS Records did anyway. Having signed this unwieldy and inexpert six-piece with the peculiar name — a nod in the direction of the 1960s and the Velvet Underground's ‘Venus In Furs’ — Thompson sent them into the studio with a young, virtually unknown producer called Steve Lillywhite. "The sound of the band really came together completely by accident. We weren't very good musicians. We still aren't, it's an ideas thing. But we were very lucky in getting Steve Lillywhite because he has great perception for the direction things should go in and he helped us to define ourselves."
The sprawling, epic proportions of the sound of the Furs' first LP proved enormously influential. Indeed, for a group so frequently derided by British critics as derivative, their impact upon other musicians and producers has always been remarkable. Bono, whose 1980 album Boy provided Lillywhite with his next job, rang Butler up recently to praise the durability of the Psychedelic Furs album. Morrissey and The Smiths' producer Stephen Street cites Talk Talk Talk and Forever Now (their second and third offerings) as the recordings he most admires. Butler's hero Bob Dylan sent the band a song, ‘Clean Cut Kid’, for inclusion on the 1984 album Mirror Moves (apparently they "won't do cover versions"). The Wonder Stuff, The Pixies, Lloyd Cole — who admitted smuggling a line from the Furs' ‘President Gas’, "It's sick, the price of medicine", into his song ‘Lost Weekend’ — and Elvis Costello, who covered ‘Pretty In Pink’ on his 1986 tour — have all made their appreciation felt.
The Furs, though, have seldom seemed particularly pleased with themselves. No sooner had they tidied their act into really impressive shape in 1981, with the Steve Lillywhite-produced Talk Talk Talk — still their biggest seller in Europe — than the band virtually fell apart. Richard Butler talks diplomatically of musical differences: "It got to be really frustrating with six people in the band all putting forward ideas all the time." His brother Tim blames sax player Duncan Kilburn's argumentative "hard-headedness" and the rigours of touring Europe and America in a cramped12-seater van. Guitarist John Ashton complains of his guitar-sparring partner Roger ‘Dog’ Morris's idleness in the riff-manufacturing department. All three confirm that the band was drowning in booze — "though we've never touched drugs" — by the time that Kilburn and Morris were fired at the end of the Talk Talk Talk tour in '82.
Shortly afterwards, Richard Butler went to New York for an extended visit and decided not to leave. "I liked the excitement and the magic of being here. I'd always enjoyed American music more than English, and New York felt in a weird way like home to me." In addition, it was becoming clear that the largest record market in the world had taken something of a shine to the Psychedelic Furs. Though their albums have never achieved much more than cult status here or anywhere else in Europe, strong American sales, solidly supported by college radio, have pushed five out of the Furs' seven releases (including the ‘Best Of’, All Of This And Nothing) to within a shout of the one million mark worldwide. Even the two stragglers — their first and last, Book Of Days — have managed a respectable 500,000.
There was another reason too for staying in America in 1982. "We wanted to record with Todd Rundgren in his studio at Bearsville, to make a more psychedelic album. People said that when we worked with Todd, he put the cellos over everything, but in fact they were there on the original demos we sent him."
Forever Now, an adventurous and integrity-enhancing project in itself, heralded the onset of a five-year progressive addiction to ever-sleeker production values which very nearly caused the Furs to disband in 1987. After their original drummer, Vince Ely, left, toured out, in 1983, the three remaining members went shopping for producers and gradually lost the plot. "There was this pressure from the record company and from ourselves that each record should sell more," Butler recalls. "And that fucks you up."
The first sign that the art school dance was finally over for the Psychedelic Furs came during their Forever Now tour in the States. "Screaming girls was something I never thought this band would have," Butler remarks, modestly rejecting all suggestions that his onstage capering, sculpted cheekbones and eyeliner might be construed as sexy. "I thought that girls thing was funny. We were often painted as a glamorous band but I never thought of myself as glamorous at all. I just wanted to portray something different on stage, something sort of angry. And I've never been a great one for going out after the show. I just like to get out of the place as fast as possible and go back to the hotel. I'm pretty quiet like that."
Mirror Moves, gleamingly produced in 1984 by Billy Idol's knobmeister and musical director Keith Forsey, was a blatant, girl-pleasing attempt to file down the band's noisome edges still further. Vince Ely's replacement, Phil Calvert out of The Birthday Party, was too approximate a timekeeper for Forsey and had to be removed in favour of a drum machine. Ashton's jagged guitar found itself suddenly swaddled in breathy synths. The Furs' first UK Top 30 hit, ‘Heaven’, had a Euro-disco-meets-Eurovision feel, and it helped to make Mirror Moves their most commercially successful album ever. By the time that John Hughes co-opted the band's music into his Pretty In Pink movie in 1985 — a wheeze initiated by the film's star actress and ardent Furs' fan Molly Ringwald — the Big Breakthrough beckoned
Diligently attending to its call, the Furs promptly hired Chris Kimsey — producer of the Stones' Dirty Work album — and recorded their fifth and most mainstream-sounding album so far. It brought them their strongest chart performance, a Top 20 hit single, and a year of unmitigated misery. "Midnight To Midnight," Butler observes crisply, "is an album I deplore. It's hollow. Musically it wasn't anywhere, just grey. And there's nothing lyrically I'm proud of on it at all. Chris Kimsey wasn't the mistake. The mistake was ours. A producer can be party to our folly but the blame rests with us. We've never gone into a studio and been forced to sound like anybody."
The world tour found them increasingly substituting old numbers for new. "By the end we'd swapped so many over we weren't really promoting Midnight To Midnight at all. I started hating touring and I literally made myself ill. I would lie in bed in the morning hating myself. I got so stressed up that my heart was beating out of time 24 hours a day. I'd get out of bed to walk to the corner and have to turn round and go and lie down again." After an ECG heart scan revealed that this was not a medical condition but an actual heartbreak beat, stress management classes were prescribed. Butler — a "tightly wound" personality who even at the best of times admits he'd "rather be doing anything than performing for the five minutes before I go on stage" — then decided he'd had enough.
"I had to be talked into staying by John and Tim. They said, You shouldn't go out on a note like that. Make another album, then decide. Make a good album." Instead, after framing a bitter polemic against the siren voices of materialist ambition called ‘All That Money Wants’ — included on All Of This And Nothing — the Furs made Book Of Days, a record which marked a disorderly retreat to the churning guitars, vocal abrasions and comparatively low sales of their 1980 debut. "I wanted to redeem myself by making an album that was totally uncommercial and as miserable as I felt," Butler says. "Not a produced-sounding record. Now when I listen to it I think it's depressing, but I'm glad I did it."
The purgative din of Book Of Days, combined with the happy advent of a new girlfriend, persuaded Butler — though he still harbours plans for a solo project — to stay put. The Furs' musical cohesiveness was further restored last year by guitarist John Ashton 's decision finally to emigrate from Britain and join forces with the other two in New York. And the recruitment of three regular sidemen, Knox Chandler, Don Yallech and Joe McGinty has also helped to raise band morale. A 12-year lesson in collaborative working practices and, indeed, life itself seems to have been learned.
"You have to be philosophical," muses Butler. "A lot of people make great albums for a while and then go into a decline, but I don't see that happening to us. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want this new record to sell millions of copies but the most important thing is what happens when you wake up with yourself in the morning."