FURS
Rip It Up – 1/83
And so what's in a name? Plenty. Take the Psychedelic Furs,
a manipulation of words deliberately fused to be noticed, to ponder over and to
arouse expectations. And these expectations are bound to be misleading as this
is part of the band's dichotomy - what see is not what you get, but what you
hear is. The Psychedelic Furs, apparently fluffy anti- fashion nonsense, but in
reality Richard Butler (vocals), John Ashton (guitar), Tim Butler (bass) and
Vince Ely (drums), a band with a bluntness and cynicism who, with three albums
already behind them, are growing into something special
It’s early December and the band have just completed the
first leg of a world tour. Richard Butler from his room in New York's Grammarcy
Hotel sounds tired: "Yeah, I'm tired, we're making up some new stuff next
week and that's all we have on, thank Christ. And we're waiting for the second
leg of the tour which starts next year when we do Australia and the Clearwater
thing.” Ahh, that's Sweetwaters, Richard. Clearwater's near enough. Actually
this interview was scheduled for the previous week but it was, uh, aborted.
What happened?
"You phoned us at a very unfortunate time as it was
John's birthday and it was chaotic. But tonight it's my brother Tim's birthday
who's 24 so we've been celebrating that." So how old are you?
"I'm 29, the old boy of the band."
So you’ll retire when you hit the sensitive age of 30?
"It depends from what. I don't intend to be in
rock'n'roll all my life."
Well, what?
"I'm thinking of moving the whole band into silk screen
prints. It would be nice to have the band being an artist instead of just one
person. The usual thing is for the lead singer to go into movies and the rest
of the band do solo albums. We're thinking of different ways to do things.”
Butler has this laconic Mick Jagger drawl in his voice as if
nothing would surprise him. Anyway the pleasantries are over let's get some
hard facts on the band's beginnings bereft of the horseshit of record company
guff sheets: "Yeah, they're crap. We're sorry about that but we only have
some control over what the company puts out and they make it all sound so good
and glammy and it's not like that at all.
"I was at art school in London doing word prints and I
was mainly interested in lyrics from Dylan's Highway 61 and Lou Reed's Velvet
Underground period. And I wanted to get the same feeling over in word prints
that those guys gave to me in in music, but it didn't happen. And when it came
round to graduation they didn't like the obscenities I had on the prints and so
I asked Tim if he wanted to form a band and he agreed. He bought a bass and we
invited a couple of his mates along. Originally there was brother of mine,
Simon, on guitar and there was Roger Morris (guitar) and Duncan Kilburn (sax).
We did some shows but we never had a permanent drummer and we used to get things
thrown at us because we were called the Psychedelic Furs and unlike the punk
thing we didn't have a violent name. We had a hard time but I enjoyed it as I
don't like being part of a t a fashion. When we got a permanent drummer, Vince
Ely, the whole thing gelled and we started drawing really big crowds in London
and we were the coolest thing up to be seen, fab and all that. And we got
signed up.
The use of a provocative name full of whimsy and brain
damaged connotations pre- I dated the Liverpool scene: "Yeah, but we never
had anything to do with the psychedelic revival. Écho and the Bunnymen confined
themselves to that but we've never had anything to do with it. We've never
wanted to revive anything; we're doing our own music for our own time. How can
you make up songs that are to do with the sixties when you're living in the
eighties?"
Did you ever feel any affiliations with early punk?
"We came up about the same time and you couldn't ignore
the power of bands like the Sex Pistols. But we took lots of influences that
the punk movement were denying themselves and, we just pulled something out of
all those influences."
Vocally you have been compared to Jagger, Bowie, Dylan, Reed
and there's a Rotten sneer in there as well but what are your listening
preferences?
"Nowadays I like the triste of European balladeers like
Jaques Brel, Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf. Europeans have a sense of putting
a song across that I appreciate, it's called triste and it's basically a
sadness but it's also a celebration of feeling. Like when you fall in love you
have to celebrate when you feel anything so deeply."
The first Psychedelic Furs' album appeared at the beginning
of 1980. I was less than impressed with it. Richard Butler, or Butler Rep as he
was then, was buried under a con- fusion of ideas, influences and imprecision.
Energy was the operative word but their music lacked
organisation and leadership with Butler's vocals being well back in the mix: "The
vocals were like that because I didn't want them to be more important than any-
thing else, they were just another instrument and I wanted the band to work
democratically, which we still do. Nowadays the vocals have become more
important and they're mixed accordingly, but that was the way we worked that
point and was on purpose." Talk Talk Talk was an improvement. The energy
and density were still there but Butler's vocals were more defined and the
songs more controlled and precise. Dumb Waiters, Pretty In Pink' and
particularly 'All of This and Nothing' were managing to convey Butler's direct
sentiments and moods. It was the last album Steve Lillywhite was to produce for
the band:
"For the time we made the first two albums his
production was great but when it came to making the third album and we had
thrown Duncan and Roger out of the band and John, Tim and myself were writing
much more melodic tunes, we needed a producer that could handle that much
melody and Lillywhite wouldn't have been the right choice."
Why were Duncan Kilburn and Roger Morris thrown out?
"Duncan, firstly because there were personal reasons
why I couldn't work with him any longer and we didn't want sax on everything
and since that was the only instrument he could play he wanted to be on
everything. With Roger, John, our guitarist at present, felt that he needed
more room. He believed we didn't need rhythm guitar and Roger was basically a
rhythm guitarist."
The departure of those two has certainly opened out the
band's sound. The heavy, concentrated albums has claustrophobia of the first
two largely replaced on Forever Now by more conventional spaces and Todd Rundgren
allowed the songs to express themselves via the band’s growing ability. Compare
the evocations of the excellent ‘No Easy Street’, ‘Sleep Comes Down’ and even ‘Love
My Way’ to the clumsy expressionism of the first album. Lyrically, too, Butler
has developed. Again, take ‘Love My Way’ with its idea of ambivalence, a love
song that’s hard to construe as a love song.
“Love My Way should've been the last track on Talk Talk Talk
as on that album I was asking myself what love was all about. The songs were
about love as opposed to love songs and I think I answered the questions on
that album with Love My Way' which is t is telling people not to worry about
the way they love or how they love, it's love that's important. It was written
for two girls I knew in Muswell Hill that were, y'know, gay. And one of these
girls I had been going out with for about five years previously and she just
decided that she had fallen in love with this other girl. I wrote it for her
because they were really worried about it. I was singing don't be sad about it,
just love your own way."
On the inside sleeve there are lyrics to three other songs and
two of them, Forever Now" and President Gas', seem to be politically
linked?
“Yeah, definitely, in fact they should've been a couplet.
President Gas' is about Ronald Reagan and Forever Now' is a dichotomy between
the way things around you work and the way two lovers can be. They're both
about organized politics, the fact that big business is running politics and
that's such a frightening thing. It looks like you're voting for a face or
promises but in the end you're voting for big business. I'm against organized
religion, politics and marriage because that's part of organized
religion."
And Love My Way' is against organised love? "Yeah, all
your life you're told through adverts, movies, what your friends say that when
you get to a certain age falling in love biding hands, giving each other
flowers and in slow motion like a toilet paper advert. Yet you could turn
around at age 20 and find that you don't love boys you love girls
instead." You're a cynic?
"Yeah, I am and I would say a cynic is a disillusioned
idealist. But I'm a realist too."
How does a realist feel about performing before 40,000
people at Sweetwaters?
"It's a little bit frightening as we've never done an
outside show before and the biggest crowd we've played to has been 4000 in Los
Angeles, but we're really looking forward to doing it.”
Your popularity here has certainly risen so, a way, you'll
be playing to the converted: "Well I don't like that. We want to make
people think and we don't want to tell people what to think. You get a band
like the Clash who work preaching to the converted. They preach politics and
bless their hearts for it and anybody who buys a Clash album is already
politically aware and I want to get through to people who aren't."
Prepare to be converted.
