Psychedelic Furs look back..but not at peace and love
“Can you believe this thing?" asks Richard Butler, lead singer of the Psychedelic Furs, blushing as he brandishes an eight year old passport photo. The picture portrays Butler, then nineteen, in vintage hippie attire, long hair, love beads, the whole bit. "Back then," he admits, "I was totally into peace and love.”
The Furs' name, of course, implies just such a Sixties connection, but this English sextet's doomy, "let it all fall" lyrics and creepy-crawly music are actually a far cry from most of the passive acidhead fare of yore. There is a certain dirgelike quality to their engaging, self-titled debut album, but more immediately striking are the early Seventies influences, particularly David Bowie (circa Ziggy Stardust) and Roxy Music in their “Stranded” period (thanks to Duncan Kilburn's saxophone work). Strangely enough, Butler and his twenty-two year old brother, Tim, first dreamed up the idea for such a retrorock band right in the middle of the British punk explosion of 1976 and 1977. "We specifically went to this because of all that was going on," says Richard as the sky darkens outside his New York hotel room. "Everything was razor blades. We wanted to be different."
Psychedelic-style rock seemed the ideal direction for Butler, who cites the Doors, Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and even Hawkwind as enduring influences. "Psychedelia is really such a massive thing," he explains. "You could go from Jefferson Airplane all the way to the Stooges. We emphasized the Stooges' side of it." Like many other British musicians, Butler started out as an art student. But when his senior thesis turned out to be "a huge print with words on it," he realized that he was more interested in verbal communication. When he attempted to form a band, though, he discovered that none of his friends had the faintest idea how to play an instrument.
Undeterred, he gathered together some similarly unskilled types, eventually arriving at the current lineup with brother Tim on bass, Kilburn on sax, guitarists John Ashton and Roger Morris and drummer Vince Ely. "We just each took up an instrument," Butler recalls. "We started learning chords and making up epic dirges that went on for fifteen minutes with only two chords, because that's all we knew how to play."
Three years later, Butler says, the Furs are "only just now starting to learn properly about melody." But while the album retains elements of those original droning chants (which the group calls "beautiful chaos"), there are also some strikingly melodic passages, particularly in the lush and sinister "Sister Europe." This innate, unschooled sense of melody, together with Butler's menacing vocals and the band's hypnotic rhythms, makes the unique. Of course, in trend, Psychedelic Furs genuinely crazed England, they've been slagged by some as mere revivalists, and Butler admits that with their name, they are really asking for it.
In England, the band is part of a minor trend with such other vaguely trippy bands as Echo and the Bunnymen and a Certain Ratio. Traces of the psychedelic style can be found as far afield as Keith Levene's guitar work with Public Image Ltd; a group Butler greatly admires. Onstage at Hurrah in New York recently where Butler stalked the stage in a ratty pink bathrobe..the Furs were a little too thin and unseasoned to send anyone off into a purple haze. But on vinyl, the group's sound is dense and convincing, thanks to the two talented producers who worked on Psychedelic Furs :Steve Lillywhite (Peter Gabriel, XTC) and Martin Hannett (Magazine).
The album was recorded in a harried two weeks, and Butler feels, "We could've gotten more bite on the guitar if we'd had more time." He also thinks the lyrics are too gratuitously negative, the word stupid, for instance, crops up thirteen times. "This album knocks a lot of things, which is very easy to do. The second album will answer the sarcasm on the first."
Butler likes to label the Furs' music. "realistic psychedelia. Peace and love, that's a load of crap," he says, with a slight scowl of disillusion. "You'll be treated like sheep. I'm sure the Clash, as well as us, see the Sixties thing as ideal. But you've got to be aggressive to get what you want. And the only way to get what you want is by violent revolution. If I thought our music could do that, I would do it.”
"But I'm pessimistic," he says, finally pinpointing the difference between this new psychedelia and the old flower-power variety. "We can't change the world with music. All we can do is open people's eyes."