THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS: Interviewed at the offices of Epic/CBS Records, London (1980)
(Interviewed by Jane Garcia with Richard and Tim Butler. Most of the others were around the building somewhere but my tape recorder could only cope with two at a time, so they didn’t take part)…
An Introduction
The Psychedelic Furs were formed almost 3 years ago by Butler (Richard Butler) with his brother Tim (bassist) and guitarist Roger ‘Dog’ Morris. They were joined after a few months by saxophonist Duncan Kilburn. John Ashton became the second guitarist in November 1978 and the band struggled to find a permanent drummer, working their way through several unsuitables until a message broadcast on the radio by John Peel (yeah, him again…) was answered by Vince Ely, ex-Photons and The Unwanted. John was also in The Unwanted but not at the same time as Vince. None of the others have been in other bands.
Their music sounds like a fight between The Velvet Underground and The Stooges against Roxy Music and X-Ray Spex, with heavy bass lines, thumping drums, dual lead guitars and this wonderful banshee-wail of a sax.
It’s only in the last seven or eight months that the band started to attract any attention, but as more and more people become disillusioned with punk and pissed off with the artificially-created ‘mod’ revival, they started to look for something different and The Furs seemed to be ‘it’. They recorded a highly successful session for John Peel’s show and then the contract chase was on. Epic/CBS were the lucky ones, and the group’s first single, “We Love You”/“Pulse” was released at the beginning of November.
Slash: A highly original question to start – why is the band called the Psychedelic Furs?
Tim: Zzzzzzzzzzzzz…………
Richard: Well, the name was really a reaction against punk rock, cos the ides of punk rock are so fucking stupid really, aren’t they? (Blank look from me at this point…) What I mean is, you used to get “smash up everything”, “be anarchist”, and like Johnny Rotten wrote a line saying, ‘I wanna destroy passers-by’ and that immediately doesn’t make sense because anarchy really means trying to find a way that people can live without government, and finding an agreeable way of living together. So if you can imagine people who are trying to do that saying: ‘Oh, yeah, we’re all anarchists. Let’s punch each other out’ all the time, it just doesn’t follow. All that punk rock was a lot of shit, because anarchy is about being incredibly responsible. I’d say this band is probably more anarchist than any of those other punk bands, in that we’re trying to find ways to live together with other people.
Slash: Is that where the ‘psychedelic’ bit comes in?
Richard: We’re influenced by the psychedelic scene as it was in that our attitudes are the attitudes of the ‘60s but we’re not putting them across as wimpishly as they were then. I think we’re virtually ignoring what happened with punk, although punk has had an effect in our music cos our music’s got all the energy of punk rock and I suppose we wouldn’t have been signed if it hadn’t been for punk...but we’d be playing virtually the same sort of stuff whether punk had happened or not. I mean, we’re mainly influenced by The Doors, Velvet Underground, The Seeds…
Slash: What do you think when people compare you with Velvet Underground – are you flattered?
Tim: Bored.
Richard: Yeah, bored. I couldn’t give a fuck.
Tim: But you’ve got to categorize us somehow.
Richard: You see, I don’t think we are very much like the Velvet Underground. We did a radio interview recently and I said the Velvet Underground would’ve been as good as us if they’d been a dance been. (sniggers)
Tim: I think people compare us with them cos they were a heavy band and that’s what we are. They were the heaviest band I’ve heard – except for us. We sort of go – 1, 2, 3, 4 – blah. (Makes long, loud psychedelic furs-assaulting-your-ear’oles type of noise) It really gets to you. Well, it gets to me, anyway.
Richard: Iggy Pop and the Stooges were a really heavy band – heavier than anything that’s been done in punk. These fast punk thrashes aren’t heavy. I think the only good punk band was The Sex Pistols while they were with Johnny Rotten – he’s just fucking brilliant.
Slash: How would you describe yourselves, then, cos most people in the States will have only heard the single?
Richard: Well, we’re not new wave and we’re not punk. I mean, we do three really slow songs – ‘Sister Europe (Author’s Note 1: This is a really atmospheric, brooding song – written about Richard’s girlfriend who lived in Italy), ‘Imitation of Christ’ (Author’s Note 2: A jangly sort of riff – about being in an ‘ongoing Christ-on-the-cross situation’ when you’re having sex or being beaten up. Or both, if you’re lucky or unlucky, depending on your preferences), and ‘Sex’ (Author’s Note 3: Ask your mummy and daddy to tell you about this. And thank you, Kris Needs, for the explanations…). We also do ‘Mack the Knife’ – that Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill song – that was written years ago. I don’t think we can be classed as ‘new wave.’
Tim: When we appeared at the Electric Ballroom the other week that prag VEC and The Monochrome Set, it said in “Time Out” (that’s the weekly guide to what’s going on in London) – ‘If you want to go down to the Electric Ballroom you can see 3 ‘mod’ bands.’ It’s ridiculous.
Slash: Okay, so what would you call the Monochrome Set?
Tim: Rubbish. (laughs. I’m still not sure if he was joking. I like them anyway.) I’d say that we’re psychedelicskifflabillyrock.
Slash: A lot of people seem to think that the natural progression, or regression, when you think about it, from the current ‘mod’ revival will be towards psychedelic…
Tim: We’re not into it for a revival…
Richard: We won’t be there if it does come back. We’re not interested. We’ve been doing basically what we’ve been doing for years – we were called the Psychedelic Furs and playing down The Roxy ages ago, when there was a big punk scene down there, and we used to get things thrown at us and people walking out – I mean, just being called the Psychedelic Furs was a social blunder in itself at the time. But that’s all we need, a couple years later, just when we’ve been signed, for people to say: ‘Oh, it’s the psychedelic revival band, isn’t it?’ Just like the mods’ cos we’ve been working and doing the same sort of thing for a long time, so no way are we interested in a revival.
Slash: Was there a particular reason why we chose “We Love You” as the first single, cos it’s got the same title as that Stones’ song from their psychedelic era?
Richard: It was really to establish the difference between us and the old psychedelic bands, cos they used to go round saying: “Oh yeah, we love you. We love everything, nan”, and like putting flowers down rifles at Yale University – things like that. If you say “We love everything” it just sounds so stupid really. The song is just being very sarcastic. It’s not a very positive statement for us – not as much as the other songs, but we brought it out as a single first to show how distant we are from the original psychedelic way. We wanted it to be apparent from the beginning.
Slash: Some of your songs could be deemed controversial, don’t you think, cos of the titles?
Richard: Yeah, well we’ve had all that. We played at Portsmouth Polytechnic – they think they’re clever students down there and they’re all into this leftist scene. Anyway, they thought: “Well, this song is called ‘Blacks’”, and immediately they started throwing fucking bottles and glasses cos they thought it was racist. They thought “Sex” was sexist and all the women’s libbers started throwing things. It was a load of bollocks.
Tim: One of the guys who was throwing glasses actually walked up to the social secretary of the college and said: “Those guys – I just heard them saying in the song that black people have got smaller brains than white people”. He swore he heard it, which is rubbish, cos it’s about a quote that Andy Warhol made about white people getting rich off the fruits of black people’s labour.
Richard: “We Love You” doesn’t get played much on the radio here cos the lyrics are a little bit inflammatory, I think. Things like ‘I’m in love with Catholics’ and ‘I’m in love with Althia and Donna / All that shit that goes uptown ranking’. You know, if you’re thinking about it, that could be construed as a racist statement, which it absolutely isn’t. It’s just taking the piss out of other records all the way along cos it says: ‘I’m in love with Frank Sinatra / Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘I’m in love with The Supremes / Oh, ‘Baby Love’, so the Althia and Donna / ‘Uptown Top ranking’ thing is just a continuation of that – saying what a lot of shit records get put on, really.
Slash: What’s the song ‘India’ about? (This is my fave Furs’ song. It’s got all the ingredients of their best stuff: Howling sax, constant repitition of a riff building into a crashing climax with Richard wailing away merrily.)
Tim: Well, it’s about ‘India’.
Slash: Oh.
Richard: It actually started off being about the country India, but I change the lyrics all the time until I arrive at something final. So, it started off being about the country, cos we’re called the Psychedelic Furs and all that business, and then Mountbatten got killed (he was the queen’s uncle, history fans and monarchists. He got blown into tiny pieces by an IRA bomb last August) and he had a daughter called India, so that came into it as well. Now, it’s sort of half about the country and half about a girl – not Mountbatten’s daughter – but the fact that India’s a girl’s name. I’ll have to have a big re-think about the lyrics before it’s actually recorded for the album cos the album will sort of freeze it. It doesn’t mean I can’t change the lyrics in the future cos the lyrics to a lot of songs change from day to day, but recording it will be a very important time so we’ll have to think about the lyrics in terms of that.
Slash: Who writes the music?
Richard: We all do. I write the lyrics – I write lyrics all the time.
Tim: We write a tune and he sort of looks through wads of lyrics and he sees which one goes best with the tune.
Richard: The tune comes first, really, I think...Obviously when you write lyrics they’ve got a certain metre to them, like morse code, and the morse code has to sort of fit with the music. What normally happens is that we go into a rehearsal studio, they make up the tune, and then I go home and rifle through the old lyrics and find some things that I think will fit, but the music comes first really. I dunno, though, they come together, seeing as I’ve already written half the lyrics before the tune was made up. It just sort of both happens and you have to make them gel. I can’t say, ‘Right, I’ve got these lyrics, you guys – make up a tune to fit them’, that’s impossible. The music comes first.
Slash: I know it’s a long way ahead, but does the “second album syndrome” bother you cos so many bands have problems with second albums?…
Richard: Right – we’re admitting it ourselves. The first albums will be songs we’ve been playing for about 2 years, so we’ve had two years to make up songs and throw them away, if we wanted to, cos we’ve made up better ones, or something like that. I mean, for every song we play at the moment, we’ve thrown out at least 3 others – it’s that sort of distillation of songs. We find it very easy to make songs up but nowadays we’re getting much more fussy. We’ve made up 5 songs in the last month and they’ve all been thrown away – one because someone said it sounded a bit like Joy Division, so we said: ‘Right – out’. But after we’ve recorded the first album we go into 2 months just rehearsing to make up a new set and that 2 months is going to be fucking chaos really, cos we’re going to have to cram it all into that time, whereas before we had 2 years. So we’ve got a twelfth of the time to come up with a whole new set.
Slash: I read that you wanted a “Banshee type control” over your record contract – have you got that?
Richard: Yes.
Slash: Do CBS let you do what you want?
Richard: It’s difficult to tell. They signed us because of what we were doing, so for them to change it at this stage would be stupid. We went in and said that we wanted “We Love You” as the first single cos, as I said, we weren’t worried so much about separating ourselves from the punk scene as from the original psychedelic scene, and we thought we’d do it straightaway; and then we said we wanted Steve Lillywhite to produce the album, cos he’d seen us a few times and is really into the band, and we got exactly that. And I designed the singles bag and all the promotion material, and I’ll do the album cover, hopefully in conjunction with this poster company called “Times Ten” (they did those great Cramps posters) so, you know, we’ve done everything we wanted to really...I can only say that we got a good deal. CBS immediately assigned us to an A&R man – Howard Thompson – to work closely with us. Apparently they’re trying to get back to the small company type of thing, and we’re the band they’re trying it out with.
Slash: Didn’t you think about putting out a record on your own label, or signing with a small company to start with?
Tim: I think that’s a waste of time.
Richard: I think that if you’ve got something good to say, you want it to reach as many people as possible. That small label thing doesn’t often work very well. I mean, the way we thought about it was: We’ve fucked around long enough…
Tim: ...We’ll wait for the big ‘un…
Richard: We were all working up until about July (Richard was at art college and Tim was ‘a brain surgeon’ – maybe he said ‘drain surgeon’, I’m not sure…) – working during the day and saving up all our money cos we had to rehearse at weekends. It got so that we weren’t eating anything cos we were working and going straight to rehearse, and we’d had enough of it. So we thought, “What’s the best way to do it? We can either take one of these offers from a small company, or we can go with one of the big companies that offered us a deal.” We took all the relevant contracts to a solicitor and decided that CBS was the best one. Then we re-negotiated it a bit…
Tim: ...And here we are.
Richard: Howard Thompson was the first one to see us from CBS and he really liked us, so he brought down Muff Winwood, who’s the head of A&R. In the end they played a tape to Maurice Oberstein, who’s the head of CBS here and Maurice Oberstein said: ‘I want you to sign the Psychedelic Furs. I want a band that’ll come in and throw up all over my desk,”
Slash: Have you done that yet?
Richard: No, not yet...But very nearly.
