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 in 1987, Heartbreak Beat, proved also to be their last. The largely unremarked 1989 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 apologizes, 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, realized, 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."
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