The Psychedelic Furs were the most seventies of all the bands to make it in the early eighties. Many, many acts chronicled in these pages wore their David Bowie influence like badges of honor. The Psychedelic Furs seemed less like rabid fans and more like a band who could actually have been on the same bill as Bowie or Roxy Music or Mott the Hoople. They would have been pretty far down the bill, as the group, with their droning sax player and the singer with the nicotine-raddled larynx, began life making an ugly, muddy wall of sound. But they had that quality that Roxy Music, especially, used to have: They dressed the part but kept their distance. Part of them always remained in the shadows. Even when producer Todd Rundgren treated them like a mud-caked camper van with "Wash Me" written in the dirt, the lush, shimmering music they made still refused to wear its heart anywhere near its sleeve.
LM: "Love My Way" and "The Ghost in You" are two of the most transformative, hypnotizing tracks in my record collection. "Love My Way" is the darker of the pair, but both radiate all the hope and optimism of a young girl who's yet to have her heart broken. Whenever I hear "The Ghost in You," I become that girl all over again. Richard Butler may look and, certainly on the first two Furs albums, sound like a more mature John Lydon, but after Todd Rundgren got a hold of him, the singer-songwriter parted ways with the petulance and morphed into one of the most romantic figures in music.
JB: lf I can indulge in a new wave career-trajectory version of Fantasy Baseball, I would liked to have seen the Furs continue in that wistful, vulnerable direction that so suited Butler's phlegmy tones. I would like to have seen them follow the path of latter-day Roxy Music, where they faded into tasteful anonymity and the music became almost mouth-watering in its sophistication (Flesh + Blood = awesome, underrated record. Reappraise!) until ultimately they made the Most Beautiful Album Ever (Avalon—no reappraisal needed). The Psychedelic Furs took another route, but in a parallel universe, "Love My Way" was just the first step to a glorious future.
RICHARD BUTLER: The songs that were really important are the ones that changed the course of our careers, and that would be "Pretty in Pink" and "Love My Way." "Love My Way" turned things around a lot more than "Pretty in Pink" did, and that's why we went on to do songs like "Ghost in You."
I was working with [ex-Furs guitarist] John Ashton on the third album [1982's Forever Now]. I was supposed to have written some ideas before I went over, but I'd been out carousing instead. The next morning, I had one of those little xylophone things, and I picked out these three notes and made this little melody [sings the opening notes of "Love My Way"]. It was all done in about 10 minutes, and I thought, That's good. I can go to John's now. I loved the song; John wasn't so struck by it. Then Ed Buller, a keyboardist who was working with us at the time, put this marimba part on it, which became the bulk of the song.
I enjoyed the direction "Love My Way" took the band. We wanted cellos—I'd listened to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring—we wanted horns; we were using more keyboard-y sounds, and we looked for a producer who would be good at that kind of thing. Todd Rundgren came to mind because he had just done Deface the Music, sounding like the Beatles, and I thought, He's using those instruments. He knows what he's doing.
When we went to work with Todd, "Love My Way" wasn't the song you hear today. He said, "This song could be a great song, Richard, if you try and be less aggressive with it." The idea of singing had been anathema to me. Then he came up with the idea of using Flo and Eddie. Even though I liked Marc Bolan and T. Rex [to whom Flo and Eddie lent their trademark harmonies], I didn't know whether I loved the idea of these backup singers on the song. But [Rundgren] said, "If you don't like them, we'll take them off, I promise." So we recorded it with Flo and Eddie, and it sounded great.
I loved [working with Rundgren]. It's funny, because Andy Partridge apparently hated it. He came up to me in a coffee shop in New York and said, "How was your experience with Todd then?" Andy Partridge thought he was overcontrolling, but Todd consulted us every step of the way. He said, "What kind of sound do you want? Imagine for a minute you're playing in a room: What kind of room do you want it to be? A club? A theater?" We decided on a theater. We wanted it to be intimate and warm, of a certain size but not overblown. We've always been a band that pulls people in. You won't see me stomping up and down saying, "Can you hear me at the back?!" and "Hello, Chattanooga! It's great to be here!" The amount of words I will say to an audience during a tour is a page of a notebook, and they would mostly be "Thank you." I don't like talking much between songs. It's a degree of shyness and a degree of not seeing the point in saying any of those things. I don't feel the need to go, "Are you having a good time, fill in the name of the city." I first noticed a difference [in the Furs' core fan base] when "Love My Way" became a radio hit in America on the West Coast. We did an in-store in Seattle, and the place was absolutely mobbed. We had to go out the back entrance and get in this car, and it was like being in the Beatles. Up until then we hadn't really experienced that. It was more like being in a pop band rather than the rock band we'd been in before. There were a lot more girls down at the front of the stage. You have to be careful of that kind of popularity. We had had a very cool type of popularity, and "Love My Way" threatened that to a degree.
I was a big Dylan fan until art school. That's where I discovered the Velvet Underground, Bowie, and Roxy Music. [The Epsom School of Art and Design in Surrey, England] was a very old-fashioned type of art school—quite academic. In the last years, I got into Warhol and doing prints. Two years later, I was working in a screen-printing place doing prints of my own, and punk rock came along with the Sex Pistols. I got to see them at the 100 Club [in London]. The place was packed, even though punk hadn't quite caught on at that point. I formed a band and started to print the posters for the shows we were doing. I don't know how I ended up being the singer—probably because it was my big idea to form a band. [Our first gig] was at somebody's party in Leatherhead. We just decided we were going to play. We played about two songs, then everybody left and shut the door. They were hippies—they didn't know what was happening.
Eventually we were playing clubs [in London] like the Roxy, the Africa Centre, the Lyceum, Music Machine. Early on, our music was jaded and angry. It was the mood in England around that time: Margaret Thatcher, garbage strikes, the IRA bombing in Guildford, my hometown. It was an easy time to be jaded in. I used that feeling but didn't use the obvious political words. I always found obvious political songs don't ever seem to work. I was more into the poetry of lyric writing. I was inspired by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and certainly Bob Dylan.
For the first album [1980's Psychedelic Furs], we worked with [producer] Steve Lillywhite. Steve had done the first Banshees record. He said that he would like to record us not using very many tricks, just make it sound how an amazing live show would sound. It was recorded very quickly—a lot of it was live—and I think the whole thing might have been done in a week or 10 days. I loved it!
While we were writing songs for the second album [1981's Talk Talk Talk], we improved as songwriters. "Pretty in Pink" just came to me, and I built the song around what that phrase conjured up. I always thought "Pretty in Pink" was a song about a girl who sleeps around a lot and thinks she's very clever for doing it and feels very desired, but people are laughing at her behind her back. I don't think the movie Pretty in Pink did us any favors. It made light of and put a different spin on a song that actually had more to say than what the movie did. It's certainly less fluffy.
The story I heard [about how the song came to be the title of and theme song for the 1986 film] was that Molly Ringwald went up to John Hughes and said, "You've got to listen to this song. You've got to write something about this." Hughes [supposedly] loved it and went on to write the movie. The original version came out in 1981. It was a fairly well-known song, but in a college-radio situation. We rerecorded it for the movie. It was our idea. The record company was perfectly willing to go with the original version, which we should have. The original is better. It's not radically different, but I don't think it has the same rawness as the original.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
"Love My Way," a cover favorite for artists as disparate as Live and Korn, was the first in a U.S. hit parade that also included "Heaven," "The Ghost in You," the rerecorded "Pretty in Pink," and "Heartbreak Beat." In 1992 Butler and brother/fellow Fur Tim started Love Spit Love, which recorded a popular rendition of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" (see this page) for the film The Craft. It was later repurposed as the theme for a TV show with a similar hot-young-witches approach, Charmed. The Furs re-formed in 2000 and continue to tour. Meanwhile, Butler has also returned to his first love, painting, with his 2013 ahatfulofrain show at a Chelsea gallery in Manhattan earning rave reviews, like this one: "Unlike the Ronnie Woods and Bob Dylans of the music-to-art crossover world, Butler actually has real talent for creating captivating artwork."
BUTLER: We'd made [the Furs' fifth album, 1987's] Midnight to Midnight, which I absolutely hated. We were very dry of ideas and under a great deal of pressure from the record company and ourselves. We were recording in Europe. It was a hellish adventure just to get it done. I felt it was a really subpar album that really didn't have that much direction to it, and that took a lot of the wind out of my sails as far as belief in the direction that we were going in. After that, we'd made a couple of records [1989's Book of Days and 1991's World Outside] that were consciously very uncommercial to redress the balance to some degree, but then I felt I'd needed a break.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Love Songs with Ice In Their Veins 1. "I'm in Love with a German Film Star," The Passions 2. "Love Shadow," Fashion 3. "Another Girl, Another Planet," The Only Ones 4. "The Last Beat of My Heart," Siouxsie and the Banshees 5. "You Have Placed a Chill in My Heart," Eurythmics
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