Beautiful Chaos: The Psychedelic Furs - Dave Thompson

 BEAUTIFUL CHAOS: THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS -

DAVE THOMPSON

How to explain the Psychedelic Furs? How to put into words? Well, firstly let's break them down a bit because as with the life of many bands there are phases, usually dictated by changes in line-up. With the Psychedelic Furs I'd say there are three phases to them. The first phase being their early days, up to the release of their debut album. The second phase being their 'Americanization'  and their subsequent mainstream success following the Pretty In Pink movie. Their third phase is that which followed their splitting up and subsequent reunion - the phase they are still in to this day.

It's the first phase that I'm mostly interested in because during that time I believe the Psychedelic Furs were tuning in to something very special. Something that was beyond words. Something unspoken. The audience they were attracting was essentially a punk one, although the kind of punks who had a very refined taste in what they considered to be 'good punk'. And remember, this was at a time when punk was a broad church.

Those who appreciated the Psychedelic Furs might also for example like Crass, early Antz, Poison Girls, Crisis, early UK Subs, Chelsea and the Lurkers. The kind of bands that still possessed a punk spirit. Bands who like moths drawn to a flame, continued to orbit around the punk ideas of individualism, outsider art, and - for want of a better word - belief. Fundamental belief. Punk was a word trying to describe a feeling, as Mark Perry once put it, and the Psychedelic Furs in their early days were very much a punk band though to recognise this took a certain awareness of the fact that punk was multifarious, multifaceted and multidimensional.

Like all the best and most interesting bands, the music press hated them - which in itself was always a good sign. The abuse heaped on them by music journalists being at times the equivalent of what was always heaped upon Crass and early Adam And The Antz: 'Psychedelic Furs give being bad a bad name', as Sounds music newspaper declared, as a typical example.

Almost every time the Furs were written about there was also an inevitable mention of the Velvet Underground, as though to have been influenced by the Velvets was somehow a bad thing. Yes, the Psychedelic Furs wore their influences on their sleeves but when those influences are the Velvet Underground, Bowie and the Sex Pistols, then they are not only good influences but ones to be worn proudly.

Very few journalists, however, seemed to pick up on and give much thought to the influence upon the Psychedelic Furs of the 1960s. The name of the band in itself would have rang alarm bells but it was hardly ever delved into. The music they played couldn't really be described as 'psychedelic' as such (putting aside the question as to whether The Stooges could be called psychedelic) as it was more a bass-driven, forward-moving wall of sound entwined with saxophone and rasping vocals.

The sound they created - the world they created, even - was that of the Sixties being waved goodbye and having the last word on the subject: 'This is the pulse of fools like you, who sound so red and turn so blue. The sound of uselessness in summer, the war is over if you want,' from the song 'Pulse'. Or putting to bed forever the hippy trail to India notion with the line 'Needles on the beach at Goa', from the song 'Fall'.

The summer of love was done. The dream was over. And if the Manson killings and Altamont were the cultural low points of the psychedelic Sixties, the Psychedelic Furs were providing the final comments along with the full-stop at the end of the exclamation mark.

This is all, of course, my own interpretation of what the Psychedelic Furs were about and it's one that differs somewhat from Dave Thompson's in his book Beautiful Chaos: The Psychedelic Furs. But then that's always the beauty of a band when they refuse to explain themselves, or to explain their lyrics. It leaves the audience free to apply their own meanings to the songs and to perceive the band on whatever level suits them.

Thompson's book tells the story of the Psychedelic Furs in a very A to Z manner, starting from the witnessing of the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976, to them achieving the American success they always sought. It is also, however, a classic case of 'For what good is it for a man to gain the world but to lose his soul'.

Come 1987 and there they are, all big hair and shiny suits, touring an album in America, on heavy rotation on MTV, girls down at the front of the stage, cocaine on tap - and coming to the horrific realisation that they are hating every minute of it.

There was always - in their early days in particular - a certain mystique around the Psychedelic Furs that added to them being somewhat apart from other bands of that time who also ended up throwing themselves at America. Think: U2, Simple Minds, The Cure, Depeche Mode, etc. A problem with Dave Thompson's book - though unavoidably so - is that it goes some way in dispelling that mystique. Weirdly, however, there are also a lot of contradictory quotes throughout its pages, so rather than revealing the truth about the Psychedelic Furs it somehow wraps the band up in barbed wire and protects them against too much invasiveness. 

Was vocalist Butler Rep an unacknowledged genius or a pretentious prat? Were the Psychedelic Furs important players in the story of music culture or just an accident of the times who sold their integrity for a swift one off the wrist down on the old main drag? The answer is that we'll probably never really know and it's probably even better if we don't ask because as with the Sixties, when the dream is over all that remains is the memory. And when the memory is tempered with the mother of all hangovers, all that is left is the wreckage and you crawling out from under it.

John Serpico