DIY Furs wear well

Psychedelic Furs Richard Butler's favourite album 'Talk, Talk, Talk', was a product of angry times.

By the end of the 80s the world was well and truly over leg warmers, bandannas, and Bananarama. The Psychedelic Furs on the other hand, whose music still stands up today, were just over each other.

"The 80s were very busy and more than anything, we got sick of the sight of one another and we started to get tired of the songs too," remembers singer Richard Butler.

The Furs sure had some hits: Love My Way, Ghost In You, and the classic Pretty In Pink, from the 1981 album Talk Talk Talk, which was made more famous by the movie of the same name from 1986 starring sultry brat pack actress, Molly Ringwald.

"There is a pressure that when you've had some hits, people want to hear those songs and it just becomes like a jukebox. We needed to give the songs a rest and each other a rest, too," says Butler.

In 1991 the band took a 10-year break. They started gigging again in 2000. On Wednesday the Furs play the St James in Auckland. It's the band's first visit here since playing at Sweetwaters in 1982.

"I personally saw it more as a break rather than splitting up," says Butler, who started painting again and released two albums with his band Love Spit Love during the layoff. He has also just released his self-titled solo album.

Today, on the phone from his home in New York, he's more keen to talk about the history of the Furs.

The band started in London in 1977 when Butler was an art student looking for an outlet other than painting.

"I'd always loved music and when I was at art school I was listening to Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and Roxy Music, and I was kinda thinking, how can I do what they're doing with painting? The answer is, you can't. It just seemed like musicians were people from a different planet, and how you got into that world no one really knew. But then punk rock came along and made it all possible."

So, together with his bass playing brother Tim, saxophonist Duncan Kilburn and guitarist Roger Morris, Butler formed a band.

"It was DIY. The Furs were a do-it-yourself band, made up of a bunch of friends, with equipment we could rustle up, who really got into it, and we started doing well," he says.

For Butler, punk rock brought about a major shift in his, and the world's view of music.

"Before then it was much more culturally significant and there were important cultural figures like Mick Jagger. Our parents hated them and it was important that they hated them. It was a battle line being drawn. So was punk rock but the difference was it was more like being a movie star, than a music icon. And even today, that iconic, cultural status has gone out of music and it's now just about entertainment."

The Furs' self-titled debut, featuring belligerent tracks like India, Fall, and Imitation of Christ, alongside the simmering Sister Europe, gained them a cult following. Even now the album is a fiery onslaught and many of the songs erupt in frustrated fits.

"It was a fairly angry time back then," says Butler, coolly. "It's funny, a little while ago I was watching the Sex Pistols documentary where Johnny Rotten was narrating and I'd forgotten how angry young British people were with Margaret Thatcher, and how genuinely evil Thatcherism was and how anti any sort of youth culture she was. People were striking, there was garbage all over the streets of London, and it was a very angry time."

Then, in 1981 Talk Talk Talk was released. With songs like Pretty In Pink, Dumb Waiters and Into You Like A Train, it remains the Furs' best album.

It's certainly Butler's favourite: "It's exciting for me to listen to it now because it sounds like absolutely nobody else did. That and the first album really made the Psychedelic Furs sound so that we could shoot off in other directions. Talk Talk Talk just captures it all. It captures the time we were in, and what it was like to be in London and it certainly makes me remember what it was like being in that city back then.

"There was a great deal of drinking on the Psychedelic Furs part. For that record there were six of us in the band, which for those times was a fairly large band, and it was very democratic and everybody wanted their ideas to be heard. So there was a great deal of arguing, and fighting, and a good deal of passion about it. It was because of that, that the record sounded like it did."

Forever Now (featuring the stunning Love My Way) and Mirror Moves followed in quick succession but after a string of average albums, starting with the patchy Midnight To Midnight in 87, the Furs called it quits.

Now though, Butler is loving being back in the band and as well as performing old material they also play new tracks.

"The songs all still stand up pretty well. But obviously some, like President Gas, are even more relevant now, in a weird kind of way."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Psychedelic Furs
FORMED: 1977 in London
ESSENTIAL ALBUMS: Psychedelic Furs (1980); Talk Talk Talk (1981); Forever Now (1982); Mirror Moves (1984); Richard Butler - Richard Butler (2006)
PLAYING: St James, Auckland, Wedmesday, June 21