“It’s got nothing to do with the coming of age of Molly Ringwald,” says Tim Butler, bassist for the Psychedelic Furs about their most famous song, “Pretty in Pink.” The acclaimed English band stops in Baton Rouge this month. “That movie had nothing to do with the song and its lyrics but the name. The real song is pretty mean.”
Butler adds, “It’s a guy who sleeps with a girl and then just throws her aside. The title means she’s pretty when she’s naked in bed, and he doesn’t want anything to do with her after. Funny thing is, (Ringwald’s) the one that asked John Hughes to write a movie around that song, because she was a fan of the band.”
The Psychedelic Furs formed in 1977 and went on to craft a foundation to the sound of the alternative 1980s, lending a lyrical density to the surface-level action of punk. “Actually, (my brother) Richard and I grew up with my father listening to Bob Dylan, which greatly influenced Richard’s lyrical writing,” Butler says.
He offers this explanation of the name. “The psychedelic part was to set us apart from a lot of the punk band names at the time. We really liked psychedelic music of the ’60s, whereas the punks were saying it’s all rubbish—that they’re boring old farts. We actually liked Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground.”
“The Furs part I don’t really remember,” he says. “We came up with the name on sort of a drunken binge down at the pub.”
The band’s 1981 album Talk Talk Talk, the one that spawned “Pretty in Pink,” is awash in swirling orchestration tempering the arty edge to Richard’s sneering vocals, setting the stage for bands like the Smiths and the Mission. “We like to think that we helped, back in the early days of alternative music, to bring some energy back into music. We weren’t punk, but we had the energy of punk, with a more traditional rock-n-roll sensibility.”
The Psychedelic Furs had an uncanny media savvy, too. A video for “Love My Way” from 1982’s Forever Now found its way into regular rotation on a then-new music network called MTV. It brought them to a new audience, which in turn brought about changes in the band.
“We had a couple of tours of America under our belt, and we sort of soaked in what we started to see around us,” says Butler. “That’s when we started to become more Americanized in that Forever Now and Mirror Moves period and went on to an extreme with Midnight to Midnight, the great catastrophe of an album we committed to vinyl.”
It also brought about internal tensions in the band, an incident of which happened on the Forever Now tour in Baton Rouge at Trinity’s—formerly the Kingfish—where the Sex Pistols had played only a few years earlier. “John (Ashton), the guitarist, dropped and threw his guitar at Richard and stormed off stage. There almost was a riot—well, there was a riot in the club—and like eight police cars were called,” Butler recalls. “When people ask ‘Have you got any memories of your career that stand out?’—one of them always is the riot in Baton Rouge.”
The band went on hiatus in the 1990s, and the Butler brothers performed in the band Love Spit Love, which featured the 1994 modern rock hit “Am I Wrong?”
“Toward the end of the ’90s I got a phone call from (Richard) saying ‘How do you feel about getting the Furs back together?’” Butler says. “I thought we’d had a long enough time off. We had the excitement and energy for it; we’d been on the treadmill of album, tour, album, tour all through the ’80s, and we were glad to be away from that, to recharge our batteries and get our love back for the Furs.”
The Psychedelic Furs perform at the Manship Theatre June 27 to play Talk Talk Talk in its entirety as well as songs from throughout the band’s catalog. Tickets are $40-55 and available through the Manship Theatre box office or manshiptheatre.org. psychedelicfurs.co.uk
