Gimme all your jazz: Ranking Psychedelic Furs albums

Until “Heartbreak Beat” skirted the edges of the American top thirty, Psychedelic Furs thrived in the limbo state between just beyond college radio cult status and the wider mainstream embrace of The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode, etc. “I never understood why Psychedelic Furs didn’t sell more records,” AllMusic quotes Paul Weller saying once. The heaps of mousse and Macy’s leather drag of their High Reagan Era may have had their share of responsibility. Each album released after 1980 flirted with submission to prevailing values about Acceptable Alternative Music, yet even their post-peak career had moments. The much-derided Midnight to Midnight isn’t terrible, only its videos are, especially the one for “Angels Don’t Cry,” in which Butler, a dead ringer for Anne Murray, flaunts his size 26 waistline. 1989’s Book of Days, embraced by several friends, has “House,” a murky callback to the post-punk ethos in which they thrived, and I may be alone in loving the Modern Rock #1 “Until She Comes,” a jangly, mumbling smoocher as insistent as 1984’s “The Ghost in You.” They should’ve been competing with The Cure; instead, circumstances and changing radio tastes forced Butler into something Love Spit Love and a wan Smiths cover — a humiliating gesture, not when Forever Now and even Mirror Moves could compete with The Smiths.

However, Butler remains among my favorite rock lyricists, so secondhand in his appropriations of Lydon, Iggy, Bowie, Siouxsie, and so on that he wore Thursday’s rags and made them work — and convinced Bowie that he needed to produce them (he didn’t, alas, one of the eighties’ great what-ifs). To match the permutations in their arrangements, Butler threw a heap of images that forced listeners to make connections..

Below is my solid ranking of my favorite albums, with apologies to Book of Days enthusiasts.

1. Talk Talk Talk (1981)

Suddenly the music has, to quote a beloved influence, steel and pulses and real. John Ashton and Roger Morris’ guitars could be said to play in tandem — even the rhythm lines are pretty! Steve Lillywhite, figuring out how to position the singer at the microphone, helps Butler emerge as the most authentically inauthentic of post-punk sages. “I Just Want to Sleep With You” and, god, “Into You Like a Train” don’t get passes for honesty, but they require context should listeners still have the patience; confused about his confusion, Butler anticipates the awful figures in contemporary hip-hop.  “Pretty in Pink,” a perfect song, imposes order on psychosexual chaos: an excellent chord progression is the exoskeleton on which he hangs zigzagging thoughts about a girl who may or may not deserve the treatment she gets from thuggish guys, one of whom is probably Butler. Duncan Kilburn’s sax provides the pathos in “She is Mine” and “Dumb Waiters,” Vince Ely the fuck yous in “All of This and Nothing.” I had a friend, a woman in her late forties, confide that TTT’s morass of irreconcilable conclusions spoke to her during twenties. I still get it.

2. Forever Now (1982)

Their third album begins with the heady swirl for which they were already famous, but listen: a synth line replaces Kilburn’s sax, and Butler sounds on first listen as if he were The Birdcage‘s Nathan Lane forced into a tux. And is that Flo & Eddie on backup vocals? Yes, thanks to producer Todd Rundgren, continuing his streak of helming records by acts who wouldn’t employ him again. Years after first listen, I don’t know what the hell the band are on about in Forever Now except a state-of-the-world missive from a band too fucked up and insular to notice beyond platitudes. Taut slogans, though. If Bob Christgau thought “President Gas” looked like prophecy in 1982, it looks behind the times in 2018, although there hasn’t been a week this epoch when I haven’t hummed a line, with “It’s sick, sick, the price of everything” and “President Gas, on everything but roller skates!” my favorites. “The Furs’ masterpiece,” I wrote in 2006, “the album on which Butler’s sextalk was sexier and gabbier, the sociopathic monologues hilarious and apt, Ashton and Ely snarling and pounding as if they could scare the Mellotrons out of the studio.” Actually, Rundgren’s filigrees strengthen Butler’s performative psychosexual confusion. “Until 1982 their best songs reflected the turmoil of a front man dying to sell out (back when “sell out” weren’t mere buzzwords) but too chickenshit to admit it…,” I wrote in the same reappraisal. Forever Now has “Danger,” the first disaster the band ever wrote, but with “Love My Way” (“It’s the new role” — perrrrrfect) as a compensatory pleasure I excuse many venal sins.

3. All of This and Nothing(1988)

Readers may have noticed that compilations have made these lists intermittently. I can’t deny the strength of P-Furs’ first GH, beautifully sequenced and juiced with enough album tracks to whet appetites for Mirror Moves and Forever Now. Most impressively, new song “All That Money Wants” belongs. I suspect the fans that turned the single into one of the Billboard Modern Rock Chart’s first #1s thought it augured a return to a time before the gloss.

4. Psychedelic Furs (1980)

Through the miasma comes a hacking of fragments, a struggle over sibilants — is it really “stupid on a Steinway” we hear? A saxophone wheezes like a ship’s call in a Turner canvas in search of safe harbor. Guitars refuse to play regular chords. Tempos drag when they don’t plod. At the center is a singer obstinate about articulating the crudest adolescent rebellion: against women, against a vague enemy, whatever. In “We Love You,” tipping their hats to the attitude informing the Rolling Stones song of the same name, P-Furs proclaim their love for blue cars, the BBC, nuclear bombs, and, the biggest lyrical bomb of 1980, Frank Sinatra: they even quote him! The track is so sarcastic that it emerges as irony. Nothing sounded like this record in 1980.

5. Mirror Moves (1984)

By 1984, record labels had realized that their A&R men needed to do better jobs promoting these so-called college bands on mainstream radio: an axiomatic premise during the peak year of MTV/radio cross-pollination. Hiring former Donna Summer and Billy Idol man Keith Forsey was risky by Furs standards: without knowing it they had hitched themselves to AOR disco but with airier textures, or INXS with breathing room. It worked.  “Heaven” and “The Ghost in You,” whose synth chime motif anticipated Tears for Fears’ American breakthrough by a year, got extensive radio and MTV play (to celebrate, Butler grew his hair longer because L.A.). But reduced to a trio, P-Furs ran out of material, resulting in their first okay record; you need nothing on the second side besides “Highwire Days (“Like a Stranger” and “My Time” boast arrangements as featureless as their titles). “Here Come Cowboys” reprises the mild metaphorical anti-Reaganism of the previous album’s “President Gas,” while Mars Williams blows loud sax all over the multi-colored dance club churn of “Heartbeat.” Return to “The Ghost in You,” though. Isn’t that a lovely verse melody? Butler, exploiting spectacularly vampiric cheekbones in the video, made for a better Bowie in 1984 than Bowie did.