Sunday, June 25, 2006


you are a young impression able adolescent, with the infinite horizon of future spread before you, north south east and west, you like girls and you like music, but you're not sure what you like best, girls are so mysterious and all the beautiful magnetic forces you feel towards them are met by the strange thermodynamic law of an opposing force, so those teenage years you chase the music, you loose yourself in it's landscapes and thus the soundtracks to the future are written.
a cold winter in london, you have a holiday job at the winsor and newton paint factory, a bleak Lowry building, masses and masses of toxic chemicals and bright tubes, it's as if the willy wonka paint factory had been designed by hells architects. every morning you drag your self through those huge gates and punch the clock, every morning you see the same old faces, wrinkled and toothless, sad and almost undead, as you clamber into your white overalls and head into sector 7 where you and your best friend pour chemicals into a vat, and make Creulean Blue and Perylene Turquoise. Yeah this was not the kind of alchemy i had in mind, but you plug in your little cassette player press a few buttons, slip in a tape, press play and the soundtrack starts, and right on cue the acid you washed down with a cup of tea kicks in.

I saw the furs in London, they were amazing, a 7 piece band, dark and brooding, tribal and menacing and Richard Butlers voice sounding like nothing i ever heard before, touches of Johnny Rotten and Bowie but with his own ironic drawl, 'we love you' like he just didn't. Yeah the Psychedelic Furs were the band i plugged into when i was working in satans colour factory, mixing up huge tubs of strange colors in huge vats, me and my best friend tripped for about 2 months non stop, day in day out, just to get through the fucking awful haze of holiday jobs during the uni break and all through that time the only band we listened to was the Psychedelic Furs who i think had two albums out at that time, well before they went all disco.
fast forwards to last night and i am down the front with agent stone going ballistic, tribal fucking primal mutant music as my flashback head filled with beautiful swirls of crystal blues and explosions of flurorecent Thoindigo Violets penetrate the enmore, yeah you probably recall the furs as a kinda eighties pop band, but before 'pretty in pink was used in the movie and before they discovered drum machines, 'The Psychedelic Furs' were an awesome sounding band, and last night they had reverted to the old format, almost shamanic in parts, Butlers Voice raspy and gravely was filled out, it was emmense as he moved through the set with exactly the same kinda egde and energy that he had 30 years ago. It was a good sound for the most part despite one moment where the mixing went a but AWAL but the feel off the old Psychedelic Furs was present and along with my weird flashbacks, i found myself in mezmorized by, the moments of brilliance in 'President Gas, Imitation of Christ, India, Sister Europe, Into You Like a Train, Heaven and Love My Way.

I still can't work out what to make of that band, they seem a dichotomy with these amazing songs and then they have terrible ones like the awful 'heartbreak beat', but i guess for the sake of nostalgia i will always associate them with my LSD coping strategy in the corridor's of industry, behind the scene in Winsor and Newtons paint factory.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

LSD is primarily a chemical imprinted - it restricts the flow of some hormones, increases the production of others, and allows for the free reception of both. it then allows the nervous system to imprint on whatever mixture is found the most shocking - the one that calls into play the most physiological response (usually the one with the most adrenal secretions, but not always).
so, think how a few months of tripping in a paint factory to the furs has got you where you are right this second.
its just got to be healthy.