The Psychedelic Furs – Midnight to Midnight

Well, things have been chugging along just fine on the Psych Furs front. Even if I wasn’t overly enthused about Mirror Moves, it had some really good songs, and really stuck with me. In late 1986, we saw the Furs live for the second time, at Syracuse’s Landmark Theatre. I remember it as a really good show, but have no particulars as to what they played; judging by setlists from around that time, it was probably very focused on the first three albums. If they featured any of the songs from this then-forthcoming album, I’m sure they sounded great live. The Furs had that great stage energy and noisy ambience. I do seem to recall really falling in love with “India” at that time, which could well have been inspired by a long live version.

Wikipedia tells me “Heartbreak Beat” from this album, released in 1987, became their highest charting single in the US, their only Top 40 hit at that time.

I despair.

There’s nothing bad or unlistenable on this album. “Heartbreak Beat” certainly has many of the trapping of a dance rock hit, including saying the same meaningless phrase over and over and fucking over. But boy is this not the music I’m looking for from this group, and it’s generally not my style. It’s remarkable how fairly subtle shifts can change everything – personnel, production, songwriting. There’s just no spark here, to my ear, nothing that carries the emotional weight that Richard Butler’s voice can carry.

Unfortunately, that meant an end to my collecting Psych Furs records. Some years later I bought the great CD collection “Should God Forget,” and was mystified by the title, which turns out to have come from a single on their 1989 release, “Book of Days.” At that point I’m honestly not sure I even knew they had a new album out – that was an intense year in my life, taking up a new career in a new city and having zero extra money to spend – but whether I did or didn’t, I ignored it. In my recent deep dive into the Furs – because once I start listening to them, it takes me a while to come out of it – I finally paid some attention to three tracks from “Book of Days.” By “paid attention,” I actually mean “became obsessed.” In particular, “Torch,” whose title meaning isn’t evident to me, is a mysterious lament that I love to sing and am working on doing my own cover of on ukulele. So now I’m wishing I had picked up “Book of Days,” if only to hear if the rest of the songs are a return to form. (Reviewers were not particularly kind.)

Nevertheless, no matter how deep a dive I’m doing into the Furs, I can do without this record. Slick cover, though!

Must mention that this album also contains a mistake that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered in new vinyl – it came with the wrong sleeve. Yes, kids, that’s a Queenryche sleeve, and it came in the original packaging. I was quite flummoxed by it at the time but the store where I bought it, the last iteration of Record Theater on Marshall Street in Syracuse, would not take it back, which didn’t please me. The Furs record did have a custom sleeve, which I felt was part of the purchase, but they didn’t see it that way.

The only comparable production mistake that I remember involved the same store, and they did replace it at that time. I had bought a beautiful two-CD collection of Beethoven cello and piano sonatas by Sviatslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich – took it home, put it in the player, and heard something I couldn’t even really identify as music. I kept thinking it was something that had gone horribly wrong in the production of the disc, somehow making terrible noises, some oddity of digital production. I took it back to the store, explained that whatever it was, it wasn’t Beethoven, and they put it in their player and the clerk said, “Oh, yeah, that’s Rush.” So it was.