1984, and The Psychedelic Furs are down to a trio. They’ve moved on to a producer, Keith Forsey, who was having a bit of a moment, having just hit big with Billy Idol’s albums, co-written the song from “Flashdance,” and more.
1984, and our household is down to a duo – our roommate of five years shipped off to California in late 1983, and the two of us were married. By the time this was released in August, we were near the end of our time in our first marriage apartment in downtown Syracuse, and looking toward moving even more downtown and becoming pioneering renters in what was then still an old assemblage of half-used warehouses, assorted small businesses and a chicken-packing plant known as Armory Square. Alas, that apartment was not ready when we needed it to be and, unable to stay on in our old place, we had to scramble to find a new apartment, which we ended up locating in the lovely and then up-and-coming Hawley-Green neighborhood of Syracuse. And it was likely there, in the fall of 1984, that we first listened to Mirror Moves. I certainly still associate it with that apartment.
The apartment was in a pretty freshly renovated old Edwardian on Green Street, two doors down from Lodi. We had a very nice landlord who lived very nearby and had renovated a number of the buildings on the street. As unlikely as it seemed at the time, we once again had a two-story apartment – this one entered through the kitchen and then opened onto a nice long living room, and upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Our bedroom was a step up and a little low-ceilinged, tucked into one of the eaves of the house, with a window at about knee level and a nice skylight. There was a magic to it. The whole apartment, though it opened mostly to the east with two windows on the south, was light and lovely when Syracuse had sun, which wasn’t extremely often. Next door, we watched our neighbor Cosmo (who didn’t speak much English) tend to his grape vines and make his own wine. We had five wonderful years there, hard as that may be for me to believe now – the whole latter half of our 20s, when we were figuring out who we were, what we wanted to do together, what we wanted to be together. Unfortunately, the answer to that led to having to give up that apartment when I had an opportunity in Albany, which forced our first year apart for the sake of career, when Lee was tucked into a sweet but cheaper apartment down the street while I lived in a crusty fourth-floor walkup in downtown Albany until we were able to count on the future. But that was still a few years off.
I came into “Mirror Moves” with my love of Psych Furs being an essential part of my personality. And, I really liked it at the time, but also it felt like something different, a continued move away from the sound from that first album that I still really revered. Even compared to “Forever Now,” this seemed beyond polished. The songs were mostly so strong that didn’t matter – I found “The Ghost Iin You,” “Heaven,” and “Alice’s House” to be instantly infectious. I’m confused to this day that “Highwire Days” closes the album, because it just doesn’t sound like a closer. This got a lot of play in those first couple of years at Green Street. Those songs all figured in my mix tapes of the day, and their production sound kinda set the tone for the other songs I would try to include in that era – songs by Human League, Face To Face, Animotion, Til Tuesday all filled the tapes.
It was a production sound that I soon became tired of. My compilation tapes from those mid-’80s years all have the same ring to them, to the point that for a while I thought something was wrong with my tape deck. Now the Furs were leaning into synths and drum machines, there’s still something a little thin about the sound on this, and it was soon clear that of their four albums, this was my fourth-favorite. Still a lot of fun to listen to, but I wasn’t sure that I didn’t want them to return to their earlier sound, and this one fell out of my rotation.
Listening to it now, though, hearing it with somewhat fresh ears, this is a really good album. And every time I play it, I think of that wonderful apartment and those early years of our marriage, which were really pretty damn magical.
