The Psychedelic Furs – The Psychedelic Furs

I’d love to say that I jumped on The Psychedelic Furs the first time I saw it on the display at Desert Shore Records back around 1980, one of the very few very recent releases that I remember seeing in stock there. Perhaps it was a promo copy, but I know that he had a copy of this debut record with an accompanying T-shirt, and both the design and the name appealed to me. But, having heard absolutely nothing of their output, I didn’t take the plunge.

So I didn’t become familiar with this first record, from 1980, until after I’d already gotten their second, “Talk Talk,” and their smash hit third, “Forever Now.” And at first, it seemed so much less polished that I didn’t much care for it, and then . . . it really started to grow on me, for exactly the same reason. There is something so perfect, primitive, underproduced about this first album — something about the densely layered instruments, the somewhat buried vocals, the subliminal sax lines. There’s a barely suppressed anger in that perfect Richard Butler sneer, a punk attitude on top of a noisy rapturous assault. Once it hit me, it hit so hard that I started to disregard the other works and wishing there was more of this. Throughout the ’80s, this was an album I came back to over and over again, a dark background sound in times of tension and change, a perfect noise for one’s twenties.

Over the decades, this has been the Psych Furs album I’ve played the most – over and over and over.

It’s only recently that I got into the iconic Boston band Morphine, and it suddenly occurs to me how similar the sound is – while Morphine is obviously funkier and less punky, there’s still that sublime dark embedded saxophone.