The Psychedelic Furs
The Best Of Collected musical highs of an enduring great British band.
With reunion tours and recent, excellent, albums, it’s a good time to be a Psychedelic Fur. Perhaps nobody could have predicted, 40 or so years ago, that they would still be around in the
21st century.
By no means a characterless band, the Psychedelic Furs nevertheless seemed to lack the stadium greed or occasional blandness that was so useful to near-contemporaries such as U2 and Simple Minds. Certainly their early work managed to retain the punk sneer while adding a strangeness all their own: songs like India and Sister Europe seemed to allude to Bowie and the Velvet Underground while fitting snarkily into a post-punk England of Only Ones-style charity-shop drag and John Peel session acceptability.
It was America that changed the world’s perception of the Psychedelic Furs as both MTV exposure and the perennial Trojan Horse for British bands, the movies of John Hughes, gave the band a bigger audience at the same time as they developed a more commercial sound. With a string of achingly gorgeous arena epics like Love My Way and Heaven, the Furs were able to compete with the permed hell of American chart rock, and to give Americans something less awful to listen to. And in among the beautiful songs there were still sneers and snark like President Gas and the remodelled Pretty In Pink. It’s true that for a while the Psychedelic Furs traded invention and idiosyncracy for a more reliable and somewhat unvaried sound, but in recent years they’ve recovered the spark that made them so different and appealing, as evinced by songs like Don’t Believe (a welcome addition from 2020’s fantastic Made Of Rain album).
Any band that has lasted on and off for almost half a century is entitled to its longueurs, its disappearances and its disruptions. As this Best Of collection amply shows, the Psychedelic Furs have managed the ups and downs as well as the ins and out better than most. As ever, the collection serves as a fantastic starter pack for anyone thinking of getting involved with the band for the first time, or just for playing while making the dinner in a snarky fashion. A useful purchase, and a reminder of the many highs of a great band.
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