April 2014, Georgia Theatre, Athens GA
I can agree that movies from the 1980s, for the most part, are terrible. After the grit of the 1970s, the Me Decade, for which I came of age, wallowed in shallowness and abject excess. Horror movies became funny, movies with talking dogs were popular. Tom Cruise became a movie star — and I helped. I’m sorry.
But the one aspect of 80s movies I won’t apologize for is the apex of the soundtrack. The movies may have sucked, but the soundtracks were the bomb. There are two distinct soundtracks to movies, while not the best of film fare, remain close to my heart, and they share one band with enduring songs 30 years later. I saw that band play recently. Nostalgia is not dead.
The Psychedelic Furs live in that middling realm of bands where it has enough popular songs to be known by many, but isn’t so popular as to be inaccessible. In every way it’s still a working band (like The Fixx or Toad the Wet Sprocket), but a working band which wrote the musical gems Love My Way (featured in Valley Girl) and Pretty in Pink (of which the movie was named for). It only takes one song for lasting greatness, and the Furs have written a couple.
I’ve been to enough of these reunion-after-a-decade-apart shows to declare they are, in several aspects, better than the first time around. I saw The Pixies in 1991, and that was a band that hated one another. Black Francis sang Monkey Go To Heaven like it was a curse. During a 2004 show, and again in 2011, the feel and sound was different, new while still old.
I managed to see the Furs some 30 years ago, and don’t remember too much of it, other than the band didn’t seem to care much if the audience was there or not. It was not the case on this night, as the Butler brothers (and the band’s lone original members), lead singer Richard and bassist Tim, embraced the fans with full-on enthusiasm. It must be heartening to know that 37 years after you start a band, hundreds of people still want to sing your songs. At one point a teenage girl in the front row held up copy of the band’s self-titled first album which Richard took and had everyone in the band sign. I don’t much like fans who do this sort of thing, but the band’s reaction made for a great concert moment I’ve never seen in a live setting.
As for the songs, the band enthralls in playing those that aren’t the hits, confirming once again my theory that bands often dislike their songs everyone else loves. So while I was excited for Love My Way and Heartbreak Beat, the band was far more spirited for It Goes On from 1981′s Talk Talk Talk and Yes I Do from 1982′s Forever Now. With still a couple more hits at its disposal, the band chose President Gas and India for the encore, which it played with intense fervor. President Gas, a nod to hypocrisy of blow-hard politicians, is as fresh now as it was when it came out in 1982.
Another successful return for a band that years ago meant something to many people, and helped propel the soundtrack rage of the 1980s. While it’s unusual seeing a 60-year-old guy still trying to be a rock star (though not as unusual as it used to be), the songs being sung take everyone back to their younger days.
And we can all live with that.
