Richard Butler Talks Lyrics

Former Psychedelic Furs frontman - now heading Love Spit Love - has one main routine: Generally avoiding it. When his muse calls, he obeys immediately, whether at parties, restaurants, museums, etc. "I always write things down on matchbooks and napkins," he laughs.

Butler corrects, primps and culls words meticulously the whole way, changing them sometimes at the last moment of his studio vocal performance. Nocturnal Butler's lyrics are also awash with rain, water, meteorological and environmental images, raising another point though the writer is clearly drawing out some natural psychic principle, the local geography of his home always materializes.

Old Furs fans will recall Butler's peculiar distaste for weathermen. Butler's rain is always somewhat Jungian in intention, with everything from "It's raining in my head/But no tears come down...." (1982's "Sleep Comes Down") to 1994's "Change in the Weather," which seems to ritualize his own ageing ("Look out, the weather's strange," he sings.) Butler's move to New York City and its squalid watersheds ten years ago drew his conciousness to earth issues, and now the phrase "dirty water" seems to gush into every second Butler lyric....for lyricists, geography is theology.

Butler started writing lyrics long before success came. Originally he wanted to be a visual artist. As a teenager on a grant at England's Epsom Art School, Butler drew. These pictures as he recounts at age 42 were his first tangible "songs."

Butler reads books, voraciously, and to an extent sees literature's impact on his lyrics. Butler rereads Modernists like James Joyce or T.S.Elliot. The latter's "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" reads "All the women come and go/Speaking of Michelangelo." Butler, in "Dumb Waiters," echoes with, "In the room where lovers go/Talking on the telephone." He reads newer stuff, too - Martin Amis, Nik Cohn and others. Visual artists such as Joseph Beuys also sieze his attention.

Butler scolds bookish, "literary" rock. "It shouldn't be like a fucking English lecture. It shouldn't be, like, teaching people. I think the beauty of lyrics is that it's a kind of a mystery", he says.

"My Best Work Ever is...."

Richard Butler is proud of "All Of This and Nothing" on the Psychedelic Furs' Talk Talk Talk which includes such jewels as "You didn't leave me anything that i can understand/Hey, I never meant that stuff/I want to turn you 'round."

"My Favourite Lyricists Are...."

Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Micheal Stipe, Ween

(Excerpts from AP magazine Jan '96)