Richard Butler
Richard Butler

RICHARD BUTLER
"Richard Butler" (Koch Records) 2006

Carmine Pescatore

The inclusion of a Richard Butler song, "Good Times, Bad Times," in the trailer for Susanne Bier's film "Things We Lost in the Fire" (with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro) gives us the opportunity to write about an album released in 2006 that went unjustly unnoticed. It is the first solo work of the singer and composer of the Psychedelic Furs, a band that in the early Eighties stood out for good music and some hits in the world charts ("Heaven," "The Ghost in You," "Pretty in Pink"). Richard Butler, in this album that simply bears his name, after closing the group chapter and after years of silence interspersed with personal issues and softened by his activity as a painter, showcases eleven tracks of exceptional craftsmanship that reconcile both immediate listening and in-depth enjoyment, with songs rich in suggestions and poetry.

All compositions are born and fade away in soundscapes made of distant echoes, frequencies, messages in the ether, radio voices. They all offer sudden and splendid orchestral openings and emotional endings, and all have deeply introspective lyrics. An album with no weak points.

Italo Calvino wrote that "melancholy is sadness become light," a phrase well-suited to these lyrics. And it is melancholy that permeates all the texts, which do not feature wordplay or symbolism but delve into sensations in a clear yet evocative language pointing to skies, seas, airplanes, satellites, stars, lights, and "miles of silence." All deciphered as landscapes that follow existence.

The album starts with the aforementioned "Good Times, Bad Times," a perfect song, an acoustic ballad that becomes electric with lyrics developed on negative phrases (unmake, unread, unsay, unwrite, etc.), describing the desire to move forward free from the burdens of the past ("Give back everything I won"). The following "California" is characterized by a "drone," a continuous note that slowly gains intensity along with lyrics that begin with the eternal movements of the Ocean to reach questions about the reality of love: a feeling as grand and equally incomprehensible as the sea. "Breathe," "Milk," "Nothing's Wrong," and "Second to Second" are songs that are at once canonical and oblique, using music boxes, distorted guitars, female choirs, and restless conclusions. "Last Monkey" is instead a gem of electronics, with suggestive, cosmic sounds and echoes, almost entirely instrumental. The album, opened by a track with great impact, has an epilogue to match: the splendid "Maybe Someday," hard to forget for its heartfelt interpretation. In fact, Butler's voice, once so close to the timbres of David Bowie, is in this album only comparable through elective affinities and indeed uses tones the artist has never used before.

An album that will appeal even to those who do not know or did not particularly love the Psychedelic Furs, an absolutely sincere work by a musician for whom the success of the past will probably not come again. Indeed, this solo debut of Richard Butler raises an unexpected question, the current lack of space for many big names of the Eighties, unexpected because the youngsters who bought their records today are not even forty. One proof is the little attention given to the recent (excellent) returns of Bauhaus and Tears For Fears. Yet Butler is today an author who paints songs with the same intensity as his canvases and who cites William Blake "England's green and pleasant land" and no longer dresses like a scarecrow.

But on second thought, who, in that decade, wore watchable clothes and hairstyles?