The Psychedelic Furs
Forever Now

THE REVIEW

I have this image of myself reflected in a shop window in some English town that I can't remember, in the summer of 1982. I'm wearing an utterly improbable raincoat, holding the new single by the Psychedelic Furs, in extended version, in my right hand, and I'm trying to figure out how much I resemble Richard Butler. Annamaria is laughing and rightly making fun of me.

When I return to Italy and finally play "Love My Way", I will be perplexed (I will only realize much later that it's a luxury). What is this pop drift?

In September, when the full-length "Forever Now" is released, the same perplexity. Where have the dark bass of "India", the tragedy of "Sister Europe", the complexity of "All of This and Nothing" gone? The edges have been smoothed, the paranoias burned away. The voice remains, and I find no adjective other than the obvious: beautiful. Pop, almost perfect. And here, inevitably, comes the digression. How much does a producer matter? Having abandoned Steve Lillywhite (who was never as "dirty" in his work as he was on our first two albums), they moved to Todd Rundgren. And the difference is noticeable. The former Utopia member indeed fills the operetta with all the things he loved at the time: fake strings played on keyboards, electronic drums, synths coming and going, doubled by guitars on the endings. Which, stated like this, sounds very eighties and should be appalling as the years go by. And yet it still works wonderfully. The fact that a few years earlier Rundgren produced Wave by Saint Patti, and later produced Skylarking by XTC with completely different sounds, says a lot about the man's skill, but it would be a digression that would take us too far.

The substance is that here we are faced with ten pop gems, the kind most bands would commit mass murder to have all on the same album.

We, nostalgic for rougher movements, are free to prefer the first two albums, both then and now. But what is touched by King Midas cannot be debated.

For instance, that post-funk guitar break, stolen from the Bunnymen but done much better, which is in "You and I", how many thousands of bands have used it in the following years (I, with mine, always use it)?

It is impossible to understand which song I prefer, but "No Easy Street", years ago, made it onto a C-90 where I collected my favorite ballads (even though it sounds totally different from all the ballads collected there). And the game "You cry like a baby, you cry like a babe, you cry like a lady, you cry like a girl" I adore, as well as the final guitar solo.

I add nothing else.