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In March 2020, the Psychedelic Furs eagerly await the release of “Made of Rain”, the band’s first album since 1991.
British brothers Richard and Tim Butler and their bandmates have been working since reuniting in 2000 to produce music that could stand up to their classic 1980s albums.
In the 1980s, Psychedelic Furs released hits “Love My Way,” “Heartbreak Beat,” “The Ghost in You,” and the song that inspired Molly Ringwald’s 1986 film of the same name, “Pretty in Pink.”
But the coronavirus pandemic has derailed Furs’ grand plans for 2020. The band postponed the release of the album and a tour that included homecoming performances at New York’s Apollo Theater and London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Although The Furs belatedly released “Made of Rain” in July 2020, the Apollo and Royal Albert Hall performances were postponed twice, all the way into last year.
“It’s very frustrating because after so many years without any new material, we’re excited to play something new,” bassist Tim Butler said from his home in Stanford, Kentucky. “The pandemic came and shut us down.”
Because touring is off limits, phone interviews are all the Butler brothers do to promote their new album. Nonetheless, “Made of Rain” debuted on multiple charts in the US and UK.
“It got great reviews,” Tim Butler said. “It’s up to Mojo and those magazines’ best albums of 2020.”
When Psychedelic Furs finally performed their homecoming show at the Royal Albert Hall, the experience did not disappoint.
“It’s amazing to be in such a famous building,” Tim Butler said. But in England we don’t.”
Psychedelic Furs is on the road again this year, performing at the Manship Theater in Baton Rouge on Wednesdays. The show is sold out, but tickets are available for the group’s Friday, May 12 performance at the House of Blues in New Orleans.
The Butlers have lived in the United States longer than in their native England. They emigrated to the United States after their “Forever Now” tour in 1982.
“I consider myself an honorary American citizen,” Tim Butler said. “I never actually took the oath, but I have a green card and I pay taxes.”
Moving to the US made sense for the brothers from a touring standpoint.
“Here, because it’s so big, you can visit it year-round if you want,” Tim Butler explained. “However, you can cover the whole of England in three weeks. And the British audience is fickle. One day you might be the man of the week, but a few weeks later you’ll be belittled by the media.”
In America, says Tim Butler, “We’ve had audiences since we first got here. They bring their kids. 16 to 60-year-old audience.”
Next week’s Psychedelic Furs show at the Manship Theater will be the band’s first appearance in Baton Rouge since 2013. This should have been a relatively uneventful affair compared to The Furs’ scaled-back gig at a club called Trinity’s in Baton Rouge in April 1983. Halfway through the show, now former bandmate John Ashton threw his guitar at the back of Tim Butler’s head and stormed off the stage.
Tim Butler told The Advocate in 2011: “We left the stage and we were never going back. There was a riot in the audience and six or seven police cars were called.”
The April 15 edition of The Morning Advocate’s Fun reported that “the crowd was enraged and demanded a refund.”
At the Manship Theatre, the Psychedelic Furs will perform the band’s hits as well as songs from the long-sought “Made of Rain”.
“We had a lot of songs come and go because we were nervous about this song or that song being good enough,” Tim Butler said of the album, which was 20 years in the making. “When we finally got an album of songs that we thought were great, we recorded them very quickly. It was a Furs album, but it was on par with anything new in rock music right now. We didn’t stop at 80’s.”
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