The Psychedelic Furs

Certain Songs #1660: The Psychedelic Furs – “We Love You”

October 20, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Psychedelic Furs
Year: 1980

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Not to be confused with the Rolling Stones song of the same name (you know, their post-incarceration single that featured John Lennon & Paul McCartney), the utterly masterful “We Love You” has at least one thing in common with its namesake: you’re never sure how seriously to take the sentiment.

It’s possible that Mick Jagger — who’d narrowly avoided a long prison sentence, after all — was feeling vulnerable enough to believe that he truly loved his audience, but then again, he also needed Lennon & McCartney (and that piano riff from Nicky Hopkins) to actually get it across. That said: “We Love You” remains one of the peaks of The Stones psychedelic period, which we’ll hopefully get to next year.

Certain Songs #1659: The Psychedelic Furs – “Susan’s Strange”

October 17, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Psychedelic Furs (U.S.)
Year: 1980

There were basically two different types of songs on The Psychedelic Furs: noisy drones and atmospheric swirls. And while I preferred the noisy drones — of course! — I could see where a whole album’s worth might begin to get a bit repetitive, so it was good that they had both types.

Especially the U.S. version of the album, of which Columbia not only altered the running order, they also substituted two songs — “Soap Commercial” and “Susan’s Strange” for a song called “Blacks / Radio.” None of which I knew for a couple of decades, which actually meant that when I finally heard “Blacks/Radio,” it was like hearing a cool early P-Furs song I’d never heard before.

Certain Songs #1658: The Psychedelic Furs – “India”

October 16, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Psychedelic Furs
Year: 1980

What if, the Sex Pistols, but with a saxophone? And an unrelenting drummer who does builds instead of rolls? That was the unlikely recipe for The Psychedelic Furs, whose debut album utterly slayed me when I finally got around to getting it in early 1981, and whose second album . . . well, we’ll get to that soon enough.

Naturally, the U.S. and U.K. versions of the album differ, and naturally, in all cases I’m going with the U.S. version, because it’s the one that I lived with, and I definitely lived with this record, even if I did drop the needle a couple of minutes into the album in order to ignore the slow, near-ambient buildup to the opening track, “India,” which — once it gets going — well and truly establishes their sound.