Behind the Albums: All Of This And Nothing

A selection of quotes from The Psychedelic Furs on the first compilation album All Of This And Nothing, released in 1988.

Vince Ely: "It's a sort of compromise between the record company who wanted a 'Greatest Hits' – which would have been difficult – and the band who wanted a 'Best Of.'

"It's also got the recent single 'All That Money Wants' which gets back to basics, to the original sound of the first album. It's fairly representative of the approach for the new album we're recording at the moment, rather than the more commercial sound of [Midnight To Midnight]." (Evening Post 1988)

Richard Butler: "As a cross-section I think it's pretty representative of what we've done. I don't think it misses anything important. Anyone who thinks we're only about 'Pretty In Pink', Mirror Moves and Midnight To Midnight can pick this up and think, 'They're different to what I thought'. It provides more of a whole story. That's what I want, more than the record to sell a lot of copies. It gives people who want it, a general picture of what we do." (Melody Maker 1988)

Richard Butler: "We were originally going to release a live album, and recorded two shows. We were going to make it a double album: one studio compilation and one live, which would cover 20 songs. We decided against it in the end. Putting crowd noises on a record is the weirdest feeling. I decided it would be better to underplay it and record something in a smokey kind of theatre." (Melody Maker 1988)

Richard Butler: "There will always be songs people think should or shouldn't be on here. John [Ashton] really wanted 'India' on the album, but Tim [Butler] hates it. We were having almighty fights about what should be on the record and Tim just said, 'I don't want "India" on it, I think it's a dirge' and with that he [__] off back to New York. Out of respect for that, we left it out.

"What we've ended up with is an album which people will hopefully listen to once and say, 'How can I not play this record over and over again?'" (Melody Maker 1988)

Richard Butler: "We were gonna bring out this album as a double album. There's going to be a studio compilation and there's going to be a live compilation. But we got to listening to the live stuff and it's... it felt strange. I mean, I hate mixing live stuff anyway. And we decided just to do it as a studio compilation." (MTV Europe 1988)

Richard Butler: "We had some input with it. It's always with putting out compilations there's always a battle with the record company because the record company – if they were left to put out a compilation, will probably tend to go for what you've released as a single because they figure – and probably rightly – that that will sell the most amount of records. Whereas what we wanted to do was at that point we weren't interested in selling the most amount of records. We would rather put out a compilation record that just had what we feel or what we thought was the best. And we kind of, we had a battle." (120 Minutes (MTV UK) 1989)

Richard Butler: "Having that compilation album really helped; just looking at what you do best gave us some kind of perspective." (New Musical Express 1989)

John Ashton: "It didn't do anything commercially... And it really didn't turn out what we wanted it to be because we wanted it to be a retrospective of the band, not of our greatest hits, as it were. Or nearest misses. And that's a thing brought about by the record company. They suggested that we do it. Then when we turned around and gave them the list of our songs, we had a big argument with them because they wanted other songs on it. They wanted the 'Heaven's' and the 'Heartbreak Beat's' and the 'Pretty In Pink's'. That's not really what we wanted to do at the time. That was the beginning. When we realized that we were putting an album together of our favorite music, that's when we really began to sit down and discuss what was good about the band." (B-Side 1990)

John Ashton: "Looking at All Of This And Nothing really helped because it put our favorite songs onto one album, but we had to make concessions for the record company, unfortunately, later. But it did help to get us all together thinking about where we'd come from and where we'd got to. (B-Side 1990)

Tim Butler (on being asked if the band had ever been discouraged enough to quit): "Yes, we had this period after [Midnight To Midnight] came out and we were kind of floundering. We had gotten away from the original sound and direction behind the band and gone in a more commercial direction. It took putting the compilation album together for us to realize how far we had strayed." (Chicago Music Magazine 1990)

Richard Butler (on the band and their label arguing about what songs they wanted on the album: "There's always headbutting with compilations. I've never thought that what a band sells as singles were the best representations of what they do on record. So when they come around to putting out a compilation they always want to put out the singles. And if you've got any involvement with it, as we did, you go, 'Hang on, if you're going to put those in then you have to put this one in and this one as these are important songs but that isn't an important song.' It gets argued 'cause they'll say, 'Well, look, we have to have this song on it or else it's not worth putting it out.' So it ends up being a compromise. But saying it's a greatest hits record is a contradiction in terms. It's something you've managed to hash out and agree on. They put songs on that they argued for and you put songs on that you argued for." (B-Side 1991)