Behind the Albums: Midnight To Midnight

A selection of quotes from The Psychedelic Furs on Midnight to Midnight, their fifth album, released in 1987.

Richard Butler: "The [songs] on this album are much simpler, and I think the ones on Mirror Moves were a lot simpler as well." (Alternate Beat 1986)

Richard Butler: "We wanted this album to have more of a band feel about it, and [Chris Kimsey's] good at getting records to sound like a band made them." (Alternate Beat 1986)

Richard Butler: "It's more guitar-oriented than last time, and the edges haven't been smoothed off so much. We wanted a bit of edge back into it." (Austin American Statesman 1986)

Richard Butler: "We thought [Mirror Moves] was a little too smooth, soft. We wanted it like that at the time, but looking back on it, we kind of missed the edge. So we decided to put a bit more of the edge on [Midnight To Midnight], and, edge being guitars, you put more guitars on." (The Boston Globe 1986)

John Ashton: "I think the [upcoming Midnight To Midnight's] going to sound more expensive, but there should be a bit more fire to it as well; the last two albums were maybe a bit smooth. This time it feels more like a band; we've got a real drummer and I can spend more time getting more attack on the guitar." (International Musician 1986)

John Ashton: "Chris Kimsey, who's producing [Midnight To Midnight], is really wonderful, he's got a real heart. I'm really happy about this album, if any of the others were classics, then this one definitely will be. Chris reckons it'll be so popular we'll have problems keeping up with it all!" (International Musician 1986)

Richard Butler: "It was supposed to be released earlier this year, but we've been quite fussy and hence it's been remixed and stuff. It's called Midnight To Midnight and it's got more guitars on it than Mirror Moves, it's got more of an edge." (Record Mirror 1986)

Richard Butler: "Keith [Forsey] wanted to [produce] it, and we wanted him to do it. But when we did Mirror Moves, we had to wait ages for him to get out of the studio with Billy Idol. Now he's there with Billy again." (Unknown source, 1986)

Richard Butler: "New York has definitely affected the feel of the songs [on Midnight To Midnight]. I very much pick up on what's around me, steal things, phrases, the feeling of being out at night in New York." (Winner Magazine 1986)

Richard Butler: "For this album we wanted a more band live feel." (Creem 1987)

John Ashton: "It's a pleasant surprise, a very tough sound with more of a guitar edge — I finally got my own way! The singles 'Heartbreak Beat' and 'Angels Don't Cry' are the easier side of the band, more toned down in energy. Some of the other stuff gets pretty wild, though!" (Evening Post 1987)

John Ashton: "It's too pop, a little too packaged and nice. We're supposed to have a mean, rough image, but we've got a teeny-bop image now." (The Indianapolis Star 1987)

Richard Butler: "The rest of the musicians in the band are more than backing musicians. Mars Williams the sax player's been with us about five years, five and a half years. And Paul [Garisto] the drummer's been with us about three years. They're very important to the sound of the band and they played on the album as well." (Les Enfants du Rock (French TV) 1987)

Richard Butler: "I think, lyrically, it's more accessible and musically it has more bits than Mirror Moves." (Melody Maker 1987)

Richard Butler: "I wanted to do some songs that were more easily understood. I had never done an album like that and I wanted to try one. Lyrically, I wanted this one to be simpler than any album I had done before. It took a lot of paring to make it simple. I find it easy to sit down and write wildly abstract, stream-of-consciousness material. I feel comfortable with the looser form. You can go off on tangents. But writing in this simple style takes discipline." (News Press 1987)

Richard Butler: "When we made Mirror Moves we went out and toured with that for about ten months, I think. And after ten months we didn't want to go straight in and make another album. We wanted to take a break. And then so we took a couple months' break and started writing the songs. John's still living in England so I had to come over to England and do some and he came over to New York, where I am these days, to write the rest of it. And then [inaudible] waiting for a producer, and when we chose the producer he was working on something else. I think he was doing Killing Joke at the time so we had to wait. Having said all that, it just took that long. It also took the longest to record than we've ever spent before. I think it was about five months, six months in recording. " (Radio Luxembourg 1987)

Richard Butler (on being asked where Midnight To Midnight was recorded): "All over the place. We started in Switzerland and then we got bored. So we quit Switzerland after about six weeks and moved to Berlin, which was a bit better. But I managed to talk Chris Kimsey into going back to New York for the end of the album." (Radio Luxembourg 1987)

Richard Butler: "Looking back at Mirror Moves, for all its strengths, I missed a lot of the edge on it. And I missed the guitar. On this one we wanted to put a bit more of that edge back so we went and did it." (Radio Luxembourg 1987)

Richard Butler: "With this one we wanted a more live kind of feel. And we went with Chris Kimsey for those reasons, you know, that he likes getting the actual band in the studio playing like a band." (Radio Luxembourg 1987)

Richard Butler: "With this new album, it was more like playing as a band, though afterwards I'd still want to change things round. I was constantly changing lyrics and melodies..it was driving Chris Kimsey mad! I'd nick a bit out of one song and stick it into another one and by the end, I had about three different ways of singing 'Angels Don't Cry' and at least two versions of 'Heartbreak Beat'. Finally Chris said 'OK, you've got to settle on just one version of each song, you're driving me crazy.'" (Rock Express 1987)

Richard Butler: "Mirror Moves was a great album, but in retrospect I kind of missed the attack that earlier albums had had. We wanted to stick some more guitar edge on this one." (Rock Express 1987)

Tim Butler: "We're not actually changing ourselves. It's the audience who's coming around to our sort of music. Each album we don't say, 'Oh we're gonna make this one more commercial than the last one.' Maybe people are getting bored with what's on the charts. This album is doing the best we've ever done so far. Maybe the audience is ready for us at last." (Rock Fever 1987)

Richard Butler: "We made this and Mirror Moves simple on purpose. Maybe at the expense of mystery, which is the way I enjoy writing. It's hard work making an album simple. The next one will be different – we're going back to not necessarily a roots feel, but a more aggressive feel, less structured." (Santa Barbara News-Press 1987)

Tim Butler: "We're much happier with this one. It's getting back to the original guitar-oriented rock 'n' roll sound that we began with, and are popular for." (Santa Cruz Sentinel 1987)

Richard Butler: "I still think the band's off the wall. You definitely hear more of that on [Midnight To Midnight] than on Mirror Moves." (Sounds 1987)

Richard Butler: "We wanted to go in and make a band album, as opposed to Mirror Moves which sounded like a studio record. It was done immediately after a tour of Europe and before a tour of America." (Sounds 1987)

Richard Butler: "I don't think what we do is going to fade out tomorrow. I've put a body of work behind me that I like, but yeah, the best is ahead. We still haven't made the record where we can stand back and say, Yeah, that's what we've been on about all these years. That's perfect.

"We've probably come closest to it, that toughness, on Talk Talk Talk and [Midnight To Midnight]. At the moment, it's bits here and there." (Sounds 1987)

John Ashton: "The release of our album was delayed because our record company CBS didn't want us to put it out before Christmas. They were too busy plugging the Bruce Springsteen box collection and Barbara Streisand's LP. We had to agree with them." (The Sunday Sun 1987)

Richard Butler: "I wasn't very happy with [Midnight To Midnight]. I wanted to get back to what we do best." (L.A. Life 1988)

Richard Butler: "[Midnight To Midnight] was simpler lyrically, but that is not the way I work. The whole way I wrote went out the window.

"Musically, I think things like 'Heartbreak Beat' are great, but lyrically it is not that brilliant." (L.A. Life 1988)

Richard Butler: "To be polite to Midnight, we tried to make it accessible. I knew it wasn't the most adventurous writing, lyricwise, that I'd done. But I wanted something people would easily relate to and, having done that, I think it was our biggest mistake as a band.

"I got sick of people saying 'Oh, what's this lyric about?' and not quite understanding so I thought I'd make a really simple album that people could quite easily digest." (Melody Maker June 18, 1988)

Richard Butler: "We did get lost on Midnight To Midnight but, recently, we've been getting back in touch with what we do best." (Melody Maker June 18, 1988)

Richard Butler: "As I look back on all our albums, with the exception of the last one, Midnight To Midnight, I'm still proud of what we've achieved. I'm never daunted by our history. I think I can still write as well now as I did then." (Melody Maker August 6, 1988)

Richard Butler: "Living with an album you don't really like is the hardest thing to do. You're only as good as your last album and it's not much fun when your last album isn't very good. It's a mistake we won't make again." (Melody Maker August 6, 1988)

Richard Butler: "I don't think the last two albums [Midnight To Midnight and Mirror Moves] were over-produced but they were very clean sounding." (MTV Europe 1988)

Richard Butler: "We mainly recorded across Europe because it was our producer, Chris Kimsey's idea. Zurich was a new place for us, so we wanted to give it a try. After spending a few months in Berlin, we headed back to New York because we were feeling a bit homesick." (Music Life [Japanese magazine] 1987)

Richard Butler: "We came as near to those bands as we're going to get with Midnight To Midnight. We saw we were heading in the dinosaur direction and thought 'hey, hang on'. We didn't want to turn into something turgid." (New Musical Express 1988)

Richard Butler: "I turned round during the last tour and realized that I didn't like the album that we were promoting and I didn't like the direction the band was going in. We knew something had to be done." (New Musical Express 1988)

Richard Butler: "On our last album, Midnight To Midnight, I had writer's block. I just hit a brick wall. It was a real struggle to write lyrics, and I think it shows. It's not an album that I'm proud of, and that's why I'm glad to be putting out a compilation to redress the balance.

"Midnight To Midnight sold more than any other album we've made, yet it's not really representative. It's quite daunting to think that people have got the idea of you as one kind of person when in fact you're another kind of person. I've just decided to get on with it, show them what you're about, Richard!" (Record Mirror 1988)

Richard Butler: "Everyone always asks me about that album. I just say it's not my favorite album." (Albuquerque Journal 1989)

Richard Butler: "We thought Midnight To Midnight was totally directionless. The songwriting was probably our weakest, lyrically it was for me. Just like writer's block, really. We had to take stock of ourselves." (The Boston Globe 1989)

Richard Butler: "Basically, we didn't like the record. It wasn't us, didn't feel like us or sound very much like something we would be happy with. But there it was, and there was very little we could do about getting it back." (Chicago Tribune 1989)

John Ashton: "We weren't focused about that album. It took us a long time to do it and we just got pretty sick of it. By the time we finished it, we were fed-up." (Courier Post 1989)

Richard Butler: "It was too produced, and the chemistry—not of the basic members of the band, but the other members that we had with us at that time—wasn't right. Lyrically as well it's not the most mysterious thing I've ever written. It didn't sound like this band somehow." (The Los Angeles Times 1989)

Richard Butler: "The last album [Midnight To Midnight] shouldn't even have been made." (New Musical Express 1989)

Richard Butler: "We shouldn't have gone in to make that album then. I don't think we were really ready. We spent much too long on it, writing in the studio, so there was that kind of pressure, and I was having a bad writer's block at the time." (The San Francisco Examiner 1989)

John Ashton (on why he didn't like Midnight To Midnight): "It took too long and it was not really what we were about. If you look back, our earlier albums are more of what we're about. Didn't really know what we were doing. There was not anything there lyrically that was interesting. There was nothing musically that was interesting. So, we basically just were chasing commercial success in some way, shape or form. And we realized that we weren't doing the right thing." (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: "About halfway through the last tour, I just didn't like the record anymore." (Hartford Courant 1990)

Richard Butler: "It just didn't feel right. We spent too long making it, and with the wrong people. I think we lost some direction." (Hartford Courant 1990)

Richard Butler (on being asked how he deals with the fact that Midnight To Midnight's the most successful): "I don't feel too badly about it. What we did pick up with that record was a lot of fans who weren't normally Psychedelic Furs fans. And if they liked the last record, they're probably curious about other records we've made, so they listen to those as well."(Hartford Courant 1990)

Tim Butler: "It wasn't what we're all about. Everything — the songs, the album cover — was very pop. We were selling ourselves short." (The News And Observer 1990)

Richard Butler: "The worst record we made was the one we spent the longest time making, which was Midnight To Midnight. We tried to come up with good ideas, but nothing came out. I won't do that again." (Alternating Currents 1991)

Richard Butler (on the time when he, Tim Butler, and John Ashton had to send each other tapes while living far away from each other during the Mirror Moves and Midnight To Midnight sessions): "That was pretty unsuccessful. A large part of the writing had to be done in the studio, with ideas that you'd come up with by yourself. It worked with Mirror Moves, but with Midnight To Midnight, it kind of came unstuck and we lost direction. It just didn't work chemistry-wise. We're a band that works very much as a group of people." (Alternative Press 1991)

Tim Butler: "I guess outside influences were sort of making an impact. We weren't going out there and saying we have to have a more chart-oriented or listenable sound. We were slipping into that subconsciously.

"I think the scenario started with Mirror Moves, where we started to get clean and clinical, started using a bit too much keyboards and toning down the guitar sound.

"It came to a head with Midnight To Midnight, which we weren't very happy with. Halfway through the tour we looked through the album and said, 'We've slipped off the track a bit. We're way away from where our original sound was.'" (Asbury Park Press 1991)

Tim Butler: "We're the first to admit we went through a terrible period in our sound around the Midnight To Midnight album which we weren't happy with. But I don't think it was a conscious thing. I think we started slipping slowly in that direction on Mirror Moves, and we just didn't pull ourselves back from it. We didn't realize until we started on that tour how far we had gone away from our original idea for the Psychedelic Furs." (Austin American Statesman 1991)

Richard Butler: "With Midnight To Midnight, we really shouldn't have made a record at that time. The chemistry of the band wasn't right, but it's one of those things where we had written a record in the studio before, [Mirror Moves], and it had worked great, and we said, 'hey, let's go do that again.' And we did, but the pressure being on in the studio and with things not being all right, it worked out to be a record we weren't really very pleased with. We had lost direction. And that leaves a very bad taste in everybody's mouth, to have made a record that you're not pleased with, the hardest thing is to get your impetuous back up to believe in yourself. Not that it's that bad a record, but I think that we're very, very critical about ourselves. It's always hard to do anything when the last thing that you've done, that you're not personally pleased with it, outside of the fact that it sold better than any other record that we've made. We didn't think it was a great personal achievement and it was like a cul de sac, it wasn't a direction we wanted." (B-Side 1991)

Richard Butler: "['All That Money Wants'] was about the success of Midnight To Midnight, and how people began to look at me as this commercial commodity—and that's all they were interested in. I found out that wasn't very satisfying." (Chicago Tribune 1991)

Richard Butler: "That album isn't a sore point, but we aren't performing any songs from it on this tour [for World Outside].

"I know the fans want to hear some of it, but personally I don't think it holds up very well." (Chicago Tribune 1991)

John Ashton (on the sound of World Outside): "We found we could have done better. That's why we changed directions. We were wrong. We should have stuck to what we're good at. Instead, we got more formulated with albums like Mirror Moves. Guitar-wise, I wasn't particularly happy with that album.

"Then, there's Midnight To Midnight, which was a pompous piece of crud from the album cover on. We tried to recapture more of a guitar edge. It didn't really happen. It became overproduced, underplayed and overbloated." (Courier Post 1991)

John Ashton (on Richard Butler being fussy about setlists): "He really does call the shots as far as that goes – unfortunately.

"Not that I'm putting him down, but the band would like to play some songs from Midnight To Midnight. I don't think Richard believes in any of those songs lyrically. So that's why we won't play them." (Courier Post 1991)

Richard Butler: "It's an album I deplore. Musically, it wasn't anywhere, just gray." (Music Connection 1991)

Richard Butler: "With the last two albums [Book Of Days and World Outside], we decided not to go into the studio until we had enough songs written, while with Mirror Moves and Midnight To Midnight, a lot of it was written in the studio. I think you tend to lose some of the excitement, the edge and the feel when you spend too much time in the studio." (Music Connection 1991)

Richard Butler: "It's far enough behind me now to admit it was a mistake and laugh about it." (New Musical Express 1991)

Richard Butler: "It was empty. Lyrically the weakest, clichéd, and I hate that. I couldn't write. Writer's Block sounds a pompous thing to say when you're only writing ten four-minute songs, but that's what it was." (New Musical Express 1991)

Tim Butler: "That album was a mistake. It was an experiment that didn't work." (Northern Star 1991)

Tim Butler: "At the time we thought it was an experiment that was right for us, but it ended up being the low point in our career. I guess we listened to Top 40 and what was popular at the time, which I think was a big mistake." (Pittsburgh Post Gazette 1991)

Richard Butler: "Midnight To Midnight is an album I deplore. It's hollow. Musically it wasn't anywhere, just grey. And there's nothing lyrically I'm proud of on it at all. Chris Kimsey wasn't the mistake. The mistake was ours. A producer can be party to our folly but the blame rests with us. We've never gone into a studio and been forced to sound like anybody." (Q Magazine 1991)

Richard Butler: "By the end [of the Midnight tour] we'd swapped so many [songs] over we weren't really promoting Midnight To Midnight at all. I started hating touring and I literally made myself ill. I would lie in bed in the morning hating myself. I got so stressed up that my heart was beating out of time 24 hours a day. I'd get out of bed to walk to the corner and have to turn round and go and lie down again." (Q Magazine 1991)

Richard Butler (on how the band went mainstream with Midnight To Midnight): "Directly after the Midnight To Midnight album I thought, 'I don't like the way this is going.'" (Rock 'N' Roll (?) 1991)

Richard Butler: "We were so depressed about Midnight To Midnight we almost broke up. It was totally not us." (The Tennessean Sun 1991)

Tim Butler: "That was a big mistake, direction-wise. It's still a bit of a bad taste in our mouths, that period.

"We keep slagging it now, but every once in a while I will listen to it, and there are a few good tracks on there. I think they're a bit overproduced, but that was our choice at that time. We went in that direction. At least we can say we tried and it failed." (The Baltimore Sun 1992)

Tim Butler: "We still think of Midnight To Midnight as a rocky direction for us. It was too slickly produced. It took us six months on and off to do that album, which is a long time to pour over the songs." (Northern Colorado Mirror 1992)

Richard Butler: "Directly after the Midnight To Midnight album I thought, 'I don't like the way this is going.'" (The Province 1992)

Richard Butler: "We'd been on the road six weeks and I said, 'I hate this tour and I hate this album.' When the tour was finished, I was incredibly depressed.... It's all of the baggage when you've been with a band that long, people say you've got to play this whole list of songs and I wanted to get away from that. (The Boston Globe 1994)

Richard Butler: Midnight To Midnight was a record I absolutely deplored. I didn't like the songs, the sound, the production, the tour, even the lights. I told the band I wanted to quit." (The Province 1994)

Richard Butler: "I know I probably shouldn't be saying this, but I wish we had never made Midnight To Midnight.

"Both the process of making it and hearing the end result... that was the lowest point for us. We were down to three members by then [out of six at its peak], and we had no direction. We had nothing prepared when we went into the studio, so those songs were just forced out of us. And I think it shows." (Los Angeles Times 1997)

Tim Butler: "That was a very hard time for the band. We went into the studio with only three or four finished songs, and the rest we had to cobble together in the studio. That's why it took us nine months to make the album." (Should God Forget liner notes, 1997)

Tim Butler: "Recorded mostly in West Berlin. This was a depressing time; Chernobyl had just happened and the American Discotheque in Berlin had been bombed (pretty much on the first day we arrived). Because of Chernobyl, people were warned to shower after walking outside, which curbed our sightseeing ideas." (Should God Forget liner notes, 1997)

Richard Butler: "[Pretty In Pink] made mainstream America notice The Furs. However, it created the pressure to record Midnight To Midnight before we were ready." (Greatest Hits liner notes, 2001)

Richard Butler: "Midnight To Midnight was overly slick, hollow, vapid and weak. We were forced into the studio before we were ready. Daniel Lanois told us we didn't have the songs and we went into the studio anyway with Chris Kimsey producing instead. Daniel was right." (Greatest Hits liner notes, 2001)

Richard Butler: "We got horribly lost around the time of Midnight To Midnight. By the time we got to Midnight To Midnight we turned round one day and said, 'How the heck did we get here?' I felt like I had come a long long way away from what my roots were, which was Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan and all that sort of stuff. We'd got ourselves out on a limb, unintentionally, and got too far away from what our roots were. I remember getting physically ill from Midnight To Midnight. I remember the moment it happened actually. We were on tour. And I was out on stage wearing a fringe leather jacket and I looked behind me and this huge hydraulic lighting thing came up that had three star shapes on it made out of lights, and it had the ramps you could run up and the hydraulic ramp along the back, and I remember thinking, 'what the heck are we doing?' I threw the jacket away that night and just dressed in a black suit for the rest of that tour. And then came off that tour and physically got ill. Every morning I remember waking up and thinking, 'Oh my gosh' - it was that album cover with the hair spiked up and that plastic jacket - and thinking, Oh man, is that a mistake." (iJamming! 2001)

Richard Butler: "I think any pressure came from ourselves, which is more of a pressure that came after the first two records. We make those two, and wondered, 'What do we do now? We don't want to keep on making the same records.' So it became a pressure to do something different with every record, which included Mirror Moves – 'Let's make a poppy Psychedelic Furs album!' But we came very unstuck when it came to Midnight To Midnight, unfortunately [laughs]." (Ink 19 2002)

Richard Butler: "That record was the beginning of the end, sort of. I remember being on the Midnight To Midnight tour and looking at these hydraulic lights and fancy costumes and thinking, 'Why am I doing this? I hate this.' I actually got physically sick – stressed out; my heart was beating out of time, palpitating, for about a year after that. Doctors in England told me that I had 'atrial fibrillation,' which isn't a good thing. It took six months of living with that, and taking digitalis, until I got to a decent New York doctor who told me, 'You're just stressed. I'm not giving you anything for it.' I just hated that record, hated everything about it." (Ink 19 2002)

John Ashton (on when the band went into the pop radio sound): "That was sort of the flavor of the day. Bands were either going funky like the Talking Heads or doing the pretty-boy pop thing like Duran Duran. We were trying to strike a balance between the two, but all around us, the hair dryers were becoming as loud as the guitars. I don't think we were ever worried that we'd gone too far until we released Midnight To Midnight. Then we realized what a horrible mistake we'd made. We were all like, 'Oh, my Gosh. Look at us. What have we done?'" (Las Vegas Mercury 2003)

Tim Butler: "Two of the largest crowds we ever played for were the Glastonbury Festival at the beginning of the Midnight To Midnight tour and the Merce Festival in Barcelona on the World Outside tour." (Ear Candy 2004)

Richard Butler: "Daniel Lanois was supposed to produce the album but he said we needed more time to develop the songs. We went ahead and did it anyway with someone else!" (Metro Times 2010)

Richard Butler (on being asked what was The Furs' biggest misstep): "I think Midnight To Midnight. We got a little bit lost." (Metro Times 2010)

Richard Butler: "That one took forever. So we rehearsed and did backing tracks in Zurich, and then we went to Berlin to record. Having written Mirror Moves in the studio on-the-fly, or a lot of it, we figured we could do that again. And we found that we couldn't. We were absolutely dry and stuck for ideas." (Metro Times 2010)

Richard Butler: "It just didn't work at all. I was having a hard time writing the lyrics. It was just a horrible time. That was our misstep. The funny thing is, originally, we were going to have Daniel Lanois produce it. And he came down to the rehearsal studio and started working on ideas with us. And he said, 'I think you need to spend more time writing songs.' And we said, 'Ah, [__] that. We want to do it now.' That was a deep misstep." (Metro Times 2010)

Tim Butler: "Sometimes I get it into my head that it's a very bad album, that it's very confused and stuff. But then I'll go and listen to it and I think that it's not actually THAT bad. What irks us about it is the way in which we presented it; on the tour we had the ego ramps and all the production stuff. It just wasn't really us! About halfway through that tour we realized that we should have cut back and stopped wearing the long dusters, lost the big mullet hairstyles. But to be honest I think by then the damage had already been done. Our hard-core fans just weren't into it." (This Is Not Retro 2010)

Tim Butler: "We went into the studio with Daniel Lanois, and we took in some ideas but he said that we didn't have a whole album. We only had three or four ideas, and he said we should go away and write some more, get some more ideas and then we could do the album. But we were high on the success of Mirror Moves and we just said we don't need to do that, we've got the songs. Daniel Lanois can just [__] off... and we ended up with Chris Kimsey, who's a good producer but totally wrong for us. We should have waited... we should have done what Daniel Lanois suggested... gone away and actually worked on some other songs!

"The thing is that with your first album you have maybe two years to write it, and then you record that album, then with the next album you have less time to do it, then with Forever Now there was less time again, and then we come to Midnight To Midnight and when you're on a roll of success you have even less time which affects what comes out. Some bands can do it, but I think that around the time of Midnight To Midnight we'd just got stuck…" (This Is Not Retro 2010)

Tim Butler: "I like to think that all of our albums, save for Midnight To Midnight, you could play 'em today and not think, 'That's an '80s album.' Midnight To Midnight, of course, had that '80s production…" (Ink 19 2011)

Tim Butler: "We made one mistake. That was with Midnight To Midnight. I think you can lock that one into the '80s because of the production." (Kentucky.com 2011)

Richard Butler (on being asked if he could go back in time, what advice would he give himself after when Midnight To Midnight came out: "I would probably say, 'Take a little longer before you release Midnight To Midnight.' Daniel Lanois was going to produce that album, and he said, 'You ought to have a great deal of songs written before we start.' But we didn't want to do it that way. We were full of confidence, and thought we could come up with stuff on the spot. So we got in the studio, and I had an utter block." (San Francisco Chronicle 2011)

Tim Butler: "That album was a very '80s album, and people got the idea we were almost like a soft rock sort of band, where before that we weren't and after that we tried to get back to what we are. A lot of the older fans were scared off by the whole Midnight To Midnight thing, and didn't come back at the time, but they are coming back now. We get fans coming up to us — 'I've wanted to see you since the Forever Now tour, but I didn't like Midnight, but now it's better than what I remember back then.' Which is great to hear." (The Daily Gazette 2012)

Tim Butler: "We did a whole load of remixes of tracks on Midnight To Midnight." (Westword 2013)

Tim Butler: "When we went out on the road on that tour [for Midnight To Midnight], we had a stage and ramps and a really '80s look, with the long trench coats. It was a very mid-'80s sort of Duran Duran (vibe). We were halfway through that tour, and we were like, 'Wow, this isn't us.' After that tour, we went through a lot of soul-searching about whether we wanted to carry on past that album." (Chicago Tribune 2014)

Tim Butler: "I like to think that, except for Midnight To Midnight, all our albums are timeless." (San Antonio Current 2014)

John Ashton: "We tried to get more of a hard rock edge and it really wasn't... (pause)...it had some great songs. 'Heartbreak Beat' is really my favorite on that album." (Veer Magazine 2015)

Tim Butler: "We were avoiding songs from the album Midnight To Midnight except of course the 'Heartbreak Beat' for quite some time. On this tour, we have dusted off 'Angels Don't Cry' and 'All Of The Law'. We never even played 'Angels Don't Cry' in the tour for the Midnight To Midnight album." (Equality 365 2016)

Tim Butler: "Back in the day we weren't really happy with the production we had on [Midnight To Midnight]. Back in the 80s around the time of this album we found ourselves drifting off course from what we knew as The Psychedelic Furs. We lost a bit of our musical integrity. We were doing the whole thing with the ego ramps on stage and things like that. After that tour we had to do a bit of soul searching to decide if it was worth carrying on. We did end up carrying on for two more albums. Now, we look back on those albums and see that there are good songs but we have to strip off a bit of the overproduction. If we had a different producer back then, it would have been a fine album." (Equality365 2016)

Tim Butler: "We were listening to Midnight To Midnight recently and we haven't played those songs in recent years. 'All Of The Law' and 'Angels Don't Cry' have made their way back into our repertoire [for the 2016 tour]." (Orlando Weekly 2016)

Tim Butler (on his brother Richard suffering from chest pains while touring for Midnight To Midnight): "I guess it was anxiety, we'd really gone off the rails...trying to ingratiate ourselves into a bigger market. After that tour we seriously thought of jacking it in." (The Yorkshire Post 2017)

Tim Butler: "We were going in a direction we really hated, and halfway through the Midnight To Midnight tour, Richard was having heart arrhythmias because of stress. We almost broke up." (Classic Pop 2019)

Tim Butler: "Richard feels that we'd lost our direction. We almost broke up after that album. In my opinion, the songs may be a bit overproduced, but the thing that was worse about it was that we followed things fashion-wise – we went the way that was big in the mid-'80s, with the long coats, the mullet hair – spiky on top and long down the back, everybody back then had it. And we sort of went in with that!

"Musically though, I think the songs on there are still good, so I feel a bit better about it.

"But the production on that album can be dated very much to the '80s, whereas on our other albums, the production can still stand up there with other alternative bands nowadays." (Portsmouth.co.uk 2019)

Tim Butler: "I guess we went slightly off track with Midnight To Midnight, it was a bit over-produced, a bit 80s. I think that's the only album we did that can be allocated a time that you can tell when it was recorded." (Yorkshire Evening Post 2019)

Tim Butler: "Except for that album, Midnight To Midnight, I think our whole catalogue could come out now and not be out of place on alternative radio." (WriteWyattUK 2019)

Paul Garisto: "It took two years to make that record, we didn't really have the songs. We were rehearsing in England, in a beautiful studio, we lived there, we could rehearse 24/7 in the middle of nowhere, but we didn't come up with anything. We had studio time booked but no producer, and so... at that point Daniel Lanois got involved; he was going to produce us and came down to work with us for two or three weeks, but he left because really we didn't have the songs and he was right... stuff like that postponed the actual recording and that's why it took so long to make that record... I had a lot of back and forth with Richard at the time because he had a sound in mind and he wanted to make an attempt to record a more commercial album in a way to reach a wider audience. In my opinion, we should stick to what The Psychedelic Furs had done in the beginning, and I was not talking about the sound 'per se' but about the heart, the soul of what they had done on the first couple of records. In my opinion, writing music that stayed true to the band's past would have been a better way to go because eventually people would have come around to The Psychedelic Furs because they wrote some great songs. But whatever... like you said, the album was a commercial success." (Melody Lane 2020)

Richard Butler: "We were at a loss because we'd changed the sound from the first two albums to Forever Now, then again for Mirror Moves, which Keith Forsey had put more of a pop sheen on. And so... we were actually going to go with Daniel Lanois now. But Danny said, 'I don't think you're ready, you need more time writing songs.' But we were raring to go – we'd always written a lot in the studio. So, we went in with Chris Kimsey instead. And yet we found we'd hit a blank wall: we had a strange writer's block moment, musically and lyrically. We recorded in Switzerland, then at Hansa in Berlin, but... we'd kind of lost our way. There are some good moments on there, but as a whole piece it's not great. And I think the image we projected on the cover didn't help. Yeah, a bit over-stylized, and... just not us. That photo was halfway through a tour, a fleeting look, and when I looked back, I thought, 'What the heck are we doing?' We'd forgotten what we were and where we came from. Which wouldn't have happened if we'd stayed in England, I guess. We'd lost focus." (Record Collector 2020)

Richard Butler: "When we were going to get ready to work on Midnight To Midnight, Daniel Lanois was originally going to produce it. He came to the rehearsal studio and worked with us a couple of times through songs and he said, 'These are sounding good, but I think you need more songs.' We just wanted to record and we were used to going into the studio sort of half-ready. So we said, 'No, we want to do it [now].' So we went with another producer and it didn't quite work. I couldn't come up with the lyrics. The music we were coming up with wasn't that great and we kind of got lost." (Tidal 2020)

Richard Butler: "I hated that cover [on the album]. And when we did the tour, we had this hot stage setup that had hydraulic ramps that came up the back. It was this big setup and I just hated it. I started off kind of dressing like the cover and ended up in a black suit again, like when we started out. I came off that tour and just did not want to be in the band anymore at all. I was very depressed about it. And John and Tim said, 'You don't want to leave on a low note. Come back and make a record that you feel honestly reflects the band.' So we did. We came back and did Book Of Days and World Outside, and we toured for those and I didn't want to write songs with that same lineup again. It just didn't seem right, so we took a 10-year break." (Tidal 2020)

Tim Butler: "When we first got back together, we played the songs perfectly. Now we're bouncing off each other more. On albums like Midnight To Midnight, the songs are very produced. Now when we play them live, it's more rock 'n' roll." (PopMatters 2021)

Tim Butler: "I think we bent to the will of the American record company and got into the Americanization of our [music], which we really regretted. We were also seduced by the idea of getting a big producer like [Chris Kimsey], who wanted us to use loads of keyboards. It was a lush production —they wanted us in big, puffy hair and touring with all the large-scale staging and ramps, walkways and stuff. It was like what we fought against when we first started. This whole pomp and circumstance and nobody listened to what we were playing or saying, so we just stopped doing interviews during [the Midnight To Midnight tour]." (GoodTimes 2022)

Tim Butler: "By the end of the Midnight To Midnight tour, none of us were happy, and we almost broke up. We fought to get back to where we started." (GoodTimes 2022)

Tim Butler: "The whole thing that happened with that was we had made Mirror Moves and had a sort of radio hit with 'Heaven' and 'Ghost In You.' We got a taste of getting a big audience. So, there was a bit of pressure from the record company, especially after the Pretty In Pink movie, that they wanted to take that next step up. So, there was pressure to write a hit album. Instead of taking a slow rise to fame and building as we had been doing, we dove straight into going for the prize. It sort of worked out, but it didn't work out as well as we thought, and we immediately regretted it as soon as we'd done it and released it. After Midnight To Midnight, we started to get back to our original sound." (Nuvo 2023)

Tim Butler: "Except for our album Midnight To Midnight, which sounds very dated and '80s, our albums sound like they're part of a whole piece. They hold up." (Tallahassee Democrat 2023)

Tim Butler: "We'd gone the peak of Midnight To Midnight and then we decided that that wasn't the direction we wanted, we'd sort of sold out. So we did Book Of Days and we didn't do any videos or interviews, and I think we sort of lost our audience, and when we came back with World Outside, they'd sort of forgotten about us." (The Collapse Board 2024)

Tim Butler: "[For our 1987 album] Midnight To Midnight we went into the studio for six months." (Scenestr 2024)

Photo: Michael Halsband