Behind the Songs: Alice's House

A selection of quotes from The Psychedelic Furs on the song "Alice's House".

Richard Butler: "'Alice's House' is an asylum, and it's just a song basically about madness. Where it says, 'in the softest room,' you can take that as a padded cell, and 'you sing without a key.' Well, I always associate people who are insane as singing way out of tune, plus, you're in a room without a key. 'The butler is serving tea' is just sort of a wild image, and 'wearing a shirt without any sleeves' is simply a straitjacket. It works on illusions like that." (Artist Magazine 1984)

Richard Butler: "The thing is, if you start with a basic sequence of chords that sounds good, you can do anything at all with it. You could probably take the chords from a Motorhead song and do a reggae version of it, an MOR version, a punk version, or whatever. Once we have got that, we play with it until either it ends up as a song we like or we chuck it. Only once have we done a song from scratch twice that was 'Alice's House' off Mirror Moves. We recorded it originally with Todd Rundgren to go on Forever Now but we didn't like the way he did it. And we did it again with Keith Forsey. For some reason, that song was just a [__] to get recorded, even the second time round. We nearly didn't put it on Mirror Moves either, it was such a [__] to get done." (One Two Testing 1986)

John Ashton: "We lumped ['Love My Way'] in with the demos that we were doing [for Forever Now], and none of the record companies saw it [as being a single]. They saw 'Aeroplane.' They saw a version of 'Alice's House' that we did that they liked a lot, which came later. 'Alice’s House' never made it to Forever Now." (Popdose 2012)

John Ashton (on playing the demo of the song to Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters Of Mercy): "I couldn't tell whether he was impressed or not. He's very…." [puts palm in front of his face]. (2015 interview)

Rich Good (on being asked what were his favorite classic PFurs songs to play live): "'Soap Commercial', 'Sister Europe', 'Dumb Waiters', 'Only You And I', 'Alice's House'… Honestly, there's not really any I don't like playing." (Post-Punk.com 2022)