My Psychedelic Furs Vinyl #17

All Of This And Nothing (1988) (Columbia FC 44377) (Canadian LP)

"'Don't believe in anything'... that's the line of theirs I like best and typically, that song's ["No Tears"] not on the compilation. It's not compiled chronologically either. Maybe that's a return to their early characteristic cutups, I don't know. But they're free now, these songs. They've broken out of their era with all their tender ferocity intact. They're still as alive and alert in '88 as they ever were and, though I greet all but one of them with the blur of hindsight, they still confuse my perspectives.

"Giddy, that's how 'President Gas' gets me. John Ashton's dipsomaniac guitar reels through Todd Rundgren's production... it's like dancing through wet concrete, too awake to the rituals, too broken to resist. [Richard] Butler was fond of referring to the era of the Talk Talk Talk album as a wall of melody as opposed to the first album's wall of sound. I just think of a juggernaut, juiced and out of control, a skid and a bruise and wonder what 'hell without the sin' will be like.

"'All That Money Wants' is the moorings loosed again after the sensible dialogue attempted by the Midnight To Midnight album. Having deliberately shed dimensions to see what it must feel like to be understood, The Furs have returned to abstraction with producer Stephen Street. It's a trim squabble alright, a rediscovery of certainty in doubt. 'I don't believe that I believed in you' indeed. Incensed thunder.

"The unequivocal purity of rage, that's 'Imitation Of Christ', betrayed by the death of the hippie dream, converting all that disappointment into a beautifully bitter piety. Mocking the aims it mourns, it is willfully unfocused, furious, sprawling and scolding with a noble hypocrisy. 'Sister Europe', also from the debut LP, broods, the kinetic calm before the mental storm. Blossoming like deadly nightshade, it slurs its seduction.

"Stifled by the small-mindedness of fashion-fixated Britain, The Furs recorded 'Love My Way' in America with Todd Rundgren – a nicotine crooner steeped in melancholy.

"It was the start of a change of heart, a desire to reach beyond the faithful, and 'Highwire Days,' from the Mirror Moves album, is indicative of that change. The image of a mind on the edge of sanity, balanced precariously, seeing through the fabric of everyday existence, knowing better yet, unbearably, incapable of changing anything, is probably Butler's finest. 'Get smart, get scared...' That way madness lay and The Furs moved on.

"'She has got it in for me/Yeah, I mean it honestly...' 'Dumb Waiters' is barbaric paranoia loosed to roam and groan through the sickliest saxophone imaginable. Butler was reading Martin Amis, obsessed with words not making sense or, rather, to release language from the thrall of common sense was his aim and 'Pretty In Pink', a sister song from the Talk Talk Talk album, was eventually his justification. Utterly misinterpreted by John Hughes it was turned into a pleasing but inappropriate movie and, re-recorded and re-released, gave The Furs their greatest hit.

"'The Ghost In You' and 'Heaven' were the poles reversed, energy piling towards the positive. Accepting that fulfillment means having to trust one's nature against one's better judgement, The Furs embraced romanticism and soared, cool and clear-headed. There's a brightness here, bold and certain. 'Heartbreak Beat', typical of the Midnight To Midnight album, succeeds in retaining personality against all odds.

"'All Of This And Nothing' is my private one, my own sweet problem. I always thought the debris around that room, the stuff scattered about that brought Butler to declare 'You didn't leave me anything that I can understand' was 'A roomful of your crash.' Now it turns out the word is trash, not crash. I adore the disease all the same."

Steve Sutherland, May '88.

Side 1:

1. President Gas

2. All That Money Wants

3. Imitation Of Christ

4. Sister Europe

5. Love My Way

6. Highwire Days

Side 2:

1. Dumb Waiters

2. Pretty In Pink

3. The Ghost In You

4. Heaven

5. Heartbreak Beat

6. All Of This And Nothing

My Psychedelic Furs Vinyl #14

All That Money Wants (1988) (Columbia 38 07974) (USA 7" single)

Side A:

All That Money Wants

Side B:

Birdland

Behind the Songs: All That Money Wants

Vince Ely: "[All Of This And Nothing'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].

"I think the band has backed off from a commercial approach even though it's easier to write that sort of song. We never expected 'Money' to be a hit – though we did think it would do better than it did – and to be honest, I think a hit single would actually work against us now." (Evening Post 1988)

Richard Butler: "The inspiration behind 'All That Money Wants' is just – it's just about people wanting money too much and you know, seeing just, that there's nothing really to it." (Interchords 1988)

Richard Butler: "I'm most happy that it has got some alternative play. It is good to see that it is getting played where it is most important to get played." (L.A. Life 1988)

Richard Butler: "The person in the song is dissatisfied and constantly pushing toward success. Then when he gets it, it rings hollow.

"Musically, it isn't far from the truth. If I found out anything in music, it is that you have to please yourself. If you are trying to reach (more) people, that is when you do your worst songs." (L.A. Life 1988)

Richard Butler: "We wanted [the music video] to be really low-key. We were rehearsing and then taped what they wanted." (L.A. Life 1988)

Interviewer: "Your writing process is presumably different now, yet 'All That Money Wants' seems to be some sort of reversion back to confusion."

Richard Butler: "Well, what I'm trying to do now is not control things too much because that's what I've been doing. I don't have to look at every line and go 'Oh, I dunno, I could change that around...' Y'know, it's just a matter of getting it done and letting it flow, being a bit more free about it." (Melody Maker 6/18/1988)

Richard Butler: "We wanted to release a new single and also wanted something new to be on [All Of This And Nothing]. I think it fits in better than tracks off Midnight To Midnight. The mood is very much like a song from the album Forever Now, which is why it follows 'President Gas' and feels right." (Melody Maker 8/6/1988)

Richard Butler: "We've decided to write the next album really fast. This is one of the three songs we have for it at the moment. When you rush yourself, when you force yourself into that position, that's when the music works best." (Melody Maker 8/6/1988)

Richard Butler: "That's the new song we did with Stephen Street, who's worked with The Smiths [and] worked with Morrissey recently. I like it, it's kind of like a bit of a return to the old sound of the band that we had. It's more layered, it's kind of a bit more mysterious directly." (MTV Europe 1988)

Richard Butler (on the video): "We didn't really want to go and make, you know, like we are doing in the music. We wanted to take a step back from it from being very, very produced. So we told the guy [director Walter Pitt] that – we were actually rehearsing upstate in New York and we just told him to try and work the film around. Just watching us rehearse and just watching us walk around and not try and make it so we had to stand there smashing guitars like it was in the song and all that kind of business. And they actually talked me into singing round the song for him a couple of times because I didn't even want to do that. But he came to me and said, 'Well look, we've been filming you but we've only managed to get about five seconds of you so far. So would you run through it?' So, I said yeah." (MTV Europe 1988)

Richard Butler: "'All That Money Wants' is about dissatisfaction with America." (New Musical Express 1988)

Richard Butler: "It was me saying that I'd learned that success isn't what it's all about and money isn't what it's all about." (Austin American Statesman 1990)

Richard Butler: "It 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)

John Ashton: "Richard came to visit. This is what came out. This was the first step in the 'Let's get back to our roots' period. A personal favorite of mine, it had an 'Indie' feel, due in part to our new direction and Stephen Street's production." (Should God Forget liner notes, 1997)

Tim Butler: "Stephen was a great producer – he had done 'All That Money Wants' with us." (Uncut 2020)

Behind the Albums: All Of This And Nothing

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: "I feel some of the songs are classics. 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." (Record Mirror 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)

Interviewer: "Have you ever been discouraged enough to quit the business?"

Tim Butler: "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)

Fan from Lexington Park, MD: "Richard, will you be releasing the All Of This And Nothing video collection on DVD?"

Richard Butler: "We haven't gotten around to the videos yet, but there's a lot of interesting stuff. Legacy are re-releasing the first four albums, and we're adding demos. If we were to do a DVD, we would go deeper and find interviews with the band. That would be great to put on and mix in with the videos." (USA Today 2001)

Interviewer: "On the front cover of your celebrated greatest hits, All Of This And Nothing, the band look very Velvet Underground. Were they a big influence on your image?"

Richard Butler: "Yeah, to a degree. I was also a huge Andy Warhol fan from my time at art school, so we were very influenced by that whole Warhol aesthetic." (Hot Press 2020)

My Psychedelic Furs CDs #9

All Of This And Nothing (1988) (Columbia CK 44377)

Track Listing:

1. President Gas

2. All That Money Wants

3. Imitation Of Christ

4. Sister Europe

5. Love My Way

6. No Easy Street

7. Highwire Days

8. She Is Mine

9. Dumb Waiters

10. Pretty In Pink

11. The Ghost In You

12. Heaven

13. Heartbreak Beat

14. All Of This And Nothing

Notes:

Tracks 1 and 5–6: From Forever Now (1982)

2: Exclusive to this compilation

3–4: From The Psychedelic Furs (1980)

7 and 11–12: From Mirror Moves (1984)

8–10 and 14: From Talk Talk Talk (1981)

13: From Midnight To Midnight (1987)

All Of This And Nothing Ad

An advertisement for The Psychedelic Furs' compilation All Of This And Nothing appeared in the August 6, 1988 issue of the NME.

Via @nothingelseon (Twitter)

All That Money Wants Ad #2

Another ad for The Psychedelic Furs' "All That Money Wants" single appeared in the July 9, 1988 issue of Melody Maker.

Via @nothingelseon (Twitter)

All That Money Wants Ad

An advert for The Psychedelic Furs' single "All That Money Wants" appeared in the July 2, 1988 issue of UK magazine Melody Maker.

Via @nothingelseon (Twitter)