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Every
week the WB series "Charmed" (starring: Alyssa Milano - Who's the Boss,
Holly Marie Combs - Picket Fences, Rose McGowan - Scream)
opens with the song "How Soon Is Now?" performed by Richard Butler and
one of his bands, Love Spit Love. The song appears in the 1996 movie
"The Craft" and is available on that soundtrack. Like the Craft, Charmed
is about sorcery. Richard Butler is truly a shaman. There can
be no doubt about the spells that he casts. You get the feeling that
had Butler been born many centuries ago his philosophies would be well
documented and studied at universities around the globe, present time.
I first saw Richard Butler in 1984
with his other band, the Psychedelic Furs. I had heard his music,
long before ' 84.
Initially it was the music that
I was drawn to, but I then became engrossed by the lyrics. The lyrics
changed throughout the years from a fairly abstract form to a more symbolic
form - but always there remained recurring themes.
Butler’s best lyrics are a mixture of seediness, angst, glamour, darkness, sarcasm, sensitivity, cynicism, and awareness that combine at times to provide a very heady mix of thought provoking visions which are often disturbingly close to the bone. Butler uses his word play to paint pictures which constantly change from mood to mood - from one listen to next. If you have a listen to "Love My Way" (the tune you are hearing now!) you'll be sucked in by its melody.
LOVE MY WAY
There's an army on the dance
floor
It's a fashion with a gun, my
love
In a room without a door
A kiss is not enough
Love my way
It's a new road
I follow where my mind
goes
They'll put us on a railroad
They'll dearly make us pay
For laughing in their faces
And making it our way
There's emptiness behind their
eyes
And dust in all their hearts
They just want to steal us all
And take us all apart
Love my way
It's a new road
I follow where my mind
goes
So swallow all your tears, my
love
And put on your new face
You can never win or lose
If you don't run the race
Richard
Butler to me never seemed young. I have envied Butler's droning ennui passionately,
but I never thought I shared it. Butler's harsh, mocking laughter
requires a different throat. Even now, I don't feel that I've caught
up to it. I'm almost as old as he is, but nowhere near old enough to have his
vision or wisdom.
Perhaps never seeming young is
the unavoidable price of aging gracefully.
Butler has, I think, a unique capacity
to invest emotional nuance into words that in other singers' songs might
be no-ops. There are two quintessential examples. At the ends of the lines
of the chorus, where an ad-lib for this song form would probably have you
insert a woman's name, repeated, to hold the chorus together, Butler instead
sings the "and it" that joins one "Hurts when I..." to the next. I hear
an incredible number of things in this tiny conjunction, from constant
surprise that there's another pain, to an awareness that another pain is
better than emptiness, to a hopeful conviction, each time another "and
it" hangs for a moment
suspended, that a new clause means a new sensation, and perhaps this one
won't be pain. Orson Scott Card once explained his propensity for beginning
sentences with "and" and "but" by observing that the Book of Mormon does
it quite a bit, and reasoning that he must have absorbed this style during
his upbringing and come to associate these connections of ideas with the
expression of truths. That can't be where I got it from, though, so I believe
there must be something more universal to it, that they aren't the fingerprint
of a single search for truth, they are the signs (or perhaps even the tools)
of the search for truth itself. Purposeful language proceeds by association
and syllogism the way a climber moves from grip to grip, and the effort
marks you as surely as the climber's passion is evidenced in the contours
of their calf muscles.
The other word that nobody sings quite like Butler is "Yeah". In pop "yeah" is often used as a nonsense syllable, but there's a linguistics dissertation to be written, if it hasn't already been done, about the difference between "yeah" and "yes", and Butler's rendition of "yeah" would merit a chapter to itself. "Yes" accepts, "yeah" only acknowledges. "Yes" says that things are proceeding as expected, and "yeah" confirms that they are not (taking the function, sometimes, of the French "si", yes when the expected answer is no). "Yeah" admits irony and sarcasm. This might be generational, but "yeah", because of its informality, also seems to me to be harder to fake; "yes" is something you say, "yeah" is something you feel, and it's easier to say something you don't mean than it is to feel it. When the Beatles sing "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah", the "yeah"s are part of the social self-image they shared with (and described for) their audience. When Richard Butler sings "yeah, yeah, yeah", it is the abstract of a minor eternity of inner turmoil.
Having Richard Butler in your band
is like having an insurance policy. His sneering vocals, coarsened
by many chain-smoking years, assures
that every record he's on has redeeming quality.
Even on the best tracks that any
band Richard Butler is associated with, your attention is ultimately drawn
back to The Voice and the lyrics above the music, which stands out like
a colossus among midgets. Richard Butler is my favorite of all time.
His songs are echoey walls of sound that takes on lifes of their own.
Richard Butler's hoarse sneer and mocking portrayal of messed-up characters
provides the perfect vocal complement to that flying, swirling sound his
bands are associated with. Arguably, he and the Clash are the most
influential and adored acts to have emerged out of the UK since Pete Townshend
and the Who.
The two most essential links to Richard Butler on the web are burned down days and TalkTalkTalk . Please give them a look! Or you can for more information or return to my homepage . goes out to Paul for allowing me to share a scan of Richard. Kudos to Paul.
