At their best the Psychedelic Furs are fantastic

It’s amazing what the movies can do. In 1986, the John Hughes teen flick Pretty in Pink — the one where poor girl Molly Ringwald and rich kid Andrew McCarthy get it together despite their friends’ disapproval — took its title from a Psychedelic Furs song, which featured heavily in the film. Whoosh! Suddenly they were proper stars. Or rather they were for a year or so.

They reformed in 2000, but were just another band on the nostalgia circuit. Then along came another movie, the 2017 arthouse hit Call Me By Your Name, which featured their 1982 single ‘Love My Way’. Since then, the venues have grown again, the reviewers returned and the notices have been glowing. There are even whispers of another album. The one new song played at the Roundhouse — ‘The Boy Who Invented Rock’n’Roll’ — is perfectly serviceable, though heavier on mood and rhythm than the indelible melodies of the Furs’ best songs.

And the best songs — the two from those movies, ‘India’, ‘President Gas’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Heartbreak Beat’ — were pretty fantastic. ‘Sister Europe’, its title so definitively early 1980s that you could put it in a time capsule with a pair of legwarmers and a copy of Shirley Conran’s Lace, was icy and compelling. You couldn’t accuse Richard Butler of being the most versatile of singers — his voice was always somewhere in the region of David Bowie after three packs of Capstan Full Strength — but that meant there was little for him to lose. Even now he could read out the phone book and make it sound drug-addled and pretentious, which in the context of the group’s swirling proto-goth is very much a good thing.

He was a compelling frontman — his gestures were odd, rather as if he were a marionette —and he looks fantastic, albeit with the caveat that from a distance and under lights his hair could have passed for a small mammal.