Interview with FUR: ‘They love 60’s Lambretta scooters and mod badges in Indonesia, we hit that demographic we didn’t even know was there’

Brighton band FUR will release their debut album When You Walk Away on 5 November, offering us a series of tracks about relationships bathed in a nostalgic, 60’s glow.

The band comprises William Murray (vocals and guitar), William ‘Tav’ Taverner (bass), Josh Buchanan (keys and guitar) and Flynn Whelan (drums). Murray and former band member, guitarist Harry Saunders, founded the band having seen each other play at a former gig and then reconnecting at Freshers Week at Brighton University, where Murray was studying songwriting. Whelan was studying film making at the same university. Of their band name Murray says: ‘It was during that period, me and Harry had just turned 18, we wanted it to be one word and invoke a feeling or texture. We went through so many words! It feels a bit 60’/70’s, doesn’t it?,’ he said.

When You Walk Away is an 11 track album with three B-sides featuring songs that are very much interconnected: ‘It’s a post coming of age album, reflecting on being 18-15,’ Murray said. ‘When you’re 18, relationships are the be all and end all but when you’re mid-twenties, you realise that they’re not.’

The title track ‘When You Walk Away’ is actually a two-part track, each of which has a very different feel. Part I is more boisterous, more obviously 60’s in its influences, whereas Part II is slower and languorous. ‘Parts I and II were written as one song,’ Murray explained. ‘I think Josh wrote Part II first, you’ve got the cowboy riding through the desert feel, they’re kind of yin and yang. I love the concept of the statement, like King Gizzard’s sonically cohesive stuff. The melody in the first part reappears in the fifth track (‘She’s The Warmest Colour In My Mind’) but we’re not at King Gizzard’s level yet (laughs).’

‘It gives it a Pink Floyd feel, it’s a bit psychedelic’

Part II evolved in a way that they hadn’t initially expected: ‘Working on it was a real joy,’ Murray enthused. ‘Do you ever listen to a song and hear something in it that’s not there?’ I laugh and say that I do, on a daily basis. ‘That’s how this one was for me,’ he said. ‘I heard a trumpet in it. There was a guy, Mike, recording with his band in the studio next to us who played the sax. I asked if he’d play the sax on it but at the beginning it didn’t have the right feel. The next day, our producer said to us “Mike’s just laid down a saxophone solo at the end” and it was amazing, so we kept it in. It gives it a Pink Floyd feel, it’s a bit psychedelic.’

Other tracks, such as ‘She’s The Warmest Colour In My Mind’, are more tongue-in-cheek: ‘I’d just seen a Harry & Paul sketch (starring comedians Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse) where they pretended to be The Beatles and were taking the piss out of 60’s lyrics,’ he said. ‘We’ve got ‘la la las’ in the chorus, you don’t have to understand the lyrics, you just sing along. It’s so good to play live. We didn’t get really get a chance to rehearse it at all, we all learned our parts remotely. We just came off an 11 day tour with Boy Pablo (the indie pop music project of Chilean–Norwegian singer songwriter Nicolas Muñoz).’

‘What I Am’ is one of my favourites on the album because it could so easily be a Beach Boys song: ‘I think, in the intro, I kind of wanted ‘California Girls’ by The Beach Boys and the high pitched organ thing,’ Murray said. ‘I had the intro for so long. I thought I could leave that for 4 minutes (laughs). Then I had the middle eight (he sings it). Me and Josh went to Wales on a songwriting trip. It was this tiny couplesy cottage with a tiny bed (laughs), it was very cute. We wrote the rest of the song on that trip. The demo sounded less grand but we got into the studio and decided to make the drums thin out so you don’t know where the song’s headed. It’s in my top three on the album.’

‘It’s so beautiful, it’s one of the few songs for me that invokes classic albums like Rubber Soul’

I ask him what his other top two are. ‘It’s so hard but, for me, the best song is ‘No Good For You’,’ he said. ‘It’s one of Josh’s, it’s so beautiful, it’s one of the few songs for me that invokes classic albums like Rubber Soul, I love the melody, it’s subtle. It’s about the feeling of maybe watching someone who isn’t really there for you and you tell yourself it will work, even though it won’t. It’s positively self-deprecating (laughs). Our producer has a Martin D-18 guitar that I play on it, it’s one of the nicest acoustic guitars I’ve ever played. We wedged foam under the bridge to get that cool, plucky sound. I wanted it to sound as if someone was tapping along. In ‘Cecilia’ by Simon & Garfunkel, they tapped on the lino floor in the kitchen. On our song, we used brushes on the tiled floor of the studio and subtly rubbed our fingers together, rubbed our trousers, there’s the pitter patter of the snare (drum). It’s my favourite in terms of my vocal performance. We used the whole take, which is really unusual. There are tiny blemishes and imperfections that I would normally hate, maybe my voice cracks a bit somewhere, but it feels in the moment. I sang it at 2 a.m.!’

When it comes to the songwriting, Murray and Buchanan share duties. ‘I wrote all the music up until when Harry left,’ Murray said. ‘Josh was playing keys at the time but he’s a really talented guitarist. I feel that you go through stages as a songwriter. Sometimes, you can have all your aims for a song but other times, you let the moment take you and see what it means afterwards. Josh is very good with lyrics, his vocab is bigger than mine (laughs). On songs like ‘Be Next To Her’, he’s got lines like ‘no deity for me’ and ‘build me an effigy’, I had to look that up, haha. It adds to some of the charm of it, that song has a great energy. Me and Josh share a love of the songwriting of the 60’s and 70’s and we wanted to make it an influence that we wear. Flynn has the best answer when people ask him what the best decade was for music. He says right now because that means you get to listen to all the music ever made, including posthumous stuff that was first performed hundreds of years ago but which is being played for you now.’

The Beach Boys have been his biggest inspiration: ‘Different people inspire me to do different things but they’re the band I listen to and think they’re on a different planet,’ he enthused. ‘They’re leagues above everyone else with their harmonies. I love ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, it’s close to being my favourite song of theirs but I also love ‘In My Room’.

As a band, they enjoy switching it up when they play live: ‘I quite enjoy sometimes singing a song with a different attitude,’ Murray said. ‘We’ve recently hit a bit of a Eureka moment if you’ve got a loud set but a song drops down in places. We felt it was a bit boring, so we drop it down even further and strip it back to one guitar playing the melody and then when the song comes back in, it feels more impactful. In a similar way, if an intro is four bars, sometimes we’ll do eight bars live, you keep surprising the crowd, although we’re not at Grateful Dead telepathic levels yet,’ he laughed.

‘It’s the most emotional song on the album for me, sonically, it doesn’t let off’

‘Holding Up The Sun’ on the album also has a very Beatlesey vibe and Murray says he thinks it’s the track that people will be most surprised by: ‘It’s more like an epic ballad, more like Oasis,’ he said. ‘It’s the most emotional song on the album for me, sonically, it doesn’t let off. Mikey Rowe, he’s a pianist, he was recording next door to us one day. We heard someone playing the Hammond organ and thought “Who’s this god playing the organ?” He’s played for Jagger. We asked if he could play on this track and we thought he’d charge a silly amount but he was so kind and did it for so little,’ he said. ‘He ended up playing on nine songs on the album, we wouldn’t have thought to have beautiful parts like that. He was the nicest guy, he said he’d do it because he liked our music.’

Interestingly, they have built up a fan base in unexpected places, most notably Jakarta, due to the popularity of their debut single ‘If You Know That I’m Lonely’ (2017), which has since racked up almost 26 million streams on Spotify. ‘We’ve played in Jakarta a few times,’ Murray said, sounding delighted. ‘When you’re 21, you’re definitely not expecting to do a show in Asia. We’d only done a festival in Hamburg before we played in Asia, it was a crazy experience. They love 60’s Lambretta scooters and mod badges in Indonesia, we hit that demographic we didn’t even know was there.’ I tell him that a friend of mine has lived in Jakarta for nearly 20 years and has no intention of ever leaving and he grins: ‘I love it there, I love the food,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve killed some of the receptors in my mouth! Me and Josh, we’ve abused the spice.’

If he could tour with anyone, he is quick to say The Grateful Dead: ‘If it actually was a thing, people would expect telepathic musicianship, wouldn’t they?,’ he said. (The audience attending concerts by The Grateful Dead was instructed to telepathically transmit an art print which was randomly selected just before it was projected on a screen above the musical group while they were performing.) We wouldn’t satisfy that (laughs). They had different zones at their concerts, they had a “deaf” zone near the front of the stage where deaf people could stand and they had people doing sign language in front of them telling them the lyrics, I’d never heard of that before. They would give them balloons to “feel” the vibrations of the music. It’s the best live experience I’ve ever had, me and Josh are big Deadheads.’

We chat for a bit about what it must be like to be deaf and not to be able to hear music and how awful it must be and he tells me about a movie he watched, Sound of Metal, starring Riz Ahmed, based on the real life punk metal band Jucifer, whose drummer lost his hearing. ‘There’s this scene in the film where someone is playing the grand piano and the deaf kids all gather round – they put their hands on the piano to feel the music. I loved that,’ he said.

(Photo from left to right: ‘Tav’, Josh, Flynn and Will.)