Furniture

A History of Furniture

Origins (1979)

Jim Irvin, Tim Whelan and Hamilton (Hami) Lee formed Furniture in 1979. All three grew up in West London between Twickenham and Ealing. They were close knit. Tim’s and Jim’s mothers were flatmates before marrying. Hami had gone to school with Tim. Sally Still and Maya Gilder, who would join in 1983, had gone to school with Jim’s sister. Tim’s brother Larry played with the group from 1983 to 1985. An earlier school band including Tim, Hami and Larry had played jazz standards as “Dr. Scholl and the Foot Pads”.

Tim played guitar, piano and flute. Jim was never a ‘musician’ as such but had been collecting records since he was five and words and melodies came to him easily. Punk gave them the spur to start, but Furniture defined themselves against it, becoming (Jim) “an exercise in swimming against the tide … we often seemed to be doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing.” Influences included jazz, John Barry soundtracks, Sinatra, Can, Chic, The Beatles, Phil Spector, The Isley Brothers, Motown, Island-era Fairport and Traffic, Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny, Kate Bush, and among contemporaries Talking Heads and Costello. More ambitious than three chord punk, in any case, and nothing like most of the bands its members’ age were forming at the same time. Tim also played concurrently in the West London band Missing Presumed Dead, who cut two albums and a Peel session and from 1981 in The Transmitters.

The Furniture line-up added guitarist Simon Beaton and bass player Ian Macdonald. The band’s first recorded public date was 28 August 1980.

First single (1980–1982)

An early ambition was to be “a kind of cross between Chic and The Undertones”. Their debut single, “Shaking Story” b/w “Take a Walk Down Town”, was self-released in 1980 on the band’s own imprint, The Guy From Paraguay Records. A thousand copies were pressed, housed in a handmade picture sleeve designed by the group around a Xeroxed photograph of a naked man on a sofa. John Peel played the single three times in late 1980. The thrill was intense, unique … Jim would recall later in 2009.

Soon after the single, Simon Beaton left due to health problems. His departure forced the band to decide what to do next - they started moving from the punk’n’funk sound of “Shaking Story” towards jazzier, Can-influenced material. Beaton and his close friend Ian Macdonald (who played bass and left around the same time) didn’t really like the new direction. For a period Furniture worked as a trio, with Simon’s brother Tim Beaton contributing double bass and violin. Around this time Jim bought a cheap Yamaha CS5 mono synthesiser on hire-purchase; “I Miss You” was picked out on it with Tim in the basement of Tim’s parents’ house in 1981–82. Jim said of this song “Writing this was effectively the moment when the earlier, amateur phase of the group ended and we thought we might be onto something”. Early support slots included dates with Funkapolitan and The Birthday Party.

Consolidation: When the Boom Was On (1983)

In 1983 Sally Still (bass, vocals) and Maya Gilder (keyboards) joined as full-time members, completing the five-piece line-up that would run until 1990. Larry Whelan (known on the sleeves as Larry N’Azone) continued as part-time saxophonist. Later in the year, the band signed to Survival Records (owned by Furniture’s manager, Anne-Marie Heighway) on the strength of demos the band had made as both a trio and a five piece, including ‘I Miss You’, recorded at “a dilapidated studio in Denmark Street”. In September 1983 Furniture released the demos as a six-track mini-album When the Boom Was On, (“part jazz-tinged, low-budget film noir with a score by a nascent John Barry figure and part suburban bedsit angst” — Jim) on Premonition, an imprint of Survival Records set up to shelter new acts while Survival concentrated on electro. The band would have substantial control over artwork, advertising, photography and press for the releases that came out on the imprint. The electro influence can be heard on the instrumental mix of ‘Throw Away The Script’ from 1984.

On the live side, the band were regular performers, playing at the Wag Club (“slightly past its peak”), the now closed Clarendon Arms in Hammershmith, Sol Y Sombra, and on one occasion at New Romantic scenester, Rusty Egan’s Camden Palace where they felt somewhat out of place. As Jim put it: “Three or four boys of varying sizes and complexion, a half-Filipino girl, a half-Indian girl. We were a real circus troop.”

Survival singles (1984–1985)

Fully on Survival from spring 1984, Furniture released “Dancing the Hard Bargain” (April 1984), produced by former Blue Zoo member Tim Parry and engineered by Phil Chilton at The Yard. In December 1984 came three-track EP / 12-inch “Love Your Shoes”, produced by Troy Tate, formerly of the Teardrop Explodes. A self-produced four-track EP, I Can’t Crack, followed in May 1985, sung by Tim Whelan. Years later the band would learn the latter song was a favourite of the famous DJ David Mancuso and played at his New York Loft parties.

A contemporary Melody Maker feature by Chris Roberts (“Fully Furnished”, 1985) caught the group at a transitional moment. “When we heard [Love Your Shoes] on the radio it was peculiar,” Tim told Roberts. “Whoever they were they were good, but they weren’t us. It was supposed to be deadpan, understated. It ended up a bit soft.” Jim’s own description to Roberts of what the band were trying to do, “somewhere between Cabaret Voltaire and Joni Mitchell”, is an intriguing summary of the Premonition years.

Much of the 1984–85 single material was gathered together on a Japan-first 1986 compilation, The Lovemongers, alongside five new tracks: the title song, “What the Fog Said”, “Bullet”, “Talking Kitten” and “Sang Froid”. The title track was produced by Tim Parry and Walter Samuel; most of the rest by Furniture, with “Love Your Shoes” remixed by Fishlock and Greenaway. Premonition needed material quickly to fill the record so Tim edited a previously-unreleased piece, “Bullet”, down from its original nine minutes to fit. The track was built on a “simple but elaborate tape loop” and recorded via a friend’s mobile studio at Simon Beaton’s house with percussion and “Phantom Violin” provided by a Swedish busker named Helena Björglius. Jim has called it one of his favourite Furniture recordings but it had not been considered a Furniture track until the compilation made it one. Hami’s own account of the session: “Recorded with the aid of a pair of brushes, a few CAN records and some L.S.D.” The full version of the song would finally emerge more than 30 years later on Emotional Rescue’s ‘On Broken Glass’ reissue.

Breakthrough: Stiff, Brilliant Mind and The Wrong People (1986–1987)

Furniture appeared on Channel 4’s The Tube in March 1986 playing “Brilliant Mind” and “I Miss You” (on a bill with The Bangles and The Cramps) and later that year signed to Stiff Records on the strength of their demo of “Brilliant Mind”. The agent who signed them was Nick “The Captain” Stewart, the A&R man who signed U2 to Island Records.

Recording of the first album took place at London’s Townhouse Three studios with Mick Glossop producing. “I Miss You”, “Escape Into My Arms” and “Love Your Shoes” were re-recorded for the LP. Glossop, writing in International Musician & Recording World in September 1986 (reproduced under Press), described the “Brilliant Mind” session. Furniture set up live, without a click track or a drum machine; “Brilliant Mind” needed only four takes of the backing and two takes of the vocal. Hami “uses the kit more like a percussion instrument; for most of the album he’s playing with brushes, which is one of the reasons it sounds so different”. The track’s sharp attack came from a 10p coin gaffered to the outside of the bass drum skin so the beater struck the coin before the skin. The band had just replaced their ageing Farfisa organ with a DX9, and spent three days programming the DX9 to imitate the Farfisa voicings. Larry Whelan returned as session saxophonist. The album was mixed at Sarm East — famous for its association with Trevor Horn.

“Brilliant Mind” (Stiff, BUY IT 251) was released in May 1986. It peaked at number 21 in the UK Singles Chart on 10 July, supported by a black-and-white video, directed by Stiff boss Dave Robinson, filmed at 7am at the Wag Club in Soho. Robinson would film Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin’s cover of “The Locomotion” in colour in the afternoon. “Our video was simple but very effective,” Jim later wrote, “though we’re sure Robbo reckoned the Stewart/Gaskin single was the better bet.” Runners were dispatched to buy cigarettes for the invited audience after someone had forgotten the smoke machine.

The band’s most famous song came to Jim on a 110 bus from Hounslow after signing on at the dole office, with the chorus arriving first: “In essence, Brilliant Mind is a note-to-self about being a bit autistic and trying to understand the rest of mankind.” Dave Robinson had insisted the track needed a conventional back-beat but the band had refused. “Dave Robinson said it would never be a hit without a back beat,” Hami recalled. “They all had them in those days!” Reviewing the single in the NME, William Leith said “it’s the noises, the daring — or at least quirky — chunks of sound that bounce slightly unevenly, like razored power-balls, that push it into the first division”. Boy George would call it his favourite single of the 1980s (see BBC Sounds).

At the wrong moment however circumstances beyond Furniture’s control conspired against them. In 1984, Stiff’s co-founder Dave Robinson had been invited by Stiff’s distributor, Island records, to run the label as it was financially in poor shape due to the loss of Bob Marley and ventures into film. The quid pro quo was an investment by Island into Stiff but the money didn’t materialise. Robinson ended up focussed on Island while Stiff struggled, the loss of Madness to Virgin being particularly significant. In August 1985 the partnership was severed, but the damage was done. There would be a creditors meeting in August 1986 over unpaid debts of over £3.5m and the label would be sold for a mere £305k in September to the late Jill Sinclair, wife of Trevor Horn. Ironically Island would prosper thanks to U2, the best-selling Bob Marley compilation ‘Legend’ and the era-defining success of ZTT, the sub-label set up on Island by Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair most famous for Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Against this backdrop it is easy to understand the practical effects on Furniture’s career. “Brilliant Mind” stalled in the charts after Stiff had its MCPS licence (the right to press records) withdrawn over unpaid bills, cutting off supply just as the single was climbing. A second single, a re-recorded “Love Your Shoes”, became a radio hit, but its momentum was halted by Stiff’s financial crisis. The label could not afford to press enough records to meet demand, compounding the situation by delivering only to chart return shops which led to the single being blocked from the charts by Gallup. Sales would have given them a new entry position at #17 but instead it was held outside at #101 thus ending the band’s chart career.

Furniture’s first full-length album, The Wrong People (Stiff SEEZ 64), which would ideally have capitalised on the success of “Brilliant Mind”, was released in November 1986. It was positively reviewed in Sounds and Smash Hits, with the NME sitting on the fence (“This is very close to being a fine record”), spoilt only by a somewhat churlish review from Record Mirror (all reviews reproduced on this site). Its reputation has grown over time — in 2010 the Guardian would write “This week one of the best albums ever recorded becomes available to download” when reviewing the Cherry Red reissue. Unfortunately the new owners of the Stiff catalogue didn’t provide the support the release needed and only 30,000 copies were pressed, just enough to meet pre-release commitments. The fact that it didn’t even make the Top 100 album charts tells you something about the lack of promotion.

In 2019 Tim recalled “My memory is that it felt sodding terrible. Stiff Records went bankrupt the week we went into the charts, and the next week our records were being deleted and the lawyers were starting to rub their hands in anticipation. I went to the local pub, spent the last of my money on a half of lager and one play of it on the video jukebox, and went off to sign on the dole. I thought ‘If this is what having a hit single is like, I hope it never fucking happens again’.”

Exile (1987–1989)

The collapse of Stiff dropped Furniture into a three-year legal black hole. ZTT owned Furniture’s contract and the Wrong People masters but pressed no further copies and, the band recall, declined either to release them from contract or to put out new material. Extricating themselves from the contract consumed most of their next three years.

Unable to record, Furniture kept working by touring. From 1987 to 1988 they toured the world under British Council sponsorship, playing Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania (arriving at the end of the Ceaușescu period, “a new and nasty experience”), Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In most of these cities Furniture were the first Western rock band to appear in many years. Tim has recalled playing “a great big theatre in Amman in front of the Crown Prince — we’d been a shambolic indie band, turning our back to the audience; suddenly we found we had to put on a show.”

Chris Roberts, covering the Romanian leg for Melody Maker (30 April 1988), described four 6,000-seat shows in two days in Bucharest, the first appearances by a Western group in the city in a decade. Rosemary Arnott, assistant cultural attaché at the British Embassy, warned him before the gig: “Be diplomatic, please, because it could have severe diplomatic repercussions here.” The country’s one pop radio DJ wanted to know whether Furniture were “new wave, like The Jesus And Mary Chain”. After the show, at the British Ambassador’s residence, Romanian folk musicians expressed what Roberts called “a sincere jealousy of Western musicians’ freedom”. Sally caught the pulse of the experience most honestly: “It hurts as well though. Because you think: ‘Why aren’t we doing this in England? Why aren’t we doing this for money?’”

Tim viewed the situation with gallows humour. “Most people we go near; they die, they get divorced, they have nervous breakdowns, parts of their bodies fall off… we keep going, but everything around us falls to bits.” Chris Roberts’s 1991 Scrapbook essay later confirmed the reportage second-hand: Furniture were “the first group in the country’s history to make a throng get up and dance, thus risking serious mass arrest and retribution.”

Exposure to Egyptian music introduced Tim and Hami to a pop tradition “that gave nothing to, and took nothing from, England”. This would influence the sounds of the next album, and ultimately the direction Tim would take with his next band, Transglobal Underground.

Arista: Food, Sex & Paranoia (1989–1990)

By 1989 the ZTT stand-off had been resolved and Furniture were signed to Arista. A new album was recorded at Wessex Sound Studios in north London, shortly after Talk Talk had been there cutting Spirit of Eden, and mixed over a four-month summer residency at The Stereo Society, in Greenwich Village, New York. Food, Sex & Paranoia was produced by Mike Thorne (whose prior credits included work with Wire and Soft Cell) and released in February 1990. Hami: “Summer of ‘89… NYC was an inspiration” — he was glad to get out of the UK after splitting up with a long-time girlfriend. Jim: “Four months in New York over the summer, making a record was sheer bliss.”

The album’s sound reflected Tim and Hami’s touring encounter with non-Western rhythms: tongue drums on “Slow Motion Kisses”, steel pans on “On a Slow Fuse” and “Hard to Say”, cellos on “Swing Tender” and “Love Me”, and the yangqin zither on “One Step Behind You”. Jim has called “Swing Tender” Turkish-influenced and described “One Step Behind You” as “epic, volcanic”. Alongside the world-music textures the band were also “experimenting with pop and dance — Slow Motion Kisses, Love Me”, influenced by acts like Soul II Soul “and things that were moving the culture on”. “One Step Behind You” itself had been in the set since the 1987 Egypt and Jordan shows but could not be recorded until the Arista deal came through. The CD single included “International People”, a Whelan/Lee co-write that Excavating the 80s later called “an Eastern-flavoured vocal duet between Jim and Sally” that “could easily have been an A-side in its own right.”

The album was preceded in October 1989 by the single “Slow Motion Kisses” (a song written five years before recording) and followed by “One Step Behind You”. The “Slow Motion Kisses” video was directed by Martha Fiennes and did not feature the band. Both singles, and the album, were reviewed positively but came out into a market in which three years’ absence had dissipated most of the career momentum “Brilliant Mind” had built. NME’s Simon Williams called it an ‘exquisite oddity’ and Melody Maker’s Mick Mercer commented “what a record — never knowing from one minute to the next whether you’ll be knocked out, or seduced”. Ian Cheek, reviewing the FSP tour at Leeds Duchess of York for Sounds, singled out ‘Song For A Doberman’ as “a solemn ballad coloured by Sally Still’s pensive vocal” that “tears dramatically through the senses”, concluding that “if it appears as the next single, then talk of one-hit wonders should be eradicated for ever.” The album was however not a commercial success with both singles and album failing to chart.

Break-up (1990–1991)

Maya Gilder left the group early in 1990 and the remaining four continued as a quartet, dividing her keyboard parts between them. The rawer sound produced material the band liked (“My Enemy Turns Me On” among others), and they successfully headlined the second stage at the 1990 Reading Festival (“rather euphoric,” Jim recalled; “we were told by the organisers that it was one of the best crowds in the tent that year”). But audiences were diminishing, and Jim had quietly grown to hate almost everything about being in a band except writing and recording. “I kept developing weird allergies and rashes,” he has said, “that cleared up when we stopped.”

With the Arista contract over, Furniture returned to Survival and began work on a new album in the studio attached to their management office. “One day we turned up,” Jim has recalled, “and the studio had gone” - one of the partners had taken it as his share of the business. Two songs, “How I’ve Come to Hate the Moon” and “Farewell”, had already been cut - these became the band’s final output. “How I’ve Come to Hate the Moon” had begun as Sally’s composition (her home-made demo inspired Jim’s lyric) and was a highlight of the 1990 Reading set. “Farewell” had been begun by Jim when he was 13 and was completed in a room in Dollis Hill in the spring of 1990. “Coincidentally,” the Scrapbook inlay notes, “this was our last song.” In 1991 Survival issued She Gets Out the Scrapbook: The Best of Furniture as a compilation, collecting most of the singles (except “Shaking Story” / “Take a Walk Down Town”) and adding the two final recordings. After that Furniture quietly stopped working. The Scrapbook inlay, compiled by the group, added some final detail : Tim Beaton on the original 1981 Denmark Street demo of “I Miss You”; Martin Drover’s trumpet on “Make Believe I’m Him”; Boz Boorer (later Morrissey’s guitarist) playing clarinet on “Turnupspeed”; Sally’s lead vocal on “Song For A Doberman”, written by Tim in Eastern Europe, recorded in North London, sung in New York, and dedicated “to a gang member in Holland who inspired the title. Or something.” The compilation’s sleeve invited fans to send off for a fourteen-track cassette of further recordings, though that material never saw release.

Scrapbook’s accompanying essay (“London, August 1991”) closed the books with “Furniture were determined not to fit, intent on proving their own theory that they were the wrong people. The right people, I guess, hide in packs and prefer bingo to sacred thrills.” Hami’s own version was more prosaic - “I can’t recall us ever actually splitting up — we just sort of faded out.”

After Furniture

Tim Whelan and Hamilton Lee formed Transglobal Underground from 1992. Tim has continued to sing outside TGU, including with The Blood Tub Orchestra (The Seven Curses of the Music Hall, 2018: “we destroy and re-assemble Music Hall songs. Ugly old British music for an even uglier modern Britain”) and with the Magic Sponge, “West London early-’80s survivors”.

Jim Irvin joined Melody Maker as a reviewer and then reviews editor, writing under the pseudonym “Jim Arundel”; Sally Still also joined as a contributor, writing under “Sally Margaret Joy”. In 1994 Irvin became the founding features editor of Mojo, later senior editor, and compiled The Mojo Collection. Between Furniture and journalism he formed the short-lived duo Because with jazz musician Chris Ingham, releasing Mad, Scared Dumb and Gorgeous on Haven Recordings in 1991, “an attempt at Blue Nile meets the Beach Boys, Steely Dan and late XTC”. He later ran the Dusty Company imprint at Domino, produced Clearlake, and co-wrote for Gay Dad’s Leisure Noise (1999). In 2002 he signed to Warner Chappell as a songwriter. Co-writes since include work for David Guetta, Lissie, Simple Plan, Lana Del Rey, Unloved and Nothing But Thieves. Jim and Sally’s co-write “The Weekend”, with Michael Gray, became an international house hit.

Maya Gilder left the music industry and worked in broadcasting in Australia. Sally Still was subsequently involved with female underground rock acts in the wake of Riot Grrrl. Sally and Hami both played on the 1991 “Damascus” 12-inch by Catwalk, a project of the journalist (and long-time Furniture supporter) Chris Roberts. Larry Whelan works in music technology in London.

Reissues (2010–2019)

In 2010 Cherry Red reissued The Wrong People (CDMRED441). It was the album’s first CD release and added nine bonus tracks - the B-sides “To Gus”, “Turnupspeed”, “Me, You and the Name”, “It Continues” and “Brilliant Fragments”; extended remixes of “Brilliant Mind” and “Love Your Shoes” and two previously unreleased demos, “That Man You Loved” and “Never Said”. The sixteen-page booklet carried a track-by-track commentary compiled by Jim, Tim and Hami and an introductory essay by long time supporter Chris Roberts. Stephen Emms gave it a prominent review in the Guardian.

In 2019 Emotional Rescue reissued the 1983 mini-album When the Boom Was On (ERC072) and a separate EP, On Broken Glass (ERC073), collecting extended-mix and unreleased 12-inch material from 1984–1986. The vinyl pressings sold out. The reissues coincided with an extended joint interview with Jim, Tim and Hami for BanBan TonTon.

Assessment

Contemporary press positioned Furniture as a sophisticated, lyric-led act let down by the era’s industry machinery. Simon Williams anointed The Wrong People as a great lost album in 1991. The Scrapbook compilation drew warm retrospective notices: Chris Roberts in Melody Maker called it “as magnificent a monument as the average Michelangelo”; Simon Williams summed it up as “one hit, but wonderful”; Q referenced their “sumptuous melodies and lovelorn and literate lyrics”. The Wikipedia entry summarises, fairly, that Furniture are “one of the most unfortunate of bands, and a salutary lesson for any young hopefuls being courted by minor labels”.

At the end of it all, the band did it their way. They fell out of rhythm with the 1980s almost by choice (“We were totally prepared to switch lanes on every record”). They outlasted two label collapses, and the music they encountered on the British Council tours shaped the rest of their careers. Tim’s quote below from one of the early interviews is worth reading carefully. They were successful in terms of what really matters.

Tim: As far as we are concerned, we are already successful, we are successful musically. I think if we were to look back at When The Boom Was On and say: “Well, it was alright at the time but we’ll have to do something better”, then it would be depressing. There is a double edged thing there, where you could get really, really irritated that it hasn’t met with the sort of response it could have done but that doesn’t mean that it won’t, the record is still there, I don’t think the record’s worn with time at all myself and as long as you feel confident about what you are doing musically, in the end, that to a certain extent can remain its own reward, it’s not enough but it keeps you going. We are in a situation where as long as we’ve got pride in what we do, that is going to keep us going.

Sources

Band and archival

Sleeve notes and liner notes

Interviews and features

  • International Musician & Recording World: Jim Betteridge interview with Mick Glossop, September 1986.
  • Melody Maker: Chris Roberts, “Fully Furnished”, c.1985.
  • In the City: Francis Drake & Peter Gilbert, Summer 1985.
  • Melody Maker: Sorrel Downer, “Our Brilliant Career”, 22 November 1986.
  • Melody Maker: Chris Roberts, Romania feature, 30 April 1988.
  • Excavating the 80s retrospective, 19 April 2011. http://excavatingthe80s.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/furniture.
  • BanBan TonTon: joint interview with Jim Irvin, Tim Whelan and Hamilton Lee, 19 March 2019. http://banbantonton.com/2019/03/19/interview-furniture-emotional-rescue.
  • Classic Pop: “Top 100 Singles of the 1980s”, January/February 2014.

Reviews

  • William Leith: NME single review of “Brilliant Mind”, 1986.
  • Derrin Schlesinger: Smash Hits review of The Wrong People, 19 November 1986.
  • Nick Coleman: NME review of The Wrong People (“Natural Habitat”), 22 November 1986.
  • Andy Strickland: Record Mirror review of The Wrong People, c.1986.
  • Jack Barron: Sounds review of The Wrong People, 1986.
  • Ricky Kildare: Sounds live review, Coventry Polytechnic, 18 October 1986.
  • Mat Snow: Q review of Food, Sex & Paranoia, c. early 1990.
  • Mick Mercer: Melody Maker review of Food, Sex & Paranoia, 24 February 1990.
  • Simon Williams: NME review of Food, Sex & Paranoia, c. early 1991.
  • Robyn Smyth: Sounds review of Food, Sex & Paranoia, 3 March 1990.
  • Ian Cheek: Sounds live review, Leeds Duchess of York, 24 February 1990.
  • Chris Roberts: Melody Maker review of She Gets Out the Scrapbook, c.1991.
  • Simon Williams: NME review of She Gets Out the Scrapbook, c.1991.
  • Martin Aston: Q review of She Gets Out the Scrapbook, c.1991.
  • Simon Williams: NME “Lost Albums” retrospective on The Wrong People, 31 August 1991.
  • Martin Aston: Mojo review of the Cherry Red reissue of The Wrong People, c.2010.
  • Stephen Emms: Guardian review of the Cherry Red Wrong People reissue, 13 July 2010.