Sofa From Home

"You've got the five proud walkers / you've got the cast-iron staircase / you've got the dance in the cages…"

ROSEMARY ARNOTT IS THE ASSISTANT CULTURAL attaché at The British Embassy in Bucharest. She reminds me of one of those fish with puffy-out cheeks but that's beside the point. When she asks me to send her a copy of "the article on Furniture in Romania", she adds, "Be diplomatic, please, because it could have severe diplomatic repercussions here." It filters through my inebriation that she's serious.

I get dead excited about being like Diane Keaton in "Reds" or something, but when I try to explain this to Dilworth he is engaged taking photographs of Sally and Maya doing Spotty Dog impersonations. I manage to find Jim who is having his hand shaken by the remnants of 6,000 earnest Romanians. I've forgotten about being Diane Keaton now, but I do succeed in saying, "Transcendent, Jim."

"Did you think so? It wasn't too much over the fine line of rock and rollisms? Oh. Good. Well I must admit I did sing like a bastard."

I walk around in circles for a while but it's no use, I have to go back.

Jim, did you just say, "I did sing like a bastard" or "I didn't sing like a bastard"?

"I did."

Right. That's what I thought.

And I tell you, when Furniture swept into "I Miss You" and the thin white spooks ad libbed that bit about "so many miles away from home", we took one look at the legions of rigid joyless and we sobbed. It was like "Jailhouse Rock" on the set of "The Odessa Steps". It was like a Kafka novel printed on one big, wavy, breathing page. It was really something else.

"THEY must be out of their brilliant minds."

"IT'S irrelevant what you normally do," Tim Whelan is saying. "The important thing is to get a response from these people, and we'll sink to any level of corn to get it. Because what you get is worth it. If they all stand up at once there's nothing anyone can do about it!"

Somebody should probably elucidate at this juncture. English beat group Furniture, best-known here for their "Brilliant Mind" hit and underrated "The Wrong People" album, are playing four 6,000-seat shows in two days in Bucharest. They are the first Western group to play here in a decade. It's part of a tour of the Eastern Bloc sponsored by The British Council. Last year they sent Furniture to Egypt and Jordan. The trek proved so successful that this year it's Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, etc. etc. The city may have a thousand stories but this place has a million (which I don't have room for here).

"You think you've got life cornered," says Jim Irvin, "then you realise there are all these people in the world you don't know, and ways of life that you haven't even begun to consider. The inevitability that people will change is what makes love such a dangerous pastime. And travel is such a catalyst for change. So-er- don't fall in love with someone who travels a lot, that's my advice."

Do you think life is long, Jim?

"Consequences are long. I'm into latent power and restraint, not expressing the thing but knowing it's there. Tim flings himself in more. He'll bang his head on the wall till it bleeds, and then feel better, whereas I'll sort of screw at the wall with a spoon or something! Sometimes a song is like a ghostly ectoplasm I've spewed out. I'll look at the bile and think, 'Cor, that's better out than in'."

FURNITURE are Jim, Tim, Sally, Maya, and the world's finest percussionist Mr Hamilton Lee. They've been together some time, and this seems to work against them. Since Stiff went kaput, their 53 potential hit singles have played to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe, but in the UK they're still waiting for a record company with some suss and foresight to build the relevant tunnel. (Their back catalogue is currently "sort of" owned by ZTT, which is a joke in poor taste.)

Sally: "No one has to tell us we're good, we know that, y'know?"

Tim: "We've got a right to be arrogant cos we've tolerated so much sheer bad luck and stuck together. The famous thing is always: what do you sound like? And we don't sound like anything. And we don't sound like lots of different things. There is no answer, and we don't want there to be. There's not meant to be. There's a bloody answer to that stupid worthless question. We're like a volcano going off in the middle of nowhere and no one is noticed…"

Jim: "We've never had a manifesto; it's always been low-key, 'The Songs', which is tough to sell — it's not very thrilling as such. It doesn't make for good copy. I wish there was someone who could sell it, but we're too in the middle of it to step outside. That's why I never trust people who skilfully manipulate the media. There's a lot who can't live up to the kant. All wit and no depth.

"One thing Furniture has always had is a rich vein of absolute bedwetting, bloodcurdling, soulmangling frustration. It's either boiling on the surface of every song or festering underneath. We are five misfits, we don't quite connect. It's there in every manifestation — we are profoundly 'wrong'. That's why the album was called 'The Wrong People'; the other reason was because you meet the wrong people and you fall in love. That's the philosophy.

"You can be sexy superficially in a Bros/whatever way, but a true sexy human group is full of warts and bald patches and neuroses — all the things you complained about at the time but you miss when you leave your lover. You can get all the perfection anywhere! Perfection you can get anytime you want it, just switch on the telly. Flaws you have to hunt for.

"I've written this new song called 'My Heart Your Playground'. You couldn't fail with a title like that, could you?"

"I KNOW it's going to rain on our party but we mustn't let that get us down / We're going to have the best time, the time of our worthless lives…"

FURNITURE and crew are, bizarrely enough, invited to a post-concert party at the British Ambassador's house. It's one of Bucharest's plusher pads. Music is playing, which is odd — there must be a tape recorder or record player in the building. Also, there is food. Romania's leading folk musicians are introduced to the band and express a sincere jealousy of Western musicians' freedom. I get interviewed for the radio by the country's one "pop" DJ, and tell him Furniture are pure sex. He's bewildered, he wanted to know if they were "new wave", like The Jesus And Mary Chain. The Ambassador's wife wants a photograph of the not-entirely-reticent subculture known as "the roadies". "Just wet your lips and say 'Bugger'" she whinneys gamely. Well, you can imagine the ensuing chortles.

The British Cultural Attaché is a middle-aged man who is ageing five years per hour. Every time he lets out a spontaneous "Oh blast" because the infinitely wise authorities have put up another roadblock, he nervously adds, "They're lovely people though, the Romanians. Smashing people." His car is bugged. Every room is bugged. Dilworth and I are followed every time we leave our hotel, and sometimes you cross the road to look in a dusty shop window only to turn round and find you're not allowed to cross back again. The President of Zaire is visiting our man Ceausescu. The military are paying peasants to wave flags jubilantly when his motorcade passes. Most Romanian faces look sad. None are beautiful. When you say to a Romanian, "Excuse me, could you help us please?", the best you can hope for is, "No, not my problem."

Some dream that was, that the people had.

As we climb the hill to Dracula's castle, the one-time abode of Vlad The Impaler, the snow-peaked Transylvanian mountains hear Jim and me nattering about love, which is what most Furniture songs are about.

"I've never considered myself obsessive; I don't foam at the mouth," says Jim, not foaming at the mouth. "The songs are sometimes an alternative for real emotion, a geyser for things I can't express. Things I wish I'd said."

Does it compensate?

"I'm an emotional person in a cold bastard's skin. I feel at my most comfortable with someone when I'm just soaking up their presence, just basking in the big soft pillow of a love affair. When the atmosphere is just right, you're happy just being on the other side of a room from her reading a book. Like you said, sitting up in bed together writing your diaries, that's brilliant, that's the way to be.

"The trouble is I can be so busy wallowing that I forget to do the emotional plate-chucking, and it can look f***ing close to taking someone for granted. The perfect relationship should be when being together is almost as nice as when you're alone…

"I maintain that when you're in the middle of a love affair something physically courses round your body, and when it's pulled out a chemical withdrawal happens. It's denied you, so you physically hurt, I'm convinced of it."

So the greater the contentment, the less the effort?

"It's the old thing of trying hard to catch, then once caught, not trying. I always believe in saying — here I am, take it or leave it. I'm a manky streak of piss from Hounslow, this is all you're getting, better get used to it. One girl I went out with told me before we started that she always tested her man. She announced this. So we went along merrily for about a year, then suddenly DING! she'd gone. And I thought 'Oh f**k, I missed it. What was the test? Was I asleep?'

"It's like a really difficult arcade game and every time you lose your third life you have to start at the beginning again."

Let me just run this one by you — do you ever get bored with love?

"I do know what you mean. Well — the second you're satisfied you're dead. That's part of 'The Plan'.

"If I'm ever happy with any record we make, I'm worried. People always assume you've made the record you wanted to make. I don't know of anyone who's ever done that. But I still get a shiver up the back of my neck every time I hear the opening chord of 'Brilliant Mind.' 'When The Boom Was On' still gives me a naive buzz. And 'She Gets Out The Scrapbook' should've blown people sideways, there should've been no way people could ignore that record. And they did. They ignored it in their millions."

Yeah, but they're a mass of ignorant dorks in Britain.

Sally: "It's just a matter of one little smidgeon of luck and we'll be there."

Tim: "When we get the next deal nothing will stop us. We've got so many diverse ideas we could take over the British music industry and chuck everybody else out. Sod everybody else."

Maya: "Nice house though, that Ambassador's gaff. Lovely house."

Maya has got Indian blood. Sally has got Filipino blood (which I can't spell).

Tim: "We're not here 'on behalf of' the British government, you know. It's one of the most socialist things you can think of if you think about it."

So why are you here?

"To try and loosen things up. We're not being used as chickenfeed for the masses because they try to stop it as soon as anything happens."

So how will one of these concerts change Mr X in Row 77?

Sally: "There's no way of knowing. Because it's never happened before."

Tim: "Everything in Britain's been said before, heard before, done before. So the thing to do is go out and do new things."

Tim: "'The small and the crushed and the helpless. The weak and the cruel and the useless.' Hmm. But you know — I put myself in that bracket of society."

Culture shock upon culture shock. Furniture in the Eastern Bloc wield incredible gangly rhythm as esperanto, and surely Britain's asinine Easy Blockheads can only keep Play-Doh in their ears for so long. Songs to stretch your heartstrings and make you proud you're you.

"AND this time things will be different."

THESE multitudinous euphoric crowds must boost your confidence…

Sally: "It hurts as well though. Because you think: 'Why aren't we doing this in England? Why aren't we doing this for money?'"

Anyway, Sally has written a song which is going to be Nastassia Kinski's debut single.

"Which is fine, but then everyone goes: 'Really? Could you arrange for me to meet her?'"

Really? Could you arrange…?

Tim: "And then there's The Curse Of Furniture. 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. This is the strange thing."

"YOU were wild and good / you were perfection / What did I ever see in you?"

STANDING in front of a flock of sheep on a road somewhere near Brasov, we are no longer brassed off. Shortly before selling me a dodgy coat Jim says, "Y'know — travel broadens the mind and all that cobblers, but — it does. It whacks a few extra centimetres on, I'm sure. I've now seen some extraordinary places: this is not the least of them. I'm tremendously affected by all this but I don't know how. I feel flashes of elation and melancholy, but not 'grand emotions'. That sort of sums me up. And although this word 'obsession' you keep mumbling suggests sweat and haemorrhage, I must be obsessive about this group. My ambition is to be completely overrun by emotion, consumed, my vision distorted…

"'One Step Behind You' should be single of the decade. It already is in my book, which I wish someone would bloody hurry up and write.

Tim: "No it is not a damning indictment of everybody. You always think the songs are down, but they're not. They're full of pride. That one's just: — you've driven me to distraction but remember I'm watching you. One day you'll get killed by cripples and it'll serve you f**kin' right. The drunken old idiots will storm out of the doorway and get their revenge when you least expect it."

I wish Tim would turn off that twinkle in his eye.

Sally: "It's funny seeing 12,000 Romanians cheering when you sing that."