Show us your Billy Idol pose, Richard.

“What pose is that?”

The one on the poster with your arm up and your hair up and your shirt up.

“You think that’s Billy Idol? I think it’s too poofy for Billy!” A mighty laugh. “I’ve been doing those poses for years. No, it’s the perfect Richard Butler pose.”

Lots of poses: from jolly anarchy to leather Hamlet and all points in between. Since ’79 and “We Love You,” Richard Butler’s had a go at everything—drink, drugs, insanity, hair gel, hedonism, melancholy and cultdom. He’s given up the lot except hair gel and cultdom. In the last year, people who spend money have found out what people who don’t have known all along: the Psychedelic Furs are a good band. Good by Dr. Robert’s definition of a good band (imaginative, animalistic, unpredictable, worthwhile: “You’ve got to have a good tune and suck your cheeks in and have an air of otherness.”). Good by any definition of good. While their post-punk contemporaries fell into making music to tidy up knick-knacks by, the Furs soared onward and, uh, onward. I would rather be whipped naked by Mort Harket down Oxford Street during rush hour than listen to what passes for pop right now, but I’ll make an exception for Midnight To Midnight, the Furs’ fifth album and the excuse for this meeting.

Are sex and glamor important parts of pop, Richard?

“Yes. I think that’s what the whole thing’s all about.”

Justify yourself.

“I’ve really put my foot in it and now I’ve got to worm my way back out! Fame is glamorous. You get to a certain level where—it’s funny, I was watching a Bruce Springsteen video and he’s got a lot of glamor. He’s almost like this Uncle Tom character sitting there with his guitar onstage and all these thousands of people—but there’s a glamor to it. And sex as well, definitely. He’s like—Rambo! To be a good live performer, you have to project, and whatever you do projection-wise it’s going to end up being glamorous and sexy.”

On the last American tour, when the Furs’ name was being immortalized in Brett Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and the Furs’ music was being bandied about in John “Breakfast Club” Hughes’s Pretty In Pink, Richard was accosted by little girls putting their tongues in his mouth and their hands in his trousers, “straight for the main event—no messing about!” Is it the power of a hit single, or has he transformed into a sex god overnight?

“I don’t think it’s anything to do with ‘Pretty In Pink’—though that came at a great time because we hadn’t had an album out in such a long time; but it didn’t really bring us any extra people. What it did was consolidate the people we had.

I think a lot of performers would tend to get that. It’s just that I’d forgotten it happened. I used to jump in the audience all the time and grovel around on the floor— and it was much more of a boys band in those days somehow. Our audiences were more boys. Audiences have changed these days, and I guess when you get more popular, younger people come. I was shocked!” A chuckle. “We’re not a teenybop band, you know!”

Richard Butler was offered a part in a vampire movie. He’s pale and handsome. He knows exactly how he is. He sees things from every angle you can think of. Which makes him that fine combination of involved and detached, which makes for easy interviews and a hard life. He lives in New York. He doesn’t have an American accent.

Do you hang around with the New York art set, Richard? Did you have your portrait painted by Andy Warhol?

Laughter. “No way! I hate all that! I think it’s all very pretentious. Andy Warhol did some great stuff, but I hated it when you saw him out and he was surrounded by all these pretty boys and they were all trying to pamper his ego.”

If I’d had his money I’d’ve wanted my ego pampered by pretty boys. But surely it was that very same art set that seduced you away from Muswell Hill?

“New York always had a kind of mystery for me—to do with the Velvet Underground and those old detective B-movies. And when I went there it really was like that—it was winter, there was steam coming out of the subway grates, I got in a yellow cab, and it was great. And it’s still got that magic for me. It’s still mysterious and kind of dangerous—which London isn’t. London’s very safe and predictable. When punk rock was going it was really exciting, but when that all faded away, it went.

“Unfortunately, in England the social life tends to revolve around pubs, and I found them really boring. There’s a choice in London of any one of thousands of pubs and a couple of clubs, so if you don’t want to go to pubs, you’re in trouble.”

We’re sitting in a hotel between the bar and the gym, a lot nearer the gym.

You’re In your 30s now, Richard. A crucial time in your life. A time to take stock, think of new directions, ask yourself what you really want to do with the old mortal coil—

“Not really. I hadn’t even thought of it like that! I haven’t gone, ‘Oh, I’m 31 in June, I’m getting on ..”

So it’s just an accident that last year you gave up drink and drugs and now you’re giving up cigarettes? It’s just coincidence that we’re sitting by the gym?

“I’m not exactly a health fiend!” Chortle. “I gave up drinking—I mean both of them—three years ago. It had a glamor about it for a while. You thought how rock ’n’ roll it all was, and then after a while—I don’t know, you feel what shit it' all is. And then about two weeks ago I gave up smoking because I figured I want to get better every tour, and the way to get better this time was to give up smoking and be able to run around some more. I’m getting incredibly ratty and losing my temper lately, like rage.

“But no, it isn’t an accident. I think you can do those things up to a certain point, and I had a pretty wild 10 years of it.” Pretty wild. After flirting with insanity as the thing to do, the involvement-detachment balance went a bit askew and the boy went nigh on nuts.

“And then it comes to a point where you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, and you’re not going to get any better unless you stop. I think the shows were tending to suffer when I was drinking. My concentration was tending to suffer, I couldn’t remember what I’d said to people the day before. I was getting up in the morning and starting drinking wine first thing—I don’t know. It came to a head on an Australian tour, and I just thought that was enough.”

There’s nothing to live for if you give up the lot.

“You don’t think so? I think there’s everything to live for.”

Like what. The gym?

“No. That’s the con. I hate being told what to do. I hate the fact that I have to go through rage to get out of a habit. Like cigarettes: when I was a kid I hated the way they tasted at first; I was actually physically sick learning how to smoke because people told me it was the cool thing to do. Then I’m just feeding a nicotine habit—and that nicotine puts me on edge and you’re told that being on edge is a normal life.”

So have a drink to calm you down!

“No! I resent the fact that I’ve been sold that!” Richard pours a cup of tea. He pours it into the cup of coffee he’s just finished. He’s not given up caffeine.

Who did you impersonate in front of the mirror when you were a youngster, Richard?

“Bob Dylan, I think. I don’t know exactly what he does. All I used to do was go look at pictures of Dylan, then go and stand in front of the mirror and frown at myself. Oh dear. I never realized that he actually moved around quite a bit. I kind of picture him with an earring, though he never actually had one, you know what I mean? I think he looked great.”

You have never been compared to Dylan. You have, however, been compared to Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and David Bowie.

‘‘And someone the other day said we were really influenced by mid-period Roxy Music—and it’s just not an influence on us. Just because we’ve got a sax player. I guess the guy thinks anyone who’s got a saxophone is Bruce Springsteen or Roxy Music, and we got Roxy Music.”

There’s a track on the new album— “Torture,” it’s called—which sounds very Stonesy.

“Yeah, / think it does a bit. I’m not a big Stones fan personally, so I was a bit iffy about that one. But you can’t help it when you get that kind of riff going. That’s a Keith Richards-sounding guitar riff and there’s no hiding it! Well fuck it. I liked it, so I decided to keep it!”

And you decided to use a Stones cohort to produce the album.

“We listened to Mirror Moves,” the last album, “after a couple of years had gone by, and it sounded too studio. Keith Forsey is a great producer and everything, but personally I think he can tend to take a lot of the teeth out of the music. For this album we wanted a more band live feel.”

It’s definitely rock. Serious guitars.

“John (Ashton) didn’t get a proper lick in on the last album. And it was very atmospheric-feeling, that album, so he didn’t get to make as much of a statement as a guitarist likes! This time we wanted something with a rawer edge to it, because that’s the music I enjoy. I want something like that and I can’t find it anywhere; all the rock music I find is incredibly slick.”

You said elsewhere, “The band is a real professional outfit these days, which I never thought it would be. It didn’t come into my head when we formed the band that we were ever going to be great musicians.” What were you going to be, then?

“I don’t know. It was just wanting to get up and do it. It was seeing people like John Lydon, seeing that whole 100 Club gig, that punk festival, really did it for me. Seeing somebody onstage being that angry with that kind of music behind them was brilliant, and I’d never seen anything like it. And it made me want to do it. It got me off my arse to do it. And it made you see that you could. Before that, you had: bands like Genesis with all these thousands of dollars worth of keyboards and stuff like that.”

Early John Lydon was 60 percent attitude and 40 percent, er, attitude.

“Yeah, and that was important. Still is.”

So is it art or entertainment, Richard?

“I’d say it was entertainment.”

What would you say is art?

“I haven’t got a definition of art! OK, let me try then. Maybe art is something that changes your perception of things, changes your mood or something. And does that mean a cup of coffee’s art? Maybe it is.”

A cigarette would certainly be art right now.

‘‘Definitely! I don’t know what art is, really. The people that everybody thinks is art is like Andy Warhol and all those people. Maybe in 100 years, great art is going to be Walt Disney and ’50s rock ’n’ roll. Who knows? But it’s not going to be some posey guy sticking a bit of color on some canvas.”

Have you ever done anything that’s reached the hallowed heights of art?

‘‘I think onstage, some of our greatest moments. I don’t know, the song ‘Highwire Days’ sometimes, for some reason. It changes me. It changes what I am. Suddenly I feel massive. I feel like my voice is big enough to fill a big place, whereas sometimes you can be there onstage singing away—and you’re looking out and you can see this big place and it doesn’t feel like you’re big enough to fill it. But then, with a song like that it just seems like you can fill it with no problem, that and more.”

What’s the biggest misconception about you, Richard?

‘‘That I’m arty is probably the biggest misconception. That’s the one I find the most boring and the most pretentious and it’s just not true.”

Do you write better when you’re happy or depressed?

“Always when I’m depressed, I think. I don’t really write happy songs. Happy songs always sound like candyfloss. I like songs that have a deeper feeling in them—not just in terms of ‘That’s so deep, man!’ but just that hit me somewhere deeper. I listen to the radio. Sometimes I find myself humming along and singing the most trite, despicable songs because they’ve got these great hooks, but I don’t like them really.”

Are there any doing it right?

“I don’t know. I think it’s a disease that’s happening right at the moment all over, that rock music is so slick and safe. I think America’s got more of a base for rock music and it’s easier for bands to make that edge kind of music there than it is in England—bands like R.E.M. What bands really make rock music in England? Maybe the Cult. The Smiths do to a certain extent, but not the hard edge that I’m talking about.”

Midnight To Midnight was recorded in Berlin on Bowie-hallowed ground. You could see the Wall from the studio. Richard went over and found they have jeans and chocolate and lipstick just like real people. Last year he did a CND (Committee for Nuclear Disarmament) benefit. He says he’ll do benefits for lots of things. “I’m all for supporting CND. My parents—in their 50s and 60s—are both members, going on all these marches, which is great.” He calls himself “naive” but I don’t believe it. He has very good bones. There’s talk of him appearing in some movie about ol’ longneck, Modigliani. He doesn’t know anything about the new psychedelia except that he hates Dr. & The Medics and Gene Loves Jezebel and has never even heard of Green On Red, who also used to impersonate Bob Dylan in front of the mirror. He likes the original five-year-old version of “Pretty In Pink” better than the film version.

If you could make pop writers write what you wanted them to say about you, what would you tell them to write, Richard?

“I’d like them to tell the truth.”

And what, Richard, is the truth?

“That we’re brilliant!”