Their sound came together almost instantly. They wrote their first song, “In The Flat Fields,” at their first rehearsal together. It still holds up among their immense catalogue as one of their best, and one of the most listenable, evocative and energetic examples of Gothic Rock to date. After only six weeks as a band, they recorded another of their best known songs, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” a legendary and behemoth single, nine minutes long, released as their debut in August 1999 on Small Wonder Records. It stayed on the British independent charts for two years.
Bauhaus received crucial attention from alt-star-making British DJ, John
Peel, who played “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” the whole thing,
on his famous BBC Radio 1 evening show. He asked Bauhaus to record a “Peel
Session” broadcast on Jan. 3, 1980 and released as
The BBC Sessions, their first album.
The band appeared performing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in the 1983 Vampire film, The Hunger, starring David Bowie and Katherine DeNeuve. Throughout the scene, the camera focused almost exclusively on Peter Murphy, reportedly causing conflict in the band.
Murphy was the model for the UK version of Maxell’s “Blown Away Guy” ad campaign in the 1980s. The ads carry the tag line, ‘sentence your cassette to life.” A different model appears in the US version of the ads.
Bauhaus have held legendary status in the goth genre for 30 years, but they broke up in 1983, after only four years as a band. After the break up, Murphy started his solo career and the other members of the band formed Tones On Tale, then the commercially successful Love and Rockets. Both Murphy as a solo artist and his former bandmates as L&R would be more successful in America than they ever were as Bauhaus. At one point, Peter Murphy’s single “Cuts You Up” from his album Deep, held on to the top spot of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart for longer than any other single ever - displacing "So Alive" by his former Bahaus bandmates Love and Rockets. The record was unbroken until Murphy was unseated by REM’s “Losing My Religion.”
Peter Murphy as a solo artist brought along nearly half of what was great about Bauhaus , almost all the drama, and his voice – grating, seductive, deep and smooth, all at the same time. After leaving Bauhaus he formed Dali’s Car with bass player, Mick Karn, from the band, Japan. The group recorded one album with little commercial success.
Bauhaus reunited for the first time in 1998, then had an ongoing, occasional reunion after playing together at the Coachella Festival in 2004. Peter Murphy said of Bauhaus that year, “We’ll always be friends. We were childhood friends, you know.”
The reunited Bauhaus toured with NIN in 2006. Trent Reznor and Peter Murphy appeared on radio shows together during the tour, doing three or four duets per show. NIN had previously toured with Murphy as a solo artist earlier in their careers.
Peter Murphy grew up Irish Catholic, but converted to Islam in 1992 and is said to be fascinated with Sufism, the inner or mystical dimension of Islam devoted to unity with and travel into the presence of the divine. He has lived in Ankara, Turkey for the past 15 years with his wife, Beyan, Artistic Director for the Turkish National Modern Dance Company. The two met when she asked Murphy to appear in an independent film she was making. She has directed several of his videos.
“My signature is that whatever I do must be authentic and completely ahead of its time and pioneering in a way,” Murphy told the Omaha Weekly in 1992. “I’m also interested in making subversive pop songs. If you listen to Dust, you’ll hear these songs.”
“I think of myself as a wanderer, or maybe, a novelist,” he told Rolling Stone in 2005. “I go away and do my work in my own down time and space.”
In 2008, he said, “(The real Peter Murphy) is one who mainly is very warm and giving and very positive with the audience . . . The real Peter Murphy is someone who loves to raise an audience’s spirit and leave them with something that’s shared...with the performance really.”
Throughout his reunion work with Bauhaus, Peter Murphy has remained dedicated
to his independent work as a solo artist.
Immediately after the Bauhaus reunion performance at Coachella, Murphy left
on tour in support of Unshattered backed by guitarist Mark Gemini and Thevaite
Rom of Mission UK and Tricky, Jeff Wiscartoff on bass, drummer Justin Beavet
of Skinny Puppy.
His most familiar songs, “All Night Long,” “So Close” and “The Sweetest Drop,” are some of the best examples of Murphy’s romantic musical style - his smooth seductive voice singing about the excitement of love over a dramatic but understated musical setting. His lyrical focus is often on religious or metaphysical experience.
He told the Omaha Weekly in 2002 how his goals and performance had changed since Bauhaus began. “I’m not afraid of dying now and I don’t think I’ll end up in hell. Think about it like a metaphor. You’re the receptacle, clouded with fear, ignorance and coarseness. Once the truth is actually poured into the glass, the truth will take on the color and quality of the glass itself. It’s a case of cleaning that grot away and uncovering the truth of what’s in there - that’s becoming more yourself. God is here, not somewhere else.”
“I’m almost like a - I dread to say it - a religious seeker,
an existentialist,” Murphy told Rolling Stone in 2005.
In 2002 he talked about the role of Bauhaus as creator of Goth, “There’s
an element of truth there. Bauhaus was never hammer horror, but we were, in
a way that was perfectly kitschy.”
“Goth seemed like a media event," he told Rolling Stone in 2005, "Just early attempts to take the most obvious elements of what we were doing and run with that. I don’t really understand it.”
“There are so many bands now that
are victims, casualties of a designer attitude,” he said.
Peter Murphy never plays Bauhaus songs in concert, only songs from his solo
career. However, he said in 2005 that he might do a Bauhaus cover tour within
the next several years. On at least one tour, he has covered Iggy Pop's "The
Passenger" and has talked about "freaking out" over Iggy Pop
when
he was young.
Peter Murphy has created six full-length albums with a range of feelings and styles in the various incarnations of his solo career, a much larger and varied collection of work than his catalogue with Bauhaus.
His first solo album, Should The World Fall Apart, released in 1986, spawned several singles, including his cover of Pere Ubu’s “Final Solution,” a club hit.
1988’s Love Hysteria, marks the beginning of Murphy’s collaboration with Paul Stratham who would be his songwriting partner until 1995. Songs like “All Night Long” and “Indigo Eyes” gained a lot of radio play and are still some of Peter Murphy's most familiar songs. The black and white video for “All Night Long” aired regularly on MTV. While some critics claim that Holy Smoke is the first display of Murphy’s middle-eastern musical influences, Love Hysteria is full of Egyptian scales and references to that style.
Deep, Murphy's next solo release in 1990, would be the album that brought him a big increase in popularity, with the hugely successful single “Cuts You Up,” becoming a massive indie-alt hit. It marks the height of his popularity. He dyed his hair platinum blond for the cover and released an album with a much more aggressive alt-rock sound, rivaling his work with Bauhaus.
Middle eastern elements are even stronger on 1992’s Holy Smoke. Its hauntingly exciting ‘You’re So Close” is another of the most widely known songs in his catalogue. It is the first album showing the Middle-Eastern influences of Peter Murphy’s new life in Turkey. It blends traditional Turkish sounds into the sound first hears on Deep, but is a more pop-flavored than aggressive album.
1995’s Cascade, Murphy’s last release on Beggars Banquet has
an ambient techno pop sound. Produced by Pascal Gabriel, the album feature
the work of “infinite guitarist” Michael Brook and a much more
electronic sound. It would be his last major collaboration with Paul Stratham
who left to form Peach Union with Gabriel and later went on to write songs
for Dido and Kylie Minogue.
In 1995, Beggars Banquet released
A Retrospective, a collection of work from various albums with related interview
comments from Peter Murphy.
The 1997 EP, Recall, Murphy's first release on the newly formed Red Ant Records
featured some new songs and new electronic-dominated recordings of older stuff.
The album was recorded with KMFDM members Sascha Konetzko, Tim Skold, also
of Shotgun Messiah/Marilyn Manson and Bill Rieflin, also of Ministry and REM.
Murphy was briefly on the same label as former Bauhaus band mates Love and
Rockets, who had also signed with Red Aunt, but the label quickly folded.
WILD BIRDS: 1985-1995 The Best Of Peter Murphy, released in 2000, collects
songs from all Murphy's Beggars Banquet releases.
Alive Just For Love, released in 2001, was a live album recorded during Murphy’s
2000 International Just For Love Tour. It contains the full set from his Nov.
30, 2000 show at the El Rey in Los Angeles. On the tour, Murphy was backed
only by Hugh Marsh, an electric violinist, and guitarist Peter DiStefano from
Porno For Pyros. Fellow Bauhaus alum
David J. appeared with them at several shows for an encore.
Dust, released in 2002, is trancey, almost purely Middle Eastern in style. It stands out as one of Peter Murphy’s most beautiful and interesting albums. In 2008, he told Postwave.gr that it was his personal favorite among all of his albums. “I do think that Dust stands out in a way that’s very unique and was meant to be that way in a sense,” he said. “I wanted to work with Mercan Dede and to bring in some of the flavor that I was hearing here in Turkey and I think that really worked well and there were some beautiful songs on it. I’m very proud of the song “Your Face,” which was very beautiful and emotional.
Murphy talked about Turkish DJ Mercan Dede, his collaborator on Dust “...he’s a rave artist - sort of DJ where he spins and does five hour sets in clubs...He has this great, smart, Western esthetic running through his music and that’s what came around in my head.
It’s kind of like taking my hardcore fans to the very heart of where I’m going. I mean, this could be a Bauhaus album...If you listen to “Socrates The Python,” off Love Hysteria or “Huuvola” off Cascade or even “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” all the elements are there, but it’s much more focused," Murphy said.
Peter Murphy returned to his more familiar sound for 2005’s Unshattered. The record has a lighter feel than the general more moody feel of much of his material. Producer Gardner Cole also produced eighties albums by Madonna, Tina Turner and Chaka Khan.
The album was written and recorded in just eight weeks, the same work style Murphy has used since his start with Bauhaus. “I’ve always loved spontaneity,” he told Rolling Stone in 2005. “Writing from an improvisational approach - especially since I’m untrained. A lot of the Bauhaus albums were recorded with a brilliant spirit, and we’d give ourselves two weeks to do everything.”
In June 2006, Murphy recorded a live radio show cover of the song “Warm
Leatherette”
w/Trent Reznor and Jeordie White from Nine Inch Nails. The video recording
was released on the official Nine Inch Nails web site and You Tube, where
it is still available along with several other Reznor/Murphy duets.
On March 4, 2008, after writing and performing a number of original songs in concert together, Bauhaus released their first studio album in 25 years and reportedly, their last and the final installment in their 10 years of sporadic reunion. Critics have praised the album, saying that it is as fully Bauhaus as anything in their early discography while reflecting the separate growth of the band's members since their original break up in 1983. The album was recorded in just 18 days. Many tracks were recorded live in just one take. Daniel Ash reportedly used Jimi Hendrix' personal Vox wah wah pedal, a gift from Murphy at the start of the session.
According to drummer, Kevin Haskins they band will not play together again or tour in support of the album. "(We) were getting along really well, but there was an incident that occurred. As a result, some of us just felt that we didn't want to carry on as a working unit." Murphy has countered that there are "lots of incidents" in any band's relationship over time. But, while for the past ten years, Murphy's solo work was almost an adjunct to his continuing work with Bauhaus, now it will be the sole focus, just as it was at the band's original split.
Murphy talked about plans for his next release earlier this year, telling Postwave.gr “I’ve written the songs and I’m preparing to go and record them. I’m working with a wonderfrul producer, David Baron, who has his recording facility in New York State, Woodstock. We’re designing and writing for a band, so there’s a lot of melodic quality to it. The aim is to capture the feeling of a band and to introduce some analog electronic elements to the music. So far, it’s shaping up well."
By Frances Brennan
PETER MURPHY