Tom Murphy July 15, AM. Over the course of four full-length albums, Murphy and company creating an experience of heightened reality with its music that broke from convention, not just sonically but with lyrics informed by the avant-garde, romantic literature and '70s glam rock.
It was a richly imaginative counterpoint to the world of expectation in industrial England of the decade when punk rock helped to pierce the veil of post-war British mundanity and economic and cultural stagnation. Full text. Join the Westword community and help support independent local journalism in Denver.
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With local media under siege, it's more important than ever for us to rally support behind funding our local journalism. No image, no ego. The Cure were like that as well, then suddenly there was this black high hair and really badly applied make-up!
But that's OK. It's very British isn't it? We were very radical in that sense. We came and said we're beautiful, we're male and we're very dangerous. Where you get John Lydon's rants, which to me were very irrelevant even back then, Bauhaus weren't anti anything.
We were about celebrating both the beauty and the ugly in a not obviously beautiful sense. That is quintessentially a Gothic notion. The original Gothic notion wasn't just about architecture it was about finding beauty or transcendence in the most unlikely places. Even looking at Gothic architecture itself it's quite spinal DiS: When I listen back to a lot of Bauhaus songs, pieces like 'Stigmata Martyr', 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' or 'Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores' they still sound like nothing else on earth, even now, so heaven knows what it must have sounded like in !
PM: That's how we felt at the time, and that's how I still look upon those songs. That kind of injection of light crackle into what you do. It's unpredictable even though you have the shape of a song, but when you get on stage and perform it has to be about what happens in that exact moment. It's not about sitting on your laurels and being cats saying "We've got a name now, come and like it".
Every audience is important and often the best audiences are those that don't really know you. They're the people you've really got to work hard with. It's pure rock and roll, in the same as Led Zeppelin or The Doors are considered as being.
I'm one of those. I'm not like them but I am of that type, if you know what I mean. DiS: You've been based in Turkey for a number of years now. What is it about the country and its people and culture that first attracted you and subsequently made you stay there for so long? She's a choreographer and also the artistic director of the National Modern Dance Company here in Turkey and has been for many years.
I always found London to be very isolating and I'm a very reclusive person I like to keep my head down. I don't like to be the social commentator, I prefer being almost invisible. I think that's when I've created my best musical work, the times when I've not given everything away and left a few blanks here and there instead.
People fill them in, and that's part of the enjoyment with the style of writing I choose to engage in. People are also very musical here. If one person starts up a song, everybody knows it and sings along. It's a very musical culture. You can walk down any road at any time and always hear music playing. I've learnt a hell of a lot through living here, most of it remotely.
I genuinely think it's a good thing to live outside of your comfort zone because I believe that builds character. DiS: I guess the longer you spend there it kind of becomes your comfort zone doesn't it? PM: No, you're absolutely right. But, even though I live here, I'm all over the world most of the time recording or touring. I've only recently found a studio in Istanbul which I really love, which will be the first time I've seriously worked here.
I'm also quite Americanised in a sense. I have a deep love of America, almost like a fascination with it. A bit like any Brit really. It seems like a mono culture but you find out it's not when you travel around.
Cultures change from state to state and city to city. It's not that different to Britain in many ways; three miles down the road someone might speak in a completely different accent or adopt slightly different attitudes.
PM: Not living there, no. I can't see myself moving back to the UK permanently. I was recording over there last winter in Oxford for three months, and it was great, but I'm less attracted to this kind of inverted interior attitude which comes across as being very repressed, willfully ignorant even. When there is intelligence it's put across in a way that makes it feel owned, do you know what I mean? You have to make appointments to visit your friends.
All that kind of stuff really gets to me. And the bus drivers are all miserable bastards! England is like an old, miserable spinster. I tried to get a train up to Scotland from Oxford but it was just ridiculous. In America you turn up to a station on the day and board a train for your destination. Not here though, everything has to be booked in advance or it's a case of changing several times and in some cases, having to wait until the following day. I'm a Brit who knows my country only too well.
I love coming over every so often to visit, but by the time I leave, I thank my lucky stars that I don't have to live there. PM: Not so much in Europe, no.
Most of the time I tend to let things arrive on my doorstep. There's so much music being made now I just keep an open view. I thought Amy Winehouse was the epitome of what a genuine rock and roll performer was all about. No Hollywood, no effort, no million dollar videos to pump it all up, no hype.
She just walked out, opened her mouth, and that was it, job done. That's where it's at. She wasn't interested in fame or all of the bollocks that goes with it. It hit me quite hard when she died, even though I never really knew her.
DiS: It's fair to say you've influenced several generations of artists since putting out the first Bauhaus record in Did you expect to be held in such high regard at the time, not to mention ever envisage that people would be sat here talking to you about your lifetime in music thirty-two years later? PM: I kind of expected it without meaning to sound big-headed. It's like when we were talking about Amy Winehouse earlier, I understand the fame aspect and that's where a lot of irony comes in, and I embrace it in a way that also tries to remain creatively smart with it.
In all humility, I'm not surprised as if I were a fan and not me I'd want to go to as many of my shows as possible or listen to my music every five seconds.
That's how every musician feels about themselves. You go through periods where you're tested as well. The break-up of bands, lack of a label or funding, there are lean periods. At the same time, I don't see myself as the kind of artist that's limited to a fashion or time.
I think I'm always kind of renewing myself in a way. What also helps is that I'm not just some tired old studio musician. Playing live is just as, if not more, important to me, and as a result the audiences will always recognise something.
I'll take as much criticism as is out there. I really don't mind. I'm like a whale or a dolphin; I don't mind swimming under the surface while all the loudmouths have their twenty-one minutes - I think it is twenty-one rather than fifteen now in this age of entitlement - of fame.
It's almost like saying "You get on with it and I'll do the business". DiS: Ninth is your first solo album for seven years since 's Unshattered.
Why the long break between records and what rekindled your enthusiasm to make this album? That's a whole load of energy that I put out for the other guys and wanted to make that work, so there's a whole three-year period where I was purely writing songs for Bauhaus. PM: Well, not totally mine. It was a collaboration but it was more about it clicking towards the last third of it. Remember, we went in without anything.
It was a typically conscious decision to start from scratch without any material and record and mix it all at the same time. We'd just finished touring with Nine Inch Nails and we spent eighteen full days in the studio straight after. I was writing much more than I would normally when it comes to music. It is still a Bauhaus album though. I think the heart of the band is Daniel Ash and I in a way. Kevin Haskins and David Jay are very crucial of course as a rhythm section, and there are roles which we all slipped into but there's a lot of baggage, not only from the early Bauhaus years but also from the other band that the other three did throughout, Love And Rockets.
Edgy and experimental, Bauhaus was a key source of inspiration for a number of gloomy bands to follow, including Nine Inch Nails, Sisters of Mercy, the Cult and, yes, Marilyn Manson. Bauhaus, however, never developed beyond a cult following. Yet when the band reunited to play the Hollywood Palladium two months ago--its first appearance in 15 years--tickets for the two scheduled dates sold out in 15 minutes. A third show was added, and it too was a sellout. So why is the band such a hot domestic property these days?
Contacted by phone at a tour stop in Orlando, Fla. It validates our decision to reunite.
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