Peter Murphy interviewed by "The Quietus"
For the last 30 years or so, goth has been the most durable of musical genres. Loved and ridiculed in equal measure, in its refusal to die it has come to resemble any number of vampire movies where the antagonist simply cannot be stopped despite all manner of stakes, garlic and crucifixes.
Yet bizarrely, as it came to mutate over the decades to cross-pollinate with any number of other genres – techno, industrial and metal have all felt the chill hand of goth resting on their shoulders – several of its key players have come to reject the genre like a parent disinheriting an errant child. The Sisters Of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch will flee from the word with the haste of a bloodsucker making its way back to its coffin before the first rays of the rising sun, while The Cure’s Robert Smith is probably too cuddly to qualify as one despite a following that suggests otherwise.
Not so Peter Murphy. The erstwhile Bauhaus vocalist – sharp of cheek and pouting of lip – is only to happy to admit to his part in goth’s formation. Combining sacrilegious and blasphemous subject matter with S&M imagery and a high sense of camp and drama, Bauhaus were one of the first bands to use punk as a launchpad to somewhere else. Their brief reign of terror lasted less than five years but the imprint they left behind is still visible to this very day.
Now based in Istanbul, Murphy has just released his ninth solo album entitled, er… Ninth. Soon to be touring the States, Murphy returns to Europe after the summer, just in time for those long evenings to start drawing in…
From your vantage point of a lifetime of experience, how do you view the younger version of yourself who was just starting out in Bauhaus?
Peter Murphy: Well, with all modesty, when I think back, when we started writing songs in that mobile classroom I knew that I’d made it already. I remember everything because I have an elephant’s memory, and my memories of our farewell show in ’83 [at Hammersmith Palais] are particularly vivid and quite personal, in a sense. Having burnt our fires around the world, I was burnt out, really.
Can you remember what the catalyst was that moved you into music?
PM: From early on, I would whistle. I was more vocal than intellectual at school. I remember always whistling on that dreary walk to school, and there was music everywhere in my Catholic school. But there was music at home, too - more vocal music in a sense, but what really grabbed me was when I watched cheesy television shows like The Golden Shot and they’d always have these visiting stars singing a song here and there. And I used to think, 'I can do that!' I don’t know where that came from, but when I was at a concert I always knew that I’d rather be onstage than being down in the audience. But there was pivotal moment when I was about 14, and we were driving home from seeing relatives. It was night time and I was nodding off on the back seat with my head in my arms, and I just shot up with a great sense of urgency and said, 'I’m going to be a singer!' And that was that. They just turned round and said, 'Right. Go back to sleep.'
How important was the high drama of Catholicism, such as Masses, to the development of Bauhaus stage act?
PM: Tangentially, [guitarist] Daniel Ash and I were the Catholics and the other two [bassist David J and drummer Kevin Haskins] were the miserable, selfish Church of England heathens. When we first started touring, Daniel and I would stay in a bed and breakfast and their parents got them hotels. It was really pathetic. Daniel and I brought the psychodrama to the band, and I would exorcise a lot of that repressed psychodrama that had been left over from Catholicism. Personally, I used to really enjoy Mass and the hymns and there was a great contemplation of the Anti-Christ. I really enjoyed it but I also wanted a shag, which is why I went into a band, I guess. My passion, really - which came out in the first album, In The Flat Field - was escaping the flat fields of the mundane; the escape from the working class ghetto of the 'jobs for life' mentally and its forced ignorance. That reflected in the Church’s idea of hierarchical supremacy where the priests would say, 'Listen to me. We mediate between you and God; you just get on with it.' There was a lot of that that came out in the music.
Download these from "Ninth":Peter Murphy - Seesaw Sway by nettwerkmusicgroup
Peter Murphy - Never Fall Out by nettwerkmusicgroup
ust kidding!!! I absolutely looooove Mr. Murphy. He is a magical being from the land of fairies...
ReplyDeleteI love Bauhaus, and enjoyed them so much at "Cine Opera", it was a great night. A night for frenzied chaos, the ones you always remember.
Everything this dark gentleman create is pure gold!!
greenchatreuse