Bauhaus, in the middle of our street
Bauhaus is my rock guilty pleasure. I got madly into them at 17 - so enthusiastically, in fact, that one school chum told me “I used to quite like Bauhaus until you wouldn’t shut up about them.”
So what kicked it off? Well, it was lunchtime at my high school on a cloudy April (possibly March) day in 1992, and we were playing cricket using metal bats (not Dennis Lillee style) constructed from decaying roof guttering. (if that sounds a touch Lord of the Flies, it kind of was). Someone had a boombox and it was playing Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus, and as we played the music sort of skittered around the courtyard. The urgent pounding rhythm was hypnotic, but what really got me was this avalanche of cascading, hissing feedback, a sound I’d never heard before, so abstract it could have been anything. That was the thing that hooked me, though there was a lot else to the song.
The band originated in Northampton, England, in 1978. The groups’s lineup consisted of singer Peter Murphy, guitarist Daniel Ash, bassist David J Haskins, and his little brother, drummer Kevin Haskins. Bela Lugosi’s Dead was the first song they wrote, and the first they recorded, in early 1979.
The best starting point learning about the song is this interview with the band, published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the song’s release. In a nutshell, though, David J provided the lyrics (he liked old horror movies), Kevin Haskins only knew three drumbeats at the time and chose bossanova for the song. Murphy brought a very singular vocal style, and Ash contributed weirdly tuned guitar chords. The song structure is simple: the implacable beat pounds away for nine minutes, with no variation; alongside the drums marches a simple, sepulchral bassline. Vocals, guitar and studio fog round out the sound. The song has a sort-of verse/chorus structure, although it might be better to say it has a repeated alternation of groove and bridge.
The genius of Bela Lugosi’s Dead is that it’s both incredibly simple and wholly original. I suspect it’s the sort of song that can only be written by youngsters who have been informed by idiosyncratic and disparate influences. Ash’s guitar (when playing chords rather than feedback) sounds slightly Country and Western to me, or maybe like Velvets-era Lou Reed? Murphy’s vocals baritone muttering and tenor wailing owes more than a little to David Bowie.
The Haskins brothers rhythm section brings reggae to the party. David J’s dead, harmonic-free bass tone is a clear nod to reggae bass, and Kevin’s superficially incongruent bossanova beat makes turns out to be very close to a reggae steppers beat. Finally, the creeping, jittering echoes featured heavily in the song are a mutation of the echoes of dub reggae; even the feedback soloing is essentially a rockish extension of dub.
So the seminal goth rock song owes as much, if not more to reggae than Bram Stoker. (For all the gothiness Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the apotheosis of the have-a-go punk ethos: play what you like without really knowing what you’re doing.)
Bela Lugosi’s Dead is widely credited as the original goth rock song, but it’s debatable how influential it really was. We’ll discuss this more later.
Early singles
After Bela Lugosi’s Dead sold well, the group got picked up by 4ad and then Beggar’s Banquet. They released the singles Dark Entries, Terror Couple Kill Colonel, and Telegram Sam. The latter is a T-Rex cover, and this track (and its B side, a cover of John Cale’s Rosegarden Funeral of Sores), revealed another strand of influence on the group: glam rock. (In fact you can think of the visual style of goth rock as being glam rock by way of the Rocky Horror Show.) My favourite of the three singles, though, is the ponderous, medicated and unnerving Terror Couple Kill Colonel.
In the Flat Field (1980)
After a year of singles and touring Bauhaus released their first album, In the Flat Field, the following year. It’s a set of stricken, monstrous songs that - very much in my head only - reminds me of the smell of my 1993-era Doc Marten’s boots. If their debut single was largely an exercise in gloomy atmosphere, the songs on In the Flat Field are flashes of flame and spikes of adrenal fury.
The title song seems to be about wandering around a sex district, similar to the early grubby fascinations of Soft Cell, except with more guitars and fewer synthesisers. Developing his technique considerably since the Bela bossanova, Haskins provides some thunderous drumming (he was - like many drummers of the era - a fan of Budgie, the tomtom-favouring drummer from Siouxsie and the Banshee). The song is rounded out with bustling bass, furious guitar, vocal keening; make no mistake, this is an avalanche of a song.
The other songs on In the Flat Field have a similar monochrome vein. God in an Alcove is tautly psychedelic; Double Dare is panic inducing. Spy in the Cab is a slow-burn meditation with excellent synth-boop percussion. Stigmata Martyr is claustrophobic and disquieting. The final song, Nerves, is a Kurt Weil-gone-demonic epic.
So great album then? Well yes, those songs are great, but there’s three poorer quality songs (Dive, Small Talk Stinks, and Saint Vitus Dance). Now a ratio of six good to three bad should still make for a decent album, but to me the bad songs are bad enough that they significantly detract from the good. Rather than listen to In the Flat Field, I prefer to consume the first disc of Bauhaus’ “1979-83” compilation, where I can hear In the Flat Field’s good songs plus the excellent early singles and B-sides.
Mask (1981)
When I was a teen I found Mask to be quite intimidating. It commences with the highly intense Hair of the Dog and ends with the elementally Pagan title track. Looking back today, however, the album feels more defined by its uptempo dance(!) tracks: Dancing, Kick in the Eye, and In Fear of Fear. Constrasting again is the eerie ballad Hollow Hills and the 12-string shimmer of The Passion of Lovers. The result is an album that’s fun for the whole family!
The Sky’s Gone Out (1982)
Bauhaus’ third album has a peppy kick-off with a cover of Eno’s Third Uncle, followed by the death glam Silent Hedges, and then the industrial decayscape Swing the Heartache. The first side concludes with the incongruously cheery Spirit. This song would be a bit of a bum note if not for the fact that it’s extremely welcome after all the midnight misery preceding it.
Side two starts with the three parts of The Three Shadows. Part one is all groany-ghosty, part two is an interlude of Bad Seeds-esque country, and part three concludes with some regulation Murphy shrieking and wayward fiddle-playing. Then there’s the surprisingly effective ballad All We Ever Wanted was Everything, followed by the Dada closer Exquisite Corpse, a - well - exquisite corpse construction that’s as good a way to end the album as any.
As a teenager I reckoned The Sky’s Gone Out was Bauhaus’ best studio album, as the varying styles and predominantly weltschmerzy tone made for a splendid existential epic. As a grownup I now feel the album is a patchy piece of water-treading.
Burning From the Inside (1983)
The group’s final album continued the surrealism featured in The Sky’s Gone Out, most overtly on the track Antonin Artaud, but also in the giddy King Volcano and the atmospheric Who Killed Mister Moonlight?. The standout track is She’s in Parties, another reggae-inspired number that’s arguably the group’s final masterpiece. Elsewhere there’s a sense of burnout. Peter Murphy was absent from a good portion of the recording sessions because of illness, leading to several songs having vocal duties performed by Daniel Ash and David J, who weren’t as strong or distinctive singers. In some ways the album feels like an audition for the post-Bauhaus band Love and Rockets.
Bang for buck-wise, and as a record of Bauhaus as a live act, you’d do well to also check out the live album Press the Eject and Give me the Tape, which I accidentally obtained when it turned out to be the B side of my cassette copy of The Sky’s Gone Out. (This remains my crowning musical retail experience.) You could make a case that Press the Eject is Bauhaus’ most essential album. It is missing songs from the group’s final two albums, but since those albums aren’t so great that’s less of an issue than it might be.
If it’s not already clear, my pick for best Bauhaus album is Mask. As a teenager I preferred The Sky’s Gone Out, but as an adult I’m less attracted to gloom, and more appreciative of Mask’s effectiveness.
Bauhaus and its contemporaries
Bauhaus’ goth rock bona fides are an enduring conundrum to me. They’re clearly goth-ish, but they’re somewhat to the side of other, more popular Goth groups, such as the Cure, or the Sisters of Mercy, or the Cult, or the Mission. Perhaps Bauhaus would have been better integrated into the milieu if they hadn’t disbanded in 1983, prior to goth’s mid-80s commercial peak.
I think musically Bauhaus is more interesting to listen to than the other goth groups. Lyrically, however, the melancholy of The Cure was more to the point, while the more conventionally 80s rock of the Sisters of Mercy is more what people have in their head when they think of goth rock.
A perhaps more interesting comparison is between Bauhaus and Joy Division. Again, Bauhaus was more sophisticated musically (although to be fair Joy Division’s style was intentionally minimal), but lyrically they were inferior. No less a luminary than Peter Hook has suggested the difference can be explained by the members of Bauhaus being middle class, whereas Joy Division was working class. I’m not sure if Hooky has done a full analysis on the socio-economic backgrounds of all concerned, but I get his point. Joy Division was sensitive in the social/industrial decay of 70s Britain, while Bauhaus was interested in quite different world of Weimar Cabaret and Aleistair Crowley, which the class conscious may interpret as a bourgeois, frivolous luxury. And, as far as it goes, that’s true. But though Joy Division is the more Important group, I can tell you I’ve listened to them about a tenth as much as Bauhaus, because for me Joy Division is a joyless listen, whereas Bauhaus is fun. Of course, I’m middle class too, so perhaps I would say that…
What indeed is my attraction to Bauhaus? As a teenager I enjoyed the group’s manic silliness, which I found to be a source of courage and solace. As a somewhat calmed-down adult what I chiefly love about the group is their unique sound. Ash eschewed macho guitar posturing in favour of tense, sinewy licks. The drum production was always innovative, definitely following in the footsteps of Martin Hannant’s work with Joy Division, but much less frosty. The group clearly enjoyed working in a studio; nowhere is this evidenced more than the dub versions of the group’s singles, and their frequently out-there B sides (my fave is the dub reggae Earwax). Murphy had a great voice, even if his stage persona was too derivative of Iggy Pop (there’s a story that Jim Osterberg himself turned up to a Bauhaus gig in New York and proceeded to - good-naturedly? - abuse Murphy for ripping him off). His singing, too, was a bit too self-consciously Bowiesque. (Another story has it that Murphy met Bowie at a party, and was so overwhelmed the only thing he could think to say was “I like your shoes.”)
Bauhaus has retained a fierce following over the decades. They’ve reformed and toured multiple times, even managing to produce a new album in 2006 (the sadly uninteresting Go Away White). Love and Rockets had a reasonably successful career, although their efforts to chase commercial success meant their music was less original and compelling. Peter Murphy also had a respectable indie solo career. Overall their fame remains… well I want to say “undead”, but that’s a bit on the nose. Alright then: their fame lives on!