All Night Long

My first awareness of Peter Murphy as an artistic entity -- a thing, a creature, a presence -- was during his tenure as the lead singer of Bauhaus, a late '70s / early '80s British band. As I would look through the CD import section at record stores, this sleeve always stood out to me:

It had a clean design, all monochromatic appeal, and the song titles on the back spoke to worlds outside my Top 40 parameters, as I would discover when I did the deep dive into the Bauhaus catalog years later. But the first time I saw Peter Murphy, I didn't know it was him. While "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus is playing in the opening sequence of the 1983 soft-core vampire film The Hunger, we only see Peter Murphy performing it, and he transfixes the viewer in seconds. (Of course, I also saw him in an ad campaign for Maxell cassette tapes, which you can see here.) It was also the end of Bauhaus for a while, as the rest of the band jettisoned Murphy to pursue other musical adventures, chief among them Love And Rockets (which is Bauhaus minus Peter Murphy). Like it or not, Murphy was now a solo artist.

His first five solo albums were recently collected in a box set (unimaginatively titled 5 Albums), and for me, it was a must-have, even though I already had those five albums in various forms. For once I discovered Peter Murphy -- including Dali's Car, his one-album post-Bauhaus musical experiment with former Japan bassist Mick Karn -- I was all in. I wanted to sing like him, both the smoky crooning baritone and the squalling post-punk yell, and I sure as fuck wanted to look like him, like Bowie's Thin White Duke character but more exaggerated and amplified, like an anglicized Turkish deity of death. (Hey, my teenage years were as Goth and angst-filled as anyone else's.) I mean, look at this fucker:

Of the five albums, I would have to be cruel in my ratings:

Deep > Love Hysteria > Holy Smoke > Cascade > Should The World Fail To Fall Apart

I mean, any dumb shit can find something to love about Deep and Love Hysteria; the latter has his best opening track ("All Night Long") and his best B-side ("I've Got A Miniature Secret Camera"), while the former has the big MTV single ("Cuts You Up") and arguably his most beautiful and delicate song ("Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem"). Holy Smoke was my first Peter Murphy + Wherehouse Records experience, so I played both Holy Smoke and Cascade waaaaaaaaay too much in the store, trying to force people to like them as much as I did. And while I had Should The World Fail To Fall Apart in the collection -- after all, I'm a catalog completist to the surprise of no one -- I've only gotten into it a couple years ago, when a two-disc reissue was released.

After spinning the box over the past few weeks, it's only reaffirmed my judgments about my connection to his early work. (Murphy has ten solo albums in total, so this box represents the sum total of his time with the label Beggar's Banquet, the label that also had the first run of albums from Love And Rockets. It's hard to think of a band like Bauhaus that split into two commercially and critically viable entities, but I'm sure there are other examples.) Should The World... is a tentative step into solo waters, with Murphy relying on collaborators that didn't quite have a handle on how he should be presented. While it all gels nicely with the Magazine cover of "The Light Pours Out Of Me," the other tracks are solid, if slightly out of focus here and there. But when Murphy really clicks with guitarist/co-writer Paul Statham -- which persisted through the rest of his career at Beggar's Banquet -- it often moved into the realm of the magical. 

As a middle-aged fucker, I'm better able to pick up on what Cascade was shooting for, with Michael Brook's cinematic washes of guitar paralleling with Murphy's water imagery in the lyrics, a more sedate and adult take on the vagaries of love and longing then I was ready to digest in my mid-twenties. Holy Smoke has some muscularity that had to be in the grunge-saturated air of 1992, but filtered through Murphy's unique sensibilities. (In another world, "Hit Song" would have been played along other radio power ballads of the era.) And throughout all five albums, I can hear some inflections and instrumentation that had to come from his wife's Turkish heritage (his wife, who he married in 1982, back in the Bauhaus days), with percussion and trilling vocal runs that sit outside the Euro-American rock tradition. In other words, as you hope for artists with whom you've spent some time, there are layers upon layers worthy of further examination.

I never had a chance to meet him in my record store days, sadly. But I've seen him play live more than a few times -- solo at Chene Park in Detroit and at Industry in Pontiac, where a young Jewel was the much-derided opening act, as well as with a reunited Bauhaus in Chicago and at Coachella -- and sometimes, it's much better to never meet your artistic heroes and crushes. The work of Peter Murphy allows me to access a time in my life when I seemed to feel in three dimensions, when I awaited the next album or show with an anticipation and zeal that I remember but don't currently possess. He's a talisman to those times in my life, a gift that sits on my shelf, waiting for the next moment.