The most surprising thing about Peter Murphy is how funny he is. You don’t expect that from the man who fronted the famously dark Bauhaus and who rocketed to glory on a single about “Dracula” actor Bela Lugosi being dead. He is, though, and if you see him live, you will witness a man who is still joking, no matter how much smoke and spooky lyrics are involved.
He’s currently touring the world playing the entirety of the first record from goth band Bauhaus, “In the Flat Field,” which turns 40 this year. Along for the ride is fellow Bauhaus brother David J, and they also are mixing a live recording. It’s the Ruby Tour, as Murphy says, because that’s the gift for a 40th anniversary.
Murphy pokes fun at his gloomier compatriot, who doesn’t share his lighthearted approach to bringing one of the seminal dark albums to life after so long.
“I keep quiet on stage because he’s a bit serious, our David,” says Murphy with a belly laugh in his iconic baritone voice. “So I’ll say, ‘This next song is called “Double Dare,” it’s a miserable song, so wipe the smiles off your bloody faces, here we go.’ He can’t stand it.”
Anyone who has seen Murphy over the course of his long solo career knows that he thrives on being playful. That intense gaze and vampiric presence seen in the “Cuts You Up” video is a thespian at work, and it brings to life his poetic lyrics perfectly. But he has a very humble and British approach to the adulation that keeps him from taking it seriously. He prefers to defuse worship.
“It’s a lovely compliment, of course, and I do thank them,” says Murphy. “I respond to it with a knee-jerk charm. You get girls looking at you, whispering, ‘I love you,’ and I respond, ‘Oh, stop that, you’re not even singing the right bloody words! There’s only one word, girl, adrenaline. You look like you’re in an ecstasy of delight, but you’re mumbling.’ They all laugh, and I look at the rest of them and say, ‘You all want me, I know. I want me, too, when I look in the mirror, but I just can’t get to me.’ Everyone breaths, and it’s clever.”
Over the course of his career, Murphy’s style has changed quite a bit from Bauhaus. Tighter pop tunes with album-specific themes took the place of the wasteland jam band, but he’s retaught himself to be the singer who changed music way back when. The higher range and the screaming are all there, as well as the tendency to spiral songs out into evolving bits of aural shadow.
“In the Flat Field” is a weird record. It was made after they’d made a splash (though not a hit) with “Bela” and their fame as a live band had labels pursuing them. The result is an attempt to pour something cyber-organic into a static recording, so it’s exhilarating to hear that such a momentous musical debut will have a bookend taking us backward while keeping all the things Murphy and J have learned in the interim.
“With David there, there’s this reflex reaction,” says Murphy. “It hasn’t been a retrospective. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be quite good, honestly. It’s atonal, tiring and interesting. I feel the songs, a sort of body memory.”
For all that “In the Flat Field” did, though, Murphy remains amused and unwilling to be famous. Our 10-minute interview spun into a half hour after we got to talking about kids. I told him how my 2-year-old daughter was once obsessed with a B-side live version of “The Line Between the Devil’s Teeth,” and he shared how his son flat out didn’t believe anyone would pay to hear his father sing all over the world.
Though, he would ask Murphy to sometimes “play that song that sounds like when you’re dead, Papa.” That’s Peter “The Godfather of Goth” Murphy as you’re most likely to see him: laughing with endless good humor about things because there’s no point taking them seriously.
Says Murphy, “You take serious and you just turn it into a kind of a nursery rhyme, don’t you?”
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