Peter Murphy – 5 Albums

Beggar’s Arkive

It’s no exaggeration to say that the late lamented David Bowie cast an immense and glittery shadow over popular music, and it would seem the darkest part of this shadow fell on one Peter Murphy, superfan and Bauhaus lead singer. Bauhaus took the glam aesthetic of the Spiders From Mars, mixed it with the abrasiveness of punk and swapped out the science fiction for horror cinema to create one of the most iconic goth acts ever to have swished a cape. And after their split, Murphy continued to indulge this fascination with a string of solo albums.

But it’d be wrong to dismiss him as a copyist — for starters, they don’t really sound much alike. And fandom or not, Murphy is very much his own man and his own artist. And to prove this, he’s just re-released his first five solo albums in a rather tasty box set.

And you know, I’d forgotten just how good they were. 1986’s Should The World Fail To Fall Apart is a many-faceted thing, eschewing the minimalist dread of Bauhaus for lusher instrumentation and boasting his spectacular cover of Pere Ubu‘s “Final Solution”, and sets the scene for Murphy’s solo career with its dark charms. Lobe Hysteria is probably his most unashamedly glam album, but it finds plenty of time for digressions into Eastern mysticism and cosmology among the stomping. Deep is probably his most accessible, being a more traditional rock album, while Holy Smoke and Cascade return to the richness and texture of Should The World Fail To Fall Apart.

But running orders and release dates are just muso history, really. Taken as a whole, in the form of this set, they represent an astounding body of work. From the majestic pop of “All Night Long” to the utterly heartbreaking “Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem”, it’s an eclectic bag of layered sounds and influences. And over it all, of course (except the instrumentals, obviously), is That Voice.

There is nobody on Earth who sounds quite like Peter Murphy — that instantly recognisable strength and power cuts right through whatever instrumentation it’s accompanying like a hot knife through butter, and his lyrics are a curious blend of intellectual mysticism and theatrical rock’n’roll decadence, with the occasional beautiful pop gem thrown in for good measure. Holy Smoke‘s “Hit Song”, for example, lifts and retools a couple of lines from Deep’s darkly cynical “Roll Call” to create a glorious love song, while “Indigo Eyes”, for all its mythological name-dropping is, at heart, just one catchy-ass motherfucker of a tune.

Little Peter may not exactly have grown up to be his hero, but he has somehow managed to make himself just as unclassifiable and mercurial. And this is great news for anyone who likes their music to have a heart and a brain. And, possibly, a couple of silly outfits.

-Justin Farrington-