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Bauhaus Is Undead
This summer, after a long delay, Bauhaus is scheduled to embark on their first tour in Quite a Few Years. Kate and I will catch them in Seattle. Am I excited? Well… the boys are getting pretty long in the tooth now. In my most recent memory of Peter Murphy he is wearing reading glasses, conjuring bat sounds from his phone at the end of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”; this was when he toured to celebrate the band’s 35th anniversary with three younger musicians who were perfectly fine but definitely Not Bauhaus.
Given the simmering intra-band hostility that has obtained for some decades now, there is every reason to suspect that this reunion is motivated mostly, if not entirely, by filthy lucre. So I am keeping my expectations low. But at some level it’s not even about the performance — it’s about spending time with these guys who, in one configuration or another, have been a big part of my life for almost 40 years now.
In an encouraging sign, they recently released their first new song since 2008. Though “song” might not be the right word for it. According to the band,
“Drink the New Wine” was recorded last year during lockdown with the four members sharing audio files. The track employs the Surrealists’ “Exquisite Corpse” device whereby each artist adds to the piece without seeing what the others have done. Bauhaus have used this technique in the past to great effect. The title refers to the very first Cadavre exquis’ drawing rendered by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy which included words which when strung together made up the sentence, “Le cadavre exquis boiara le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”). For the recording, the four musicians each had one minute and eight tracks at their disposal plus a shared sixty seconds plus four tracks for a composite at the end.
Is this something to rival their best work? Don’t be silly. It’s a trifle, it’s a goof, it’s a prank. But for whatever reason and for however long, it’s good to have them back.
Last Notes on “Outside”
Because I can’t help myself I turned my opinions about Outside into a playlist, using the latest mixes from the Brilliant Adventure box set. At 12 tracks and 48 minutes, it’s a bit more digestible than the original album.
Also, this morning I happened to be reading a Bowie radio interview from 1972. He’s talking about Ziggy Stardust, but what he says could just as easily be applied to Outside.
It originally started as a concept album, but it kind of got broken up because I found other songs I wanted to put in the album which wouldn’t have fitted into the story… so at the moment its a little fractured and a little fragmented… I’m just lighting a cigarette… so anyway what you have there on that album when it does finally come out is a story which doesn’t really take place… I wrote it in such a way that I just dropped the numbers into the album in any order that they cropped up. It depends in which state you listen to it in. The times that I’ve listened to it – I’ve had a number of meanings out of the album… but I always do. Once I’ve written an album – my interpretations of the numbers in that album are totally different afterwards than the time that I wrote them and I find that I learn a lot from my own albums about me.
Apparently this is what he did, over and over and over. I wonder, by the time he finished Blackstar, did he finally really understand himself? One certainly hopes so.