Not surprisingly, my first exposure to Peter Murphy was from a movie. It was his face and music that are used in the first frames of Tony Scott’s great and underrated horror masterpiece, The Hunger. At the time, Murphy was of course the lead singer for the archetypal goth band Bauhaus, and it is their archetypal song “Bella Legosi’s Dead” that is featured in the opening. Ever since I saw that movie and heard that music, that voice, I was hooked on Peter Murphy.
This was in the early 1980s and, needless to say, goth music wasn’t getting much air-play on the pop-rock radio stations that I and my high school friends all listened to. Still, there was something afoot. Some of my cooler, English-nerd friends started wearing T-shirts with the Bauhaus logo on them.
As I soon learned, goth was, almost literally, an underground movement. Goth clubs starting appearing in basement-bars and old, converted warehouses. The one in Gainesville was called The Vatican, and it’s still of a legend with people my age.
I am by no means an expert on goth music, but one thing I do know is that it is not depressing. Rather, goth’s appeal comes from a paradoxical combination of melancholy realism and romantic defiance. Both of these impulses are wonderfully evoked in Murphy’s most successful solo work, “Cuts You Up”. It’s still my favorite of Murphy’s songs.
Rock on…
Ash Clifton, Writer 