Posted on 10/29/2022 5:53:42 PM PDT by nickcarraway
For many bands, they can labour away for years developing and reshaping their sound to reach what they deem artistic perfection – most never reach this eutopia. This, however, was never a worry for post-punk’s artful vampires, Bauhaus. With their cavernous, magical debut single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, they knew they had hit the nail on the head; everything after was a bonus.
In 1978, Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins and David J formed Bauhaus with the aim of bringing a sinister and more artistic edge to punk. They would employ the vibrations of glam, psychedelia, dub and prog-rock to cast their spell.
“There was an immediate chemistry between us all in the band. We were always very instinctive. I hadn’t been in a band before, but this was truly like an arthouse. It was a creative atelier. I quickly established, with everybody’s consent, that we split everything equally four ways,” Murphy told Uncut in 2019.
After just a few weeks of jamming goth-infused covers and half-baked ideas, they stumbled upon their first viable single. “Danny called me at home and said: ‘Pete, me and David had this idea about writing something on the vampire theme,’” Murphy remembered. “To me, that was really about attraction. There’s an erotic, alluring element to the vampire. We didn’t want to write an ode to Bela Lugosi, ostensibly. The kitsch element was his name because he was the biggest icon, yet he was the most unlikely vampire-looking person. So there was that Brit angle to it, but it wasn’t at all negative. It was perfect. The idea of Bela Lugosi being dead or undead is classic.”
“I had a day job in a warehouse, where I’d pack up boxes of lard, amongst other things. They were bloody heavy. I’d have these delivery labels in my back pocket all the time, and after work, I was bicycling home and had the first line in my head – ‘White on white translucent black capes,’” David J added, discussing the single’s genesis. “So I got out a packing label and wrote that down. By the time I got home, had the whole thing laid out on these pink, green and red delivery labels.”
When the young men took the idea to the practice room, the aforementioned chemistry hit an excitable peak as they pieced the instrumentals together in no time. They began with the nine-and-a-half-minute track’s nearly-three-minute introduction of dense gothic dread.
“This is how quick it was,” Ash recalled. “Kevin started playing that bossa nova beat, I came in with the riff, Dave followed with his bassline, and Pete began singing. My riff has these mutant chords – they’re not even minor chords – but it’s rooted in an old Gary Glitter song, slowed right down. I didn’t realise that when I was doing it.”
“The vocals come in about half an hour after everything else,” Murphy added. “Those two verses are like, ‘Who is that speaking?’ There was an oracular aspect to it. That voice had to come from the spirit of that beautiful, erotic, enigmatic character. That’s how the vampire worked in terms of alluring audiences. That particular monster of the Hollywood period was actually very beautiful.”
After hitting the spot with their first jam, they decided not to continue to refine what was already perfect. “We knew we had something really special,” Haskins told Uncut. “I think we actually said to each other, ‘Let’s not play this any more. Let’s wait until we get into the studio.’ We were scared of reworking it and losing it.”
Bauhaus hit the studio for their first ever recording session at Beck Studios, Wellingborough in January 1979 and laid down ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ in a single live take during a six-hour visit. Elsewhere in the session, they recorded the 12” single’s B-side, ‘Boys’ as well as ‘Bite My Hip’, ‘Some Faces’ and ‘Harry’.
The 12” single was released on August 6th, 1979, with ‘Boys’ and an early incarnation of ‘Dark Entries’ on side two. While it didn’t enter the charts upon its original release, the song has since become a goth-rock essential and has been cited as a guiding influence by innumerable subsequent artists.
“‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ just happened to be a seminal song,” Murphy told Uncut, reflecting on the single “It was the ‘Stairway To Heaven’ of the 1980s.”
“It definitely has a timeless quality,” agreed drummer Kevin Haskins. “On reflection, I marvel at what we did. We were just four young kids who wanted to make something unique without really having much idea what we were doing. But that song came out of it.”
In 1983, Bauhaus re-recorded ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ for the opening soundtrack to Tony Scott’s film The Hunger – which starred David Bowie, one of the band’s guiding influences – further solidifying the song’s position in pop-culture history.
Watch the opening sequence from The Hunger below.
Yeah.
No.
That song sucks.
ROFL! Yeah. A real pinnacle of music genius.
um....huh?
never heard of it
What utter nonsense. One is not at all like the other.
Anything like “ legend of a mind” by the Moody Blues?
Funny I never heard of the song or the band......I liked that sort of stuff back in the day.
I was more partial to Peter Murphy’s solo career. “Cuts You Up” is pure gold.
That is a great song.
One of the most seminal singles in alternative music historyThey can say it is an alternative to music all they want but this trash is not even worth knowing about.
Alternative music is to music what Jackson Pollack is to art.
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