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"I always like to say that I'm in rock 'n' roll, but not of it."- Peter Murphy
Love, humour, tension, theatre, glamour, inner, outer; it's all there in Peter Murphy's music, which has existed in the corner of the public's eye for the last 20 years without ever taking cultural centre stage.
'Mine hasn't been a designer career. First off, Bauhaus doesn't fit in anywhere and I think of myself as a wanderer, or maybe a novelist. I go away and do my work in my own downtime and space.'
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The weird, off-beat starting point for Peter Murphy's career was Bauhaus. On the surface they had a great 'pop' idea, which was essentially glam rock but angled, re-cut in stark white light - T-Rex as vampiric showmanship.
'I've got to keep it where we are all strangers but there's a very intimate dialogue happening where there's a connectedness. Every person who has an audience has that, but [the question is] whether they want to acknowledge it and make it part of the experience.'
When the band imploded in 1983, he appeared in the in the Bowie/Deneuve movie, The Hunger. It was this 'showroom' Peter Murphy who appeared on his first post-Bauhaus album, The Waking Hour by Dalis Car.
'I'm quite a sponge and a bastard Renaissance man. I can really take something and do my version of it. I'm a little bit like a child at about 2 years of age who sees somebody dancing and singing then they start imitating and that's how I see myself. I'm not a very good academic, so that's how I learn.'
Dalis Car was the wreckage/art installation that Peter Murphy has never walked away from in the UK. It was as if he'd been outed as a Dracularian pin-up. This was the stuff that clung to Murphy as he made his next move, releasing his first full solo album, Should The World Fail To Fall Apart in 1986. He was now on the margins and the album was largely ignored by fans and media. Twenty years later, the album has come to life in a way that didn't seem possible then - now it seems to acknowledge and participate in a kind of golden age of left-field pop music.
Two years later Peter Murphy re-appeared with Love Hysteria and once again it took a while to reveal itself. Aided by co-writer Paul Statham, this was more overtly 'pop', full of eastern light, glimmering, shimmering and in 'Dragnet's Drag' the first song you could throw yourself around to since he'd left Bauhaus - not as a cathartic frenzy (as inspired by 'Dark Entries') but as an uplifting, life-is-great dance: quite an achievement for a thin, drawn, former Count. 'I don't really feel that I identify with rock 'n' roll, as it were. I always like to say that I'm in rock 'n' roll, but not of it.'
'Love Hysteria has a lot of other world stories and fairy tales for adults and children - that's the imagery I want. I don't find commenting on the solid world interesting.'
The arena-days that came and went around 1990 with the release of Deep and featured the U.S. hit single, 'Cuts You Up.' This was followed by Holy Smoke (1992) which signaled the end of a re-kindled fascination with the gaunt, long-limbed 'rock-star’ for America.
His 1995 release Cascade was his first record after moving to Turkey as a full-time resident.
'Being in Turkey, I'm exposed to a lot of so-called Sufi music, all very sort of traditional in a sense. I was always interested in trying to synthesize my own Turkish experience in a more overt way musically rather than just as a subtle colour, which has always been there. I wanted to retain an approach that began even with Bauhaus - tracks like 'Bela' or 'Hollow Hills' - of using length and lot's of space and I wanted these brilliant Turkish musicians to play over it, because the sounds and instruments that I've chosen are sort of unearthly and I love that quality.'
In 2005 Peter joined Daniel Ash, David J. and Kevin Haskins in reforming Bauhaus to play the Coachella festival in the Californian desert, and went on to tour the world releasing their final album Go Away White in March 2008 . The band decided to make this their final statement and now we see Peter returning to the stage on his 2008 retrospective tour which will feature not only a cross section of his own solo work, but will include select songs from his Bauhaus repertoire.