Bauhaus: The Boys Are Black In Town

Geoff Carter

Saturday, Aug. 22, 1998 | 4:02 a.m.

I spoke to The Murphy. The Bauhaus frontman consented to a phone interview shortly after his exquisite 1995 album "Cascade" opened and closed. I didn't know what to expect of Peter Murphy - the Count! - so needless to say, the genial fellow that called me from his home in Turkey took me by surprise.

Bauhaus was a big part of my teenage years - the T-shirts, the Bowie cover, "The Hunger" - and I fully expected the pale man to materialize in the form of a bat, or elemental dust. Thankfully, he was just a bloke who had happened to spend his salad years in a cape and velvet pants, intoning the incantation "Undead - undead - undead" over a throbbing, postmodern bass guitar drone.

"Peter, what would you say about your sense of humor?" I asked him.

He chuckled; he'd been asked this question before. "Geoff, I'll tell you - it's always been there. Always."

His assurance stuck as Bauhaus took the stage at the Hard Rock Joint, the dark, dark night of August 21. The renowned "gothic" band was playing together for the first time in well over a decade and from the moment guitarist Daniel Ash, bassist David J. and drummer Kevin Haskins took positions around a television monitor broadcasting a stark black-and-white image of Murphy's angular mug, the audience was in on the joke. The dead had risen - capes, hairdos and all.

But I laughed with them, not at them. They seemed to know how absurd the charade was (particularly Murphy, who "vamped" every chance he had) and played the theatricals with a knowing wink, all the while pumping out a sound so tough and razor sharp they seemed just 10 minutes older than their prime. For all we know, the boys need the high-contrast stage arrangements, Bela Lugosi widow's peaks and hanging lightbulbs to get the old sound back, to make "She's In Parties" and "Terror Couple Kill Colonel" sound fat, authentic, alive.

Whatever the case, the old ghouls never put a foot wrong.

Murphy and Ash, in particular, seemed completely re-energized. The most underrated vocal / guitar team in rock history (I would dare call the countercultural equivalent of Plant / Page) were all over each other, playing off the other's strengths with visible glee. Murphy's sonorous, operatic wail seemed keyed to Ash's elegant treatments, making every song a pleasure to watch and hear. The Haskins brothers (David J. prefers not to use his last name) were as tight a rhythm section as one could want, slapping the old numbers into the present day with genuine menace.

The band saved most of the good stuff for the encores, though "The Sanity Assassin" and "Silent Hedges" were note-perfect. Their popular covers of T-Rex's "Telegram Sam" and David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" brought the house down, with Ash and Murphy revisiting their childhoods and acting like the glam-rock superstars they admired so fervently. A extended version of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" sealed the pact.

Many have conjectured that this reunion was born of desperation; that Murphy's solo career and Love and Rockets (the band the other three members comprise) had gasped their last. If so, it's a right shame, but my eyes tell me otherwise. What I saw was not a Dracula, but a Frankenstein - a monster made of living parts, rampaging into the good night, eager to have the last laugh. Go, Bauhaus, go.