The song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead," defined your band, Bauhaus. It's the first thing that Bauhaus recorded, right?
It was the very first song that we wrote together as a band, and we recorded it a couple weeks after writing it. It was out pretty quickly as well.
That's the version we all know, with the dub effects and everything?
It's the opening story of my book. We did it in one take. As I say in the book, that was the very first time Peter Murphy had ever sung into a studio mic.
He did a fair enough job, then. Where did you find the studio for that? Was it local?
It was a wonderful studio, now long gone, alas. It was Beck Studios in Wellingborough [Northamptonshire, UK]. Derek Tompkins [the producer/engineer] was a fantastic character, a very outspoken, interesting man. He was a very inquisitive, closet intellectual really, but he was also mad about motorcycles. He had an old Vincent from the '30s. He was in his fifties when we were in our early twenties. We liked the fact that he was so removed from our world. He had such an acute ear. He could really discern the subtle tones that were necessary to make a good record. He was confident enough in his ability to be very outspoken and tell us, "No, you don't want to do that. That's rubbish!"
Which is what you need when you're young and gung-ho.
Right! "Do it this way, and you'll thank me."
You brought him back in to do later albums, didn't you?
The third album by Bauhaus, The Sky's Gone Out. We later brought him back to do [Love & Rocket's] Earth, Sun, Moon, even though he'd retired.
The Sky's Gone Out is a pretty epic record, as far as the scope of it and the variety of tunes.
Yeah, it was ambitious. We were glad to have him there to reign us in a bit. We were pretty out there at that time.
On the first record, In the Flat Field, you took "Double Dare" from a BBC session and incorporated that. It wasn't just separating that project from the performance on the first album. You were able to say that was a better performance.
Well that's the reason. It was a John Peel session. We tried to re-record that in the studio, Southern Studios in London. That was our benchmark, because we thought it was one of the best things we'd ever done. As is often the case, those Peel Sessions were the best work an artist did. We figured out that it was because we didn't have time to overdo it. You'd have eight hours to record four tracks and mix them. You've got to bang it down and just finish it. There's a vitality to that process that's really great. We applied that to ourselves by self-imposing limitations. We'd just give ourselves two goes working on a track and, if it wasn't not happening, we'd move on. We couldn't get it to sound as good as the Peel session, so we had to negotiate with the BBC. They wanted to have a Bauhaus Peel Session EP, but we wanted to have that on our album. There was a lot of going back and forth, as well as legal negotiations. It actually delayed the release of the album. We were on the road, touring to promote the album, but the album wasn't available until a couple of months later. It still went to number one on the alternative charts!
One of the studio experiments I loved was your "Exquisite Corpse" song on The Sky's Gone Out, where you're passing tracks on and not hearing each other, but just adding things and seeing what you came up with. How did you apply that in the session?
That was my idea. I don't know if it had ever been applied to music before. I was very into the surrealists, and obviously familiar with the Exquisite Corpse. That is where you folded a piece of paper and passed it around the table; each artist would draw part of a body and extend the line of the neck down the first guy. The next artist would draw the body, and the next person would draw the legs and feet. Often people would write a few words and it would become a poem. That's where the Exquisite Corpse comes from.
Like a William Burroughs cut-up, in a way.
Yeah, like that. "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine" was the first line of the assemblage. I thought it would be very interesting to apply that technique to music. You can't continue the line, as it were. But if we each had a minute allotted, and the only thing we decided on was a key and a beat, and we all had the same beat (we could change the beat and fuck with it... it's just the time signature basically), and then we just took it in turns. Something super simple. Three would go out, and one would stay with the engineer. We'd be limited to four tracks each. We'd lay that down, and then the next guy would come in. Then there was a fifth minute where everybody just had two tracks, and that had to allude to what they'd done on their first tracks. Then we'd put it all together. It was so exciting to sit there and roll tape to see what happened.
Was everybody playing over the whole piece, or just their sections?
No, just their section. Actually, I think we had eight tracks each on the first one, and then just two on the very last one. But we didn't listen until the very end. It was uncanny how it gelled; especially the fifth element and how that all fit together. It was a successful experiment. We did it two times.
Most bands on their third album would hire a producer, bring them in, and then record songs they wrote on the road. What was the impetus to be in the studio experimenting like that?
To put ourselves on the edge and to keep things really vital, alive, and exciting. We never toed the commercial line. Quite the opposite, you know? I mean we had a track on Burning from the Inside called "The Sanity Assassin." It was a rocking track, very catchy. Martin Mills from Beggars Banquet [record label] heard it and thought it was a hit single. He said we should start off the album with it. We told him, "Martin, it's actually not going on the album." He thought it was a joke, but it wasn't. We thought it was too rock. It wasn't weird, or avant-garde, enough. We released it in an edition of a weird number, like 447 7-inch singles to our fan club. We gave it away.
My friends and I used to try to find all those damn Bauhaus records in the '80s.
They're hard to find, especially that one.
When Bauhaus quit the first time, you started making solo records.
I'd actually already started recording that while the band was still extant. I just carried on and finished it.
The first record [Etiquette of Violence]?
Yeah. Prior to that, I'd done a single ["Nothing/Armour"] with René Halkett, who was a student of the original Bauhaus [art school] from Weimar, Germany, in the 1920s. It was a one-off single on 4AD, one of their first releases. I was always looking outside of the group. I had very eclectic leanings.
Love and Rockets surfaced later with three of the four original Bauhaus members. Was that something you brought in through your brother, Kevin Haskins? He was drumming with Daniel Ash in Tones on Tail.
Daniel had a falling out with Glenn Campling, who was the bass player for Tones on Tail. Apparently (I only found this out recently), they approached Peter Murphy to re-form Bauhaus. I didn't know about it until this year. I'd seen the story that the three of us contacted Peter and he didn't even bother to turn up for a get together, so we had nothing better to do than carry on as a trio and that's why we did Love and Rockets. That wasn't my story. Daniel and Kevin came to me and said they couldn't get on with Glenn, so they were going to start a band and wanted to see if I'd like to join, just as a trio. I said, "Yeah." I was in the Jazz Butcher at the time. I could see that as great fun, but I could also see its limitations. We just needed that little break, the three of us, for it to be exciting again. We got back together, and it just clicked.
