Bauhaus
Bela Lugosi's Dead

“I began to grow when I realized that David Bowie wasn't a god,” thus spoke Peter Murphy, who knows how, who knows when, who knows where.

Well, then I never grew up.

Because for me, Bowie is still a god even now, I mean the Bowie who wandered around in the seventies... Everyone has their own Olympus and their own Olympians...

Rock is youth, period.

It is mythology and shamanism outside of that crap called reason... to hell with the philosophers, to hell with Frank Zappa.

There was a time when the gods visited the earth, got it Frank? And you, with that satyr face, should know it.

Oh, Peter, the day Bowie was no longer a god, you stopped being one too...

(Then, let's do it this way: to prevent you from thinking I am crazy, know that I think these things fifty percent... that thirty percent I think they're bullshit and twenty percent I don't think a damn thing).

In reality, I also think that extreme coolness (Bowie, but also Murphy) should be set aside. That coolness in that damn fascist communist world (dreamed by a million losers) would be prohibited, there the records would all have smoke gray covers and the musicians would play with their faces covered and dressed like Jehovah's Witnesses.

In any case, if once the gods visited the earth, between the sixties and seventies rock stars appeared... how could we young lads not get caught up in it, how?

Then it helped the matter of English, when a god speaks, you don't necessarily want to understand him... if anything, it's the priests who understand, or the rock critics... it's always been that way, from the Oracle of Delphi to any Bauhaus concert...

Ah, I've been to concerts...

Of course, I didn't see Jim, Jimi, or the Velvet... but deities are often replaced... Cronus is succeeded by Zeus, classic rock by glam rock...

And glam rock, punk, and post-punk...

I was saying I've seen concerts... but never like Bauhaus...

Never!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It must have been eighty-one, it was certainly Bologna (former tobacco factory)... an evening with Gaznevada (if I remember correctly), Peter Gordon, and Bauhaus...

During that time, how many new records did you hear in a week? How many?

Many...

All the music dealers were at work, and tapes were coming from all over... and, like, at the first of ours, "In the Flat Field," I had given at most half a listen...

And nothing, something happened that night.

That Bauhaus started the concert like this: metronomic dub wave introduction, suspended time... a couple of minutes/centuries... a sense of anticipation... the officiants, a blond guy with glasses and a fabulous ferret with a crest... then, with studied and extremely slow movements, Peter Murphy arrived, slender and wiry physique... mad eyes... fabulous nocturnal beauty...

At two-fifty the singing began... in my entire life I have never heard a voice enter in such a perfect way, never...

It was the voice of a god, no way around it... like when you close and reopen your eyes and things suddenly stand out, only here you never closed your eyes.

It wasn't, or rather isn't, but a moment, but it justifies all the previous sense of expectation by being loaded, moreover, with everything that will come after, that is, the long hypnosis... and the famous finale that rises, that rises...

That rises... Bela Lugosi, the famous actor who played Dracula, is dead and finally he is a vampire forever.

In that summer of eighty-one, Luludia was completely hypnotized and found no peace until he found the record.

The Bauhaus, what a band... and Peter Murphy, what a cool dude... I imagined him as Narcissus (from "Narcissus and Goldmund") or as a shadow from a Russian novel. Too bad that one day he wore the white shirt and turned into just another dandy,

It must have been the same day he realized that David Bowie wasn't a god.

Only David Bowie was a god... and still is... and will always be... always...

Forever...

Trallalla...