Peter Murphy
September 2001
Montreal

The phenomenon of Peter Murphy can be summed up as a voice - literally and figuratively. It was the voice of revolution in music when Murphy was the singer/songwriter for Bauhaus from 1978 to 1983, continuing to innovate alternative rock throughout Murphy’s solo career. Then there’s the subject of Murphy’s voice as a sound, its jaw-dropping range and power to deliver notes with depth and grandeur like no other singer.

Last year, Murphy embarked on a tour as the ultimate showcase for his voice, a journey called “Just For Love” that took him around North America treating fans to the most intimate, stripped-down display of his music to date. Murphy intentionally selected cozy venues and took with him only two musicians to accompany him: noted violinist Hugh Marsh and guitarist Peter DiStefano. The result was so momentous for Murphy and his audiences that a live album was issued, commemorating the tour by capturing its last performances at Los Angeles’ El Rey Theater on November 30 and December 1, 2000.

Here, he speaks about that tour’s place in Murphy history, explaining why he decided to do it and how it affected the process of writing and recording for his forthcoming ninth solo album.

The last time we spoke was right before your Wild Birds tour in 1999, which you were completely energized about. And on the heels of that you came out with the Just For Love tour, which you seem to have even more enthusiasm for and subsequently blew my mind. I was lucky enough to be at the El Rey show captured on the CD and was raving about it for weeks afterwards, thinking, God I hope he puts out a live album because the show was phenomenal!

That's really great of you to say so! You know, you probably have an inkling of the connection that the Just For Love tour had with the Wild Birds tour. For Wild Birds, I was playing with a great band but a much sort of coarser, more rock and roll-oriented band that brought something new to the arrangements to the songs I'd been playing for years. But that was still staying within the confines of the arrangements or what we can loosely call the album versions. They were changed around and I would work them in a different way and it was not exactly like treading old ground, yet it was like a review of where I was at that particular moment.

And then at the end of the set, because I’d run out of numbers with the band, I decided to play a couple of acoustic numbers. That really was just me and the guitar. And I’m not a fan of bleeding poets who come out with their humble guitar tracks and just sort of sing along – I did it just as a token to the audience and to answer their calls for more! (Laughs)

It amazed me, actually, that the songs were, to my mind, very powerful in that very naked way. There was a new kind of buzz that I felt with that experience that signaled something very new for me and triggered this album that I’m doing now. I was looking really interiorly for signals as to what sort of approach I should be taking in this actual studio album I’m halfway through now. Then immediately those encores really blew me away and I immediately wanted to come out just for the fans.

Basically that whole Wild Birds tour was a celebration of the audience who have been really loyal over many years, and it was kind of a party for us all. And the Just For Love tour was called just that because I’d written a song based around that whole notion of performer-and-audience relationship, that intimate relationship that you can have with lots of people at one time.

The [Just For Love] tour was immediately booked and everybody around was panicking, thinking, what’s he doing? Oh my God he’s making a mistake – it will be awful! And I said, “Well, this is the sort of danger that I haven’t actually felt for a long time. I want to really change myself and take away the decoration of the spectacle; I want to almost fast from the sort of theatrical performer and just test myself and put myself on the line.” So, I did the tour!

I, for one, thank you for doing it. A voice like yours is so unique and so powerful that I think what happens when you go into the studio and do, as you said, something more rock-and-roll, the voice and the lyrics get diluted as they are put on par with the rest of the music. You can easily let the voice hide in the rest of the sounds. That shouldn’t happen with a voice like yours.

That’s part of sort of the musical aesthetic that you choose, and that’s okay – that’s fine! Lots of people have told me over the years – especially my wife – “Strip it down; just sing!” I said, “I’m not doing that, no.”

Why were you so loathe to do so?

Well, I was and am still a believer in the power of theater and spectacle with appropriate sort of soundtracks, as it were. It’s my joy and belief in taking people through a journey in a show. For an album it is possible and very effective to be very eclectic and not so addicted to style – just to treat it as a sort of journey, moving from power to all sorts of emotions which need a soundtrack, and that gives rise to songs. In a way, I’m not part of rock and roll and I’m not a musician in that sense. I’m more self-contained...probably the only star left in the sort of cliché sense of the word.

Where the experience is more multi-sensory, about the visual as much as it is about what you're hearing.

And it’s not about me, it’s about me as a character voicing everything through the personality and music. This was like another element that I was a bit wary of touching on in terms of just walking out there. That was my whole configuration on it. Yet, actually, I found that there was as much theater – all the emotions and all of the different colors and places that you go musically or as a performer lyrically are all contained – if it’s a good work – in the simplest version of the song. And that was a discovery on [Just For Love].

Immediately I recorded it because I thought, if I’m going to put out a live album, let it be really something that really counts as an album and not just like a rendition of the repertoire, you know what I mean? So I’m really proud of it!

What I'm most captivated by is just how accurately it returns me to that night and the feeling of the show because you have so well integrated the sounds of the crowd and its emotion.

I’m glad you said that, because that was conscious. It’s as it was played – it’s not at all sort of chopped-up or anything. The audience is actually live audience with real-time gaps and everything. So, good! I’m glad you noticed that.

Oh, absolutely – I’ve been listening to it repeatedly, trying to figure out which screams were mine versus everybody else’s.

(Laughing) That whole audience really also captures it for me. And a friend of mine, Mercan Dede – who I’m co-producing this album with – he mentioned it blew him away when he heard it, saying, “This is the best album I’ve heard in twenty years!” which was a really lovely compliment. But one of the things he also said was, “Obviously you’ve captured the relationship you have with the audience and the whole sort of energy there that is actually just as much part of what Peter Murphy is as the music,” which I thought was wonderful! That’s definitely how I feel about my work in a sense.

How did the Just For Love touring experience coupled with putting out the live album affect the experience you’re going through now recording this upcoming record?

Well, it sort of overlaps. I think it was in the winter of ’99, when I was planning the 2000 tour…Mercan did an album called Sufi Dreams and it was in my work room laying around. I’d never heard of it so I put it on. 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 color, which has always been there. And when I listened to this album, it really amazed me because it was the first album that I’d heard that was truly a synthesis of east and west in a way that was extremely cool and contemporary.

And at that moment a weird thing happened, just one of the many weird things that happens around me! (Laughs) The phone rings and [I hear] “Oh, hello, this is Mercan Dede calling for Beyhan” – who’s my wife – and I said, “Mercan Dede – oh! Why are you calling for my wife?” He said that she’d hired him to work on the soundtrack for her modern dance piece, so that was why he was calling but it was weird that he was calling when I was listening to him and having those thoughts about him.

What synchronicity.

Yeah! I went immediately to Istanbul and met up with him. That was the person that I wanted to approach this album with. So during those conversations, the subject again came up about my voice. He was really just focusing on that, and that was the premise of the shaping of this album. Then there was the tour, which gave me a perspective, an angle on how I wanted to approach this album.

And have the songs been with you for a while or did you come up with a lot of new material?

No, I consciously decided not to write anything or commit anything melodically to tape until I arrived here and started working. This album has literally been written on the spot, recorded and we’ll be mixing it...it’ll be completed at the end of September! So it’s been really exciting in that sense, very challenging. It’s been throwing away all these considerations of being over-careful and making plans and bringing in a piece of music, but giving myself the challenge – not challenge even, just the...what would you call it in English? I forgot my English! (Laughs) You know, the premise that I should write it on the spot. And that’s working great.

And who else are you working with, what other musicians?

Well, I definitely wanted Hugh Marsh as a central player.

He was stunning on the Just For Love tour.

Yes, and you know I think on that tour and everything about the Just For Love album is the relationship musically between Hugh and myself, and I wanted that to be a part of this album. So this is going to be a very interesting follow-up to the live album. But it's also going to be a very, very sort of...it’s sounding like an album for the year 3000. (Laughs) So I’m very excited.

You're always so ahead of your time; you just can't help yourself.

(Laughs) Yes – why, I don't know! Maybe I’m an “other”.

Obviously Just For Love was an epiphany for you, and on both that tour and Wild Birds you worked with guitarist Peter DiStefano. What was it like for you to lend your voice to someone else’s music? I’m talking specifically about DiStefano’s Rambient project with Harry Gregson-Williams.

Well, it was a bit like a gunshot session. I'd been working with my wonderful, brilliant Californian guitarist and I said, “What are you doing?” He’s extremely prolific and has got about three or four projects happening parallel, so he said, “Oh, come down and meet this brilliant keyboard player because we’re doing an album, so check him out!” and I said okay.

So I walked into this place – I wasn't quite sure where I was – and I met this so-called keyboard player who turned out to be Harry Gregson-Williams! (Laughs) And I was right in he middle, the epicenter, of what’s called Media Ventures, who are sort of the top soundtrack people who do everything basically! So there I was in the middle of this, saying, “Okay, play some stuff and let me hear it,” Peter said, “All right – but would you sing on this?” I was kind of cornered, but I said, “Oh, all right!” (Laughs)

But then I realized that working with Harry was kind of like an accidental blessing because he’s a really amazing musician and has an amazing array of instrumentation at his fingertips. It’s very interesting to work with a mainstream soundtrack composer, and I really enjoyed that a lot. I wrote those [two tracks] in the amount of time it took to sing them; I wrote the songs with Harry in a day and they were finished. So that was really great in that I was able to walk in cold and work almost immediately with somebody that I’d never met before.

Yes, amazing that you two had such a connection.

It was a great sort of exercise. There’s two songs I did, one called “We Dive” and the other called “Idle Flow”. I think, you know, the mixes that they’ve done on one of them – “Idle Flow” – could’ve been better. But you know, that's my opinion.

It seems, though, that over the past couple of years you’ve gotten into this frame of mind of spontaneity, cutting through the red tape, getting to the point and just getting things done.

Exactly!

Has that come from a frustration out of having to deal with so much time wasted due to record companies and all that stuff?

You’re very perceptive and right in that I was an artist on the now-defunct Red Ant label, parallel with the then Love and Rockets. Then the Bauhaus resurrection happened, which took us a whole year – which was great, I mean, it was an amazing experience! And we all sort of...well, I put my own album on hold because I thought it was worth it and very important.

At the end of that I was convinced that Bauhaus should carry on, and I spent a lot of my energy to pull the band members and convince them to do that. And to cut a long story short, I spent most of ‘99 really pushing that, and it was incredibly frustrating actually to let what I thought the opportunity to grasp a magical moment and run with it...it just would not happen!

So then it was time to actually let go of that and look at the album that I theoretically should have begun in the beginning of ‘99 with Red Ant. So I started recording sessions and at that moment Red Ant went broke. (Laughs) That was classic!

Of course!

I thought, “Okay…great!”

Obviously you didn't take it as some sort of sign – “Well, I guess I should just retire...”

Not at all, not at all! It's their loss! So it was like, okay, right, I don’t care – I’m going to tour without a record label, without any support; I wanted to finance my own tour and I wanted to visit Peter Murphy world again. I wanted to revisit those loyal fans. Hence the Wild Birds tour, and here we are.

And how were those touring experiences different from the past touring experiences where you had the backing of a record label and whatnot?

It was much more fulfilling in that I was in control of everything and I was at liberty as an artist working as an artist rather than just as a promo machine for some label. That was very empowering and it gave me a sense of confidence in really relaxing and not being addicted to the myth that you have to have a record label. They can come look for me this time around!

Speaking of everything that went on in 1999, I spoke to Kevin Haskins and Doug DeAngelis about their Messy project and everything that they’re doing.

Good!

One turn that the conversation took is that Kevin went off on reminiscing about the early days of Bauhaus, pointing out how things today seem to be so much more complicated for new artists trying to get into the business. And even though they're kind of starting something new – as you are starting something new – it doesn't seem to be as difficult as if you were a brand-new artist because you've got your histories behind you. But there must be some obstacles you still face.

It is a much more corporate-orientated mentality, and the typical A&R approach – which always has been, I guess – is worse; there’s much less openness to truly devoting a long-term plan with an artist. And if they don’t have like a radio single or they can’t see immediate returns, well then they’d rather pump out more Mars bars, you know….

But it is more difficult, I guess, yet at the same time as saying that there is a very vibrant and vital underground musical alternative scene being generated in what I call loosely the dance area. So you get a lot of very brilliant kids making stuff at home, and that’s where it was channeled, I think – that’s the new punk whereas so-called punk bands are clones are something from the 70’s. The truly new alternative – the truly new groundbreaking areas coming through on the Radiohead stuff for instance and the Bjork stuff – Bauhaus was doing it a long time ago.

You know, these Radiohead albums easily could be Bauhaus albums, actually. But that’s how time goes and that’s how influences happen. And even though that’s not conscious and not taking anything away from these artists – I support them completely – I recognize that as being my world, as it were.

(Eagerly) So how are Kevin and Doug?

They seem to be doing really well. It was great to hear Kevin reminisce about all when Bauhaus was just starting off, playing in the tiny clubs and everything. It just seemed like there was such a whole different attitude. Like you said, it’s a business now, whereas then it was art, it was adventure!

You know, we've all carried that through, I think. At least, I have. I think Kevin’s much more in the area of having to deal with that corporate mentality because of the nature of his work [in soundtracks] and he has to adjust to that. You can’t be completely at liberty if you’re working with a soundtrack. But actually, we hold that attitude! You mentioned the “good old days”…well, these are good new days!

You always have the best closing lines.

I mean it, though! I don’t live in the past, you know; I take all that I’ve learned and brought up with me. That was one of the things that I was trying to remind the guys in Bauhaus about – it’s still alive! And it was quite difficult for them to really see that, and, so, you know… But that’s okay – we’re still here!