Peter Murphy
July 2002
via email from Turkey

For the first time we have elected to engage in an email discussion with an artist, if only because this particular individual has such a command over language and his own unique flow of words. It was a treat to soul-search for the perfect questions to put before Peter Murphy, who was gracious enough to have spoken to us previously almost a year ago, during the making of his Dust album.

Wanting to know his thoughts on the finished Dust and subsequent tour, email allowed us to find out quickly and easily despite the distance between LA and Murphy's home in Turkey. Here is the result…

To start, I wanted to share a personal thought: the lyrics on "Things to Remember" were very powerful for this writer to read and hear. Could those words - especially the part about how "the power of poetry comes from the ability to defy logic" - be interpreted as a motto you follow?

In part, yes. It's one of the approaches to writing lyrics (as like melodies), that to constantly work at removing too much dominance of mind-based 'ideas' (or what I like to call the 'small intelligence') clears the way for the active intelligence or imaginal intelligence to expand and act like an antenna, to intuit that which is trying to be written. Though this is not to infer that there is something 'out there' to steal from, rather that you become the listener of yourself. Since I have come to believe that each individual human being is a universe in themselves, a well spring of totality, then there can be no limit to what and how to write.

In a way writing/composing/creating could be likened to transcribing. It would then follow that depending on the connectedness of the writer to his own wider self/soul/higher intelligence, however you want to call it, determines the nature of the writing… "Defy logic often" is another way of saying don't believe all that the rationalists/scientists say… Holistic art is the gist of it.

You obviously learned something from the Just For Love tour about all the different and wonderful ways there are for your songs to be presented and interpreted. How did that broadening of horizons affect the production and writing on Dust, as well as the subsequent tour? I noticed very different presentations of the Dust material live versus what those tracks sounded like on the album.

The intentions behind the Just For Love tour were, among others, to go almost unprepared in front of what has now become a very familiar audience who have stayed with the PM world with such a loyalty that a certain intimacy has developed between myself and them (whoever you are J) and to play FOR them and not TO them. Another reason to do the tour was to break everything down, whilst not doing the now tired idea of an "unplugged" performance (in fact we were totally plugged in, man) but break the reflexes of the preceding 15 years of the ways in which I had been presenting myself. It was in fact a scary experience, and I only became convinced that it had worked when I finally got to mix the live album, which you can imagine was a 1st of a kind.

Musically I came away with the confidence that I was the singer-songwriter that I had hoped I was, which I know seems an odd statement, but we all need a new perspective from time to time. Naturally with that kind of emotional release, the studio album's (Dust) making on all levels was a breeze and the easiest work I've made to date. You know when a thing is going well when you forget the time and can't stop doing it. By the making of the album, I mean having the presence of mind to listen to my own instincts with a certainty, from choosing to work with certain people to the writing process.

The funny thing about playing music live that has been produced in the studio is that you will always get other dimensions coming out of the music. In fact the songs on Dust allow for a lot of improvisation hence the songs in the live context can be re-enlivened and not stifled by too much fixation on the fine print of the originals. All good.

It's odd - on this record there's a lot of very unique instrumentation - including that of your own voice - yet at the same time your voice spends a lot of time not being heard. Was that some sort of reaction to the Just For Love tour, which seemed to be all about your voice?

No, Mercan Dede and I from the start decided that the album would be about the voice in fact, yet there would be no apologetics about length of songs. There is a need sometimes to give the listener a chance to absorb what the voice/words are intimating, and with such brilliant musicians such as Hugh Marsh and the collection of Turkish Masters playing their role becomes a complement to the themes and emotion of the vocal song (which were written before the guest musicians performed with me). Basically this time round the feeling was once you taken them there, let's stay a while longer and return changed. Anyway, Dust is one long song, a journey if taken that can change you.