Peter Murphy Sings....Just For Love (cont.)
Peter Murphy Sings....Just For Love (cont.)
RR: The JUST FOR LOVE tour is a rather intimate presentation of your work…a new palette, if you will, for you as an artist, a shifting of gears from the rather intense portrayals and performances of the past. I was at the (BAUHAUS) RESURRECTION shows at the Hollywood Palladium (1998). This seems like a decidedly bold step having just concluded WILD BIRDS. Is this a natural evolutionary step in your writing?PM: (pensive) No…I think it’s a point that’s like a feeling…sort of like a ‘no-man’s- land’ at that moment…with BAUHAUS having happened and all of us…or…most of us…in rotating turns…feeling definite that BAUHAUS should’ve carried on. As a result of that tour and as a motivation from that…the RESURRECTION tour…and then after that not happening…after putting in so much energy to get BAUHAUS really alive again. And, in the meantime, the company who we were all with…LOVE & ROCKETS and I myself were with…disappeared. And so, we were all left in a ‘no-man’s-land’ of sorts…looking for record labels. So its definitely like a new period. The WILD BIRDS tour was a reaction to that sort of lack of consolidation in terms of BAUHAUS…and I’d also left my own work aside…and interest on my efforts in that. So the WILD BIRDS tour, without an album…without any real press…was me visiting my audience and looking at my own work and realizing that there was good, strong life there still…as much as there being an audience, but there was also a kind of feeling of trying to step back into my solo issues, as it were.
RR: It seems to me that its like a rediscovery by you of your own body of work. Its almost as though you are doing a retrospective constructed out of fresh resources and some new material.
PM: Well, on this particular tour, ‘Yes,’ definitely the WILD BIRDS part of the tour. And I see the JUST FOR LOVE tour as being kind of like an extension of that tour. The WILD BIRDS tour was really celebrating with the fans, in a sense, sort of the body of work that I’d done…and a ‘tip of the hat’ to the fans…and, as well, on a parallel level, it was kind of like a ‘re-look’ of how I can operate post-BAUHAUS again, because it was kind of like déjà vu…for most of us at least…in the band…we were all so taken by being together again creatively…that all the concentration went into that aim, really. And then, of course, we reach a point where…for many reasons…it didn’t happen. And I need to remind myself of…what it is I do apart from that. At the end of the WILD BIRDS set I started to introduce some really stripped-down versions of some of the songs. And that was a reflex…that was totally sort of ‘off the bat,’ as it were…another reaction to the crowd one night wanting more. And there was nine more rehearsed numbers, so I said ‘Fuck it,’…I’ll go and, you know, play a couple of songs off-the-cuff and (laughing)…spontaneously combust, as it were. And that really did work and it was kind of like, that…for the first time it felt like there was really something there…without all the artifice, all the decoration, all…this sort of…persona. I wanted to really strip it down, take it all away, and see if there was something there. And this is one of the reasons why I’m doing this tour…to explore, as you say, and search. To really put myself on the line.
RR: You seem to have, in a sense, shed your armor…almost denuding this presentation…like peeling away the barriers and the façade that can occur during the powerful aural barrage of a full-blown rock show. Have you left a certain ‘comfort-zone,’ then, or, do feel perfectly at home alone with the audience?
PM: (laughing) Sure! Definitely! I’ve left a comfort zone for sure!
RR: Its almost a cappella now for you in a sense…
PM: Almost, yeah. And its kind of like…its actually quite risky, and, its not easy. It isn’t as easy as being what I do naturally, which is sort of like reacting to the madness of stepping out in front of an audience. And, as you say, pulling out something else from my personality. I mean…in sort of…let’s call it ‘city life’…off the stage…in whatever ‘regular life’ is…I’m completely at odds with that, sort of ‘the performer’…not character, but, its sort of is like acting. Its like, as you say…it’s like an armor. Its like a mixture of armor and a mixture of a great innate sense of dramatics and reaction ‘to’ and ‘for’ an audience. It’s kind of thick. It is an armor. But now, I’ve made myself…I’ve placed…I’ve literally taken everything away. And I’ve got a wonderful violin player in Hugh Marsh who is completely brilliant…
RR: I was just going to ask you about (your accompanists) Peter DiStefano (and Hugh Marsh)…
PM: Peter DiStefano, sure. And Peter, since working with the WILD BIRDS band…he was…sort of like…really willing to experiment and use the guitar as a sort of like…a generator of atmospheres and textures, rather than just only a guitar. So I’ve got this sort of pared-down, very novel, sort of musicality in the show. And I gave them the agenda of: ‘Here are the songs…listen to them: very stripped-down.’ Very simple. So let’s see which ones we can make work.
RR: So you’ve dropped some rigidity. Does it free-flow? Is there a great deal of spontaneity?
PM: Actually that isn’t there. I mean, you know, there is in terms of the vocals, and, actually, on the past couple of shows, I’ve been trying to stretch it a bit….But, they are sort of…in effect…the song ‘un-mixed,’ as it were. Sort of like going to the studio with only three of the tracks left of the forty-eight tracks that were recorded (laughs). So its kind of like, you know…it’s an attempt to feel a certain kind of vitality and danger in actually doing what I do without being so predictable…like ‘falling off a log.’ It’s a bit like an injection and a reminder of some of the reasons why I do this, actually. This work. One of my favorite albums of the moment is RADIOHEAD’S - ‘KID A’, and…I know that’s on everybody’s lips and it’s a controversial album. It could be a BAUHAUS album. I mean, I was talking to DAVID J the other day, you know, and saying, ‘This is what we are. This is us,’ you know? So, its kind of like there’s a great sense of adventurism and experimentalism sonically, which I’m playing with on the tour. But, nevertheless, it still is Peter Murphy playing his catalog so far. But I am producing a couple of new songs which I’ve started to work with and write this year in Montreal (with Arkin Allen, aka. Mercan Dede)…not really songs…[but] trance-ethnic-electronica-Peter Murphy sonic-scapes with a vocal structure in them.
RR: There are probably people coming to the shows now that have never seen you in the other places you’ve been, either with BAUHAUS or otherwise. How are they reacting to this stripped down affair?
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