For those reliving the birth of Gothic rock in the late seventies with Peter Murphy who is playing the Bauhaus stunning debut from whoa to go tonight at the Capitol it’s fitting that tonight a few doors down from the venue at the Belgian beer cafe there’s a group of dancers reliving the sounds of 40s with swing dancing and the lindyhop included. Nostalgia is rife in Perth tonight.
Though of course a beer watching crimpolene clad time-warpers isn’t a patch on the dark and sinister sound emanating from the Capitol and the night-dwellers drawn to that scene. Everyone of course has their own nostalgia but I much prefer to revise one I actually lived through…
The main event tonight of course is that we get to ear that seminal album ‘In the Flat Field’ in its entirety fro first track to last and throughout the gig I’m at times overwhelmed by the nostalgia tat certain sounds bring, certain phrases and certain riffs. It’s tumultuous at times, has me beaming at others and occasionally I’m a little lost before being caught up in the moment again.
Tonight Peter Murphy is brooding, and strides the stage like a dark Rasputin, glowering, theatrical and in every sense spectacular. Tonight hes an actor method-acting the channeling of a past life. Tonight hes a word way from the charismatic and charming and witty man who played his solo material in this city a few years ago. Tonight he’s deep in the darkness, deep in the sound of Bauhaus, part spiritual guide, part mischief maker, laying on hands and batting aside cameras, and all the time fixing us with a steely gaze.
There are a few in tonight who lived through this before, exiles from another time and a country far away and for them this is headier stuff than their younger counterparts – to some this was their Beatles, this was their Bowie, their Punk, their Nirvana.
And as the album plays out eyes as wide as dinner plates search for the band on the dimly lit stage, at one stage Peter delivers a song with his back to the crowd, another song he dances stooped over, and the songs and the memories drip thick and fast – ‘ first it’s ‘Double Dare’ and it’s spiky taunt, then the drama of the title track to Goth’s genesis, then the bristly and brooding ‘God in the Alcove’ before ‘Dive’ and ‘Spy in the Cab’ with its sonar soundscape lead us to what would have been the time to turn over the vinyl platter.
The waves of nostalgia that flooded back are stopped in their tracks by ‘Small Talk Stinks’ the opening track to the second side of the album that I imagine skipping all those years ago, and it’s almost comforting that it sounds so unfamiliar tonight like I imagine the the album must have been in 1979.
The classic pairing of the thrusting shaking ‘St. Vitus Dance’ and the rousing and emotional ‘Stigmata Martyr’ drop me right back into that childhood explosion that was ‘In the Flat Field’ and album that opened ears and eyes and led to so many further dark discoveries. The first part of the set closes with the drama of ‘Nerves’ that leaves some of the crowd hanging and some in awe, I just close my eyes and imagine hearing it again for the first time.
After ‘Flat Field’ is done and dusted then it’s time for classic Bauhaus and Peter introduces the band starting with David J before he thanks us all for coming. We start the second part of the night with the classic ‘Burning From the Inside’ and the droning guitar that kick starts the song before a wonderful version of ‘Silent Hedges’ a song that sports one of my favourite lyrics – “Looking into purple eyes, sadness at the corners. Works of art with a minimum of steel” reminds me why I turned away from the trite lyrics of popular music so long ago.
With little acclaim next comes the song that stated it all, the ground zero of Goth ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ which sadly suffers from the vocals getting a little lost in the mix, a recurrent problem most of the night. From them on it’s a wave of dark delights from the uptempo and rather accessible ‘She’s in Parties’ that is drenched in melodica, and seems to step into an almost reggae beat at times and the classic drum beat that starts the always fantastically named ‘Terror Couple Kills Colonel’ which sounds surprisingly spry and modern tonight; all the way to the funky and surprisingly vibrant ‘Kick in the Eye’ even if here the melodica here seems a little misplaced and just this once like its in a slightly different key, so rather than adding texture it seems to fight the song a little.
We close out with a wave of emotion as the band strike first with the metal burn and relentless bass driven ‘Passion of Lovers’ before the drums burst in for ‘Dark Entries’ which musically sounds wonderful but sadly the backing vocals drown out the lead. And with that final word the band is off stage.
We do of course get to summon them back and when they re-emerge it’s with the two covers that define the band almost as much as their own catalogue and reshape the works of two of those that reshaped the seventies – Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Its Bolan’s ‘Telegram Sam’ that hits first and the prefect one-two is completed by the iconic Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust.’ It’s pretty much the perfect way to close the perfect night here in Perth.
