Bauhaus : Bela Lugosi's Dead
On January 26, 1979 Bauhaus recorded a nearly ten minute version of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in their very first studio session. The result is what has often been called the first gothic rock record and for the decade that followed, no college radio DJ could avoid getting requests for the song unless they stopped answering the phone. Especially true after their appearance in the 1983 David Bowie movie Hunger.
But back to 1979. 5000 copies of the original single, difficult to find until recently, were released in August on London's Small Wonder records. That Summer music fans met the lanky Peter Murphy ghoulishly singing “The virginal brides file past his tomb/Strewn with time’s dead flowers/Bereft in deathly bloom.” Brothers Kevin Haskins and David J set the mood on drums and bass with guitarist David Ash running all the instruments through his delay pedals. J tells Songfacts he wrote the lyrics after watching a few vampire movies.
"I came up with that first line, 'White on white, translucent, black capes back on the rack.' And it was like, 'Oh, this is interesting.' It's so descriptive - it is about the vampire. It's also about the actor - it's about retiring from the part, but then he sort of plays with the idea. A vampire can never retire from being a vampire, because that's for eternity."
It came out very quickly. It was that night that we had the rehearsal and I just handed that sheet to Peter. We all just launched into it as if it was pre-formed, and it was pretty much as it is on the record. We recorded it a couple of weeks after that first run-through.
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