Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Single, 1979)

Used to brilliant effect in Tony Scott’s 1983 erotic vampire flick The Hunger Bauhaus’ performance of Bela Lugosi’s Dead features prominently in one of the most memorable opening scenes in film. This dirge has been called the first Gothic Rock record and, if not the first, it is certainly the most revered. I don’t remember the context in which I first heard it, but I do recall the effect it routinely had on the dance floor at The Bronx in the mid-‘80s. At 9 minutes 34 seconds, Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the Goth Stairway to Heaven. Just as then (and to this day) lanky haired sub-urban high school kids in tight jeans and Van Halen tour t-shirts dutifully slunk onto the floor for the Led Zepic, so too did (and to this day) the lanky haired sub-urban kids in eyeliner and black trench coats mope out of the shadows to take their place at the centre of the dance floor for the tribe’s compulsory act of religious observance.

There can be comfort in the repetition of ritual, but even for the most devout an overly lengthy sermon can become tedious, especially if you’re standing for the duration and moving as little as possible. In Stairway to Heaven the tempo change at about 5:30 both signals that you’ve more stairs below you than above (relief), but also demands that you speed up and do something suitably expressive, just when you’ve mastered the ergonomically efficient somnambulist shuffle of a couple reaching the end of a dance marathon (irritation). To be honest, I have yet to see someone make that 5:30 transition successfully and not end up looking like a flailing marionette in the hands of a drunken puppeteer – which seems to be what the Zep demands at this point in the song. There’s an analogous yet contrasting moment at about 7:40 in Bela Lugosi’s Dead, when even the band seems to have grown totally disinterested with this already minimalist dirge. Rather than pick things up a little and make a sprint for the finish, Bauhaus just kind of drop out, one by one. This poses a particular challenge from the observant Goths. Having, as a sub-culture, elevated the affectation of ennui to a high art, the dancers struggle to mask their genuine – and well earned – boredom. I’ve been on that dance floor in communion with the Goths and imagined them, heads down, eyes hidden under a cascade of jet black hair, questioning the Faustian bargain they’ve made with Peter Murphy, yearning for Stairway to Heaven’s comparatively early release at 8 minutes 2 seconds, and the option of refreshing with a nice tall Bloody Caesar rather than a more literal beverage.

Some twenty years later, I went to see Bauhaus live in Toronto. I stood in the back. I was flanked by women and men of my generation, most of whom had swapped knee high boots, corsets and lengthy leather coats for the simple elegance of black turtle necks, tapered pants or well tailored mini dresses. Expensive eyewear marked them as (to quote my friend Chris Wodskou) ‘the College Street Rapp Optical crowd’ and they wore shoes only nominally pointer than functionality would dictate. I concluded that the Gothic horde’s first wave had all grown up to become art directors, designers, architects, new media specialists and owners of boutiques that supplied furniture to the growing community of loft dwellers. Collectively, we remained as stationary as possible and slowly sipped our expensive Heinekens while the younger, more historically accurately attired, Goth kids surged forward as the show opened with Peter Murphy’s disembodied face appearing on a large TV wheeled to centre stage.

I realize now that, in almost perfect symmetry with the impossibly sophisticated and urbane characters played by Deneuve and Bowie in the opening scene of The Hunger, Tony Scott had foreshadowed our behaviour that night with chilling accuracy. Coldly observing the Goth kids from the back of that cinder block night club, we were exercising the only option available to us from our particular vantage. We weren’t there to experience our own vitality, but to feed on the vitality of others… younger others.

Just to prove to us that they fully understood the significant and requisite pain of the 7:40 moment, Bauhaus waited an agonizing twenty minutes before returning to the stage to play Bela Lugosi’s Dead as the encore. And those of us who had remained in the shadows had feet that ached exquisitely from a long night standing on the club’s hard concrete dance floor, only shifting periodically, ever so slightly, from side to side – the minimum necessary to keep our blood flowing and sustain the illusion of a pulse.

To Hell with Poverty! - Gang of Four (Another Day / Another Dollar, 1982)

It’s somewhat incredulous that I’ve managed to get so far into this protracted and spasmodic project without mentioning the film, Urgh! A Music War. Urgh!, which was released in ’81 or ’82, is an extraordinary snapshot of post-punk new wave scene in the UK and USA. The film documents concert performances – primarily in London, New York and LA – by over thirty acts. Some of them have had illustrious careers (The Police); others (Invisible Sex) would have remained anonymous but for their appearance in this infuriatingly difficult to access (legitimately) concert film; and one or two, most notably Klaus Nomi, are dead.

Coincidentally, when Klaus Nomi died in 1983 it was the first time in those intensely stigmatic early days of the pandemic that I recall hearing of a public figure dying of AIDS. The fact that Nomi was an androgynous countertenor who – when in full kabuki-like stage make up and dressed in two-tone vinyl with hair like a Kewpie in middle age and moving like a robotic Victorian porcelain doll – didn’t do much to challenge the media’s ‘gay plague’ hysteria that associated AIDS with all kinds of real and imagined homosexual degeneracy. It’s just occurring to me now, but there’s more than a little of Joel Grey’s Cabaret Emcee in Klaus Nomi. If the former is an icon of Weimar and the rise of Nazism, perhaps Nomi is a bellwether of life for the counterculture in the Reagan / Thatcher years. Nomi’s death was a shock to my 16 year old self and I will never forget the circumstances.

[I’m sure the books are already written, but if regular ‘duck and cover’ classroom exercises in anticipation of nuclear war profoundly marked the psyches of teens during the cold war era, then the spectre of AIDS in the early ‘80s was the threat that compounded the already complicated experience of adolescence for my generation.]

But I digress… Gang of Four was one of the groups featured in Urgh! Somehow I’ve managed to convince myself – erroneously it would appear – that To Hell with Poverty! was the song they performed in the film. It wasn’t, the song documented is He’d Send in the Army. What I did recall correctly and vividly is guitarist Andy Gill’s performance. He plays like he’s gripped by a sort of palsy; as if he’s just had a guitar thrust into his hands for the first time and been shoved out on stage to herk and jerk all over one of the most memorable, disciplined, funky baselines of the whole era. It’s pure genius.