You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, been pored over and become a primary source of inspiration for any dark, vitriolic, spiky, rigidly ordered performer you’ve ever cared to listen to for the next 2 decades. Or rather you don’t know what you’ve got until you know where it’s come from. Bauhaus’s heyday may be buried physically beneath a quarter of a century’s history (give or take a current reunion), but they’ve inadvertently become as current as most bands you’d care to pluck from 2006’s roster of post-punks, goth-shock-rockers and jerky pop stars. From U2 to James and Julian Cope, through INXS, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and The Fall, and onto Marilyn Manson, Liars, and even Editors and The Killers, their desperately intense fist of paranoia and musical and spiritual exorcism has leapfrogged its way up to the so called modern age as a major force of inspiration. And that’s not to mention the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
This DVD features 2 separate, previously available and now deleted long-form videos featuring promos and sharing tracks from a brooding and artfully-delivered set of shadowy anxiety, filmed at the Old Vic theatre in
The stage show is basic; space, trailed cables, piercing single lights splitting the darkness, Lost Boys haircuts, contained behaviour. The band are heavy-footed and to the point, providing the appropriate framing for Murphey’s centrepiece. There couldn’t be a stronger argument for simplicity. The yellowed archive tinge to the picture and the haircuts are all that really give it away. This should be required viewing for anyone who thinks Brandon Flowers to be architect of anything.