MONTREAL, CANADA via phone -
08.01
I didn’t know what to expect when I first heard that I
would be talking to Peter Murphy. Such musical legends tend to have many
things said about them throughout the years that span their long lived
careers. It is naïve to believe every representation you read or hear
about any well known figure. It is more likely that any true sense of
someone can never come from pieces of stories you receive from someone’s
life. Perhaps we never really know anyone at all.
In any case I always ponder what face remains true through
all of the trials and tribulations behind the real person. I cast aside as
much preconception as possible to see behind the iconic figure that media
makes a person out to be. I was looking forward to picking the brain of
someone that had always intrigued me.
So you’re in Montreal and recording?
"Yeah, we’re midway through
finishing the studio album. And I’m very excited about it. We’re
aiming to finish it by the end of September and hopefully have it out in a
year. It’s working out very well. This album was very much
spring-boarded by the live album ["Just For Love" recently
released] so there is a kind of tenuous connection there. Well in a sense,
if you traced the Bauhaus resurrection that happened, I was just about to
go into the studio to make an album but yet I really felt that the Bauhaus
resurrection was more than worth doing. It really sort of cemented and
clarified what Bauhaus were, and that was not…not North American Goth
rock.
But with that also, I was so convinced about that I spent a
year trying to persuade the other guys to really make a definite
commitment for three albums more. So I really pulled in a lot of energy,
consequently not really focusing on Peter Murphy as a so-called solo
artist. That didn’t work out.
So I was left in a position where I was with Red Ant label
and I began pre-production on an album. Then Red Ant went into bankruptcy…
so that was strange. But actually, in retrospect it was all right because
I shouldn’t have made those albums until now. It really worked out
perfectly actually."
Funny how life will do that to you.
"Yeah, and then I went, ‘well
here I am’. I started doing my own website. [www.petermurphy.org]
And I consequently had to focus on Peter Murphy, per say. And I was like,
my god, I’m really really proud of this work. Revisiting it and just
looking at all of the albums and compiling. I also happened to be
compiling the Wild Birds album, so I was forced into listening to all of
my work in a way that was seriously considering it in the sense of
releasing it again. So I thought, bugger it, without an album label deal,
I’ll go out on my own and talk to my fans. There’s a hardcore audience
out there who I consider to be extremely loyal and connected in a very
unique way with me and me with them in a sense. So that gave birth to the
idea of the Wild Birds 2000 tour. Which was in May of 2000."
Peter assembled a very special band for the Wild Birds tour
to find some new elements to the old arrangements. He talked to Kevin
Haskins to play drums for him and the rest of the lineup just flowed from
there. Kevin worked with a band called Messy, and thusly brought in Messy’s
producer Doug DeAngeles. Doug worked with Peter on keyboards and on
pre-producing and arranging the songs. And then Kevin introduced Eric
Avery. Much to Peter’s surprise, Eric was very excited to play bass for
the band.
"To get Eric Avery actually
playing with you is almost rare, because you know, he turned down the
Stones, he turned down Jane’s Addiction, he’s almost like a hermit.
And he’s a wonderful person. And he asked me if he could play on the
tour, which is fantastic… that was very cool. "
Every great artist grows and changes. What happened with this
lineup for the Wild Birds Tour was a very new look on performing
intimately with his audience. And in the end Peter found a new outlook on
his back-catalog of music.
"So that happened, and that was
kind of a rendition of the arrangements but with a completely new band and
there were some different aspects thrown in. So it wasn’t just like a
clone of the album version. So that was really like a classics of Peter
Murphy performance spectacle… sort of theatre troupe if you like. And at
the end of the set, the audience would often not want to let me go.
I thought one night, "Ah bugger it. I’m gonna go out
and play a couple of numbers with just an acoustic guitar". Which was
something that Eric Avery encouraged me to do. And it worked so well, and
it was kind of like the first time that I’d ever really exposed myself
on that sort of naked level. You know, without the spectacle… that sort
of like dazzling production aspect and performance aspect. Because at some
layer I was trapped behind a guitar and singing."
So sort of taking away the veils between you and your
audience?
"Yeah! And it really worked. In
that way a different kind of dynamic was produced. In terms of the focus
was really in the eyes, and not in the body… do you know what I mean?
And in the voice. So that really worked and that really just immediately
inspired me to do this tour which was called "Just For Love" and
we have a live album out. So that’s the story of that."
From that the Just For Love tour sprang to life. The album
was released this summer and contains a very candid recording of a show on
the tour from beginning to end. It really gives you the feeling of being
in a concert with just a few friends and Peter looking right at you.
[Check out the Movement Magazine review of the album online.]
This tour also gave him a new direction for the material
he’s currently recording.
"…Of coarse it links into now
booting up an album from a less sort of song structured approach
initially, and writing it and arranging it on the spot. Well
it’s really sort of Peter Murphy as the singer, as it were. And the sort
of harmonic approach. The voicings are really sort of, loosely speaking,
urban. Urban with a truly, true, authentic Turkish aspects.
So for instance, I’ve been here writing now and building up
sort of pieces here. I’m
working with Mercan Dede who’s a DJ based in Montreal. He’s also
a great Sufi musician who I discovered and met in Turkey. He’s a young
guy and it’s really working out very well. It’s going to be kind of
like, you know, we’re going to have some of the world class Turkish
musicians doing sort of like Istanbul sessions. But it’s not going to be
like a world album, it’s going to be something that’s undefinable. If
you like it’s going have that element that Radiohead, or maybe Bjork, or
Tricky, or [Peter] Gabriel was sort of representing in the early eighties.
So something that’s new but old too. ::laughs::
It’s really this is Peter Murphy
as the singer, not necessarily trying to write for radio. The songs are
actually very accessible also, melodically and vocally speaking. It’s
much much more esoteric in a sense. This one doesn’t sound like anything
actually, this album, that’s what I’m really excited about. It will
probably go over the heads of the majors, but it will be one that
hopefully people will look back on as a classic. "
Yeah, I think that’s generally how it happens. The
things that people don’t necessarily get right away end up being some of
the greatest.
"But
the audience, those people who are familiar with me and follow my work
will really really love this. On the wider level, on the crossover, I
always consider myself as having constantly swam under the surface of the
water rather than so called crossed-over. And that being an advantage in a
way."
So do you feel that this better represents what you’ve
been trying to do for a while then?
"No, it’s just a moment in
time. This doesn’t actually discount what I’ve done in the past; it’s
just like a new album. It’s just Peter Murphy, here’s my own new
album. But on this particular occasion it’s really clicking in a way
that perhaps on the other projects I haven’t always had the players or
the sort of focus on the album as I have now. That doesn’t actually
discount the albums.
It’s sort of like, on a couple of albums I would have had a
producer in there, and I would bring in songs that were predetermined. It
was a case of producing those known elements, and taking them in a
direction that was sort of determined. But now this is a wide-open page,
so it’s kind of like a very interesting freeing up. It reminds me
actually of the first Bauhaus album in the way that we took away the
masque, actually no, more so like "Sky’s Gone Out" which was
the third Bauhaus album."
As in the creation method of it?
"Right, we went in with nothing
and we wrote, recorded, mixed and arranged everything within a month
purposely. It was kind of the approach that is similar here."
Peter has lived in Turkey for about nine years. He arrived
home after the Holy Smoke tour in 1992 to a house his wife had already
packed in boxes. He moved three days after that and has lived there to
this day.
The original draw to Turkey came from an offer to his wife to
begin the first ever state-run Turkish dance company. She has built up her
company over the last nine years to phenomenal, and world-wide success.
After the initial culture shock wore off Peter realized that it was an
important move on many different levels.
So that was a real culture shock then?
"Well you know, I’d been
there a number of times to make the decision but actually living there is
another thing. You think you know the language but then you realize you
don’t. ::laughs:: But now it’s really cool. It’s my home. And I’m
able to be here too so it’s really cool. "
I think I had seen written that the move gave you some
separation from people recognizing you?
"Not really, that was probably
in the context in part of the conversation of what happens when you change
culture, and of coarse you don’t have anybody knowing who you are…
again in that Peter Murphy sort of aspect. ::laughter::
And you become, like invisible. Not in the sense that I
wanted to escape any kind of attention, but as a natural effect and result
of moving circumstantially to a culture where nobody really knows you.
That was really sort of refreshing, and kind of gave me a nice space as if
I didn’t have to negotiate my own ego. So it’s sort of like a
regeneration; it keeps your work alive in a way. "
Right, and I suppose any sort of move, even if it’s not
outside of your country, will give you that sort of displacement and new
viewpoints.
"Exactly. Quite. And also you’re
in a position in which you have to make your music work in fact, in that
sort of displaced, as you say, environment. And you draw off of things
that are there even though you’re not conscience of it. It comes out.
Lyrically definitely and very much something that is akin to what I was
looking for in the lyrics in my early work before moving.
I became very fascinated
and interested in Sufism.
Which is the esoteric
aspect of Islam. The
mystical aspect.
Most Americans would have a sort of awareness of that through, I think,
somebody called Rumi who was one of the great thirteenth century mystics.
I think his poetry is probably one of the best selling in America at the
moment. But that’s one aspect of Sufism if you like.
But that fascination is really what
I felt I was looking
for lyrically
as well. Some of
the approaches and some of the messaging is quite sort of subtle, yet on
the face of it is accessible as well. In that I’m not like a Turk, I’m
not like a middle eastern person, I’m like a low-caste post-punk really
from the early eighties, you know. So it’s kind of like my work, the
Bauhaus work especially, is very sort of bastard mystic, if you like. But
not consciously so. It wasn’t like a stylistic thing. In this culture I
really found my home in a sense.
It’s
kind of difficult to move to a completely different culture. So you’re
kind of in the desert. I was alone with myself in that sense. "
So through your experiences there what belief system do
you tend to follow? If you were to put a label on it, or perhaps, even if
you weren’t to label it… and I suppose I hate "belief
systems" in a sense.
"See, that’s a problem.
Because once you start, you qualify it by the statement of the ambivalent
reflex where we say "I hate belief systems". And I was going to
answer something like.. the belief is kind of like a core state that is
inherent in you just as your fingernails are. It’s not something that
you necessarily have to borrow or join, it’s you. It’s kind of like
Carl Jung was asked, "Do you believe in god." And he responded,
"No, I know he exists" rather than "I believe". He
knew.
So then it becomes a question of, I guess, invitation and
exposure and awareness. Let’s take a very accessible metaphor… the
Matrix, red pill or blue pill. Blue pill you know, before the red pill
experience. You’re sort of in the Matrix, you don’t understand what is
real because you have no reference, no context if you like. You’re are
somehow sort of drunk… sort of asleep. In a sense taking the red pill is
like an act of belief. But that act is only a conduit to the real, as it
were.
Once the real occurs it’s extremely clear. There is no need
to hold on to belief, there is just the truth and that’s how it is. And
that leads us all to the question of where is that truth? Well, it’s
everywhere; it’s all around you. :::laughter::: Quoting the Matrix
again. It’s all around you.
But what truth? And you say, "well
that’s it". So you say, well where? So well, you
know, here’s a way to
see yourself, to be yourself.
Well what’s that way?
I’ve come to believe and accept and always have accepted that
revelation, whether it is through any source of wisdom. But through the
prophets, through so called saints in all traditions, far east, mid east,
west, north, south, they’re kind of like Morpheus if you like. And they’re
true. They actually are valid.
Now whether the message is then understood properly and then
used as a political weapon or political aspect or used as a power tool is
another question. But the core message, the essence of all revelation I
think has the baby in it."
The seed of that knowledge in a way…
"Yeah, the truth in it. We can
talk about that as hypothetical and in theory and then we can go read one
of the revelations and you can say, ‘well what about this?’ and you
can pick it apart. And then you get into kind of like the, ‘oh god here
we go’. Then you get into the very rationalistic aspect where you
discover that the certain revelation or certain things have been
manipulated by the Blue Pill Brigade, then that becomes another Matrix
aspect. But actually the core of it is true.
I
particularly believe there is an order in these messagings, in these
revelations if you like. There was a certain point where that revelation
was actually given over a certain span of ages in which it culminated in
one all inclusive total message. Which was all-inclusive and
non-separatist in a sense, but was all of them in one, in it’s essence,
and was complete. And so there is that sort of aspect there. So I’m very
interested in that, and sort of believe in that.
So
there’s your answer, half an hour later. ::laughter::
It’s difficult talking in
the Matrix; you’ve got to be
very careful.
::laughter::
For instance, on a very factual level, yes I pray, yes I go
on pilgrimages, yes I believe in sin, and yes I believe in good acts. But
these are English terminologies. It’s interesting in Arabic, and also in
the Sufi’s language the word for ‘sin’ actually means distance. As
in distance from the essence, or the source, or the truth. So the act is
actually naturally sort of imbued with its degree of distance from the
truth. So if your car breaks down and you’re a mechanic then you’re
the master. You can fix it. But if you’re like me, you’re very
distant, you try and fix that you’ll be there for weeks… you’ll fuck
it up. So that’s sort of like an act of distance. It’s just the effect
of that act of distance, which causes a sort of series of reactions which
are negative. So yes, I believe we are responsible for our acts, and there
is a comeback and there is an effect either way."
Interesting, even just the interpretation of one word from
one culture to another seems to almost reflect how that culture views
their self, in a way.
"Precisely. Precisely."
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