Peter Murphy

Goths in 2016? Come on… Maybe they no longer exist, maybe they've morphed into other restless creatures of the new millennium, or maybe they're simply tragically démodé. Tonight, though, they (re)awaken at midnight, just like the unsettling Miriam/Deneuve of "The Hunger". Well, actually a few minutes earlier: at 10pm, the hour when the most theatrically gothic incarnation the figure of the rock frontman has ever known will materialize on stage: his majesty Peter Murphy, undisputed king of darkness, vampires, tombs, silent hedges and hollow hills… in short, of all those things that we goths are so fond of, and that have built the Bauhaus's rock-solid, thirty-plus-year-old mythology (Bauhaus). But yes, tonight one can rise again, just for one night. Let's set the bats free, with all the unchanged pride of 21st-century zombies.

And the venue, indeed, helps. The Quirinetta, a stone's throw from the Trevi Fountain, has gone from being a small theatre to a rather atmospheric music club, with its chandeliers and slightly spectral set design. Past the queue of black t-shirts, heavily lined eyes and moving dark-punk mohawks that look straight out of an episode of "This Is England", all that's left to do is wait for the arrival on stage of the 59-year-old gothfather from Northampton, whose set is preceded by the opening act from Dog Byron (born Max Trani, a Roman bluesman). Punctual and dressed in black, with his trademark sharp profile and slender silhouette, Murphy appears on stage alongside the two companions of this semi-acoustic "Stripped Tour": guitarist John Andrews "Loud Boy" and bassist-violinist Emilio China. His cavernous, magnetic baritone makes the walls of the packed hall vibrate from the very first lines of the overture "Cascade", from the 1995 album of the same name – "We're fueling for the light, cascading like the rain in Twilight" – as the stage lights up in red and blue. It's already an immersion into his bleak, estranging nursery rhymes, which, all things considered, come off rather well in these stripped-down renditions, which bring out their more delicately existentialist streak.

His post-Bauhaus career, which began first with Mick Karn of Japan in Dali's Car and then as a solo artist for three decades, flows swiftly through a solid selection of songs: it ranges from the wistfulness of the poignant "All Night Long" to the more driving "Indigo Eyes" (both taken from 1989's "Love Hysteria") and the majestic nostalgic aura of "Marlene Dietrich's Favourite Poem", lifted from "Deep" (1989), as well as "A Strange Kind Of Love", which remains one of his absolute masterpieces and strikes straight at the heart with its romantic declamation and China's violin embroidering its sinuous melody (despite a stumbling start, with Andrews missing the right chord). "It's a beautiful song", Murphy introduces it in his shaky Italian. Too beautiful, indeed, to have escaped anyone who has approached his solo work only superficially – work that surely deserves far more attention, as his more recent releases also attest, "Ninth" and "Lion", both reviewed with top marks on OndaRock. Both will find room in the final stretch of the set, with "Lion" itself and "Never Fall Out", more intimate and less powerful than their studio versions, for obvious line-up reasons.

But Murphy is also one of the Duke's – Bowie's – greatest heirs, so a tribute to the master could hardly be missing, with a cover of "The Bewlay Brothers", the sublime gem from "Hunky Dory". And for a moment the spell materializes: David and Peter, together on stage, hypothetical Bewlay brothers sobbing out that ungainly melody in the "Mental Distortion Pavilion": “Now my Brother lays upon the Rocks/ He could be dead, He could be not/ He could be You”. Indeed, because death is inconceivable for someone who has won artistic immortality: "I never imagined David would die", Murphy admits, his imperturbable waxen mask seeming, for a moment, to melt into emotion.

But there are fans to please, as "the bastard sons of Ziggy Stardust" know well – the definition Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes extended to the entire post-punk generation. And so, room is made too for some of the Bauhaus's war-horses: the sepulchral liturgies of "King Volcano" and "Kingdom's Coming" are renewed, with their menacing arpeggios building in intensity through a theatrical crescendo that Murphy handles with his usual skill as a stage showman. We are all already hypnotized by the time we land on the fateful silent hedges, the eternal setting for mental horrors of every kind: the bassline of "Silent Hedges" looms large with its deep pulsations, setting off handclapping from the audience, while Peter gives himself over entirely to his unmistakable body language, head down, arms raised like a heron.

After a brief pause, the return to the stage brings another heartbreaking plunge into his vividly imagined otherworld: "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" is a brazen, passionate hymn to nostalgia, with Murphy slipping in a "Roma, la dolce vita…" between one scream and the next, while another elegant guitar phrase drives things along – and the barer setting of this Stripped Tour confirms once more how Bauhaus were one of the most effective dark bands at weaving acoustic filigree into their songs. Then it's "The Three Shadows, Part I" (from "The Sky's Gone Out", 1982) that sets up the new mental journey into the otherworldly mists of "Hollow Hills": the deathly chant of the "Mask" hit, heightened by Murphy's melodramatic baritone, sends the crowd into raptures. He allows himself, as much as his proud aplomb permits, to shake a few hands in the front row and repeatedly greet "Roma". Then, having alternated throughout the set between guitar, tambourine and melodica, he brings out the synth basslines for the final apotheosis, the ultimate loss of the senses: the stage ghost of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" bursts in, with its chilling electro-gothic staging, and there's nothing left for anyone, goths and non-goths alike. One can also sense what a full-band Bauhaus live show would have been like, with all the firepower of keyboards and rhythm section, but for tonight we make do with his "stripped" version. The nearly sixty-year-old shaman of darkness, now transplanted to Turkey and converted to Islam, has concluded his black mass, and we leave in peace, putting the bats back in their cave.

P.S. It seems the fate of the audience at Locomotiv in Bologna, where Murphy performed two days later, was quite different. The English artist left the stage after an hour of the show, without saying goodbye to the audience, retreating to the tour bus, while the band's embarrassed sound engineer put on background music inside the venue. Fair enough, it happens in rock, and even a sacred monster like Robert Fripp, annoyed by camera flashes, once walked off a King Crimson set at the Auditorium in Rome. But sometimes even the masters get it wrong.

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