Bauhaus and Peter Murphy, who has long since given up his past and become a Muslim, distilled just about everything great about the era in these elegant, revelatory, and slinky nine minutes. As a young woman in 1981, I stumbled on this EP in Palo Alto, and got a taste of what the REALLY cool kids were listening to...elsewhere. Then, as now, nothing remotely as hip as this was played on the radio in the Bay Area. Later in college, I recognized samples of this seminal tune in other songs. And who wouldn't sample it? "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is like midnight in a really erotic but unsettling dream.
Other bands had done weird before (the UK's Throbbing Gristle, the San Francisco-area Residents, for instance)but Bauhaus used German Expressionist imagery and sleek guitars and actually sounded good. They may have been, in retrospect, the beginning of Goth, but no other band, in my opinion, has sounded remotely like them since.
I still have the vinyl, and I'll never ditch it, because Bauhaus was often...what? Listen to the later "Slice of Life", and other tunes from "Burning From The Inside"--"Who Killed Mister Moonlight", for instance. Not timeless, but instead REMOVED from time. "Velvet lines the black box" of this tune and like Dracula, it's literally undead, and will never die.
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