Peter Murphy - Deep

The record that firmly established Peter Murphy's legacy beyond Bauhaus. Released on December 19, 1989 through Beggars Banquet and produced once again by Simon Rogers, Deep is Murphy's third solo album and, by any measure, his signature work, the moment his singular voice and vision connected with an audience far beyond the gothic underground that had followed him from the beginning.

The backbone of the album is Murphy's backing band The Hundred Men, featuring UK Decay's Eddie Branch on bass, B-Movie's Paul Statham on guitars and keyboards, Terl Bryant on percussion, and Peter Bonas on guitar. Their sound is spare and atmospheric, built on simple guitar arrangements that give Murphy's dramatic vocal delivery all the room it needs. During his time away from music, Murphy had immersed himself in Middle Eastern philosophy and Islamic spirituality, and that influence runs quietly through the album's mood, which manages to be simultaneously dark and luminous, foreboding and oddly hopeful.

Three singles emerged from the record, all charting on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. "The Line Between the Devil's Teeth (And That Which Cannot Be Repeat)" peaked at number 18. "A Strange Kind of Love," which Murphy's wife Beyhan directed the video for, reached number 21. And then there was "Cuts You Up," one of the defining alternative singles of the era, which spent seven weeks at the top of the US Modern Rock chart, crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100, and became the song that introduced Murphy to a whole new generation of listeners who had never heard Bauhaus. MTV's Dave Kendall championed it relentlessly on 120 Minutes, and the rest followed naturally.

The ten tracks also include the opening "Deep Ocean Vast Sea," the lush "Marlene Dietrich's Favourite Poem," and the sprawling closing suite of "Roll Call" and its reprise, two pieces that show a musician as interested in texture and atmosphere as in melody and form. Deep balanced mass appeal and Murphy's own distinct art with near perfection, and three and a half decades on it remains one of the essential records of the era.