“Bela Lugosi's Dead” by Bauhaus

"Bela Lugosi's Dead" was Bauhaus's first single, issued on the Small Wonder label in August 1979, and it's the kind of record that seems to have been exhumed rather than released. The band had been together all of six weeks when they walked into Beck Studios in Wellingborough on 26 January 1979 and cut it live in one take, during a single six-hour session. It was the first thing the four of them ever recorded.

Peter Murphy sings, Daniel Ash plays guitar, David J plays bass and Kevin Haskins drums, and all four share the writing credit, though David J has said the words were his. It's a slow crawl: the rhythm ticks and clicks like bones in a box, the bass lopes along with the echoing patience of dub, Ash's guitar scrapes and shrieks off in the shadows, and Murphy intones from somewhere under the floorboards, a crooner at his own wake.

The same session produced a handful of other songs, among them "Harry", a ska-reggae tune about Blondie's Deborah Harry, the work of a band still trying on sounds. This was the one that stuck, and it is now often called the first gothic rock record.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.