Bauhaus In The Flat Field

Strangely, I never liked Bauhaus all that much at the time, I thought they were really pretentious compared to The Sisters and lacked a sense of humour. But when I listen to them now I don’t know what I can have been thinking of. They sound absolutely brilliant – much harder sonically than I remember and with so many creepy little horror movie foley effects. Maybe it has more to do with the people who were really into them then, who did tend to be rather dour and pretentious – ‘elitists’, we used to call them. Whatever, the imagery contained in the Bauhaus oeuvre works particularly well for the Norfolk setting of Weirdo and the historical layers of what has gone on in those low-lying acres in the past. I also filched the title of their third LP, The Sky’s Gone Out, although there isn’t actually a song called that, the negative image on the front of that album says it all about the corresponding chapter in the book. Bauhaus came from Northampton, so I guess they were looking at a similarly low, flat landscape around them with this huge, often oppressive sky above. This kind of landscape can really impress upon you how small and fragile we all really are despite all our schemes and dreams: the sky and the sea, the dawn and the dusk – the cycle that will go on and on long after we are all dust.