While his former cohorts found runaway success with Love & Rockets, Peter Murphy took his time to discover his post-Bauhaus identity. His angular Dali’s Car project with Mick Karn fell flat, and his Ivo Watts Russel-produced debut Should the World Fail to Fall Apart was a lively, if uneven affair. But Murphy finally broke into the fertile late ’80s Modern Rock Radio landscape with the album Love Hysteria. With backing group The Hundred Men in place, Peter Murphy kept up his momentum with Deep.
Twenty years after its release, Deep is still regarded as Peter Murphy’s finest studio work. It’s a solid collection of dramatic, dynamic pop with nary a trace of any forced “gawth” pretense. His morbid theatrics in Bauhaus were well behind him (although he re-interprets the Bauhaus song “In the Flat Field” into the jagged “The Line Between the Devil’s Teeth”) and while there’s a wistfulness and romantic longing in ballads like “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” and “A Strange Kind of Love,” they’re anything but new romantic cheese.
“A Strange Kind of Love” would become the nom rigueur for any kind of mix tape to a girl during the ’90s. The singles from Deep were highly sought-after for the alternate “full band” version of “A Strange Kind of Love” and a third version of the song was mixed for the video. (more…)
