Everyone knows “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” For decades, it has been a staple of dorm-room posters and knockoff T-shirts and Halloween mixtapes. It has been covered by Massive Attack, Sepultura, and even Chvrches. It is a metonym for goth. But the “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” that has become canonical is not the original “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” The best-known version—the one enshrined in the 1985 singles anthology, Bauhaus 1979-1983—comes from 1982’s Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape, a compendium of early live performances. For the 1998 greatest-hits collection Crackle, Beggars Banquet stitched together the “Tomb Raider Version” from outtakes and live recordings. The band never approved it and refers to it instead as the “Frankenstein version.”
Bauhaus recorded their first version on January 26, 1979, in their first studio session, and released it that August on London’s Small Wonder records in an initial pressing of 5,000. It’s been out of print for years, though a scratchy vinyl rip did hit YouTube in 2009. Its re-release now on Los Angeles’ Leaving Records, in anticipation of the band’s 40th anniversary, marks its first official vinyl reissue. Leaving, a Stones Throw affiliate, normally puts out foggy-headed beat music, spiritual jazz, and starry-eyed new-age cassettes; it’s hardly a place you’d expect to find the dark princes of death rock. But the backstory here is remarkably simple: Leaving’s owner, Matthew McQueen, aka Matthewdavid, is a longtime Bauhaus fan married to the producer Diva Dompé, the oldest daughter of Bauhaus’ Kevin Haskins.
While “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is Bauhaus’ most iconic song, it is also something of an outlier in their catalog. Nearly ten minutes long and often as wispy as cobwebs, it’s a world away from the surging, serrated post-punk of their 1980 debut, In the Flat Field. Its lean, skeletal form sounds even less like the increasingly opulent art-rock mutations of their later albums. The original version reinforces its uniqueness. The arrangement is similar to that of the Press the Eject version, but everything here feels more vivid. The drums are crisper, the dub delay more pronounced, the vacuum of empty space around everything more absolute. Freed from the murk of the live recording, the Jamaican influence behind the song’s springy drumbeat leaps to the fore. The clanging guitar suggests that Bauhaus were probably listening to the same reggae records as the Slits when they recorded their debut, Cut, the same year.
The dub influence is even more pronounced on “Harry,” a punky reggae tune later released on the B-side of the 1982 EP, Kick in the Eye. Like the other songs on this reissue, all recorded during that inaugural session, it’s largely a curio. “Bite My Hip” is a chugging, unceremonious blueprint for the 1983 single “Lagartija Nick.” “Boys,” later re-recorded for the B-side of the original “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” single, shows the band’s fondness for Brian Eno’s early solo albums in the dry room treatment and queasy vocal tone. The previously unreleased “Some Faces” might as well be the work of a pub-rock band. While it’s nice to have these songs available, they serve largely as reminders of how far Bauhaus soon traveled from their origins—and how distinct “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” still sounds.
What is it that makes “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” so enduring? There’s its dead-simple descending bassline; the too-bright guitars, flashing like mica and then rainbows; Peter Murphy's imagistic doggerel and bark-at-the-moon howl. And then there’s its subject, a B-movie actor made famous by his role in 1931’s Dracula but already dead for 22 years when Bauhaus set foot in the studio. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” isn’t really about Lugosi, but it wouldn’t have been the same without him, either. Invoking the actor’s name as synonymous with his roles, the song inherits his B-movie legacy and even the tabloid spectacle of his death. Lugosi was famously buried in a Dracula cape against his wishes; Bauhaus assumed that moth-eaten mantle.
Yet “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” transcends its tawdry, tongue-in-cheek iconography—never mind lines like “The virginal brides file past his tomb/Strewn with time’s dead flowers/Bereft in deathly bloom.” With a climax so stormy that Edward Bulwer-Lytton himself would have approved, the song inches right up to the border of camp and gazes longingly at the other side. It’s a remarkable feat that only adds to the song’s singular qualities. After all these years, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” sounds unlike anything else. One night in January 1979, Bauhaus ventured into the bat cave and came out with a unicorn.
