Bauhaus: The Bela Session Splatter Vinyl 12" EP

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Why you'll love it

This indie exclusive comes on black & red splatter vinyl, cut at 45 RPM, in a sleeve printed like the master tape box, with a replica 1980 show poster. Pitchfork gave it 7.9 and called this "Bela Lugosi's Dead" more vivid than the live version.

This edition

Black & red splatter vinyl
Indie exclusive
Cut at 45 RPM
Poster included
Sleeve printed as the master tape box

About the album

Every scene has its big bang. Goth's arrived on 26 January 1979, when four young men from Northampton walked into Beck Studios in Wellingborough and, in one session, recorded the nine-minute song that would define a genre. Leaving Records put the whole session out in 2018 for the band's 40th anniversary, mastered from the original tape. Most of the session had sat in the vaults for nearly forty years before then, a band at the very start of everything.

"Bela Lugosi's Dead" fills the first side with its skeletal rimshots, dub-wide bass and Daniel Ash's scraping guitar, Peter Murphy intoning over the top. The flip has four more from that day: "Harry," which later turned up as a B-side to Kick in the Eye, plus "Some Faces," "Bite My Hip" and the original version of "Boys," three of them heard here for the first time.

The poster in this edition is a replica from the band's April 1980 show at Au Plan K in Brussels. Not bad for a Friday in Wellingborough.

Also at Kops: more Bauhaus on vinyl · browse Industrial & Goth