Bauhaus: The Sky's Gone Out [BEGGARS BANQUET]

Why you'll love it

This Beggars Banquet reissue is remastered. The Sky's Gone Out reached No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart, the band's best showing, went silver, and Alternative Press later named it one of the ten essential goth albums.

This edition

• Remastered

About the album

The best way to describe The Sky's Gone Out might be the sound of a band pulling in four directions and somehow landing somewhere brilliant. Bauhaus wanted to produce it themselves, then brought in Derek Tompkins to referee, and spent a month at Rockfield Studios in Wales, with more work at Beck Studios in Wellingborough and the BBC's Maida Vale, building much of the material through experiment.

It opens with a ferocious cover of Brian Eno's "Third Uncle," then swerves into the eerie hush of "Silent Hedges" and the jittery "In the Night." "Swing the Heartache" is pure atmosphere, and "Spirit," which the band wrote about the unseen fifth member they felt lifting them on stage, came out as the lead single in a separate version before this rerecording. Side two is braver still: the three-part "The Three Shadows" suite, the soaring "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" and the cut-up collage "Exquisite Corpse."

Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins never sounded more adventurous, and the album has been warmly reappraised in the decades since. We file it under goth, though its true genre may be four young men refusing to agree on anything and getting away with it.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On Beggars Banquet (cat# BBQLP2097), a reissue of the 1982 album.