Reunited goth rock legends Bauhaus cancelled the their scheduled 2022 North American tour dates on Wednesday (August 31). A spokesperson for the group said in a statement that the dates were pulled because singer Peter Murphy is entering a rehab facility to “attend to his health and well-being.”
At press time the spokesperson said no other information was available about Murphy’s health. Ticketholders are encouraged to contact their point of purchase for refunds.
The group that formed in Northampton, England in 1978 has reunited several times since splitting in 1983, most recently in 2019 after a 13-year break for a three-show stand at the Hollywood Palladium. Following a COVID-19 pandemic lay-off, they returned to the road in late 2021 and performed at the Cruel World festival in Pasadena, California in May of this year before playing a string of West Coast shows in May and a handful of European gigs in June and August; their most recent concert was in Portugal on August 27.
The North American tour was slated to kick off on Sept. 6 with a show in Toronto, before moving on to dates in New York, Philadelphia, Washington (DC), Boston, New Haven (CT), Detroit, St. Paul, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Denver before wrapping up at Radio City Music Hall in New York on New Year’s Eve.
In March, the band released their first new track in 14 years, the dreamy, “Drink the New Wine,” which they recorded during the pandemic lockdown using the “exquisite Corpse” method in which each member came up with their respective sections without seeing what the other was doing.
“Bauhaus have used this technique in the past to great effect,” they said in a statement at the time. “The title refers to the very first Cadavre exquis’ drawing rendered by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy which included words which when strung together made up the sentence, ‘Le cadavre exquis boiara le vin nouveau’ (‘The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)”
It was the first new music from the group since their 2008 reunion album Go Away White; they split once again before mounting a tour in support of that collection.
In August 2019, Murphy, 65, suffered a heart attack that forced the cancellation of a solo residency at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. In a statement at the time he told fans he had made a “full recovery” after experiencing shortness of breath that necessitated treatment for a myocardial infarction.
Listen to “Drink the New Wine” below.