In the Flat FieldBauhaus

Double Dare opens the record with a bass line that stalks forward, Daniel Ash's guitar cutting like sheet metal, and Peter Murphy's voice — a theatrical, almost liturgical baritone — entering like an actor onto an empty stage. It's 1980, the word "goth" doesn't yet exist as a musical label, but it's all here: the austerity, the drama, the darkness held at arm's length. In the Flat Field isn't "the Bauhaus goth debut." It's the record that founded a genre — and got kicked to pieces the moment it appeared.

It came out on 7 November 1980, and the object itself tells a story: it is 4AD's first full LP, the label (catalogue CAD 13) that would become the most aesthetically influential in all of British independent music — the home of Cocteau Twins, the Pixies, Dead Can Dance. It starts here, with four young men from Northampton who had already put out a few singles (among them the monolithic "Bela Lugosi's Dead," which is not on this album) and who now produced themselves at Southern Studios. Murphy on vocals, Ash on guitar, David J on bass, Kevin Haskins on drums: a band that already sounded like no one else.

And here is the knot that makes the record more interesting than its reputation. The British weekly music press — which then set the terms — treated it with hostility, when not open contempt: too theatrical, too dark, too pretentious for the post-punk consensus of the moment, which prized social urgency over gothic pose. But in the fanzines, in the underground, the record was loved and passed hand to hand. It's the classic founding document demolished on release and canonised afterwards: what the critics of 1980 dismissed as mannerism turned out to be the birth of a language still alive forty years on. They missed it because they were hearing the answer to a question no one had asked yet.

And yet the record moved: it reached number 72 on the UK chart, Bauhaus's first chart entry — modest, but enough to rebuke anyone who called it unlistenable. There was, in that austerity, a visual intelligence that would become 4AD's hallmark: the stark black-and-white sleeve anticipates the aesthetic the label would raise to extraordinary heights in the years that followed. On stage, Murphy turned all of it into theatre — but the theatre here is never mere pose: it's how the band took its own darkness seriously.

Musically it's angular, and angular by design. St. Vitus Dance and Stigmata Martyr carry the religious, bodily drama that would become the genre's signature; the title track is nervy, almost repellent; A God in an Alcove shows there was real songwriting under the austerity. It isn't an easy record, or a uniformly successful one — at times the pose outruns the song — but it's brave in a way few debuts are, and Ash's guitar, all angles and reverb, invented half a generation's sound on its own.

It's the entry point to the goth island we're building. If Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures was the industrial dark of Manchester, In the Flat Field takes a branch of that darkness and carries it somewhere else — toward the gothic, the androgynous, the liturgical. From here the road runs on to 1981's Mask, Bauhaus's next step. For the full picture — how goth grows out of post-punk, and how some of its roots reach even into dub — see the reportage on the birth of goth and its satellites.

The record they demolished in 1980 is the one that now opens every history of the genre. The critics of the day were wrong, and rarely has being wrong been so instructive.