We looked at the first of the Bauhaus home video releases, ‘Shadow of Light’ in a previous post. Its companion video of the era is ‘Archive’, which came along late 1984 and gathered together the remainder of the live material filmed at the Old Vic Theatre (in 1982) that had first appeared on ‘Shadow of Light’, bookended by a couple of newly created pieces originally exclusive to this video.
Proceedings open with ‘Lagartija Nick’, one of the newly filmed pieces. The single didn’t have a promo video at the time of its original release, but here we have a dramatised film without any involvement from the band on screen. Shot in a Victoriana sepia theme, a gentleman thief, if you will, is seen exiting the Thornhill Arms tavern, having left one of a group of three punters lighter of wallet. They give chase to the gent through cobbled streets, he eventually finds himself in a deserted warehouse with an old film projector… showing Bauhaus live in concert.
The remainder of this video proceeds in the fashion whereby the live tracks are intercut with footage of this gent watching the show, listening to the old gramophone (Bauhaus ‘face’ design labels on the platter, naturally). By the start of the last of the live tracks, ‘We Love Our Audience’ (aka ‘Spirit’), his face has been eclipsed by a projection of Peter Murphy’s pancaked face in eerie possession.
The final track is ‘The Sanity Assassin’, with a selection of Bauhaus stills animated over the music. When it was released, this was the only (easy) way to track down ‘The Sanity Assassin’ – it had previously been released on the ultra rare fan-club-only 7″ single and would be another year away until it appeared as part of the ‘1979-1983’ double album compilation. The ‘We Love Our Audience’ track was also another wonderful find on this video, ‘Spirit’ remodelled upon the the album version from ‘The Sky’s Gone Out’ – but this from the Old Vic show of February 1982, a good six months prior to ‘The Sky’s Gone Out’.
Both ‘Shadow of Light’ and ‘Archive’ would eventually be paired together for a DVD release in 2005.