Hemel Hempstead Pavilion

I'D NEVER considered the possibility of any affection existing between myself and Bauhaus until I saw them on Top Of The Pops, trashing their guitars and leaping at the dancers.

Such an act! Such a manoeuvre! One of those momentary but resonant gestures that separates the genuine outsiders from the workaday Johnnies of pop pulpdom.

Bauhaus, with that ridiculous but effective action, briefly flashed a glimpse of a thoroughly subversive underbelly. In this system, Bauhaus are a different kind of poison.

Bauhaus have become one of pop music's most elegant and cerebral shams. Live, they build from the epic melodrama of a darkened stage and a rusty downward guitar chord progression (or regression), a start which however facile in form stimulates a rush of anticipation in the audience, an adrenaline fed craving for the succession of slow-burning climaxes which are to follow.

Bauhaus represent one peak of twenty-odd years of pop thinking and rationale. They provide a show which is resolute, even arrogant, in its very transparency. Theirs is a symbolic embrace of pop's greatest contradictions and its limping inability to fully function as a communicative art form. Bauhaus are a style that outweighs substance, for the substance of Bauhaus is their style: the International style of a frigid pop modernity.

To talk of music is irrelevant. Music is irrelevant. These days, music per se has sunk with all hands (no flowers please). Any relevance that may exist is in the culminative effect of image cast, impression created and the presentation of 'a reality'. Any 'reality' which the protagonist chooses to unveil.

The immediate 'reality' of Bauhaus lies not within the group themselves but in the audience's perception of them. Bauhaus are clever (natch!) and they are rarely, if ever, fully exposed.

The streaks of white light which criss cross the stage and occasionally blind the crowd allow a rapid, stroboscopelike projection of chosen bits and pieces – aspects of the group but never the total, naked 'truth'.

Like only a handful of their contemporaries, Bauhaus are coming to (their own) terms with the multifarious goings on inherent in the pop tradition.

I admire their extraction, or rather extortion, of adulation, done with the cold steel efficiency of a well regimented gangland (the Murphy mob?) caper. Basically, it all comes down to suss and gall. That's what they've got and it's what we all need.