‘ I was just trying to hang out with the Pope’

Excerpts from an interview with Peter Murphy in the Sunday Independance, August 2000.
‘[ painting was ] the only thing I was good at in school – it was the only thing I got an Honour in, I did crap in my Leaving. But when we were on tour in our mad days of the Eighties, if we had a day off, we’d go to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate. It was the first time I saw the galleries of the world.’
On Bacon’s Triptych, May-June 1973: [ It ] is probably the work I find the most powerful, even though I stood beside one of a Pope for your photograph. I was just trying to hang out with the Pope, seeing as it’s what pop stars do nowadays…’
[ Triptych ] is like the things we don’t talk about, you know? It’s all the inside fears, the paranoia, the angst, the things we never see in people, or are not shown.’