‘ 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.’

Posted in