Robbed Hit of the week 1/16/17 - Peter Murphy's "Cuts You Up"...

"Cuts You Up" - Peter Murphy
from the album Deep (1989)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #55

This week's "robbed hit" comes from alternative rock artist Peter Murphy, who sang lead for the legendary goth band Bauhaus from 1978 to 1983. After departing for a solo career, he released his debut album Should The World Fail To Fall Apart in 1986. From that record a cover of Pere Ubu's "Final Solution" slipped on to the British singles chart at #92. Two years later, with his Love Hysteria album, his sound had softened a little to include more "janglepop", and the resulting "All Night Long" and "Indigo Eyes" were minor British hits.

In 1989, while his former bandmates, now rechristened as Love and Rockets, reached the top-3 on the American pop chart with "So Alive", Murphy released his third solo disc Deep. The lead rock radio track "The Line Between The Devil's Teeth (and That Which Cannot Be Repeated)", climbed to #18 on the American Modern Rock chart, his first success in the States' airwaves. The follow-up, "Cuts You Up", was much more sedate, and the mid-tempo alternative nugget with flashes of the goth he's known for, was a much better "fit" for radio, which made it a huge success on the newly-emerging "Modern Rock" format...

While "Cuts You Up" went all the way to #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock radio chart for seven weeks (ironically breaking the record at the time by...Love and Rocket's "So Alive"), the single stopped just under the halfway mark on the Pop Hot 100 in May of 1990. The track also crossed over to the Mainstream Rock list at #10. A third single from Deep, "A Strange Kind Of Love", peaked at #21 on the Modern Rock chart.

In 1992, Murphy put out his next record Holy Smoke. The lead single "The Sweetest Drop" spent a week at #2 on the Modern Rock chart, while "You're So Close" made it to #18. He has since released a handful of solo albums, the most recent in 2014 with Lion which did reach the American albums sales chart (#173). He also reunited for a while with his Bauhaus bandmates to tour in the 2000s.

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Here's Murphy performing "Cuts You Up" live on TV in 1990...