The appearance of Bauhaus in Tony Scott’s frantic-to-a-fault The Hunger is Peter Murphy’s finest moment: the lead singer’s gaunt Bowie-esque cheekbones contracting and contracting on camera competed with the real Bowie’s.
A solo career began not long afterward, uneven, a bit like Robert Palmer’s in its committed dilettantism: bass-happy fripperies with Japan’s Mick Karn as Dali’s Car, Middle Eastern colors on Love Hysteria (awful title for a solid album) and Deep‘s “Cuts You Up,” his grandest achievement, such that I couldn’t help putting it at the top. Co-writing with keyboardist Paul Statham and forming a real band he called The Hundred Men did the trick; on “Crystal Wrists” and the brooding “Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem,” helped by sympathetic engineering, summon deep ocean, vast seas. Holy Smoke (1992) had the misfortune of getting a release months after Nirvana Changed Everything. British bands still did well on the modern rock charts, but they needed more pizazz than Murphy’s power chords, though “You’re So Close” is a fine example of his Lugosi-ing for the sake of a crossover, which “Hit Song” didn’t. Cascade (1995) sounded even more out of time.
1. Cuts You Up
2. All Night Long
3. Crystal Wrists
4. Hit Song
5. Blind Sublime
6. A Strang Kind of Love
7. Deep Ocean Vast Sea
8. Should the World Fail to Fall Apart
9. You’re So Close
10. God Sends
11. I’ll Fall with Your Knife
12. Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem
13. The Judgment is Your Mirror
Humanizing The Vacuum 
Hard to argue with Cuts You Up as No. 1.
I’ll Fall With Your Knife is my No. 2.
More recently, I Spit Roses, Slowdown, Gaslit and Good Works are among his 20 best.