Revisited: The Birthday Party – The Birthday Party

Another new feature for 2012 here on Pocket Jury is the Classic Albums Revisited, which we hope to run every couple of weeks or so, between reviews and features on current bands. The idea is we will have various writers tell us about the history of a particular record, maybe a little about why it is considered to be a good or influential album. Occasionally we’ll hand the reins over to somebody outside the normal pool of writers so they can tell us how a particular album affected or influenced them. Hopefully as the years go by we’ll build up a decent archive and it can help people to find information or inspiration.

The first Classic Albums Revisited article is about the 1980 debut album by Australian band The Birthday Party. Unusually, the album was both the first record by the band under that name and also the last under their previous name – The Boys Next Door. In their brief existence from 1980-83, they released nearly four albums worth of material and were highly influential across several genres of music.

Please give the article a read here.