Revisited: The Birthday Party – The Birthday Party

A look back at the debut album of fabled Australian post-punk band The Birthday Party.

 

Contrary to the concise annals of popular music, punk rock was a highly regionalised phenomena which gradually manifested itself around the world by degrees over several decades. Away from the perceived hubs of rebellion – primarily the twin metropolises of London and New York – there were pockets of disenfranchised youths on both hemispheres, particularly in sleepy rural towns  and suburban backwaters. Before the East Coast of America became known as the font of discordant rock music, Ann Arbor, MI produced two of the most significant and influential bands of the late sixties – the Hendrix-aping rhythm and blues explosion known as the MC5 and their lizard-brained cousins The Stooges. The latter were arguably the more enduring of the two, going on to redefine wilful primitivism in the context of rock music over three inspired albums. The Stooges were a concentrated wad of ultra-distilled garage rock based around the singular vision that less was more. Taking inspiration from Motor City based funk and soul, the quartet shifted the emphasis towards a monolithic rhythmic foundation, over which the live-wire frontman Iggy Pop would bark repetitive monosyllabic mantras and guitarist Ron Asheton would unleash Mingus-inspired improvisational licks with a metallic edge. Deniz Tek, a Turkish-American fan born in Ann Arbor would move to Sydney, Australia at the start of the seventies and drawing inspiration from the fertile proto-punk mecca he had left behind formed one of the best Antipodean rock bands of all time – Radio Birdman. Around the same time in Brisbane, The Saints were playing increasingly up-tempo rock contemporaneously to New York City based band The Ramones – largely credited as the first punk rock band.

At the time largely unaware of the fledgling punk rock movement on the East Coast, four friends attending Caulfield Grammar School in Suburban Melbourne started a band in thrall of their heroes Roxy Music, David Bowie and Lou Reed. Drawn together by a collective disdain for sports and an appreciation for the arts, the group coalesced as a band around 1975. Singer-songwriter Nick Cave was a tall, gangly figure with equine features and an unusual clash of influences – he sang in an Anglican church choir throughout his childhood but his highly literate parents had also read to him from Nabokov’s Lolita at night. Talented multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey was Cave’s primary musical foil, implementing and colouring the latter’s compositions with guitar and piano. The rhythm section was filled out by school-friends Phill Calvert on drums and strapping, straight-talking bassist Tracey Pew. After playing out under a variety of names, eventually the group settled on The Boys Next Door. The Saints and Radio Birdman were soon drawn to Britain, where groups like The Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks had started to become popular in 1977, often known as Year Zero for punk rock. Whilst playing shows in and around Melbourne, The Boys Next Door began to encounter another punk-influenced band called The Young Charlatans, who featured former members of The Saints backing a young guitarist and songwriter known as Rowland S. Howard. Similarly to Cave, Howard had devoured books as a child and shared many musical inspirations such as The Velvet Underground and Brian Eno. Initially the two bands didn’t get along particularly well, with the often confrontational Cave taking exception to the gaunt and somewhat fey appearance of Howard. The guitarist was equally dismissive of Cave’s band, describing them as predictable and boring.

Encouraged by their slowly expanding local following after cementing their reputation as an exciting live band, The Boys Next Door tried their luck in the studio for the first time. After recording approximately an album’s worth of material, the band found themselves dissatisfied with the resulting sound. At the same time, The Young Charlatans were falling apart due to inter-band tension, having recorded just one hastily assembled demo. The Boys Next Door also were faltering, caught between an album they were becomingly increasingly disenfranchised with and writer’s block. Howard was without a band and his relationship with Cave and Harvey had improved to the point whereby he had been at hand during the recording session, if only as an observer. He’d even sat in for a couple of encores when the band were too drunk to play. It seemed logical to incorporate the guitarist into the band, especially given that he had unrecorded songs ready to go. The band welcomed Howard into the fold and returned to the studio to finish what would become the flip-side of their debut album Door Door. The closing number was slow-burning elegy to teenage ennui called ‘Shivers’, penned by Howard when he was just sixteen years old. It would become one of the defining anthems of Australian post-punk, a shimmering torch song of glacial pacing, replete with angst-ridden lyrics and a characteristically mournful reading by Cave. Although the band were happier with the second half of their debut recorded with Howard, it wasn’t until the following Hee Haw EP that they began to find their feet as a quintet and establish a sound of their own, away from the deceptively mild-mannered, slightly Anglicised new wave of Door Door.

Cave and Howard both shared a literary background and a keen appreciation of art outside of the narrow constraints of popular culture. In particular, both devoured books by the notable Southern Gothic authors such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, as well as French poets ranging from Arthur Rimbaud to Victor Hugo. The creeping influence of both the Gothic and Romantic movements of the Northern Hemisphere gradually began to seep into their work. Whereas the nascent punk rock of Australia had been primarily concerned with attitude, The Boys Next Door took an increasingly post-modern approach to their creative endeavours. Influenced by the decadence movement and Dionysian philosophy, the band began to mine the darker side of artistic expression. Working on the theory that excess, immorality and intoxication were the soul of great music, the group became a portable microcosm of indulgence. Their music began to borrow liberally from various genres which were primarily focused on nihilism, narcissism and the ecstasy of sin. Inspired by the atonal negation of The Velvet Underground and Suicide, the Faustian Delta blues of Robert Johnson and his follower Muddy Waters, and also the garage rock primitivism of The Stooges, the band’s music became increasingly stark, antagonistic and cathartic. In the live arena, the band became wilder, looser and more chaotic as a result. Their shows were increasingly dithyrambic by nature, full of confrontation as the band became contemptuous of their audience. Cave took the onstage antics of Iggy Pop and combined them with the fervour of a Southern Baptist preacher. Indeed, Cave was becoming more thematically intrigued by the nature of blasphemy and Old Testament style apocalyptic prophecies. It was a subject the band would return to on subsequent releases and they would often played shows under a banner which bore the maxim ‘Surprising Where You Find God’. After a while, they found themselves banned from many of the venues in or around Melbourne.

From July 1979 onwards, the band were in and out the studio with new producer Tony Cohen, a fellow Melbourne native with a sympathetic ear and a keen sense of humour. Cohen had a good working relationship with local label Missing Link and crucially was also around the same age as the band. The quintet issued the stop-gap EP Hee Haw as a concession to their label, who were funding their time at Richmond Recorders. Two of the songs ended up being carried over to what was to become both the last album by The Boys Next Door and the first album by The Birthday Party. The first was an extraordinary guitar work-out entitled ‘The Hair Shirt’, a Cave penned number which showcased his new approach of ambiguous, post-expressionist lyrics punctuated by bestial grunting and shrill nonsensical exclamations. Howard’s revelatory playing on the track matched the lively frontman’s energy, the guitarist slashing at his trademark Fender Jaguar above the steady pulsing of Pew and Calvert. As the singer began to hoot and holler during the song’s wild outro, Howard’s guitar went into sonic overload, oscillating wildly as if channelling some off-world alien bird-song. The needle-work riffing of Howard’s ‘The Red Clock’ was echoed by Harvey’s double-tracked saxophone, as Pew lay a drip-drop bass-line below, matched by the the droning vocalisations of Cave. The two songs were representative of the significant shift in approach that had occurred following the addition of Howard. Although still very much in the mould of punk rock, their sound was starting to bear the hallmarks of other genres of music, particularly the quick-fire percussive rattle of rockabilly and the angular art-rock of Californian luminaries The Magic Band. In place of the post-adolescent yearnings which dominated the lyrics of their early songs, both Cave and Howard were delving into abstract imagery, taking cues from expressionism and surrealism.

By September the band had two more songs ready to go, including another demented Cave number called ‘Hats on Wrong’. Centred around a cyclical bass motif and a sparse drum beat by Calvert, the song was amongst the first to abandon the more conventional structure of the band’s previous compositions. The rhythm section provided a solid, repetitive groove upon which Cave, Harvey and Howard seemingly improvised vocals, saxophone and guitar parts respectively. The atonal bleating of Harvey’s saxophone combined with Howard’s free-form stabbing guitar parts recalled both the primordial proto-punk of The Stooges’ masterpiece Funhouse and simultaneously predicted the subgenre which would soon be known as No Wave on the East Coast of America. Howard responded in kind on ‘Guilt Parade’, a bass-heavy dirge which seemed at once more despondent and raucous than anything the band had previously committed to tape. Propelled by a sodden bass-line by Pew and matched by a crackling gut-level riff, Cave dejectedly brayed the words as Harvey accented the narrative with sombre bursts of saxophone. As the song progressed, the tempo increased until the music seemed to fall over its own feet and land in an untidy pile, only to be coaxed back into life for an unwilling reprise by Howard’s effervescent Fender Jaguar. At the start of 1980, the band returned to the studios for one last session to cut the remaining six songs which would make up their first full album as a quintet. Appropriately one of the songs was to be a cover of an old Gene Vincent number from the fifties entitled ‘Catman’. Penned by Vincent and his occasional writing partner Tex Davis, the song was a storming two minute rockabilly stomp, complete with unnerving lyrics about a feline sexual predator which were thoroughly appropriate in the context of an album which often seemed fixated upon transformations of the beastly variety. The tightly coiled rhythmic refrain around which the song was wound was drawn even tighter by Pew and Calvert, increasing the tension of the original to near breaking point. Cave’s penchant for animalistic howling suited the song perfectly, as did Howard’s corrosive guitar tone. With moments to spare, the guitarist manipulated his instrument into omitting a ghostly high-pitched whine, as if to emulate the singer’s brazen whooping.

The remaining songs which made up The Birthday Party were arguably more madcap and off the wall than those the band had already recorded in the latter part of 1979. The band had finally settled into their own unique groove, establishing the sound which would become so influential over three albums in as many years. As with all great post-punk bands, the root of their sound was the simple but effective use of a solid but funky rhythm section as an anchor. Calvert was a solid drummer who was gradually finding a niche between spare new wave-like beats, rockabilly-esque fills and primal tom-tom flourishes. Pew was the outback cowboy of the band, with his Tom of Finland-esque stage attire and a natty moustache. His bass-lines were deceptively simple but had a thick, danceable quality which allowed the other members of the band to concentrate on textural interference. Harvey was a decent guitarist but also an excellent utility man, able to cover on organ, piano and saxophone when the songs demanded additional colouration. Howard was an inspirational and singular guitarist who could transform songs into unhinged, discordant and artfully-broken cacophonies. Simply using the natural reverb of his Fender Twin amp and two MXR pedals, he could produce impenetrable fogs of distortion at whim. Onstage he swayed from side to side, lost in a reverie with his guitar hanging off him and a cigarette permanently dangling from his lip. Comparatively, Cave was the archetypal rock wild-man, howling and barking through songs, swinging from the rafters and provoking the audience in a deliberately confrontational manner. The lanky frontman usually had torn clothes hanging off him, fresh from the morgue make-up and a shock of black hair which fell untidily around his contorting features. Cave wrote songs like he painted – in abstract fragments of grotesque, tortured splatterings. Most of the time his musical ideas were simple, amelodic piano compositions consisting of two or three notes repeated over and over. When the band incorporated Howard, they near enough immediately abandoned the somewhat polite power-pop of Door Door in favour of seedy bordello vibes, nightmarish surrealist soundscapes and stop-start rhythmic pulsations.

Opening track ‘Mr. Clarinet’ was a bucking, jagged hunk of menacing trash rock, replete with a ham-fisted, sea-sick organ part courtesy of Harvey. The song rode on Calvert’s leaden one-two beat behind some appropriately bizarre percussive chipping by Howard. Oddly, Pew hadn’t been available when the band cut the final take of the song and was left to improvise a part on his own. His strange, almost Morse code-like bass figure which never quite married with the rest of the band’s playing added to the distinct queasiness of the song. Cave’s peculiar lyrics were suitably unreal, an abstract vignette of a world inhabited by brass and woodwind instruments. As Howard unravelled a spindly riff in response to Harvey’s increasingly distorted organ part, the narrator began to mumble dolefully to his uncaring love. ‘Riddle House’ was an up-tempo Howard number which featured some excellent interplay between himself and Harvey, as well as a Middle Eastern tinged saxophone break. Lyrically, the guitarist’s choice of wording was more oblique and less vivid than his fellow song-writer. On both ‘Riddle House’ and ‘The Red Clock’, the central theme seemed to be purposeful obfuscation as a means to convey a state of profound confusion. The kinetic ‘Waving My Arms’ seemingly dealt with a different type of confusion, apparently an ode to sexual naivety propelled by a particularly filthy bass-line courtesy of the reliable Pew. Cave and Howard shakily harmonised on the song’s suitably nervous chorus as the chattering guitars ebbed slinkily around the edges of the mix amidst indiscriminate blurts of sax. By contrast, the quasi-industrial droning of Cave’s ominous ‘The Friend Catcher’ was the bleakest song on the album. Introduced by a shrieking wall of feedback from Howard’s MXR Blue Box distortion pedal, the song lurched at funeral march pacing as Cave moaned about being a “prisoner of sound”. As the song loped to an agonising conclusion, Howard’s metallic creation became a curtain of sheer noise which engulfed the rest of the band, suffocating the life out of the hapless narrator. For the rest of the decade, entire movements and subgenres formed in the wake of Howard’s playing on ‘The Friend Catcher’, which was often imitated but never bettered.

The final song on the album was possibly the best of all. A joint composition between both of the principal song-writers with Harvey, it was a four minute post-punk rave-up entitled ‘Happy Birthday’. Introduced by two razor sharp guitar lines which continued in each channel for the duration, the song was propelled by a devastatingly funky bass-line by Pew, both rumbling and danceable. The dissonance of the twin lead guitar parts, alternately weaving in and around the steady, repetitive hum  of the rhythm section gave the song a bipolar quality which Cave embellished with a deranged vocal take. Along with his now standard howling and hooting, the singer added bestial grunting, trilling and eventually mimicked a barking dog. His extraordinary vocal performance was contrasted nicely by plain-spoken gang vocals from the rest of the band, giving the song a memorable call and response effect. On paper, Cave’s lyrics seemed to concern a child’s birthday party, complete with a description of increasingly alarming presents, but the sheer intensity of the presentation belies the apparent mundanity of the situation. The song would in part inspire the band to change their name to The Birthday Party, whereupon it was released as a single in Australia and the UK. The band had decided to move to Britain looking for a more sympathetic audience, which was one of the reasons for the name-change. The initial pressings of the record in their native country still bore the name of The Boys Next Door but subsequent reissues would correct it to The Birthday Party. Eventually the entire album was attached to the prior Hee Haw EP and released as a compilation. The group would endure a torrid time in Britain during the early eighties, unable to build a following or impress the largely xenophobic music press. Their only supporter was to be the influential radio DJ John Peel, who was regarded as the elder-statesman of youth culture and alternative music. Fortunately his patronage afforded the band the opportunity to visit both America and eventually Berlin, which the band would eventually make their European base of operations. The band issued another three albums worth of material as The Birthday Party and would go on to be regarded as one of the greatest and certainly most influential punk bands of all time.

Revisited: The Birthday Party – The Birthday Party
(1980) – Missing Link Records/4AD