adventures in stereo birthday party

Junkyard by The Birthday Party (4AD/ 1982)

'Aaaaargh! Horror, Vampire, Bats Bite!' Release the Bats by The Birthday Party

The somewhat tenuous Birthday Party-related incidence of sudden violence occurred one Saturday evening at my hometown's one and only kebab and burger joint. It happened in a flash and I just didn't see it coming. I'd placed my order, when totally unexpectedly, the guy behind the counter grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, pulled me towards him and then delivered me a right hook square in the mush.

As I staggered backwards with the impact, the kebab 'n' burger-jockey leapt over the counter and pushed me outside into the nearby bus-shelter. Then, as if daring me to mix it with him, he jumped up and hung from the shelter roof, before proceeding to undertake a series of pull-ups in a sort of "don't-fuck-with-me" show of machismo.

Meanwhile, the guy from the Tandoori next door had appeared brandishing a meat cleaver. Thankfully, I was well known at the Tandoori as an often drunken but essentially harmless young fool, and the guy with the meat cleaver was able to vouch for me to that effect, thus saving my bacon. Needless to say, that was the last time I ever asked for a 'bag o' bats' as a side order at the Burger Stop, or anywhere else for that matter.

My assailant, who I believe was Turkish, had clearly interpreted my jocular request as some kind of pointedly racial slur akin to the ordering of Alsatian vindaloo at an Indian eaterie (a prevailing and much believed urban myth at the time involved the reported discovery of half a large dog in the kitchen of one's local curry house). And this was something that hurt me rather more than the smack in the mouth. Particularly as neither my friends nor I, held with all that, "excuse me, Gungadin, could I have some more poppadams?" strain of witless verbal abuse that our town's small number of ethnic service sector workers were commonly subjected too. So the thought that the burger guy had assumed me to be just another casually racist, beered-up bozo cut me to the quick.

The truth was that my unusual culinary request had merely been a sort of surrealist verbal tic: the articulation of a Birthday Party-inspired in-joke which was regularly shared amongst the post-punker posse with whom I was hanging. For in the late summer of 1981, we were all bats mad. The Birthday Party's "Release the Bats" was a huge favourite, as was "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus with its lyric, "the bats have left the bell tower, the victims have been bled, bled, bled".

Consequently, we missed ne'er a opportunity to introduce bats into a conversation in the way of, "make mine a pint of lager and a bag o' bats", or "I'd best be off now, gotta go and release the bats," or even the aforementioned 'the bats have left the bell tower' uttered with all of the import and gravitas of NASA announcing that "the eagle has landed". Pretty silly, I know, but the type of knowing wordplay that forms part of the verbal cement of friendship. Only, in my case I just happened to pay the price for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Anyway, I simply hadn't heard a record as exhilaratingly primal or as patently absurd until the time I first span "Release the Bats" on my hand-me-down late-1960s record player. Indeed, much of the track's brilliance lies in its utter preposterousness, and even today I'm still not sure whether, with its knowingly schlocky lyrics, the record wasn't in part at least intended as a knockabout lampooning of the Goth iconography that was so prevalent at the time. Or even a direct piss-take of their 4AD label-mates Bauhaus.

Either way, The Birthday Party not only sounded like no other group — they looked like no other group. And the visceral energy of the single was certainly reflected in its sleeve artwork featuring a primitivist montage of drawn skulls and photographs of the band in performance. On such picture depicted singer Nick Cave with his naked and emaciated torso daubed with the legend 'Porca Dio'. Another showed bassist Tracey Pew looking like some kind of redneck throwback to pre-punk, with his distinctive moustache and cowboy hat – how confusing was that to a proto-Goth such as myself.

So, with my appetite having been whetted by "Release the Bats", I followed the band's career backwards, picking up copies of earlier singles such as the "Friend Catcher" EP and the fab "Mr Clarinet". However with Junkyard, characterised as it is by a total absence of anything resembling conventional song-structures save for the bluesy "Several Sins", I was forced to conceed that I may have bitten off a little more than I could chew. In fact, I remember even being initially quite embarrassed by the album. In spite of this, I stoutly defended Junkyard in the face of friends who, when they came to call on me, would ask me to play it so they could have a good old belly-laugh at it, and by proxy at me for having gone out and bought it in the first place.

In particular, they would request the tracks, "Dead Joe" and "Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)" the choruses of which go, "Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho Dead Joe/ Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho Dead Joe", and "pow, pow, pow, pow/ pow, pow, pow, pow" respectively.

Ultimately, it wasn't until I saw a clip of the band in-concert on some early-Eighties TV show that I can't remember the name of, that I truly began to understand and appreciate the album. For with their ragged and uncompromising sound stripped down to its bare bones, the Birthday Party looked and sounded like the most exciting live band in the world (sadly I never got to witness them first-hand). And listening to it now, the record still stands up as a startling and disconcerting collection of deconstructed trash-can blues which undoubtedly formed the template for the swampy rhythms of bands such as Gallon Drunk.

Sure, with lyrics dripping with romanticised, murderous, misogynistic violence, Junkyard is undeniably ugly. But the record also has a twisted beauty all of its own, which is showcased to best effect on the slower more musically spacious tracks such as "She's Hit", "The Dim Locator" and "6-inch Gold Blade".

In retrospect, though, It's perhaps not unreasonable to ascribe Junkyard's intensely malevolent power to the sound of a band in the process of tearing itself apart. Drummer Phil Calvert seems to have been ousted during the album's recording, and Tracey Pew is conspicuous by his absence on most of the tracks due to his having been jailed for a drink driving offence in his native Australia.

As it happened, it was Pew's death the following year from an epileptic seizure which finally signalled the end for an increasingly dysfunctional band within which, working relations between Roland S. Howard and Nick Cave in particular had grown ever more fractious.

BACK TO 'B' HOMEPAGE

"In the late summer of 1981, we were all bats mad. The Birthday Party's "Release the Bats" was a huge favourite, as was "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus with its lyric, "the bats have left the bell tower, the victims have been bled, bled, bled".