The Birthday Party - Prayers on Fire (1981)

This album made me want to write...


Nick Cave - vocals, saxophone, drums
Rowland S. Howard - guitar, vocals, saxophone
Mick Harvey - organ, piano, guitar, vocals
Tracy Pew - bass, clarinet, double bass
Phill Calvert - drums

With:
Phillip Jackson - trumpet
Mick Hauser - tenor saxophone
Stephen Ewart - trombone

Rowland S. Howard 1959 –2009

The Go-Betweens- Send Me A Lullaby (1982) (expanded re-issue- 2002)

Here’s a poem by Sam Shepard:

I keep praying
for a double bill
of
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK
and
VERA CRUZ.

If I was going to pray for anything I’d pray to hear a group that were as good as certain critics thought The Go- Betweens were:
Exquisite, poetic guitar pop. The ultimate cult band- Uncut.
A dream of what a pop group should be- NME…
This is the CD reissue of 1982’s Send Me A Lullaby- the 12 track UK version, not the 8 track Aussie one. There is a discsworth of bonus material, including a collaboration with The Birthday Party.

The Birthday Party- Peel Session December 10th 1981

This was the fourth Peel Session recorded by The Birthday Party. It features 3 tracks from Junkyard and a Rowland S Howard number called Bully Bones that I don't think appeared on any other studio recordings.

The Birthday Party- Drunk on the Pope’s Blood. Lydia Lunch - The Agony is the Ecstacy (1982) Split 12"

The Birthday Party side of this split 12” was subtitled 16 Minutes Of Sheer Hell. There was a frenzied wrath about The Birthday Party's live performances, and violence was never far beneath the surface.
The Lydia Lunch track is a plangent dirge set against a great soundscape of feedback and distorted guitars underpinned by a solid gothic drum beat.
Dark stuff indeed.
Line ups:
Birthday Party:
Phil Calvert- drums
Tracy Pew- bass
Mick Harvey- guitar
Rowland S Howard- guitar
Nick Cave- vocals

Lydia Lunch:
Christian Hoffman- drums
Steven Severin- guitar
Murray Mitchell- guitar
Lydia Lunch- vocals

The Birthday Party- Mutiny EP (1983), Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds- In the Ghetto (7”) (1984)

The Birthday Party- Mutiny EP (1983)
The demise of The Birthday Party.
Phil Calvert was ejected in 1982 and Mick Harvey moved to drums. When Tracy Pew was jailed for drunk driving and petty theft, Barry Adamson came in as a temporary replacement.
Late In 1982 tension between Nick Cave and Roland S Howard came to a head. Blixa Bargeld from the German band Einstürzende Neubauten was brought in to play guitar on the track Mutiny in Heaven. The Birthday Party eventually disbanded in late 1983, due in part to the split between Cave and Howard, and work and drug-related exhaustion.

Jennifer’s Veil is arguably the point at which The Birthday Party realised the peak of their potential. Its gothic narrative is typical of early Bad Seeds works. According to Amy Hanson in Kicking Against The Pricks The Birthday Party by now sounded like a cross between The Stooges, Dracula and John Milton on smack.

Line up:
Nick Cave- vocals
Tracy Pew- bass
Mick Harvey- drums
Roland S Howard- guitar
Blixa Bargeld- guitar.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds- In the Ghetto(7”) (1984)
The emergence of The Bad Seeds.
In 1983, after some studio work Cave’s new band made their first public appearance on New Years Eve in Melbourne under the name Nick Cave - Man Or Myth?.
The band then briefly called themselves Nick Cave and the Cavemen before adopting the Bad Seeds moniker, in reference to the penultimate Birthday Party release, The Bad Seed E.P.
Bargeld and Adamson’s replacement of Howard and Pew was stylistically very much a ‘like for like’.
Writing about rock music? The old man asked me, looking puzzled. Written about Elvis? I told him that no, I hadn’t written about Elvis. How can you write about rock music without writing about Elvis? The proposition was, he made it plain, frankly absurd.
So this is the first single from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. A cover of an Elvis Presley single from 1969, this version was released in June 1984.
The Moon is in the Gutter is a Brechtian murder song that points the way to the Bad Seeds later work. Apparently Bargeld achieved one of his eerie sounds here by massaging the strings of his guitar with an electric shaver.

Line up:
Nick Cave- vocals
Mick Harvey- drums
Blixa Bargeld- guitar
Barry Adamson- bass
Hugo Race- guitar

The Birthday Party- Mr Clarinet, The Friend Catcher 7" singles (1980)

In 1980 Melboune punksters The Boys Next Door prowled into London and changed their name to The Birthday Party. Ice cream and jelly, and a punch in the belly …Indeed. The Roxy poppiness of their early songs was swamped by the dark Brechtian cabaret that epitomised their work for the next three years. They unleashed an infernal sonic machine that rumbled, screeched, gained pace and exploded in the faces of their audiences.
These are their first two singles. It’s all here, the staccato snare drum, the menacing bass and the wall of tortured guitar sounds.
The Birthday Party 7” singles- Mr Clarinet, The Friend Catcher (1980)

Line up:
Nick Cave- vocals
Mick Harvey- guitar
Tracy Pew- bass
Rowland S Howard- guitar
Phil Calvert –drums.

Unfortunately these downloads are no longer available. Get versions here: http://amputeearms.blogspot.com/2009/01/birthday-party-hee-haw.html

The Birthday Party Peel Session: 28th April 1981

When I listen to the genius Nick Cave these days, his soulful piano, his reflective religiosity, (we’re not talking Grinderman here!) I pinch myself and think back to The Birthday Party. Mad bad and dangerous to know- 'Oops!, I've got blood on the end of my boot’.
Mayhem? Dark visions? Awestruck I wandered these dark plangent soundscapes. It was another world, and despite (or perhaps because of) the breezes of menace and seething swampy danger, it was good.
Cave said that the group was named from the birthday party scene in Crime and Punishment. Read it? There is no birthday party. it was a wake. Nick’s memory betrayed him, but it was an apt slip This is the second of four sessions that the boys recorded for Peel .