The Birthday Party

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The Birthday Party
General information
Genre (s) Post-punk , Gothic rock
founding 1976
resolution 1984
Website www.thebirthdayparty.com.au
Founding members
singing
 Nick Cave
Drums
 Phill Calvert (until 1982)
Guitar, keyboard, saxophone
 Mick Harvey
former members
guitar
 Rowland S. Howard
bass
 Tracy Pew
bass
 Barry Adamson

The Birthday Party was an Australian rock group from the early 1980s . They are considered one of the most influential post-punk bands.

history

Members were Nick Cave and his former schoolmates from the Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne Mick Harvey (guitar, keyboards, saxophone) and Phill Calvert (drums). Tracy Pew (bass) and Rowland S. Howard (guitar) joined them later. Under the influence of the punk movement, which also reached Australia in 1978, they released their first LP Door, Door , in 1978 as “The Boys Next Door” , which contained the lively, but still binding, guitar-heavy New Wave .

In 1980 the group moved from Melbourne to London and released the LP The Birthday Party , on which they were listed by their record company under both "The Birthday Party" and "The Boys Next Door". This LP marked a radical change in their stylistic devices and an expansion of the conventions of popular music as a whole. Their new, unusual-sounding mixture of the aggressive energy of punk, the tradition of a very raw blues , which, carried by Pew's stoic bass lines, regularly climbed into chaotic orgies of noise, earned the band the recognition of the criticism and the support of the influential BBC presenter John Peel a.

In 1982 the group moved to West Berlin for the second time . Further LPs followed, which remained as uncompromising as the debut album. As the author of most of the lyrics, Cave developed the thematic preferences of his later career. Sometimes there were comic-like horror stories with dirt, fear and bizarre characters ( King Ink , Nick the Stripper ), sometimes stories of murderers ( Deep in the Woods ), abandoned, possessed, of madmen hunted through swamps ( Swampland ), often surreal and with religious references ( Big Jesus Trash Can ), which Cave gave a frighteningly real dimension with unrestrained expressive singing or with a dark grave voice.

Despite the recognition of the music world, to the displeasure of the band, the band's commercial success was very limited, which was hardly surprising given the high proportion of cacophony in their dark music. The Trouser Press Record Guide wrote that "neither John Cale nor Alfred Hitchcock were ever this terrifying". Aptly, the back of a live mini-LP that the band shared with Lydia Lunch was subtitled : "16 Minutes Of Sheer Hell" ("16 Minutes Of Sheer Hell"). The alcohol , heroin and other drug consumption of individual members may also have been responsible for the musical excessiveness of the band .

Calvert left the band in 1982, after which the multi-instrumentalist Harvey took over the drums. When Pew was arrested for drunk driving that same year, Barry Adamson (Ex- Magazine ) replaced him on recordings and live performances.

The Birthday Party broke up in 1984 due to a disagreement between Cave and Howard, who had written most of the songs with Harvey.

Several bands emerged from The Birthday Party: In addition to Cave's successful band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds , Crime and the City Solution (with Harvey and Howard) as well as various projects by Howard, best known These Immortal Souls, are to be mentioned here .

Discography

Boys Next Door

  • 1979: Door Door
  • 1979: Hee Haw (EP)

The Birthday Party

Albums

  • 1980: The Birthday Party / Boys Next Door
  • 1981: Prayers on Fire
  • 1982: Junkyard
  • 1982: Drunk On The Pope's Blood
  • 1985: It's Still Living
  • 1985: Best and Rarest
  • 1988: Hee Haw
  • 1989: Mutiny / The Bad Seed
  • 1992: hits
  • 1999: Live 1981-82
  • 2001: Peel Sessions

DVD

  • 2003: Pleasure Heads Must Burn

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reynolds, Simon: Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 . London: Faber and Faber, 2005 ,, ISBN 0-571-21569-6 , pp. 429-431.
  2. ↑ Lewis, Luke: Release The Bats - It's The 20 Greatest Goth Tracks . March 5, 2009. Retrieved June 2, 2012: “7. The Birthday Party - Release The Bats. Knuckle-dragging drums. Sickening, scything distortion. Barely comprehensible vocals in the Vic Reeves 'club style': here was a compelling sonic template for goth's lunatic fringe. Most gothic moment: Nick Cave's blood-curdling shriek: “Whooaaargh! BITE! "It was a story about vampire sex was promoted by an advert with the words" Dirtiness is next to antigodliness "."
  3. ↑ http://trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=birthday_party