CHRIS Carr, The Birthday Party’s final manager, is recalling a typical show during the band’s chaotic pomp. “Suddenly, I heard this whack – whack-whack-whack-whack!” he says. “I look round, and Nick Cave’s beating someone in the audience on the head with a mic! That kind of shit went on all the time. I’ve never seen anything like it. By the end it was out of control. I can only imagine it was like the Stooges at their peak.”
These days, Nick Cave enjoys a celebrated position as a cultural elder statesman – musician, man of letters, online sage – while his band the Bad Seeds have become arena-filling rock royalty. His music has evolved from savagery to romance and, latterly, somewhere beyond. Yet no matter how far Cave has moved on, creatively speaking, his songs continue to dig into the knottiest human impulses and fears, an exploration he began in the early part of his career with The Birthday Party.
Emerging from Melbourne’s small but vibrant post-punk scene, during their brief existence, Cave’s wild, rock’n’roll provocateurs left behind a slender but brutal body of work: two cacophonous studio albums and a series of singles that expanded their music from brooding post-punk to mutant jazz, deviant blues and sickly murder ballads, inadvertently helping create goth along the way. Alive with uncompromising attitude, extreme hair and certain danger, The Birthday Party built a blistering sonic world of their own.
“When I first heard them on record, I thought they were punchy and raw,” says Barry Adamson, who played in a later lineup. “Then on stage, you’ve got Rowland [S Howard], this haunting and haunted figure with the most remarkable style of guitar one had heard for a while, and on the other side the big fella, Tracy [Pew], looking like he’d come out of the Village People but he’s ferocious and muscular. Then you’ve got Nick doing backflips across the stage, leaning into the crowd, challenging and provoking them. But it wasn’t hammy or made-up. It was frightening, funny and on the edge of chaos.”
“We came in with completely individual, extreme sounds,” says multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey, whose own presence on
