THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Crashing out of the Australian suburbs, NICK CAVE and THE BIRTHDAY PARTY took post-punk nihilism to its darkest, most demented extremes. With tales of violence, drugs and hostility, band members and onlookers recall how hell broke loose. “The chaos on stage reflected our lives off it,” learns Nick Hasted

Photos by DAVID CORIO

CHRIS Carr, The Birthday Party’s final manager, is recalling atypical show during the band’s chaotic pomp. “Suddenly, Iheard this whack –whack-whackwhack-whack!” he says. “I look round, and Nick Cave’s beating someone in the audience on the head with amic! That kind of shit went on all the time. I’ve never seen anything like it. By the end it was out of control. Ican only imagine it was like the Stooges at their peak.”

These days, Nick Cave enjoys acelebrated position as acultural 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 aseries 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 ablistering sonic world of their own.

“When I first heard them on record, Ithought they were punchy and raw,” says Barry Adamson, who played in alater 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 awhile, 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 stage had fierce focus, and who rounded out the lineup with drummer Phill Calvert. “We never discussed this, and had no idea if they’d work together, so when they did it was arevelation.”

“The chaos on stage reflected our lives off it,” Howard told Uncut shortly before his death in 2009. “That was very much part of the band, that there should be no showbusiness about it –what you saw was what you got.”

As anew documentary Mutiny In Heaven: The Birthday Party demonstrates, The Birthday Party may point the way to Cave’s future, but their frequently deranged saga is far more than amere preamble for the Bad Seeds.

“I see the Bad Seeds as apostscript to The Birthday Party,” says Paul Goldman, who directed the notorious video for “Nick The Stripper”.

“There are very few times when things come together so ominously and powerfully, not many bands that were so scary to contemplate. You couldn’t sit down and watch The Birthday Party. It was immersive and visceral, they were adanger to your fucking health. They could take you to avery dangerous place and leave you stranded there. A lot of the time, the band were stranded there, too.”

AS befitting a story whose participants have spent time visiting some pretty dark places, the key players came together in aboys’ private school –Melbourne’s Caulfield Grammar. Harvey and Calvert were already pupils there in 1970, when Cave –who’d recently moved to the city from rustic Victoria –was enrolled at Caulfield, with Pew arriving the following year. “Nick was atraditional rebel with acause, always looking for trouble and finding it,” says Harvey. “Tracy did that, too, but he rebelled in amore unfathomable way. He had aset of ideas and a purpose, but it was difficult to discern –he just wasn’t going to fit in. We started aschool band in ’73, playing covers of early Alice Cooper, Bowie, Lou Reed and Alex Harvey.”