Live 81-82

WELCOME TO the car smash. The Birthday Party were, like all the great bands, a good five years ahead of the pack: it would take that span of time before another remarkable 4AD act, The Pixies, would smash through the vapidity of the ’80s, eating rock ‘n’ roll’s carcass alive and spewing chunks of it back up into grotesque new configurations.

Yep, The Party were something else alright, a ragged combo who emerged from the hellbilly junk culture of Oz, steeped in some pan-Atlantic stew of Yank blood-lust (reflected in Nick Cave’s love for the crude artwork of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth) and English experimentalism. Live 81-82 is the band’s only officially sanctioned full live album, and ten of its seventeen tracks were mixed as late as last year, with Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard in attendance. Henry Rollins also gets a credit; presumably his bulging archives were accessed for the assembling of these performances, the bulk of which originate from London’s Venue in 1981, the rest from Bremen and Athens the following year.

The quintet had much in common with The Stooges (whose ‘Funhouse’ they viciously maul and deface here, abetted by Jim Thirlwell on saxophone): intelligent individuals creating a deceptively primitive racket. Prise off the armour of volume and treble-overkill, dig under the ribcage, and you’ll find that this body electric is constructed brilliantly skew-ways: if the devil is just God when he’s drunk, then He certainly designed the Birthday Party early on the morning of the seventh day.

Beefheart and Pere Ubu comparisons would dog the band, and for sure, they took both the deconstructionists and the Delta bluesmen on board. Musically the group were idiot savants, with Howard deploying a mangled anti-guitar style which veered from approximating Chuck Berry-with-a-chainsaw moves on ‘Dead Joe’ to mimicking the squeals of a trapped mixo-rabbit on ‘She’s Hit’. And under him, Tracy Pew, Phill Calvert and Mick Harvey cranked out relentlessly jagged rhythms that had more to do with industry than art (no surprise that Cave and cohorts would later find a kindred spirit in Einzturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld).

Presiding over all this, to use his own parlance, a-flappin’ and a-squawkin’, was Nick The Stripper, the art/lit student gone mad in squalid London, reborn as a juvenile delinquent Fuckleberry Flynn hotwiring hell’s wheels and haring off into the frothing night, yowling songs of swamplands, junkyards, murdered girls and 6" switchblade knives.

The group didn’t last. It couldn’t. In 1981/82 The Birthday Party were rock n’ roll at its most prime-evil, and in an era of anti-"rockism", ethno-faddists and retro-fashion buffs, these wild colonial cannibals offered Britain a reflection of its exiled self so twisted and malign nobody could bear to look at it for too long.

Some bands sell records. Others change lives. For the final time, welcome to the car smash.