THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: HEE HAW (1979-1980; 1988)
1) Mr. Clarinet; 2) Happy
Birthday; 3) Hats On Wrong; 4) Guilt Parade; 5) The Friend Catcher; 6) Waving
My Arms; 7) Catman; 8) Riddle House; 9) A Catholic Skin; 10) The Red Clock; 11)
Faint Heart; 12) Death By Drowning; 13) The Hair Shirts.
Technical note first. The CD edition of Hee Haw, released long after the ashes
of The Birthday Party had been scattered by the wind, actually consists of (a) The Birthday Party — the band's LP
debut from 1980; and (b) Hee Haw, an
EP from late 1979 which they still released under the earlier name of The Boys
Next Door. Prior to that, The Boys Next Door had an even earlier LP release, appropriately
titled Door, Door, but since it was poorly
recorded, released on a completely unknown minor Australian label, and Nick
Cave has subsequently pretty much disowned it as a childish first attempt, we
will let it pass by here. Special mention must
be made of an early epoch, scattered bits of which are still preserved in
Australian TV archives, when Nick Cave used to dress up for public appearances
and seemed to take his primary cue from Paul Weller.
But forget about it, anyway. The real career of
The Birthday Party starts with the move to London, by which time the five
Australian boys (not all of them next door) had gotten their act together and
not only knew exactly what they wanted to do, but also knew exactly how to get
it done. The Birthday Party played its own version of «art-punk», a fairly
unique brand of music that combined elements of garage rock, hardcore punk,
avantgarde jazz, goth, electronica — anything goes, really, as long as the
production style is hot, sweaty, and jungly, the lead singer sounds like a
madhouse client imagining himself to be Tarzan, and the two major players
(Rowland S. Howard on guitar and Mick Harvey on just about anything) make as
much noise as possible.
«Oh no», you'd say, «not another early Eighties' band of crazy noisemakers!» But throw on
ʽMr. Clarinetʼ, and from the very outset you will find that this amounts to
much more than crazy noisemaking. The Birthday Party were not slackers — they
learned not only how to play those instruments, but also how to combine them
in complex, innovative ways without it all falling apart. Harvey's heavily distorted
organ (substituting for an actual clarinet, I guess) plays sort of a psychedelic
fugue, against which Nick Cave is howling and bellowing like a prime patient
that's been subjected to way too many re-runs of Alban Berg operas. The
abstract absurdity of the results separates them from the punks, but neither is
this poppy enough to put them in the same house with Siouxsie & The
Banshees, nor is it solemn-demonic enough to warrant a comparison with Joy
Division. First track = first head-scratching enigma.
Things become a lot clearer when they get to
ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, arguably the quintessential track of the album (and the one
that is connected to the band's crucial name change — from the direct, but
boring Boys Next Door to the symbolic Birthday Party). If ʽMr. Clarinetʼ left
any doubts, ʽHappy Birthdayʼ dissipates them — this is Modern Madhouse Music at
its modern maddest. In the deep past, the Stooges used to conjure this spirit,
but the Stooges, being good kids of the Sixties, accessed their psychic
innards on the express train of sexual tension: Iggy channelled his aggression
into physical lust, whereas The Birthday Party direct their youthful adrenaline into the brain areas responsible for
maniac depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Of course, there
is a social basis for these disorders — it ain't much fun to play mad unless
you can convincingly prove that it is your society who drove you to this brink.
In the first case, you're just playing mad; in the second case, who knows? You
might be producing A-R-T.
ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, with its spooky tale of a
«wonderful dog chair... that could count right up to ten» (I wish I had one!), is the perfect example —
tricky, off-putting time signature; knife-edged, ribbon-cutting bluesy/funky guitar
riffage; and the perfect send-up of the happy «birthday chorus» where you get
to hear Nick Cave woof-woof-woofing, consciously and passionately «ruining» an
actually catchy vocal pop melody. In doing so, The Birthday Party created just
the perfect birthday song to crash, bust, and burn any birthday party that
you'd wish to avoid, but can't, seeing as how it was cruelly sprung on you by
circumstances beyond your control. And as far as I can tell, nobody knows
anything about the woofing dog chair. Still one of those mysteries.
If the songs do get more «tight» and
«collected», they start sounding too dangerously close to their competition — a
case in point is ʽWaving My Armsʼ, which anybody could easily mistake for a
lost Bauhaus outtake, what with the dark gothic bassline, the echoey jangling
guitar, and the repetitive, but thoroughly disciplined chorus. None of which
means it is bad — on the contrary, it is the album's most easily memorable
song, rallying the band to action like a deranged set of the Four Horsemen's
cousins: the line "and we won't get to sleep for fifty thousand
years" will probably keep ringing in your ears longer than anything else
off the album (with the possible exception of "woof woof woof woof woof").
Speaking of the Stooges comparison and the
alleged «asexuality» of the songs, ʽCatmanʼ, if you just look at the lyrics,
should, of course, count as an example to the contrary — "catman's coming,
looking for a girl, better hide your sister, man" — but even if Nick's
yelps and yowls are clearly influenced by Iggy, he still sounds like a man in a
straitjacket, chained to the battery, his major problem never descending
anywhere below his head; and Rowland Howard's guitar is still reveling in
droning, atonality, and complicated patterns that are way too intellectually
controlled and experimental to be counted as «penis-driven». It might be best
to simply ignore the lyrics (many of which, at this point, seem crude and
underworked anyway) and just bang your head against the wall instead. If you
get to do this on time, you get to experience the complete bliss package of The
Birthday Party.
In conclusion, the only flaw of this package is
a comparative one — in retrospect, it now looks like a masterful rehearsal
before the genuine thunderstorm of Prayers
On Fire — and it should by no means lessen the sincerity of the thumbs up.
Nor is the average quality of the original Hee
Haw EP, appended here as a bonus, any less impressive: early «jazz-goth» pieces
like ʽThe Red Clockʼ and ʽFaint Heartʼ have their share of inventiveness and
spookiness, too. No wonder the boys would blow all competition off the stage
back in the early Melbourne days — even those who consider their early efforts
too silly and immature will have to respect the level of playing and internal
coordination.
Check "Hee-Haw" (CD) on Amazon
Fun, and unexpected, fact: Catman is actually a Gene Vincent (!) cover, which already sounded impressively Birthday Party-like in its original incarnation.
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