THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: LIVE 1981-82 (1999; 1981-1982)
1) Junkyard; 2) A Dead Song;
3) The Dim Locator; 4) Zoo-Music Girl; 5) Nick The Stripper; 6) Blast Off!; 7)
Release The Bats; 8) Bully Bones; 9) King Ink; 10) (Sometimes) Pleasure Heads
Must Burn; 11) Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 12) Dead Joe; 13) The Friend Catcher; 14)
6" Gold Blade; 15) Hamlet; 16) She's Hit; 17) Funhouse.
Although The Birthday Party pretty much built
up their reputation through live performance, they never released a live album while
the band was still active — possibly because they felt no need, what with the
studio records already letting off as much steam as any live performance could
accumulate. The first «semi-official» Birthday Party live LP only came out about
two years after the split — It's Still
Living, capturing an Australian show from 1982, was released by their
former manager without anybody's consent, and is usually chastised for vastly
inferior sound quality and other problems.
It took almost two more decades before an
archival Birthday Party live release finally appeared that could sort of serve
as a proper «benchmark» for evaluating and enjoying the band's sound. Here,
everything was improved — courtesy of the respectable 4AD label, the
performances are well-recorded and nicely cleaned up, and the setlists offer a
fine retrospective of the Party's career, focusing primarily on Prayers On Fire and Junkyard, unquestionably their two
finest offerings, but also featuring some rarities and oddities. Most of the
material was culled from two shows in London and Bremen; a historically
important bonus piece is the recording of ʽFunhouseʼ by their spiritual
forefathers, The Stooges, in Athens from September 1982, although,
unfortunately, it is also the one track that suffers the most from near-bootleg
sound quality.
I should emphatically stress, though, that The
Birthday Party live do not get much wilder than The Birthday Party in the
studio — frankly speaking, it would be hard to imagine how they could get much wilder than that, unless
it meant dragging out random audience members on stage and cutting their hearts
out in black voodoo rituals (and even then, you'd have to get this on DVD to
genuinely enjoy the proceedings). But on the other hand, The Birthday Party live
do not get any less wild than The
Birthday Party in the studio — if this was really typical of their live sound,
it means they could work themselves to exhaustion every night, and still come
back for more. From the first track and right down to the last one, each single
member of the band is playing at the top of his powers, and Nick's devil roar
never sags, not even for a second.
From an audiophile point of view, these
recordings could actually be preferable to some of the original takes — in the
studio, the band went for too much echo and lo-fi, whereas here all the
instruments are completely out front: the vicious lead guitar parts on ʽDim
Locatorʼ, for instance, shoot at point blank range into your ears here, whereas
on the original version they sounded rather remote. You may like or dislike it,
but it does make the listening experience significantly different — a rare case
of an underground band's archival live release sounding «cleaner» than what
they did in the studio, and one that may offer additional insight into the art
of Mick Harvey's and Rowland Howard's guitar playing. Or compare Tracy Pew's
bass on the original ʽShe's Hitʼ and the almost ʽDazed And Confusedʼ-style thick
doom sounds on this version — it's like he's tugging at these strings from
inside your own head. On the other hand, that studio echo did account for some
extra eeriness, so that it is impossible to objectively prefer one over the
other.
The final performance of ʽFunhouseʼ, adding guest
player Jim Thirlwell on saxophone, would be a more than perfect conclusion here
if the sound quality were reasonable, but even as such it is still a noisy sensation
— every time the guitar, the sax, and the singer lock forces in a hysterical
outburst, on the illusionary verge of totally losing control, we have Bedlam
incarnate, though it is interesting to go back and listen, for comparative
purposes, to Iggy doing this stuff on the original Funhouse. The Stooges were summoning the flames of Hell — the
Birthday Party sound much more like your local madhouse band, celebrating the
joys of clinical insanity rather than demonic possession. It may simply have
something to do with Nick's «mooing» voice not having as much guttural power as
Iggy, but you could also say this about Ron Asheton vs. Rowland Howland (the
former makes his instrument sound like a spray hose of hellflames, the latter
prefers to evoke the atmosphere of a serious nervous breakdown), so yeah,
similar intentions, different spirits.
Finally, we are offered occasional glimpses of
Nick Cave's tender side — through bits of stage banter like "thank you, I
love your haircut as well", casually, but respectfully cast off towards
somebody in the audience right before launching into a fiery version of
ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ. As few as they are, they are
important — seventy minutes of this unending assault and battery might make you
feel that we are dealing with a bunch of psychopaths beyond salvation (an
alternate version of GG Allin and friends), so even a single nicely spoken
sentence of sanity, dropped in casually like that, can be reassuring, and
further confirming the obvious thumbs up and the obvious recommendation to pick
this up and never let it go.
"they never released a live album while the band was still inactive"
ReplyDeleteDo you mean active rather than inactive here, perchance?
"in Athens from Spetmeber 1982"
I think Nick gets a good deal wilder in a live setting. Compare the "King Ink, get up, wake up" section of that song to the studio version.
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