The Birthday Party Junkyard (Compilation)

Before Nick Cave established himself as a poetic rock star with a brooding smoulder, he played more of a carnival barker as frontman for The Birthday Party, contorting his limbs and voice in antagonising feats of showmanship. Minted in 1980, the band had absorbed The Young Charlatans’ distinctive guitarist Rowland S. Howard and changed their name from The Boys Next Door upon relocating from Melbourne to London. Following an anxious, gothy debut album under the former band name, The Birthday Party quickly came into their own with the 1981 singles “Nick the Stripper” and “Release the Bats”, both off-kilter dirges that encouraged Cave to chew maximum scenery. His baroque growling and seething was echoed in arrangements that lurched toward dissolution while swapping the adolescent appeal of punk for more portentous jazz and blues influences. On The Birthday Party’s final album, 1982’s Junkyard, their sound had only grown more abrasive and unwieldy. Co-written by Melbourne peer Anita Lane, “Dead Joe” hooks into such an intense pummel and churn that guitarist Mick Harvey had to sit in for drummer Phil Calvert to complete the recording. Lane, who died in 2021, also co-wrote “Kiss Me Black”, showcasing Cave as his most libidinous. The players—including maurading bassist Tracy Pew—seem to dismantle the songs as they proceed, in tandem with Cave’s guttural turns on tracks like Harvey’s stop-start “Big-Jesus-Trash-Can”. Yet there are plenty of hooks, thanks to Howard’s widely imitated knack for askew, skittering guitar lines. The most melodic of those heralds “The Dim Locator”, also written by Howard, while Cave’s surprisingly controlled baritone on “Several Sins” foreshadows his more debonair role leading The Bad Seeds. And his grandiose storytelling flourishes are on full display on “Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)”, which modernises Shakespeare’s hangdog prince with an itchy trigger finger and a burning desire to make off with someone else’s Cadillac. As a portrait of a band near the end of its short lifespan, Junkyard is a vivid time capsule indeed. Calvert exited soon after, and Pew had to be replaced for a stint too. By the time of 1983’s The Bad Seed EP, Cave was clearly already looking ahead to his next project. But this album was by no means resigned to obscurity, with its chaotic intensity influencing the likes of Henry Rollins (who would later reissue it) and The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow. Decades down the track, indie rock acts like Man Man would plunder the record’s twisted DNA, while Cave’s mid-aughts side hustle Grinderman visited similar motifs. Beyond just The Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party gave way to Howard’s outfits These Immortal Souls and Crime and the City Solution and set the stage for Harvey’s long tenure as both a low-key solo artist and a sought-after producer for everyone from PJ Harvey to The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster. But never again would these core players push themselves to quite the extremes that they did on Junkyard, an album every bit as indelible as Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s exaggerated cover illustration.