The Birthday Party

Prayers On Fire
Shock, 1981

It seems fitting to revisit Nick Cave's early work in the week his nostalgic side-project Grinderman is released. Prayers On Fire was The Birthday Party's first album, though the same musicians had released Door, Door as Boys Next Door two years earlier. The change of name heralded an even darker and trashier aesthetic. Their two albums, plus a handful of EPs, were enough to ensure long-lasting notoriety and a slew of releases more than a decade after their demise, including a facetiously titled best-of compilation Hits, the John Peel Sessions and Live, 1981-1982.

It would be easy to emphasise the contrast between the Cave of late, whetting housewives with sappy, inoffensive tracks like 'Into My Arms', and the young, middle-class malcontent who snarled unmentionables in the '80s. But there's a link between them in Cave's adulation of idolised females, even if the poor girl/object usually winds up mutilated in The Birthday Party version. On 'Zoo-Music Girl', Cave seems to mean the same thing when he wails "I kiss the hem of her skirt", and then, "I murder her dress!"

While the band's revered tracks are usually their noisiest – 'Blast Off', 'Big Jesus Trash Can' – they were particularly creative when experimenting with piano and saxophone. 'Dive Position', from Door, Door, is nerve-jangling with horror-movie piano and a shrill, inhuman voice which echoes the title in the verses. Prayers On Fire closes with 'Kathy's Kisses', a clomping, off-kilter song with only three repeated lines and a manic saxophone. Even without Cave's degenerate lyrics, it sounds like a well-behaved pop melody that woke up to find itself drunk and staggering through the red-light district. It foreshadowed the carnival-blues style Tom Waits would pursue a few years later.

The Birthday Party's mythology was underscored by their live shows, which, going by accounts from the time, were fairly unhinged. Clinton Walker includes a good description of their smack-soaked nights at St Kilda's Crystal Ballroom in his book Stranded. His account is part of the story of early '80s Melbourne, but the real beauty of Prayers On Fire and Junkyard is that they're so unique it's hard to recognise them in terms of time or place.