LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Of A Punk’, was simply the most bizarre and – in retrospect – unsuitable track that 4AD ever stuck its logo on.

      ‘That was completely and utterly Peter. I thought it was silly,’ says Ivo, referring to the two-minute track by Red Atkins, a.k.a. forty-five-year-old Frank Duckett, a home studio enthusiast that, for reasons still unknown, had penned a daft homoerotic ode (‘yes he’s a hunk of a punk and you know that he’s my kind of man’). Peter Kent’s verdict? ‘It’s hilarious.’

      A 1982 interview in the British fanzine Blam! confirmed that the Spasmodic Caress track wasn’t actually a demo, but a third re-recording after the first two were deemed ‘shit’ and ‘absolutely terrible’, by singer Pete Masters. Promised what drummer Chris Chisnall called ‘a single of our own’, the Colchester quartet nevertheless had to suffice with Presage(s). Kent did find them support slots to Bauhaus and on a Modern English/In Camera bill, but the band’s next release wasn’t until 2004’s self-released posthumous compilation, Fragments Of Spasmodic Caress.

      It was a good thing 4AD wasn’t staking its reputation on Presage(s) because, like three-quarters of the Axis clan, most of these bands went the same ignominious way – but then ‘presage’ did mean a sign, warning or omen that something typically bad will happen. In 1980, Psychotik Tanks self-released ‘Registered Electors’ (subsequently added to Presage(s)’ digital download version) but nothing more; Atkins would only ever release one more EP (including the original, and a second version, of ‘Hunk Of A Punk’), and that was twenty-five years later. Both Last Dance and C.V.O. would never release another record.

      One of the most anonymous artefacts in the 4AD catalogue was followed by one of its most prized, with Ivo’s A&R antennae finely attuned this time. If Bauhaus supplied the foundation and Rema-Rema had shown what heights could be scaled, The Birthday Party was the real beginning of 4AD’s inexorable climb. It’s been so long since the band was on 4AD, it’s generally forgotten that this is where Nick Cave first landed outside of his native Australia.

      Hailing from Melbourne, the capital of the south-eastern state of Victoria, The Birthday Party had only been on British soil for a handful of months when Ivo first saw them live in 1980. According to founding member Mick Harvey, the band were in a state of flux, aware that they were having to start again at the bottom of the ladder, as they’d had to in Melbourne five years earlier when they were known as The Boys Next Door.

      As Harvey recalls, the band had outgrown their home city and set their sights on conquering the northern hemisphere, taking the usual Antipodean route to London. Given the quintet’s original, discordant brew of rampant blues, garage rock and Stooges-style punk, London had never seen anything like The Birthday Party. The reverse was equally true.

      ‘I don’t feel that way anymore, but I originally developed an intense, blind, boiling hatred for England,’ Cave told me in an interview for the Dutch magazine OOR in 1992. ‘Everything was so mediocre. All the bands were weak and limp-wristed, and I was so pissed off.’

      Harvey is more ambivalent about the experience. ‘Yes, it would have been horrible for an unemployable drug addict,’ referring to singer Cave (and guitarist Rowland S. Howard, who died of liver cancer, aged fifty, in 2009). ‘It wasn’t the same experience for the rest of us, but London was a pretty tough, draining place. It felt severe and a bit hopeless.’

      Swapping Australia’s relative stability, sunshine and wide open spaces for the bitter resignation and winter blues of Britain only drove Cave and the remaining Party members to more agitated states, though they didn’t persist with the kind of songs that attempted to address Melbourne’s own stifling conservatism, such as ‘Masturbation Nation’. It was one of the few original songs by The Boys Next Door, formed by teenage friends Harvey, Cave and (drummer) Phill Calvert, one half of a school band at Caulfield Grammar that had split off to form a new union with bassist Tracy Pew after school was out in 1975. The band had mostly churned out covers of rebel anthems from the glam and punk songbooks, but Howard’s addition in 1978 brought a choppier, scything style of play and a bluesy, expressionist mood to match Cave’s increasingly oblique lyrics.

      ‘We incorporated punk and new wave into our sound, but we weren’t interested in being The Damned,’ Harvey recalls. ‘We were more Pere Ubu, Pop Group, and The Cramps. By 1979, we’d found our own direction.’

      That year’s debut album Door, Door was followed by a change of name, to The Birthday Party, and of location, to a squat in west London’s budget-conscious Antipodean stronghold of Earls Court. ‘We arrived in London on a wing and a prayer, completely unknown,’ says Harvey. ‘It was difficult to get gigs, and we spent a lot of time working out how to.’

      The Birthday Party was the first band Ivo signed after seeing a concert, and there wasn’t to be another for eleven years. He’d seen them by chance, at their second ever UK show, at north-west London’s Moonlight Club; he’d gone to watch The Lines, whose manager was Steve Brown, Ivo’s travel companion from the Moroccan trip. German synth duo D.A.F. was top of the bill; the Australians had played first. Ivo was captivated by the uncompromising dynamic sound, especially Harvey’s Farfisa organ sound on ‘Mr Clarinet’, though, he noticed, ‘nobody else was paying any attention to what someone described to me as “some bunch of Aussie weirdos”.’

      It turned out that Daniel Miller had been paying attention. Miller, who had started Mute Records to release his own records (The Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’/(‘Warn Leatherette’), had expanded the label by signing D.A.F., and was responsible for The Birthday Party opening the show. ‘We’d gone to see Daniel because he’d sunk money into getting D.A.F., and also Depeche Mode, going,’ recalls Harvey. ‘Daniel was very encouraging but said he couldn’t take on anything else. But Ivo expressed great interest. We’d heard of 4AD, and it was obvious that we weren’t a commercial prospect, so we knew his interest was genuine.’

      Harvey invited Ivo down to The Birthday Party’s next show; afterwards, Ivo discovered that his favourite song in their set, ‘The Friend Catcher’, had been recorded back in Melbourne, and 4AD could have it for a single. ‘The band came into the shop with the tapes and a grainy black-and-white photo of a cake they’d bought and stuck a candle in, and that was the artwork,’ Ivo recalls. ‘There weren’t many great sleeves in that first year.’

      In September 1980, the band recorded a session for BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who had given Bauhaus the same accolade. In October, 4AD released ‘The Friend Catcher’ though not the album that had been recorded in Melbourne before moving to London (the Australian label Missing Link released it in November 1980), as The Birthday Party preferred to concentrate on their new material, fuelled by the hardships of London and the bile of their response.

      PR Chris Carr set to work promoting ‘The Friend Catcher’, starting with a slew of live reviews. ‘The initial reaction was, “What’s with the stupid name?”’ Carr recalls. ‘I told journalists that The Birthday Party was a Harold Pinter play, and they’d say, “I know, but it’s still a stupid name for a band.” It was like some unwritten rule.’

      Carr could see that part of the problem lay with 4AD itself, being associated with the vehemently disliked Bauhaus. ‘In those days, your roster was your advertising and it took a long while for 4AD to get the same kudos that Mute or Factory had,’ Carr says. ‘People didn’t like Bauhaus’ artistic pretensions and Modern English, for example, were seen as too fey for what was going on around them, and so they could never get established.’

      With a proven audience and earning power back home, and an album to promote, The Birthday Party returned to Australia in late November for the summer. Funded by Missing Link, they began recording a new album. In the meantime, 4AD had just released its first ever album.

      Bauhaus’ In The Flat Field had been recorded at London’s Southern Studios: ‘It was like a bunker, which made things very intense,’ recalls David J. ‘We had formed in isolation, and the album reflected that we felt like outsiders.’ The sound of the album mirrored the claustrophobic conditions, and without any objective input from 4AD, who respected the band’s wishes to go it

Скачать книгу