december 30th extract

The Birthday Party- Big Jesus Trash Can

I was quite prepared when this track just came up this morning to spend 500 words and a bit of time slating The Birthday Party. I listened to it while brewing a pot of coffee, having a smoke and mulling it all over. I could follow a route of seeing the Birthday Party as responsible (in part) for the emergence of goth; all that Old Testament imagery, wailing and gnashing of teeth, big back-combed matted hair, tales of depravation, disgust, murder; black clothes and black imagery. On the other hand I could look at the intrinsic dark humour of The Birthday Party; how the fact that it is so very much over-the-top; that it’s really impossible to take it all with any level of seriousness that it’s actually a comedy record (not in a Barron Knights-style but you know what I mean)-it’s so self-consciously dark and bleak that it’s as if they thought so hard to make it grim and then added (trowled and heaped) another layer and more on top because it wasn’t at that level of grimness that they wanted. It’s basically so much darkness that you can’t help but laugh at the sheer, unremitting and relentless nature of it all. 

I was also thinking about how my British mis-conceptions of Australia have them down as a lager-drinking, sports-loving nation of people and how that seems at odds with the personae of The Birthday Party. Did they break off recording this album at any time for a can of Fosters and to sit down to watch some Aussie Rules? Did their tour schedules have five day breaks so they could make sure they’d see the Ashes? (It would be quite a good image to see Nick Cave and the lads wandering around Sydney Cricket Ground, looking suitably dishevelled.) I’ll bet they’re not openly into sports but that a little bit of them cheers inside if England loses the Ashes. I suppose that my mis-conceptions of Australia could in some ironic way, mirror their views of U.S. as Australians in their mid-twenties when this album was recorded. All Southern Gothic-ness. There certainly doesn’t seem to me anything specifically Autralian about The Birthday Party and if I didn’t know that they were from the other side of the world I’m sure I would think that they were from America (or, bearing in mind their goth-ness, Leeds or Bradford.)