Its’s New York in 1981 and a momentum is gathering in the city, this is post punk and alternative music is heralding changes to three chord thrashing guitars. Nick Cave is about to scream his way into the city’s underground.
I am a woman with technical sound expertise living on the Lower East Side having moved to the city last year at the behest of my friend Haoui Montaug and Rough Trade’s, Geoff Travis. I work with U.K. indie bands breaking into the American marked. I’m at a loft on the corner of Bowery and East Second Street, right by CBGB, I need to listen to music from the next band coming in from the UK. Touring America back to back there has been no time in-between travelling to listen to this. Who are this Birthday Party band anyway? Dropping the needle onto the black vinyl copy of Junkyard spinning on the turntable Release the Bats onto the turntable and an outburst of antipodean rage blasts the room from the speakers on the floor by the far wall as Nick’s voice is sent screaming around the cast space. I’m pissed for agreeing to get involved with this.
Now, when you’ve hung around London clubs at the height of Punk, it’s more normal to like a band after seeming them live than listening to vinyl. For months, my days and nights have revolved driving around the East Coast around alternative nightclubs doing tour management and sound for bands - this Birthday Party music is just noise. I prefer to dance to my vinyl. The lyrics are intriguing though, and I’m curious but I don’t want this tour. I’ve ADD, as usual I’m listening to this at the last minute. An Econoline van is parked outside on the Bowery and their flight, which I’m due to meet, arrives at Kennedy in an hours time. Changing my mind is not an option, besides I never want, on first sight or sound, the people, places or things that become influential in my life
I meet Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Roland S Howard, Tracey Pew and Phil Calvert outside arrivals their plane at JFK. In those first hours I’m struck by their relationship, what I heard is at odds with laconic style of the people I meet. Nick, in skinny jeans and pointy boots, his bumbling gait, his shock of spiked black hair and snub nose, grinning. Mick, in his suit, the sensible one; Roland seemingly lost on this earth, tall and gangly in his burgundy shirt, skinny jeans, leather jacket, anxiety barely concealed within a too cool to care pose, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He reaches for his luggage and the trolley rolls away as he tries to hike a suitcase into the van. Mostly, he says fuck. Tracy solidly built, determined in a denim waistcoat, jeans, cowboy boots with spurs and a Texan hat. Philip, invisibly normal and next to his peers, the straight one that holds the beat.
This is their first time in the city so I’m a native by comparison. I put the van into drive and they take in the views from the Queensborough bridge. They banter, a lazy humour, we head into the city and the Iroquois hotel on 44th Street. Once it was home to James Dean, all our bands stay here, the Birthday Party are Stooges fans and Iggy is living there, it’s an added bonus. What they have developed over years of shared history I am welcomed into as an incomer who knows where to get Wild Turkey - and, as another fellow far from home.
Like Nick’s father, my mother has tragically died a few years before and nothing is worse than sudden death for shock, or better than trauma for unbridled punk style self expression. I swing between submission and defiance, passivity and aggression, calm in a crisis and betraying an edgy anxiety in still waters. Useful qualities for managing unpredictability and The Birthday Party onstage offer that in waves. A maniacal storm is about to crash onto these Manhattan shores.