Mick Harvey discusses the story of The Birthday Party: “A relentless build-up to an explosion”
At some point amid a ramshackle 1983, Nick Cave received a phone call from Mick Harvey saying, ”I think The Birthday Party should split up”. He wasn’t too surprised. In fact, he was almost fatalistically resigned to it. His reaction implied he would become a painter and decorator. On one hypothetical Christmas, he would probably tell his kids about the time he was in the most violent group in the world. After all, the band had existed like the fizz of a lit fuse, so at some point, an explosion was inevitable. And what the hell do you do after an explosion, move out of town or try to rebuild the house from the rubble?
Well, Cave went back to Melbourne and decided that was ”it for me as far as music went”. But two factors precluded retiring from the boho side of society; firstly, ‘former member of punk band frequently described as a coterie of raving lunatics‘ isn’t a line the sings straight off the CV. Secondly, The Birthday Party were a blaze of glory, and even the flickering embers were still effuse with originality and creative vigour. ”Well, don’t you think we should start another band?” Harvey asked when the pair reunited, and from the ash heap of history rose The Bad Seeds.
Ten years earlier, Harvey, Cave and the would-be drummer Phill Calvert were just kids at Caulfield Grammar School. Like most other students who preferred their hair a little bit longer, so to speak, David Bowie was their hero. And so, they decided to form a band as a homage to the trailblazing outsiders who had inspired them. ”Most bands had very similar influences,” Harvey admits. But soon, The Boys Next Door’s new hobby would lead to greater exploration, and originality came brimming forth with The Birthday Party once Rowland S. Howard and Tracey Pew joined on bass and guitar.
It was from that point that strange things started to happen both within the band and in the wider world. ”When we came through the process of punk and got into like ‘79, we were really looking at it, thinking, ‘This has kind of gone wrong. It’s been very commodified and commercialised, especially in the UK‘,” which is where they found themselves. They were now devoid of a scene, lingering on the outskirts with The Fall and The Pop Group, ostracised by the flinching mainstream not just because of their singular style but the rampant hard drug use that came with it.
”Punk,” Harvey explains in his measured tones, ”had gone from being an alternative thing into being very commercial. The look and everything had become a bit more superficial. So, I think we were looking back to the energy that had been lost, and we still saw that in the extreme end of things with bands like The Pop Group. So, we just sort of jumbled it all up, and somehow, coming out of being young and heavily influenced, we suddenly found our own sound and just went with it. I can’t explain it any better than that, really.”
As the confluence of their literary ways and their aversion to the sliding zeitgeist began to build, The Birthday Party simply grew increasingly singular, increasingly outlaw, and adopted the disposition of a band who sounded as close to the outskirts as their own existence at the time. They were happy in his cultural hovel. ”The sound of the band really came about as our confidence grew that we were doing something singular. Then, certain members of the band developed their sound more and more individually as players. The confidence was there for them to move forward and create their own thing, especially with Rowland and Tracy, and to some degree, my influence was probably more to do with the drumming and rhythms and how they were being used,” unable to hold a laugh, Harvey adds, ”probably one of the reasons why Phil ended up out of the band.”
However, his exit also hints at the tale that ran alongside their musicology: the unstable pedestal of being dubbed ‘The Most Violent Band Alive‘. ”It’s funny, violence at the shows just happened occasionally,” Harvey honestly admits. ”In many ways, the shows just embodied the tension and borderline aggression in the music. There was a lot of energy there, which sometimes spilt over into violence, and that wasn’t the ideal situation, actually. The ideal situation was where it remained in a state of tension, which was a bit inexplicable, then it was just very edgy and exciting. To be honest, it didn’t become violent all that often.”
But in some ways, this also tied into the sound of the group, not just in the frantic tension of their music but from the very fact that they were in a race to revitalise punk. The essence of expression was the source of their vigour and their rush. They had to develop competencies on the wing, which Harvey admits also made up their unique tone. ”Yeah, that was really part of it, too,” he responds. ”We started as a band who weren’t particularly great musicians. But as the years went by, we became really good and doing what we were doing, if you know what I mean? You learn a lot on the fly. When you’re doing things that way, you don’t learn in an orthodox fashion; you learned a lot of things that you like doing. That’s how you develop your own style and a specific virtuosity in your own direction and style.”
That continued in their live shows, too. Nobody performed quite like The Birthday Party. There was a brimming tension, like a prolonged horror movie moment awaiting the jump scare. It delighted the band to have the audience in their palm because, from there, they could rattle the audience like a second-hand Skoda driving over a cattle grid. ”The outlaw spirit was just a response to where things had ended up,” Harvey explains.
”We were shocked that things had flagged and just dropped to the doldrums in terms of energy, aggression, and that statement of intent to do something different,” he continued. “There was a whole audience out there still in ’79 and ’80 that were very open to experimentation and really wanted to listen to something different. We saw it as an opportunity for freedom of expression. The audience had open ears. That gave us the confidence to stick by our guns and play this crazy stuff, and we were right.”
”The first shows there was just 20 or 30 people there, and I don’t know what they were thinking. I can’t imagine!” he recalls. However, a cult fanbase followed. And discussing things with fans from the time, they even saw that the band’s frantic defibrillation of punk had a short life expectancy. All that singularity and manic hedonism was a force to behold, but it was a face to uphold.
”I think as it really energised, it was like going through a relentless build-up to an explosion. It really didn’t feel like the kind of thing you could just keep doing for ten years. I don’t know how long we thought we could maintain it,” Harvey continues, ”but it was going to be impossible. You look at The Stooges, and they just couldn’t keep going. You burn out. When you’re pushing that hard along an extreme line, either you change radically, or you accept that you have to burn this out.”
The Birthday Party were also fated to the latter. As Harvey explains, ”Because part of the chemistry that had been set-up that created that was all about the band and how they interacted.” They couldn’t have become Coldplay, I quip as a joke, and Harvey latches on, ”We weren’t even writing songs with chords! I could tell you what key, what songs they were in, but where they were going in terms of chords or even what the melody was half of the time was completely unclear. We were working in a completely different and unorthodox way with the music.”
So, unsustainability was inherent; it was part of the drama but also part of the flaw in some way. The symbiotic idiosyncrasies of the band required a tight cohesion, and there was a communication breakdown fuelled, in part, like the Roman Empire, by hedonism. ”We just weren’t a coherent gang anymore,” Harvey admits. ”We had also kind of done what we needed to do. So, if we were going to continue, we’d have to move on to something else.”
That impending transition was made pretty clear to him when Cave said to him, ”I don’t even really relate to this music anymore.” In fact, Harvey was the agony uncle for a lot of the fraying that had begun. ”For some reason, maybe because I was coherent and could actually remember what people were saying, I was just sort of thinking, well, this is not going to work anymore.”
But today, they remain a glowing blaze of glory – now celebrated in the new Ian White-directed documentary Mutiny in Heaven. Its own synopsis defines their appeal: ”This is a twisted tale of ascent, realisation and implosion whilst dealing with issues of artistic muse, creativity, addiction, fame, interpersonal conflict and the unique relationship between creative vision and self-destruction – all underpinned by the dark, wry humour of the individual band members.”
It’s a film that digs into what made The Birthday Party so glorious, not exclusively played backwards by virtue of their continued legacy. As Harvey said when asked about whether it was strange looking back: ”It still feels very much like part of the story and something I still connect with.” Indeed, it still feels like something many people connect with because when an explosion happens, it never truly goes away; the ripples reverberate, and the rubble provides the perfect encampment for the next outsiders on the scene.
The live shows, the violence, the fallouts, and Harvey desperately trying to corral a coterie of drug-craving punks into a working order are all drama under the bridge. However, now, as the stylus pulls off the gravel driveway of the LP’s outer rim and slips into the groove of Junkyard‘s first track, it is sent flying like the racetrack rabbit as ‘Blast Off’ lives up to its Ronseal name and catapults the song into action with Cave howling the point home like a banshee who has just stubbed her toe. Akin to wandering into the most manic ‘local bar for local people’ in the world, the weird new fetid realm oozing off the record like a mirage doesn’t even offer up that shushed slow swivel of heads before it whacks you on the jaw. The band’s revitalisation of the punk spirit is still as palpable as ever for a moment; it always will be. The only question is whether it’s too weird to ever truly call it punk in the first place. Sensational haircuts and horrifying screams abound, there’s a riveting mania to the cut of this jib that remains a shot in the arm.
The Birthday Party are a rare mutation too weird to truly die, and Mutiny in Heaven documents their outlaw existence and ethereal afterlife with rigorous vitality. And it’s on its way to cinemas near you soon. It is due ti screen in the UK as a part of Doc n Roll Festival on November 12th at Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. You can find further details here.
