Something weird and changing always happened when I left Brisbane for my Christmas holidays while at Uni. Hunters and Collectors blipped on my radar on the first day back in Brisbane for second year. Never heard of them before. A few of my friends plus one guy I didn't know formed Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums between second and third year. And between 1980 and 1981 The Boys Next Door became The Birthday Party. I first saw this in a small article in RAM magazine. I only read it because they were touring nationally with the Go Betweens.
I'd liked Boys Next Door. Door Door is a great post punk album filled with melody and anger and some intriguing arrangements. I got into it through the single Shivers (more on that 45 in another post) and while it was never on high rotation I looked forward to what they'd do next. They seemed to have gone to the UK for the standard Australian failure-to-penetrate mission and had come back angrier, nastier, spikier and noisier. I read the new name and wondered if they'd taken it from the Pinter play. I never had the Prayers on Fire LP but I had it on cassette. Truth be told apart from a few standouts apart from a few standouts I could never quite get into it. It seemed formless and unfocussed.
When I saw them the following year at the New York when they came on stage protected by a forcefield of impermeable contempt for everything around them and when Nick Cave violated the stage/audience divide by charging on to the mezzanine, grabbing random punters and screaming: "EXPRESS YOURSELF!" at them I began to understand. They were a circus act. A kind of grand guignol without a keeper. They were performance rather than recording artistes and worked like Trojans at it. Even their interviews, trickling through the synthpop and the dross, were performances: Nick Cave sneering that no one would come to their shows for the music.
This was the kind of propaganda by deed act the world needed at the time. They knew they would never outsell anyone even one tier above them so they settled in for constant kudos. It's the trade off between mass popularity or worshipful cool. The former case has to be inhumanly strong to grow and change and maintain the fan base (what was the last industrial dub album by U2?). The latter case doesn't require longevity but doesn't ridicule it either (Wire anyone?) as long as the sense that the act in question did what they did for love.
So when Release the Bats crashed, splattered and bumped its way out of my eensy clock radio somewhere in the wilds of 1981 I was all admiration. Also, I was in fits. The thing was so gloriously puerile and violent. "How I wish those bats would BITE!" Sex horror vampire. Don't tell me that it doesn't hurt. Guitar tone tortured on a molten frying pan and a bass that seemed to wear a permanent dirty grin. And the drums just go on, the restless homicidal natives of an old Hollywood movie. And Nick just keeps screaming. It felt both teeth gratingly childish and real, as dangerous as they were at the New York. "ARRRRRGH! BITE!" A chunga kunga chunga kunga.
You don't create fear by saying the word horror. Bauhaus' Bela Lugosi's Dead while pleasantly gothic is only ever silly and try-hard if you attempt to take it seriously. But if you say horror the way a child might and sound like a grown up it's wrong and unsettling, like the reverse effect of Mercedes McCambridge's smokey old voice coming out of twelve year old Linda Blair's mouth in The Exorcist. All the screaming in this track feels like that, a grown man with a child's urges, Elvis' twin brother kept alive but let out of the basket in the back shed. And still so try hard so look we bad that the entire thing sounded like a big jokey taunt. It was exhilaratingly funny.
No one else had heard it and for a while I thought I'd dreamed it. A few of us were in a shopping centre out in the wilds of darkest Brisbane once (all doughnut stands and auto shops) and as we left I asked one of us to scream the title like on the record. He waited until we were almost out and let out a gigantic rasping RELEASE THE BATS! to the shoppers. It sounded like a wildcat. I was bent over laughing. I'm a late developer and was still very giggly at eighteen. Later at band practice between songs I got the drummer to play the basic tom beat while I screamed into the microphone. Mirth all around.
Weeks later, sitting around with the same people, sipping on lukewarm XXXX I brought up the track in a conversation about recent music. Someone said: "That! It's all chaos and noise until you realise it's actually a song".
He was right. He's still right. There are verses and choruses and if you strip it back it might as well be a rockabilly number. Hmph! I thought. Still laugh at it, but.
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