1981@40: OF SKINS AND HEART - THE CHURCH

A pair of barre chords, clean but hot ring out and repeat until the band enters to provide foundation and reinforcement. Steve Kilbey's first lines which contain the album's title force the centre of gravity with what would become one of the most recognisable voices in Australian music. Most of it could be form-fit power pop but there's some odd backing vocals which, though sung, sound like a jumble of a crowd in time and pitch. "Such strange things you say." This band would continue with this theme, too, with Kilbey's sculpted abstractions floating over what would grow increasingly to be a neo-pscyhedelia. All that in four minutes? Well, there's a lot of clear hindsight which covers the rest of the record.

Chrome Injury keeps it up with bright guitar breaks and chunky palm-muting. More forceful harmonies both in blocks and backing vocals extend the textural range but we're still in Boomtown Rats/Records style powerpop. The sense that a band with passable songs met producers who crammed them into a new wave packing case. It's not bad at all. It's very listenable but it's also like almost everything else on the radio which is the main problem. The last one of these I did for this blog was Prayers on Fire which sounded like nothing on the radio. I made a big thing of how filmsy a value timelessness is when regarding music of significance or power. I've just remembered another dimension. This music works and worked then because it had a sound form a time when most things like it also sounded fine, the aesthetic itself is dependable. So, is it unremarkable just because it's sounds like 1981? Well, no, it is remarkable because better writing that offers peaks makes its best stand out. We're about to hear the biggest single the band released.

The Unguarded Moment starts with overdriven guitars swirling around a colourful figure. The band kicks in with a clear lead riff before the vocals start. Same deadpan but melodic tone over chugging muted guitars that break into swells of chords and then the pre-chorus line and the line of the chorus surprise with a clear ringing descant vocal soaring above the Kilbey foghorn and we're in the land of the hit single. If you listen today you might find the arrangement over reliant on needless repetition but there's a solid attitude and clear sense of narrator in the songs that wipes out all lingering on how the words are nicer sounding than substantial. "So deep, deep without a meaning." Steve Kilbey was asked the following year if he would mind if someone else in the band came up with a song that was deep without a meaning. He said that, frankly he wouldn't want to be in a band playing other people's songs. We were ready for boycott him (for about five and a half minutes) but he was right. He wasn't the sole songwriter in the band nor even the only lead vocalist but the stoner minstrel character he created for the rest of the decade remains one of the most immediate public personae that anyone of his peers produced. That put him on the same rung as Nick Cave (and both of them well above the old school pouting of a Michael Hutchence). Long after this hit could be found in op shops the sound of bright guitars around the voice that lived somewhere between Geezer Gangster and Bob Geldof you knew you were listening to The Church. After a soaring vocal coda and tasteful solo the riffs leave the song in symmetrical order. End. And you want to hear it again.

And so it goes. Little stands out  but it doesn't have to. An edible feast of swirls, chunks, textures and tunes. You can leave it on. The single stands out but mostly because its craft is superior. The rest doesn't sound like filler as much as the sound of the times (remember, that's a good thing) But then something happens.

A mellotron track of male choral voices with a bass playing harmonics. Kilbey's voice comes in well under this as though it's approaching on the path to the front door. A lithe guitar begins a raga rock figure as the vocal gets closer. Another guitar plays a tinkling arpeggio in the distance. A constant series of declared images (deep but low meaning) ends with the question of the title: Is This Where You Live? The band picks up substance and drive for further verses. From this point until the dismantling ending the song could be any of the others but that the power pop section is just a passage in a setting of something genuinely grand lifts the entire thing up to where the single was feeling so lonely. Too long to be a single by itself, it's the album's epic which would become an obligatory feature of most of the band's '80s output. It's a joy.

The rest is a trio of songs that, like those that follow Unguarded Moment, serves perfectly well to round out the album as a document of what a feisty guitar pop record sounded like back in '81. If it sounds like it's calculated for that effect it's probably best to put most of the blame on the producers but if you do don't forget to celebrate these points of identity and recall how their trails were still being felt decades later when new guitar pop bands were being celebrated for ... something ... when really they were couching their songs in sounds that while once current and vital had become serviceable for conemtporary use. Yes, there is a big slice of late '60s psychedelia (they are on Parlophone!) in this record but it's not slavishly applied, it's rather allowed to influence. I can imagine Steve Kilbey singing a perfect Syd Barret cover I just never heard him do it.

1981@40: PRAYERS ON FIRE - THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (and why sounding dated is a good thing)

I was up in Townsville on holiday around Christmas when I read that The Boys Next Door had changed their name to The Birthday Party and were touring with The Go Betweens. I thought the name change was an odd choice and, as a Pinter-file, mused that it was from the play of the same name. Ok, I thought, I wondered if it would be reflected in their music. The Door Door album was so perfectly power pop with quirks and this development felt like they were moving into something harder and starker. I filed the news mentally and went about my day. Wait until they had an album out.

Should point out here that the band's transition included an album with both band names each of which you could choose as a title. This is distinct from Icehouse by Flowers becoming Flowers by Icehouse as that was in response to naming conflicts with another act. Boys Next Door went into the album as that but released it as The Birthday Party. News like this, travelling very slow at the time I considered Prayers on Fire to be the first Birthday Party album. Just a quirk of my memory.

The record was released in April 1981 but I was first aware of it form a review in the fanzine X-Change. The reviewer was so cowed by having to describe the album he wrote it as a fiction, an abortive short story about the neighbourhood bad kid whose childhood atrocities put him off limits to all others by their parents. Not only could I relate to that (from one of the good kids' perspective) but that the LP had forced the gleefully non-professional reviewer away from trying to be reserved and objective made me want to hear the thing.

I didn't have a record player that worked. I was still living with the screaming injuries that made up my brother's marriage and fatherhood (no, the kids weren't hurt and the injuries were pyschological but there was a lot of screaming) so I probably didn't need this album in my life. Nevertheless, in the way you will, I found myself noticing tracks form it played on ZZZ and eventually found someone to tape a copy for me.

Zoo Music Girl starts with galloping tom toms and ugly bass, slightly broken, before a thin whining of a guitar figure on the higher strings comes in like a mosquito when you're trying to sleep. The punchy vocals chant the title until the screaming double voiced lead vocal comes in over a sudden tempo change which feels like waking into a gale. The lyrics are aggressive and nonsensical, masochistic, pleading, Elvising and grunting. A brass section bleats low behind it. It might be closer to Charles Mingus waking from a nightmare but what it isn't is rock. The term tribal would soon get batted around when this or that band sounded less like Visage than the middle act of King Kong and it was used of this an a few other tracks on this record but it doesn't fit. There's no ritual here. There's plenty of sex and violence, as there always would be with The Birthday Party, but it's more like fun in a dark room than a sacrifice to the tiki gods. So, oddly, for all its over the top force and pose, it does not come across as contrived. It actually sounds clear and raw.

Cry adds distorted John Lee Hooker riffs to murmuring backing vocals and a tortured shouting lead. Capers dives into Brecht Weill territory and comes up sounding like the weirdest circus act you've ever seen. Two swift and engaging numbers with a sprightly step and pleasantly macabre tone. Sounds like a fun ride, doesn't it.

Well, a raked open chord lets loose a brooding bass figure and we're in Nick the Stripper's world. Everything rises from the swamp. The drums push up and it's no 4/4 rockin' role. "Insect!" snarls the voice and repeats until it turns into "incest". A detective movie brass figure bams out and Cave's growl slithers to the surface: "Niiiiiiiick the stripper, hideous to the eye." A sleazy horror tale swirls around the room as the guitars float and snarl. Nick the stripper dances on all fours. He's a fat little insect. Here we go again. Rowland Howard takes a brief meandering solo that loses itself in the sweat the first time but, energised, returns busier and darker until the end. Everything about the song is uneven, the solos coming in like voyeurs and leaving, the brass figure just turning up here and there. You can waste your time picking out influences but for intent and motion nothing has sounded like this before.

Ho Ho kicks in with drums and an ironic feeling guitar figure that is minor but sounds chromatic. Rowland Howard's vocal is more subdued than Cave's but more melodic for that. He sounds exhausted but it's more like playing a role than real fatigue. The pirate yo ho ho call bumps the lines about sick winds to build a picture of a ship adrift. What kind of ship? Who's at the helm? We might not want to know.

A sizzling wash of ultra fuzz pedal white noise is kicked in by a guitar and bass riff, another non rock time signature and a Nick Cave vocal that variously barks and screams. Figure of Fun is a first person evisceration of the kind of moribund fan of this band as well as contemporaries like the Cure, Bauhaus or Joy Division. Morose and rejected but persistently declaiming that he (almost certainly gendered in this case) doesn't need the approval of the crowd, money, love, sex or anything that they compete for. If the concept of the sigma male had been current back then this song would have been his anthem. A decade and a bit  on, Henry Rollins would bark out his own lashing in Low Self Opinion. That the Brithday Party targeted so many of their own fans at the time puts them in the same set while appearing to sing from the cool team. Post modern much?

A massive noir movie bass riff, solidified with low piano keys and big tom toms begins King Ink. A sneering descending riff on the guitar enters and leaves and enters again. Meanwhile King Ink lumbers though the dark, stinking, self-loathing but powerful, a threat composed of a void of doubt and violence. The band give him form and a kind of scaffolding to move across with punchy riffing and force. Abstract but no less frightening for that.

A Dead Song brings back the jungle telegraph drums, adding screeching guitar as well as a rising/falling chromatic riff that could be from a surf rock number. Cave wails, distraught and ugly, in confusion. Is it religion or just an all pervading despair? The dance comes to an end with a cried "thou shalt not" and "the end".

A dark bass slumping riff and a screeching sax on the top with jazzy drums. Yard. Cave caterwauls over the swamp water. The narrator is sitting "father's hole" which could be his corpse or his grave. It feels like Wise Blood the musical that never hit Broadway with a big chaser of New Orleans blues. "Hands and feet. Knobbly knees. Yard. Yard" Maybe imprisoned in the yard or finally emerging from it. The riff shuffles to a clean finish but there is no end for this character.

Dull Day, appropriately enough, begins in more or less standard rock fashion with a chord progression. Cave comes in with two small verses about someone who feels little other than irritation at his surrounds. Even in the abstract when he cuts his feet on the pieces of coloured light that have broken after falling on the floor. In the second his head is a night club but it gives him no pleasure so that he insists that any comers cut in. He withdraws and gets drunk. I can't help thinking that this Boys Next Door sounding song inspired a look through the mirror to produce Figure of Fun. The Birthday Party were like that themselves as regards their earlier incarnation which extended beyond a band name to create a new ethos. Having them both on the same LP says that to me.

A chromatic riff played on the lower piano keys in a strident Brecht/Weill strut. A sax joins in with a chromatic descant as Cave tells of trying to kill something with a hammer. Nothing's working, though, and when he tries to kill it in bed but the nuns in his head rise and beat him up from inside. He ends by saying that "it's just you and me, girl. You and me and the fat." The last word (which Cave knew was Australian slang for erection) is repeated with increasing quizzicality as the stride of the song and the album come to an anticlimactic end.

Most of these songs are three minutes or less. If it weren't for the defiantly ugly layout of the album cover art you might have picked this one up in the racks of a record shop and thought it promised a power pop band. But if you played it not even the accessibility of Dull Day would have supported that misapprehension. This platter from the days of Visage and Duran Duran did not conform to the kind of thing that was charting. And that leads me to why this album is important and also why it is important that it be regarded in its time lest the kiss of death of the judgement "timeless" be slimed upon it. 

This album is firmly in the realm of post punk. For starters there is no one thing it sounds like. You can see viscera and offal of Brecht and Weill as well as hear the menace of the Stooges and a lot of blues anger pushed very little into the space between melody and noise. But none of those things matter as much as its coherence: it was made by a band at that time. So what was the time?

It was Human League when they were still dark and strange (and made the opposite journey to the Boys/Party), the lightless quirkiness of Snakefinger and the sheer terror of the guided found sound of Throbbing Gristle. Even a lot of things that did chart like The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees played on the shady side of the street. But influence is only lateral to its time with cover bands, whatever stirred the Birthday Party had stirred long before and when taken as a whole was rendered by absorption unrecognisable. This, is the fat, screaming spirit of post punk, a label so surrendered that it was only ever adopted in hindsight and contains so much diversity that the U.S. variant of it, No Wave, fits much better. The Birthday Party fall and remain post punk.

But lest you should think I'm damning with faint praise let me open up the ceremonial brass section by declaring that this clear association with time and place elevate the band higher than pretty much anything deemed timeless. The free for all contributions from this album's forebears blend until they just sound like The Birthday Party in 1981. I'm not talking about this kind of reverb or that production standard but the attitude that brought songs like these to soundscapes like these: that a group of musicians mixed it up with theatrics and wild abstractions regardless of whether it tied in with the broader culture around them. 

And that's the other thing, if anything like this album were to be made today it would be in tribute. The past thirty years have seen the notion of market forces survive the physical record industry to the effect that playground law rules more strictly than it ever did which means that everyone just sounds like the bullies. A friend of mine who participates in panels that judge new songwriters told me he'd lost count of how many times the C-A minor-F-G chord progression was turning up. There were of course commercial forces in 1981 that pushed an aesthetic on to industry success and the mainstream of course absorbed even the spikiest of post punk so it could be slipped easily into a Pepsi commercial. But, when the market itself changed from the ground up as it has, commercialism and creative will are seen as indistinguishable. When Prayers on Fire was released they were never in the same sentence.

It's important that this record is from 1981, from before rock music's innovation nestled into its quiet death in the '90s. In an era when everyone can be kind of famous fewer than ever stand up to leave for their own chambers and do as they would. You didn't have to know about the band as personalities to understand this, a listen to a cassetted copy was enough for me. Take a look at a promo shot of Good Charlotte and then try and reconcile that with any of their tracks which never sound anything but mainstream. 

When I first heard the single Release the Bats from the end of 1981 I thought it sounded so extreme that I laughed. I'd scream the first lines when out with friends as a kind of rallying cry to the kind of person in Figure of Fun. But then I heard it a few more times. A friend said, it's great until you really listen and realise it's an actual song. The greatness of this moment of The Birthday Party is that you never had to make that realisation. It was just there if you wanted it.