I could live inside The Birthday Party and never grow old (or tired). Or so I like to imagine.
Junkyard was the then London-based Australian band’s 3rd and last studio album, released on July 10, 1982, before some of the members morphed into Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds whose first album, From Her to Eternity, appeared in 1984. And while I’m also a Bad Seeds fan (and Grinderman), the brutal manic hairbrained energy of The Birthday Party touches a softer spot deeper down.
The lineup on Junkyard included Cave on vocals, Mick Harvey on guitar (and percussion, drums, saxophone, bass guitar, organ, and bass drum), the ever wonderful Rowland S. Howard on guitar (and saxophone), Tracy Pew on bass guitar, and Phill Calvert on drums with Barry Adamson on bass on “Kiss Me Dead” one of two Junkyard songs co-written by Anita Lane, Nick Cave’s then significant other. And let’s not leave out the cover art by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Dave Christensen, a perfect parental advisory if ever there was one.
From Nick Cave’s (wonderful) The Red Hand Files, answering some questions about his song “Carnage” from the album of the same name (2021):
‘I’m sitting on the balcony / reading Flannery O’Connor with a pencil and a plan.’
I had just read an article that dealt with Flannery O’Connor’s unfortunate attitudes toward race, and her subsequent defenestration, and I am experiencing that particular conflicted sadness, so familiar these days, of watching someone I have loved for so long, and who has given so much to the world, driven to the margins by an unforgiving present, taking part of me with her. More carnage.
There’s a touch of Flannery O’Connor’s southern gothic terror in Junkyard, dirty low down killer blues, sexy rockabilly skronk, and Cave as demented Elvis impersonator (especially on single “Release the Bats” which was included on the CD reissue) ratcheted up to fever dream levels.
Producer Tony Cohen said he was approached by Cave and Harvey before the recording. They felt the previous album [Prayers on Fire] had been a “slick and pleasant, Little River Band record” and they wanted the new record to “sound like trash. A scratchy, trebly sound.”
This is carny music, a favorite Cave atmosphere, a Fun House crammed with off kilter rock ‘n roll. To my mind and ears, Junkyard is a perfectly flawed flawless record, a last gasp of full throttled attitude.