THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
The Birthday Party (originally known as The Boys Next Door) were an Australian post-punk band, active from 1978 to 1983. Despite limited commercial success, The Birthday Party’s influence has been far-reaching, and they have been called “one of the darkest and most challenging post-punk groups to emerge in the early ’80s”. The group’s “bleak and noisy soundscapes”, which drew irreverently on blues, free jazz, and rockabilly, provided the setting for vocalist Nick Cave’s disturbing tales of violence and perversion. The creative core of The Birthday Party – singer and songwriter Nick Cave, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Mick Harvey, and singer, songwriter and guitarist Rowland S. Howard – later went on to acclaimed careers. (More from Wikipedia)
Nick Cave is described by Allmusic as “one of the finest songwriters of the post-punk era, whose hybrid of blues, gospel, and rock complemented his dark, literary style and baritone vocals”. After fronting a band called the Birthday Party in about 1980, Nick Cave assembled a band as a sort of post-punk super-group; and this band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds has released 15 albums in the 30 years since.
(November 2014)
