To be a Birthday Party fan was and is to understand in one’s bones how much damage and electricity can be conducted through a truly spectacular new wave hairdo. “Thank you,” Nick Cave says at the end of the live version of Junkyard’s “The Dim Locator,” found on the raucous and essential Live 1981-82 compilation, “I love your haircut as well.” And hairdos, even metaphorically, the Birthday Party had in spades. The image of bassist Tracy Pew, practically shirtless and throbbing beneath an oversized cowboy hat, is as iconic a part of the Birthday Party’s mythos as the subway grate is to Marilyn Monroe’s. Whether it was Cave or guitarist Rowland S. Howard who popularized the long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to the belly, that every frontman of every noise gothic cow-punk outfit has adopted since the early ’80s, the lineage of scrawny come-hither-ness that began in the Birthday Party’s camp is undeniable. They were the exemplar of having great hair as both aesthetic and ethos. There’s a reason that the Great Plains’ song “Letter to a Fanzine,” a 1987 nerd-punk anthem of scene-hierarchy jealousy, begins with the lines, “Isn’t my haircut really intense/Isn’t Nick Cave a genius in a sense?” In a sense, they all were.
By the time of Junkyard’s release in 1982, the Birthday Party (along with co-songwriter Anita Lane) had been in England for two years. Left behind in Australia was the band’s old name—the ironic and aptly teen-dreamy the Boys Next Door—and that old version of the band’s core influences: Roxy Music, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and more Roxy Music. “We became a bunch of sniveling little poofs,” bassist Tracy Pew said in a 1981 NME interview. Cave added, only slightly less problematically, “I used to wear frilly shirts and pigtails before any of this English shit. We committed the unpardonable error of playing to the thinkers rather than the drinkers.”
Complicating the shift is the fact that the Boys Next Door’s second album—1980’s The Birthday Party—was also the Birthday Party’s first album. While released under the original name, that album was written and recorded after the band heard the first convention-warping records made by the Pop Group and Pere Ubu, and were transformed. Though newly inspired, the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party album sounded like a near-complete transition into what Nick Cave, Tracy Pew, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, and Phill Calvert would become. With Howard’s mutant mosquito guitar and Cave’s yowl still changing from plaintively put-upon to predatory put-upon-er, the record utilizes the same jerking rhythms of the Fall, another band that inspired the decampment from Melbourne, but the Birthday Party’s sound is swampier, more soulful even, with horns and high-guitar squall giving a threatening silliness to the proceedings. It’s like the band was already driving the Ed Roth hot rod depicted on Junkyard’s cover, but drunkenly and underneath a circus tent.