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Hamlet move so beautiful
Nov. 7th, 2008 11:46 amWednesday night I watched the Birthday Party's Pleasure Heads Must Burn, a DVD of concert footage from 1983 and 1983, along with some bonus television appearances from that same time period. I'd somehow managed never to watch this before, shame on me. But watching it for the first time now, all these years later, had its own benefit of knowing how Nick's career would go and seeing how it all began.
First up on the DVD was a video for Nick the Stripper, in which Nick looks about 14 years old and you can't believe that big voice is emerging from that skinny little kid. I suppose he was probably 19 or 20 at the time. He matured fast, though; the next video shows the classic Nick Cave of the 1980s, huge hair and feral eyes and jutting jaw and stovepipe trousers and tall stack of bones piled six feet high, words being wrenched out of his body in his spastic angular dancing. (and if I ever needed any confirmation that my preferred aesthetic of the male body was formed in the 1980s, well, yeah. thankfully I had enough sense to keep away from the serious junkies). The power and ferocity of the Birthday Party shows are legendary, so I was expecting to see that. What I wasn't expecting was 1) how much better those songs are live and 2) how in control of his voice and body Nick Cave really was, when everything appeared completely out of his control. WRT point one, I feel like I've finally heard these songs the way they were meant to be heard. I do have some live recordings, but seeing the visual made my reaction more visceral. The studio recordings are so sterile in comparison. And point two, Nick was always singing there when he was supposed to be, even if he was buried under a sea of people after flinging himself into the crowd. Only once or twice did he lose the microphone. Even with the drugs and booze and general primordial chaos on stage, his discipline is astonishing. The rest of the band was right there with him, Rowland Howard looking cooler than cool, as if Spike of Cowboy Bebop had been a proto goth in London, Mick Harvey looking exactly like Mick Harvey, and Tracy Pew, the gay cowboy icon, pumping away at his bass--in the video to Junkyard, he pretty clearly climaxed on the floor, grinding his bass to himself. It was all lust and sex and madness driven to a seething edge again and again, with Nick the Stripper/Junkyard King/Hamlet holding the reins. Oh for a time machine...
Anyway, yeah, I liked it. Sound quality is surprisingly good, film quality is appropriately grainy. Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of music and hasn't seen it before, to newer fans of Nick Cave for the history of it all and to anyone who remembers vinyl and wants some nostalgia with bite.
(side note: I'm not saying it's a bad song, but I still don't understand what Release the Bats is doing in the company of their other songs. It really sticks out oddly. The vampire imagery frankly pales next to the plain old human derangement of the other songs.)
First up on the DVD was a video for Nick the Stripper, in which Nick looks about 14 years old and you can't believe that big voice is emerging from that skinny little kid. I suppose he was probably 19 or 20 at the time. He matured fast, though; the next video shows the classic Nick Cave of the 1980s, huge hair and feral eyes and jutting jaw and stovepipe trousers and tall stack of bones piled six feet high, words being wrenched out of his body in his spastic angular dancing. (and if I ever needed any confirmation that my preferred aesthetic of the male body was formed in the 1980s, well, yeah. thankfully I had enough sense to keep away from the serious junkies). The power and ferocity of the Birthday Party shows are legendary, so I was expecting to see that. What I wasn't expecting was 1) how much better those songs are live and 2) how in control of his voice and body Nick Cave really was, when everything appeared completely out of his control. WRT point one, I feel like I've finally heard these songs the way they were meant to be heard. I do have some live recordings, but seeing the visual made my reaction more visceral. The studio recordings are so sterile in comparison. And point two, Nick was always singing there when he was supposed to be, even if he was buried under a sea of people after flinging himself into the crowd. Only once or twice did he lose the microphone. Even with the drugs and booze and general primordial chaos on stage, his discipline is astonishing. The rest of the band was right there with him, Rowland Howard looking cooler than cool, as if Spike of Cowboy Bebop had been a proto goth in London, Mick Harvey looking exactly like Mick Harvey, and Tracy Pew, the gay cowboy icon, pumping away at his bass--in the video to Junkyard, he pretty clearly climaxed on the floor, grinding his bass to himself. It was all lust and sex and madness driven to a seething edge again and again, with Nick the Stripper/Junkyard King/Hamlet holding the reins. Oh for a time machine...
Anyway, yeah, I liked it. Sound quality is surprisingly good, film quality is appropriately grainy. Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of music and hasn't seen it before, to newer fans of Nick Cave for the history of it all and to anyone who remembers vinyl and wants some nostalgia with bite.
(side note: I'm not saying it's a bad song, but I still don't understand what Release the Bats is doing in the company of their other songs. It really sticks out oddly. The vampire imagery frankly pales next to the plain old human derangement of the other songs.)
