You can forgive people for not being into the Birthday Party. They made some rather challenging music which, while enormously influential on goth and so-called alternative music, they were never going to be a Top 40 chart act. Not in a million years. My fave Birthday Party track is Big Jesus Trash Can, but there's no decent footage of that online. There is this video of Nick The Stripper though, a no-less disturbing song about incest. Cave has more than his fair share of repugnant characters in his work, but Nick The Stripper could be one of his most abhorrent.
I find it fascinating that only the tiniest fraction of the increasing numbers of Nick Cave fans, drawn to him post-Kylie/post The Boatman's Call, have failed to gel with the Birthday Party material.
ReplyDeleteFascinating but hardly surprising.
I never went to see Nick Cave till around 1990. I was too scared to do so before then he was so intimidating a presence. You're right about how many obnoxious and repugnant characters he's created in songs and in prose.