With Cave, the new-wave Byron, booming lyrics of disaster and screaming sounds of torment, they were chaotic, scary and very, very loud. Junkyard , the third Birthday Party album, was recorded in London, where, in exile from their native Melbourne, Australia, the band had built up a fanatically devoted audience. Utterly at odds with the work of their contemporaries, and unlike anything that has come since, their music is hard to classify. It's certainly uncompromising, even demanding, but it's also exciting, passionate and dangerous, and it went on to influence much of the mid-Eighties industrial scene. Ripe with the classic early-Goth fascination with the grotesque, they were also prime movers in the Goth movement.
Stories often remain half told, glimpsed in almost unintelligible vignettes.
Dead Joe , for example, borrows from J G Ballard in its depiction of a traffic accident as both sculpture and junk, rather than simply the setting for Joe's final moments. Neither of the album's two versions even approaches logical narrative. It's a feast of dramatic music, plump with extremes of tragedy and comedy, and jolting forward on the brink of collapse.