Release the Bats
The Boys Next Door formed in 1977 in Melbourne, where Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, and Phill Calvert were students at Caulfield Grammar School. They added guitarist Rowland S. Howard and bassist Tracy Pew and renamed themselves The Birthday Party around 1980. That year they relocated to London, where John Peel championed them on BBC Radio 1. Their live sets built a reputation for being either transcendent or physically dangerous, often both at once.
By 1981 the music press had started calling them a goth band. Cave and Harvey hated the label. They wrote “Release the Bats” as a parody and set out to mock the vampire imagery and sex-horror theatrics they found preposterous. The lyrics cycle through “sex horror sex bat sex sex horror sex vampire sex bat horror vampire sex” until the words collapse into noise. Producer Nick Launay recorded it at Townhouse Studios in London in April 1981. He could only book Studio Two after midnight because the daytime sessions were occupied by Phil Collins. Released on 4AD on July 31, 1981, it reached number 3 on the UK Indie Chart.
The song became a founding text of gothic rock anyway. The Birthday Party relocated to West Berlin in 1982 and broke up in 1983. Nick Cave went on to form the Bad Seeds. What remained was the joke. A song written to mock a scene had become its scripture.
“I’d written the music. Nick started singing the words and it all just fitted together. We were in fits of laughter because it was just preposterous. Very exciting, but it’s a really silly song.”