by Nick Cave & The Birthday Party

We enter the strangely alluring landscape of Nick the Stripper. We look at the Crystal Ballroom scene in Melbourne’s St Kilda and head to the set of the chaotic Nick the Stripper video clip.

The Almost a Mirror podcast has a soundtrack featuring Australia’s top musicians. You can download the songs on Bandcamp. Nick the Stripper features a wild performance by Anna Simic and guttural grunts by Andy Griffiths, who used to be in the band Gothic Farmyard at the Ballroom. Original Birthday Party’s Phill Calvert is on drums and Jasper Fenton does Rowland-esque guitar. The soundtrack is recorded and produced by Richard Andrew at Pharmacy Studios.

Listen to the podcast theme song

The theme song brings a touch of pop whimsy and melancholy, and makes me feel like I’m in a John Hughes movie. Written by Michael Simic, produced and performed by Mick Mooney aka Le Trouble, with backing vocals by Kay Proudlove.

“It is 1979 the year I finished high school and the night of my last HSC exam. It was a t shirt and jeans evening in early November. Gus Campi a school friend and me borrowed his mum’s car and drove over to the London Tavern Hotel on Hawthorn Road in Caulfield South to see the Boys Next Door play. My memory is the gig was in an upstairs band room and the room had a blue white lighting. This gig possessed none of the sweaty crowded edginess of later Birthday Party gigs at the Ballroom. Rather, Gus and I stood in a near empty room with four other paying attendees plus Keith Glass the BND manager who we recognised from Missing Link records where he was the owner and where Phill Calvert the BND drummer worked on the counter. As for the gig there was Shivers and at least one song where the band not quite having it together had to restart at the insistence of a finger waving Nick Cave. As for the band, they gave off a distracted and bored air. They did distracted and bored really well then. We ended up at a party at the home of two of the other attendees somewhere in Richmond off Bridge Road. We’d left the car in Caulfield and got a lift over to Richmond to the party so had to walk home down Punt Road toward St.Kilda Junction. By then the balmy evening had given over to a much cooler night and with no money for a taxi and no bus or train to catch it was a long, cold walk home. ” – JOHN WILSON

PHOTOS courtesy Jane Sims, Andy Griffiths, Mariella DelConte, Melynda Van Wayward: Nick Cave; Tracy Pugh and Nick Cave – Boys Next Door; Andy Griffiths and Gothic Farmyard; Hugo Race; Bands 1977-1980 at punkjourney.com