This is fascinating: An early—1978—interview with Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard back when the group that would eventually gain infamy as the Birthday Party were still known as the Boys Next Door. Cave would have been 20 years of age here and 18-year-old Howard hadn’t even been in the group very long at all at that point. The YouTube poster speculates that this might be the very first Nick Cave interview—at least one captured on videotape—and I reckon this might be so.

The Boys Next Door formed in 1973, when Cave, Mick Harvey and Phill Calvert were all students at the Caulfield Grammar School, a private boys school in suburban Melbourne.  Although their repertoire originally consisted of David Bowie, Alice Cooper and Lou Reed covers, the Boys started performing Ramones songs as early as 1975 when bassist Tracy Pew, another student at the school joined, along with punky originals with titles like “Sex Crimes” and “Masturbation Generation.” With Howard’s arrival, his trademark feedback guitar sound gave a violence to their music that had been missing. He also brought along a song they’d be closely associated with, “Shivers,” a number the group performs below with Howard singing.

In the interview footage (a handmade title card near the end identifies it as “Conversations”) the kid asking the questions seems quite drunk. I’ve seen dozens, probably hundreds of interviews with Nick Cave and he’s always been a cool customer. Here his persona seems already quite fully-formed, even at this tender young age, as he gives the “interviewer” bemused looks and takes a long time to answer his goofy questions.
 

 
And from the same uploader, a vintage performance clip of the Boys Next Door from 1978 doing “The Night Watchman” at Ethel Hall in Swinburne College, Melbourne, Australia.
 

 
“Shivers,” here with Howard on vocals and Cave on guitar in 1978 at Tiger Lounge, Royal Oak Hotel, Melbourne