The Birthday Party played the legendary Haçienda Club in Manchester once in 1982 and once in 1983, and, per Haçienda policy, both shows were videotaped for posterity. The Birthday Party’s two most recent releases at that point were also their two best albums, Prayers on Fire and Junkyard, and based on this footage there’s a strong argument that they were as good as any band in the world at that moment.

The shows were released under the title Pleasure Heads Must Burn on VHS by Ikon in 1983 and then again on DVD by Cherry Red in 2003. The DVD release had a bunch of nifty extras such as a bizarre video for “Nick the Stripper” and some other Dutch and Australian and British clips.
 

 
In the 1982 show Cave is wearing a pale blue (possibly grey) blazer he would probably not be caught dead wearing today; a year later his jacket is black. So many of their best songs are represented here, “Hamlet (Pow! Pow! Pow!)” and “Dead Joe” and “Release the Bats.” Both shows are shot in an immersive, “up the bracket” style that is very effective.

More after the jump…

 
A fresh-looking, immaculately dressed 21-year-old Nick Cave covers the Nancy Sinatra classic along with Mick Harvey, Phil Calvert and Tracy Pew as The Boys Next Door, the original name of The Birthday Party, in 1978 (Rowland S. Howard would join them soon afterwards).

I’m a massive Nick Cave fan, but I’ve never seen this clip before. It’s pretty amazing to witness how fully formed his rockstar persona was then, even at this tender age.

Love the mascara. Adam Lambert eat your heart out…

Video directed by Chris Löfvé:

 
Sad news from Australia: Rowland S. Howard, the guitarist for post-punk legends, The Birthday Party, died of liver cancer on December 30th, 2009. Since the Birthday Party’s break-up in 1983 over his “creative differences” with Nick Cave, Howard’s distinctive, angular, “broken glass” style of guitar-playing has featured in groups such as These Immortal Souls, Crime and the City Solution, Nikki Sudden and the Jacobites and in collaboration with Lydia Lunch on their astonishing goth-tinged cover version of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s classic, Some Velvet Morning.

Howard told the Australian edition of Rolling Stone that he had liver cancer and was on the waiting list for a donor. “If you’re trying to write about the human condition there is only so many things you can choose from. Being told that you’ve only got a couple of years to live without a transplant is a pretty frightening experience and certainly changes the way you feel about your life, [it] makes things so much closer.” Howard was 50.

Below: The Boys Next Door (the original name of The Birthday Party) with a young Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave, perform their cult hit Shivers: