The Birthday Party
Nick Cave's pre-Bad-Seeds band. Formed as The Boys Next Door in Melbourne in '78, renamed Birthday Party in '80, moved to London and then Berlin, and collapsed under its own intensity in '83. Cave the feral lyricist, Rowland S. Howard the scraping-glass guitarist, Tracy Pew the drunkest bass player alive, Mick Harvey holding it together. Prayers on Fire and Junkyard on 4AD are the canonical records. Every noise rock frontman who ever climbed onto the PA stack is doing Cave circa 1982.
People
The Birthday Party's frontman in the Melbourne/London years before he fronted the Bad Seeds. Pre-Bad-Seeds Cave is a different animal — drunker, angrier, more prone to throwing himself off the stage. The template for every noise rock frontman who came after. Also: one of the great songwriters of the last fifty years, which is a different conversation.
The Birthday Party's guitarist. Howard's tone — that scraping, treble-bleeding, barbed-wire sound — is the template for half a dozen noise rock bands that followed. Died young in 2009. The solo records are as good as anything he did in the Birthday Party.