Number one for three weeks from 5th September 1981
While many interviews have revealed his uniquely dry sense of humour, Nick Cave isn’t particularly renowned for his way with a catchphrase or punchline. In the mid-nineties, you could shove Jarvis Cocker – a man who isn’t averse to a bit of spite and darkness himself - on a panel show and be assured of a few cheeky giggles, but it’s safe to say that nobody called Nick Cave’s manager about putting him on Pop Quiz.So it's strange to listen to “Release The Bats” afresh for the first time in decades, years after it last pummelled my ears during Friday nights at the Rayleigh Pink Toothbrush (goths welcome), and notice both how camply brilliant it is and how indebted to simple sloganeering. For a track which is largely regarded as spearheading the gothic movement, it owes a far bigger debt to Joe Meek and Screaming Lord Sutch than Joy Division or Bauhaus, taking the ketchup and cleavage gore of a thousand cheap Hammer spin-offs as its source text.
“Bite! Bite!” demands Cave at the start, before asking loudly but almost incoherently “Tell me that it doesn’t hurt/ a hundred fluttering in your skirt?” an image which is immediately ludicrous rather than disgusting.
The track, like many Birthday Party singles, starts as it means to continue, like an unchallenged steamroller slowly crumpling up the edge of the street where the parked cars live. There’s no discernable chorus, just a continued barrage of stabbed guitar lines, catchphrases (which as the song progresses descend into excited gibberish such as “sex horror sex bat sex sex horror sex vampire”) and Cave ripping himself into a state of either ecstasy or fury. He seems conflicted about the bats, wanting to destroy them (or “explode” them) as much as he wants to celebrate them, like a wildlife preservation officer who happens to have some living in his attic.
The drumming is also worthy of mention here; in common with a lot of the indie chart entries I’ve been listening to for this period of 1981, the near complete aversion to a cymbal or a hi-hat is both notable and strangely typical. Martin Hannett famously got the ball rolling on this percussive style with Joy Division, but it also became adopted by acts whose debt to Joy Division was less immediately obvious – Felt, for example, were also adding bottom-heavy percussion to their otherwise airy indie-pop compositions at this point. In The Birthday Party’s case, it anchors the sound down with those jazzy basslines, making “Release The Bats” bit-part punk racket with a strange unwieldy swing on top.