What the bloody hell is that racket?

I think that as a teenager you have a duty to play music that annoys your parents but my mother got off pretty lightly with me considering what I could have been listening to in the post-punk years. I played my fair share of noisy records but I think my tastes were relatively conventional compared to some of the more extreme and atonal stuff you'd hear on John Peel in the evenings which often sounded to me like someone dropping a piano on a cat. Even 30 years later the discordant din made by bands like Throbbing Gristle, Einstrzende Neubauten, The Pop Group and You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath (what a delightful name that is) still sounds completely deranged and makes you go "What the fuck was that?" If I was blasting that sort of barmy racket out of my bedroom stereo I think my mother would have called for the men in the white coats to come and take me away. Though to give her credit one time I was playing "Atmosphere" by Joy Division very loudly and she stuck her head round my door and said "This is nice, who is it?" – but I guess "Atmosphere" is a very pretty record when you think about it.

But lest you think I was some nancy boy who couldn't take the hard stuff I did occasionally dip my toe in the deep end of the post-punk pool like when I bought the hair-raising 1980 single "The Friend Catcher" by Australian terror noise merchants The Birthday Party. It opens with a wall of eardrum-splitting feedback and a monster guitar riff that sounds like the gates of hell opening, over which lead singer Nick Cave growls and yelps like someone who's just escaped from the loony bin. Cave, of course, later had a very succesful solo career and made a record with Kylie Minogue. It's completely batshit but brilliant and a record I still like today, something I can't say about a lot of the weirder stuff I bought all those years ago. Not that I'd play it when my little girl was in the house, hearing this might scar the poor little lamb for life.

Download: The Friend Catcher - The Birthday Party (mp3)