We draw from the large book of the Rock’n’Roll folklore and open the sides to the early eighties. It was a toxic mix of drugs, chaotic live shows and developing animosities that Nick Caves Birthday Party collapsed in the end. The band founded in Australia, whose members soon lived and worked in London and finally moved to Berlin, operated on the edge of a “huge explosion”, so Birthday party guitarist Mick Harvey once described it. The narrow line between tension and tensions could no longer be taken. And the Bad Seeds were not yet invented.
In this small time window, Nick Cave’s collaboration with the Berlin instrumental band falls the skin (in the occupation of Christoph Dreher, Martin Peter, Thomas Wydler and Remo Park). The skin plays two special features of this confusion by the Wall, they use the sometimes solemn power of two electric guitars and they keep taking up their pieces with guest vocalist: inside, Debbie Harry, Blixa Bargeld and Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon, Anita Lane and Alan Vega. For a while, the loft of skin bass player Christoph Dreher is the socio-top of a Berlin underground network, about which the Neu-Berlin Nick Cave had to stumble.
Because the recording studios in Berlin are too expensive and the plan to book the Can-Studio in Weilerswist fails, the choice falls on the “Studio Funk” in Aachen, where Dreher lived in Berlin before his time. It runs like this in the studio: The musicians of the skin are playing the tracks as instrumental versions, Nick Cave, who is traveling with his friend Anita Lane at the time, takes a two -day session for singing shots, later his voice can be heard on four of the seven pieces of albums.
The album shines like no other recording between Caves Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds
The album, which was first published in August 1983, which was no longer available in vinyl form for a long time, shines the room between Caves Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds like no other recording. Now the Hamburg vinyl specialists from Grand Chess have launched this newly mastered production of Burnin ‘The Ice. A first re -publication was published on the Hit Thing label in 2004. The label, which was curated by Larry Mullins, part of the live occupation of Bad Seeds, had awakened the attention of CAVE through past publications such as Morphosa Harmonia by Thomas Wydler and the Mullins-Owl production Camissionia.
The skin-meets-cave album now comes out in a limited edition of 1,500 copies in the crystal clear vinyl, and there will be 1,000 copies in red vinyl for the US market. The images that are sufficient in the booklet classify the events into the time, the Nick Cave of these months wears a hair structure that can compete with that of Robert Smith (The Cure). The band’s musicians have adopted the style of the Bebop era, they appear in suits, also fail to contact the audience and avoid everything that could indicate the proximity to the rock’n’Roll folkore.
It is a sound informed by the new buildings and Joy Division
Where is Burnin ‘The Ice musically in these postpunkt and electro-pop days? It is a sound informed by the new buildings and Joy Division, which hugs uncompromising, hard and hot and built close to Noise, the seven tracks underline the exception that the band and their not so prominent, visionary singers conquer these days. In the recordings, the skin impressions of the skin also come together with the Splatter Blues from Cave, a deeply American narrative from the intensive care unit of rock. “Stow-A-Way” at the beginning of the album gives an idea of where Nick Cave will be taxed with his next band (skin drummer Thomas Wydler will be among the Bad Seeds from 1985). A song like an existentialist short film out of nowhere, Cave has suffered in the dear shipwreck and sinks to the bottom of the sea, all attempts to rescue fail.
The longest track on the album, “Dumbe Europe” with six and a half minutes of play, begins in feedback, the guitars sound more like a cutting machine from an industrial operation, the dull beat that starts in the background and a voice that you cannot be sure that it belongs to Nick Cave if you do not know. The narrator reports to death in “Dumb Europe” from a bleak place, the soul frozen: “And if i The tonight that throw me in / some bleak Teutonic hole / six feet under with a snap-frrozen soul”.
You can find out which albums were still published in April 2025 via our monthly publication list.