Birthday Party: Friend Catcher

[jhexp]

Does anyone know how Rowland S Howard got that insane sounding intro to The Friend Catcher by The Birthday Party? It sounds like a motor crash in a car driven by a banshee in heat.
I’ve seen a live version and even he wasn’t able to replicate it.

[MattK]

I can't find the quote at the moment, but I know Tony Cohen (session engineer) worked with RSH to make his tone as harsh as possible. I think it ended up as Jag -> MXR Blue Box -> MXR Distortion Plus -> Fender Twin Reverb absolutely cranked, then surrounded by sheets of corrugated iron with contact mics on it. Absolutely brilliant, better than anything Nick Cave did.

[jhexp]

Thanks for the info., makes sense.
I’m guessing some room mics placed far off for the ambient noise catching the feedback off his Twin Reverb mixed in as well. One of the most chaotically beautiful intros ever recorded, and agreed, Birthday Party were much better than Nick Cave’s boring solo material.

[timtam]

I was writing something along similar lines about Tony Cohen etc when I decided to check Robert Brokenmouth's book on Nick Cave and the Boys Next Door/Brithday Party on my shelf ....
"(The title of the Hee-Haw EP) comes from Nick's 'hee-haw' noises at the beginning of the Friendcatcher'. (p66)

So if true ... it's Nick's voice ! OTOH he does eventually utter the actual words 'hee haw' but only about half way through the song. So maybe that's wrong. Listening to it again now it's hard but not impossible to reconcile the high pitched part with a voice (and knowing how Nick sometimes sang then). Less so when it changes pitch (which could then be guitar). I can't recall if they reproduced that opening caterwaul live on the many occasions that I saw them around that time. It is however typical of those early Birthday Party sounds - that were often a wall of noise/sound that eventually got anchored to something more tuneful by a thundering Tracy Pew bass line.

Anyway this is what I had previously written before checking Brokenmouth ...

I don't have any particular knowledge. I think you'd have to talk to someone who was actually there to get the truth. Unfortunately Rowland and engineer/producer Tony Cohen are both gone now. Mick Harvey probably knows. Mine are just rough impressions I recall reading at the time ... stories of how the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party made their early records. Like how they and Tony Cohen played around with creating extreme sounds at Richmond Recorders studio during those early recordings.

Cohen was still pretty young as an engineer then, and his experience would have been mainly with what passed for 'commercial' music in Australia in the mid- to late-1970s ... pretty dismal stuff. But he got to do much more of a producer role on the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party work, partly because the band were inexperienced in the studio, but were intent on creating sonic mayhem. He then basically went on to make a career of producing that less conventional music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cohen

I just found some more general info on the sessions in ch6 of the biography on Cohen here (but nothing specific):
https://web.archive.org/web/20211202064 ... -blair.pdf
eg
"Rowland Howard had brought along a Blue Box [Boss* octave/fuzz] with numerous pedals as well as a Space Echo which was a tape echo machine used to repeat the sounds it picked up. With every knob turned to the max Rowland began to frantically work the pedals as feedback caused a constant piercing noise. The feedback was coursing from the speakers irrespective of any guitar chords and was further amplified and duplicated by the echo machine. It was a truly horrible noise."
"To make the guitar as abrasive as possible the amp was surrounded by a tunnel of corrugated iron with microphones placed on the metal itself."

*oops should have said MXR - thanks for the correction below.

[MattK]

Nice, but there's no way that intro is anything other than Rowland channelling another dimension.
(also, note to that source, the Blue Box is very much an MXR pedal and Boss make nothing like it)
One of our forum members used to sell a RSH tribute pedal which was a clone of the Blue Box and a clone of the Distortion Plus in the same enclosure. Enter at your own peril!
I have a Blue Box but I am waiting for the right day (and the right power adapter) to sit down and attack it.

[MattK]

Tony Cohen's own words:

Rowland always wanted more treble on his guitar, so I brought in sheets of corrugated iron and made a tunnel covering his amp, with contact mics placed all the way along. It sounded awesome, completely over the top, which was exactly what he wanted. Tin exaggerated the treble frequencies. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use much of the sound in the mix because it destroyed everything else. I tried the technique on kick drums but it didn’t work, it just made the fillings pop out of your mouth. We were experimenting a great deal. Not all of it was brilliant, but it’s nice to explore.

from https://goodreadingmagazine.com.au/arti ... etely-mad/

[MattK]

Also Harry Howard made a lovely little photobook about Rowland's Jag. I *think* it's still available, a nice thing to have:
https://foundsound.com.au/products/19130

[timtam]

Nice, but there's no way that intro is anything other than Rowland channelling another dimension.
(also, note to that source, the Blue Box is very much an MXR pedal and Boss make nothing like it)
One of our forum members used to sell a RSH tribute pedal which was a clone of the Blue Box and a clone of the Distortion Plus in the same enclosure. Enter at your own peril!
I have a Blue Box but I am waiting for the right day (and the right power adapter) to sit down and attack it.

Any other band and I'd have said there's no way that's a human voice. Having heard Nick make extraordinary noises on many occasions around that time I'd say it's possible that at least the high pitched part is him.

Boss was my mistake (in []), now noted above.

The original run of Harry's picture book of Rowland's jag is all gone according to his Facebook. I had seen the undated 'pre-order' at Found Sound before but am not sure if it indicates a new run or not ?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=45616&p=1774465&hil ... d#p1774465

[MattK]

Ah, well I'm glad there are enthusiastic buyers for the book!
There's no point arguing opinion, but one other piece of evidence is that the metallic shriek is featured several times and discussed in the brilliant documentary about RSH, Autoluminescent.
I say this every time but it's maybe my favourite movie about a musician I've ever seen (and I have seen a lot). You can rent it for a couple of bucks here:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/autoluminescent

[timtam]

Yeah happy to agree that's it's more likely Rowland than Nick. And the wonderful/sad Autoluminescent does add a bit ... with Tony Cohen talking about multiple effects, changed-pitch feedback, and miked-up corrugated iron around the amp (!) on Friendcatcher, from around 26:30 minutes in (I downloaded it from somewhere long ago). Friendcatcher is being played over some live video of Rowland playing, but pretty sure it's only the record version and so the video is probably from elsewhere. And so maybe they never reproduced that opening live.

[Plumerai]

This Birthday Party doc is playing NYC this weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhmSg9zUgFo