Birthday Party - Live in Athens, Sporting, Sep. 17,1982

Harold Pinter passed away on Dec. 24, 2008. He had written twenty-nine plays among which The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal marked the second half of the 20th century. His works comprise an anatomy of the contemporary British society. Pinter's influence as a playwright is enormous; very important figures such as Sam Shepard and David Mamet have been strongly influenced by him. He has also worked as a screenwriter for movies such as The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007), while he is also responsible for adapting his aforementioned plays. He had also been an actor, director and poet.
Pinter was also a vigorous political activist; an artist that was living, breathing, realising and outspeaking the problems of the society of which his was a member. In 2005, in his acceptance speech, given from a wheelchair, for the Nobel price award for literature, he strongly attacked the US foreign policy arguing that "the United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War" and continued his speech giving examples. Later on, for the same subject, in a phrase full of irony regarding the respective policy of the media, he said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Of course, his Nobel speech was only a tiny part of his overall attitude.
During the 80's, his was constantly criticizing Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, while in 1999 he strongly opposed the involvement of the United Nations in the war in Kosovo. As for the invasion in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, he cited Tony Blair and George W. Bush as mass murderers and war criminals.

Check also:
haroldpinter.org
Harold Pinter (wiki)
Guardian's obituary
Guardian's pictures

Pinter's Nobel speech



Today's upload offers a bootleg recording of Nick Cave's group before the Bad Seeds, the Birthday Party, the name of which many claim that pays homage to Pinter's famous play. Their sound, a disturbing blend of post-punk and industrial, is, of course, some thousand miles away from what a contemporary fan of the Bad Seeds expects to listen to. This concert documents a group with a primitive, dirty sound, equally violent and poetic with a self-destructive frontman howling to conjure his demons, provoking the audience to follow him. It is interesting to note that this was one of the very first concerts given in Greece by western rock artists; from what we can hear, the audience that attended were a little bit "unprepared" for such a sonic and visual assault...
That night, the Birthday Party were: Nick Cave (vocals), Rowland S. Howard (guitar), Tracy Pew (bass), Mick Harvey (drums), Jim Thirlwell (aka Foetus) (saxophone)

Tracklisting:
01-Hamlet Pow Pow Pow
02-Sonny's Burning
03-6'' Gold Blade
04-Deep In The Woods
05-Dim Locator
06-Fears Of Gun
07-Still Burning
08-Release The Bats
09-She's Hit
10-Funhouse
11-Junkyard
12-Loose

download link: here