The Boys Next Door - Door, Door

The Door to the Cave

Year 1979. The Ayatollah returned to Iran, compact discs were shown to the public for the first time, the West Indies beat England at home in the Cricket World Cup, the IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten, and daswickerman was born – so like any year, a mix of good and bad events. In music, a number of influential singles were released which would go on to feature on albums in 1980 (Bauhaus, The Sugarhill Gang) and Michael Jackson released Off the Wall, his first solo album. Saxon also put out an album, but that’s probably only interesting to Saxon fans. Far and away, the most interesting album of 1979 is Boys Next Door’s confusingly named album Door, Door.

Formed in the mid 1970s in Australia, Boys Next Door released only one album under that name before switching to The Birthday Party and relocating to London. Notably Door, Door comes just after Roland S. Howard joined the band. While Nick Cave went on to be a bigger solo artist, the real soul of Boys Next Door was the collaboration between Cave, Mick Harvey, and Howard. Without Howard’s lyrics or overdriven and distorted guitars to balance Cave’s vocals and the existing guitar work of Mick Harvey I doubt the sound would really work at all. The album as a whole is interesting as an artifact of post-punk evolution that has a level of pop sensibility that wouldn’t really become a major feature of punk for another decade and would influence multiple genres and performers for decades.

The album starts out extremely strong with one of the best album opening riffs of all time. The song, The Night Watchman, also sets a tone of paranoia that permeates the album from front to back. That paranoia is present to some degree in every track, and over the course of the album themes become more disjointed and begin to veer into the avant garde styles that would take hold with the goth movement in the 1980s. Songs like After a Fashion are a good example of how far ahead of the curve they were musically with the layering of guitars, and the use of stereo phasing to add atmosphere to the track complimenting wailing vocals is one of several instances where unexpected production decisions reward a closer listen.

While the front half of the album shows seeds of the coming descent, the influences of 60s rock are still front and center. On Roman Roman the band issues a scathing takedown of Roman Polanski that also offers a level of resignation to the state of the world that lionizes such a man. Door, Door continues to drop into madness, culminating in Dive Position which feels like it belongs in a Guillermo Del Toro dream sequence in a carnival where a monster is trying to make love to a clown or something. I Mistake Myself is where the album drops almost completely into acid pop paranoia. It’s only Howard’s raw guitar work that counters the reverse effects and Cave’s rambling to pull it back from the edge. The final track on the album, Shivers, is a personal favorite of mine that swings between suicidal ideation and beatification of teenage love. What’s amazing is that Howard wrote this song when he was 16 and it holds up to this day. It also serves to bring the album full circle and provides a denouement following the cycle of madness exhibited in the previous tracks.

It’s not just that Door, Door holds up that makes it notable as a 1979 release, but that you can hear its influence across the 1980s new wave, goth, and punk scenes in a more enduring way than some of the other interesting albums released that year. In part because of songs like Shivers and The Night Watchman but also because of how seminal his work in Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party was for Cave Artists you wouldn’t normally lump together like PJ Harvey, Arctic Monkeys and St. Vincent all cited Cave and his work as influential and you can hear the seeds of that career in every track of Door, Door.