NME - March 26, 1983
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY - EVERY YEAR SHOULD HAVE ONE
ROWLAND'S FRIENDS
"How I met Lydia Lunch, we were playing in New York and I met her at the Chaise Lounge. I'd been wanting to record 'Some Velvet Morning' for a while and it struck me as a good idea to do it with her. Not the least because she would be good for selling the project to companies with! And it was true, they jumped at the chance. "After that, the German company Rip Off asked Lydia to record an album, so she got me, Mick, Genevieve (Rowland's girlfriend) and Tracy over to Berlin to help her do it . . . in the end the Germans couldnt pay the studio bill, so the tapes are gathering dust. "Because 'Some Velvet Morning' sounded so good - it had this dreamlike quality and depth - I formed this group called These Immortal Souls with Barry Adamson and Genevieve. There were plans to release a series of 12", each with a different theme, but no company's terribly interested . . ."
ROWLAND'S SORROW
"Alot of my favourite songwriters are people who write when they're obviously close to the edge and the songs betray this quality of weakness or fragility . . . I guess I'm primarily interested in people rather than expressing an idea. I'm interested in affecting people on an emotional level, hit them really hard, so they feel the same emotions you were feeling at the time of writing a song. Anyone who can achieve that I think is very great . . . "If I can make a record as good as the things I was listening to at 17, thinking they were the best, then I'd be satisfied. I think 'The Bad Seed' is really a work of art, strong, powerful, and capable.""
AND HIS FRUSTRATION
"The songs I used to write were really personal songs, and Nick said he couldn't sing them because it was too embarrassing, like reading somebody else's diary. So for a long time I was writing impersonal songs, and it's taken me a year to rediscover how to write self-expressive songs. Now I have to decide which ones are for The Birthday Party and the others I keep for me, Genevieve and Barry Adamson."
- Chris Bohn
(excerpts)