Honeymoon in Red

Music

Honeymoon in Red is musically eclectic, combining elements of burlesque, no wave, singer/songwriter Jacques Brel, American Underground, the use of a "varispeed" for atmospherics, a song by country pop songwriter Lee Hazlewood, dissonant piano and guitar and muscular bass guitar and the darkly charismatic personas of Nick Cave and Lydia Lunch.

The album generally resembles the angular pop of The Birthday Party's Prayers on Fire, although the song "Dead in the Head" recalls the strident guitar playing of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Unlike The Birthday Party, Honeymoon In Red emphasises vernacular speech akin to 1970s American television and film, instead of emulating the Southern Gothic literary genre. In a 1983 television interview, Lunch spoke of the experimental music as "religious music" that was "not rock".

Album cover

The album's graphic design resembled a lurid 1950s Saul Bass movie poster, with cockfighting motifs. The liner notes from Lunch titled "THE TERRORTORY" comments on commercial and religious puritanical attitudes. It included an Annie Sprinkle photograph of Lydia Lunch's body superimposed onto a rural roadmap, also a photograph by a Chris Stein of Lunch wearing a suicide-blonde wig and heavy make up, holding up a large pistol.

Fallout and release

Mick Harvey has stated that the project was originally conceived as a new band; a collaboration between Lunch, Genevieve McGuckin and Rowland S. Howard. After the initial recording sessions in Berlin in June 1982, the tapes languished without a release. In 1987 Lunch readied the tapes for release on her own Widowspeak label, with added contributions by J.G. Thirlwell and Thurston Moore. Lunch had already fallen out with Nick Cave and Harvey, and they insisted that their names not appear on the release, as they had no hand in the remix and overdubbing. Lunch subsequently used pseudonyms for Cave and Harvey (including "A drunk cowboy junkie" and "Dick Strum", respectively) and obliquely criticized them in her liner notes as "tight asses" and "sheep in wolf's clothing".

A 12" single of "Done Dun" (a Cave/Lunch duet) was released on side B of the Lydia Lunch/Thurston Moore/Clint Ruin single "The Crumb", and referred to The Honeymoon in Red Orchestra.

Reception

Trouser Press called it "not a great album by any means, but of definite interest to fans of those involved."

Personnel