Songfacts®:

• The weaponization of bats isn't even the weirdest thing about this song. The bigger question is: what's all the stuff about the sex machine?
  
  Lyrically and musically, "Release The Bats" is quirky, unbalanced, and irreverent. As the title suggests, it's about unleashing aggressive bats, some of which explode. They are sicced on a woman and sent directly up her skirt. As the story develops, the woman is identified as a "sex vampire" and a "cool machine," and may or may not be a robot of some sort.
  
  baby is a cool machine
  she moves to the pulse of her generator
  
  There's no way to tell for sure.
• "Release The Bats" is a parody of bad goth music and was an inside joke about how the Party was being unwillingly associated with goth. Despite The Birthday Party's best efforts, the song ended up influencing the genre anyway, and got theme even more firmly entrenched as a "goth band," which irritated them to no end.
• Band members Nick Cave and Mick Harvey wrote "Release The Bats" when they were in their early 20s. Both men continued collaborating throughout their careers, most notably in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Harvey also played bass drum on the track while Cave sang.
• "Release The Bats" didn't break into the main charts, but it reached #3 on the UK Indie Chart.
• The Birthday Party released this song as their first single on July 31, 1981, with "Blast Off" as the B-side. The advertisement for the song read: "Dirtiness is next to antigodliness."
• At first, the song wasn't intended to be recorded, even though it was a staple of The Birthday Party's live act. Harvey said that the recording "happened almost by accident."
• The studio version was recorded at Townhouse Studios in London, which housed the likes of Queen, Duran Duran, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Elton John, and many others. The song was first recorded during a live session with John Peel, a legendary UK DJ.
• The Birthday Party included the song on their final studio album, Junkyard, in 1982.
• "Release The Bats" was sung by Nick Cave with an Elvis shiver and hysterical horror exhortations. "We'd learnt rockabilly from Link Wray and the Melbourne pub scene and Nick was incredibly into early Elvis," drummer Phil Calvert told Uncut magazine. "'Release The Bats' is almost a comic poke at that sort of vibe, with a lot of attitude."
• Though it became a goth staple, the band struggled to take this song seriously. "I'd written the music," Harvey said. "Nick started singing the words and it all just fitted together. We were in fits of laughter because it was just preposterous. Very exciting, but it's a really silly song."