Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  DEDICATION

  For my children,

  Atticus, Franny and Levon

  And for Bryan Wellington,

  Anne Shannon and Eddie Baumgarten,

  and all the boys and girls next door

  ‘At the end of it all, it was difficult to decide which was the more romantic, the more exciting: the real man or the myth he has become.’

  Colin F Cave, Ned Kelly: Man and Myth

  Nick Cave singing ‘I’m Eighteen’, Boys Next Door gig, Swinburne College, 1977 (Peter Milne)

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: The Journalist and the Singer

  Part I: The Rider

  Such Is Life

  King and Country

  Part II: The Good Son

  Man in the Moon

  Down by the River

  Part III: Sonny’s Burning

  The Word

  Double Trouble

  Zoo Music Girl

  Boy Hero

  Part IV: God’s Hotel

  Shivers

  Flight from Death

  Crime and Punishment

  Epilogue: The Singer and the Song

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Quotes by Nick Cave are from interviews and phone conversations between us from 2010 to 2018. These are used throughout the text – and without endnotes – unless additional context is required.

  Interviews that occurred earlier with me over the course of Nick Cave’s career – and published stories of mine about him and his work – are referenced in the endnotes and acknowledgements.

  Interviews I carried out with Nick Cave’s family, friends and peers – along with material drawn from books, essays, articles and reviews, and Nick Cave’s own journals, notebooks and letters archived at The Arts Centre, Melbourne – are referenced in endnotes.

  In areas where published material and my own interviews overlap, I have chosen the more articulate version, and delineated between a published quote and an elaboration based on my own conversations. This was made easier by well-worn anecdotes, even the verbatim retelling of certain events.

  I have tried to be wary of entrenched perceptions – and their opposite, the elision or rewriting of history, in content or emotion, to fit with a new point of view. Certain truths, even ‘facts’, remain in the province of the group more than the individual. History is still alive to those who lived it.

  Un pour tous, tous pour un

  One for all, and all for one.

  PROLOGUE

  The Journalist and the Singer

  The first time I ever spoke to Nick Cave was in a phone interview to promote his second solo album, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), an ominous, blues-affected work that sanctified the birth of Elvis Presley and thereby rock ’n’ roll itself in quasi-religious, apocalyptic terms. Our conversation around the recording was as dry as spinifex, so slow and spacious it sometimes ceased to exist. As if Cave could not be less interested in what I was asking or saying and never would be. Given his notorious hatred of journalists back then, this made for an uphill experience. I put the phone down with sweating palms and a sinking feeling in my heart. What a failure.

  Dealing with Cave again, let alone meeting him in person, was not something I looked forward to. In 1988 I nonetheless lobbied to interview Nick Cave for Sydney’s On the Street. Second time lucky, I must have been hoping. Face to face he had to be more approachable than that distant voice on an echoing telephone line. Besides, he was the pre-eminent Australian rock ’n’ roll artist of his day. This made him hard to ignore.

  Cave was in town to read from and preview a much anticipated literary work in progress, a book that would become known as And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). He’d already gone so far as to declare himself ‘more of a writer now’1, disowning rock ’n’ roll for its lowbrow qualities and Pavlov’s-dog audience responses.2

  I was given a laneway address for a warehouse located directly behind Sydney’s somewhat alternative and bohemian gay strip, Oxford Street. Cave was apparently holed up there with a girlfriend or a dealer or criminal acquaintance: rumours varied, depending who I spoke to. As always with Cave, rumours were all around him, as if his every movement across town were hotwired into the gossip chambers of inner-city Sydney conversation. The only other wave-making machine of this kind that I would ever know was Michael Hutchence. It was as if you could feel their presence rippling through the city from the moment their flight hit the tarmac and they entered, half in secret, into our closed little world.

  When I knocked on the door of what looked like an old garage, a key was hurled to the road with a vaguely familiar shout hovering invisibly on the Sunday-afternoon air. As I let myself in, I heard footsteps on the wooden ceiling and the creak of a trapdoor above. At the top of the ladder-like stairs that rolled down to meet me with a thud there was now a hole in the ceiling where Nick Cave himself stood, bathed in backlight. He beckoned me upwards like some awful figure in a B-grade horror film about a journalist come to interview a terrifying rock ’n’ roll vampire. I gulped and set forth on my way to meet my Nosferatu.

  Once I arrived upstairs, the atmosphere changed immediately. Cave was a solicitous host, while a young woman I took to be his partner bossed him about as if I had just entered a Goth version of the British comedy George and Mildred. ‘Get Mark something to eat, Nick,’ she said briskly. A large serving of the very best fruits was put before me – grapes, lychees, melon, apple – all prepared and presented in a grand manner.

  As Cave was about to seat himself and enjoy some of this banquet, his partner said, ‘Did you offer Mark some coffee, Nick?’ Again he rose, mock lugubrious, stick-insect angular. He went over to an old metal funnel attached to a wooden workbench, poured in some coffee beans and began to slowly turn a handle: ‘Grind, grind, grind, it’s the story of my life.’

  With a variety of expensive biscuits now also arrayed before me, I was soon thanking the couple for their surprising hospitality. Cave asked me why it should be so unexpected. An evasive answer seemed tactically unwise, so I mentioned the Prince of Darkness thing around him, and his reputation for treating journalists poorly. ‘Who says that?’ he asked, a little surly. ‘Why, the NME [New Musical Express] . . .’ I began to say, in reference to the influential British music paper of the day. ‘The NME!’ he barked. Cave began to grind the coffee beans with much greater intensity. His partner looked at me and said, ‘Don’t get him started.’ To Cave she called out in a calming voice, ‘Now, Nick . . .’ Cave ground on, taking it out on the beans: ‘The NME!’

  Finally he came back over to us with a large silver coffee pot steaming with his efforts. A set of fine china cups were ready on a matching silver serving tray. Mid-pour, Cave lost focus, the coffee slowly streaming out of the spout and around – but not into – the cups in an ever-widening circle, the tray filling with black liquid as if it were a swimming pool, until he snapped back into consciousness and finally found the cups as well. Completing the task at last, Cave then asked me with all the decorum he could muster: ‘Would you like milk or sugar with that?’

  The next two and a half hours felt rather like an interview taking place under similarly dark water. Each question seemed to demand huge reservoirs of concentration from Cave, not to mention frequent pauses and micro-sleeps. Cave’s sometimes thin and creaky, sometimes sonorous and self-consciously refined speaking voice certainly had its hypnotic qualities. I felt suspended, unsure of what to do, or even how to leave. To be honest, I’m not sure the encounter ever quite ended so much as faded away. With everyone heavily relaxed, I departed once more through the floor.

  It wa
s yet another Cave interview in which I felt I had somehow failed, despite Cave’s very best efforts to help me. This was largely because I didn’t really understand how to write up what had happened. I also dreaded sitting down and transcribing the interview tapes, a process that would demand even greater leagues of passing time from me all over again.

  Two nights later, on stage at the Mandolin Cinema in Sydney’s Surry Hills, Cave would recite from sections of his work in progress while an ambient soundtrack rose and fell with suitably ominous and dreamlike effect around his reading voice.3 Looking every inch the ‘Black Crow King’ (one of many self-referential character songs that would add to his mythology, despite the satirical swipes it took at his image and those who subscribed to it), Cave did not so much walk onto the stage as dangle, stoop and hang in the air as if from unseen strings. He would eventually fall off the stage. And yet the cinema was full to the brim with his fans, a sellout performance over two nights, and a success in terms of the mood created by him reading from what appeared to be a credible, black-humoured, Faulknerian work of fiction well on the way to completion.

  In 1994, six years after these readings and our warehouse encounter, the boot would be on the other foot, when I once again spoke to Cave, this time over the phone. He’d been living in São Paulo, Brazil, and – by all public accounts at least – was as clean as a whistle. For me it was an early-morning interview. Very early. Unfortunately, I’d broken up with my girlfriend the previous night and not been home, to sleep or otherwise, barely brushing in the door to take Cave’s call. Thank God I’d prepared the previous day. When Cave asked me how I was, I told him at great length: that I’d been out wandering all night, that I’d been here and there, felt this and thought that, a long, wild, emotional ramble that ended with me saying I loved his new record, Let Love In, and finally asking if he had a favourite walk he liked to take in São Paulo.

  Cave took this all in with a long pause and slight grunt – and we began to talk. It was a great interview and I liked him a lot. He seemed completely non-judgemental about my ‘condition’; in fact, I’d say he was both courteous and curiously amused throughout. As for his answer to my opening question: ‘Well, I make my favourite walk daily. Which is up to my local bar. Out the door, up the street, past the junkyard where the chickens and the old junkyard dog sits. And up a steep hill to my favourite bar, San Pedro’s. There’s this giant barman there who is the fattest guy I’ve ever seen. He is constantly described by locals as a huge woman, but he’s a man with a moustache. He looks more like a giant baby to me. I sit there and read, drink and contemplate the meaning of life. Then I walk back down.’4

  A few years on I would meet Cave again, in 1997 in a rather sterile, fluorescent-lit room at the offices of Festival Mushroom in Sydney. Cave remembered me well enough, but his mood was odd and, I realise now, highly vulnerable, as The Boatman’s Call – a raw and revealing album that revolved around his break-up with Brazilian partner Viviane Carneiro and a wounding affair with PJ Harvey – was about to be released. None of that was public knowledge yet. I nonetheless asked him, almost randomly, if he thought the love of a good woman could redeem a man. It was a question that seemed to arise out of his lyrics and what they implied across the record. Cave looked at me as if I were a total fucking idiot, and then away at the white wall as if he were a hopeless and godforsaken case himself. ‘How the hell would I know?’ he said. And then he looked back at me and waited for the next question.

  More than a decade after that last experience, I began work on a biography of Nick Cave’s life. Biographies are strange beasts, underlined by a cautionary wisdom that dates back to artists of the Italian Renaissance and their understanding that the portrait painter always paints something of his or her self.5

  Nick and I met to discuss the project at his Brighton and Hove home office in the United Kingdom in 2010. I was told he could give me a few hours. We would spend the next three days talking intensely, then speak often in person after that, as well as on the phone, on tour and via email over the years to come. I still remember that first meeting outside his office, a very warm day. We were so close to the beach I could hear the waves washing back and forth over the stones. I had on a new pair of Havaianas branded as ‘Brazilian blue’, a good-luck purchase for my opening encounter. Nick noticed them immediately. ‘Great colour! Mine are pink. I will wear them tomorrow.’

  He was bright as a button, his office charged with creative energy and an apparent zeal that year for the works of American poets John Berryman and Frederick Seidel. Later, I would become intrigued by Berryman’s sense of multiple selves and his use of them to create a performance on the page, interrogating himself through actors that were variations of his own personality. Seidel was very different: commanding and privileged, savage and song-like as he moved through his world. It was not hard to understand why these voices appealed to Nick. He encouraged me to investigate Jerome Rothenberg, whose collection Technicians of the Sacred had become a foundational text for him. It gathered together a global array of shamanistic ritual songs and chants and their contemporary equivalents. The radical leaps in logic, the sense of magic at work, the veneration of sound (over language itself) as a form of meaning or feeling – all resonate in everything that came along from Push the Sky Away onwards. As I write, I can see how Rothenberg’s work changed Nick’s thinking about music as much as lyrics, affecting the spiritual journey he would go on to make Ghosteen with Warren Ellis and the rest of The Bad Seeds.

  On the second day of our meetings in Brighton, we went upstairs to Nick’s family home, a rare act of trust. While Nick was answering phone calls, his wife, Susie Bick, asked if I was hungry. She made me a sandwich for lunch, then offered me tea and biscuits she scrabbled to find in their fridge. Susie had an aristocratic, almost nervous, energy that struck me as eccentric and vulnerable and wild, not quite of this earth. Something about Susie finding those extra biscuits for me felt particularly kind and thoughtful. And though she did not want to be interviewed for the biography, I liked her from that moment on for making me feel so welcome in her home, where others may have been more defensive or suspicious.

  Nick told me later that Susie had a habit of moving the furniture around. He would return from a visit to London or a tour, even just a night out, and not be able to find the lounge and the television. ‘Sometimes she’s moved the entire bedroom to another room and I can’t find that either.’ He seemed to accept this with a shrug. ‘I’ve mentioned it in song. People think it’s some poetic image I’ve made up. I’m just documenting a straight fact.’

  There was a guy downstairs whom Nick had recently helped clear out some space. ‘He was like those people you see on TV shows about hoarding.’ It had been almost impossible to get inside his apartment. The debris had begun to collect outside in the hall. Nick felt a sense of achievement when he convinced him to surrender a number of old and rusty pushbikes, as well as the more general rubbish he’d accumulated. It was all a matter of giving the poor fellow encouragement. ‘I told him, “C’mon, you can do it.”’ Nick laughed. ‘I know he will collect the same kind of stuff and it will all just come back in the door and I will have to do the whole thing again a year from now.’

  Perhaps fame necessitated the same house clearing. I would see how forcefully some people sought to attach themselves to Nick, as well as how wounded and resentful those left behind could feel. I set my own terms of intimacy and distance as best I could, embarrassed by the way people would disempower, even disenfranchise themselves, just to be in his company.

  As a biographer, I came to define the cloudy territory I found myself in as akin to a working friendship. I understood that when the work was over, the friendship would likely pass. This was the dilemma Nick left behind for people as their life story got sucked up into the slipstream of his, forever measured against his adventure and the songs that marked it. I vowed to avoid this fatal attachment. Though, of course, as you get to know people over time, things are never so st
raightforward. The act of maintaining a little distance can be confusing, perhaps even two-faced. So too can opening up.

  On the third day of our meetings, the end of a school day, Nick and I went out for pizza with his ten-year-old twin sons, Arthur and Earl. Like many fathers who worked from home, Nick struck me as attentive and involved with his children, and very close to them, a good father. Earl seemed quieter and shyer, nearer to Susie in his tender demeanour. Although Arthur was fair in his looks, he took more after Nick and was robustly social. He was interested in magic and a bit of a performer. Arthur had an impressive rope trick he could do. Even when he showed me how he had managed the finale, a dramatic and quick untangling, I still could not work out how he had done it. Arthur tried to show me again a few times and I failed to see the revelation each time he explained it. Eventually, Nick waved his hand at him to stop him and said, ‘I think your secret is safe here in England, Arthur. Mark won’t be able to take the rope trick back to Australia with him.’

  By the summer of 2013, I was deep into the biography. Nick and I met in Melbourne at his mother Dawn’s house. It was twilight and we walked with his sons to a nearby park. The boys shared a skateboard and what looked like a very good digital film camera. I was under the impression Earl was more accomplished on the skateboard, but it was Arthur who rode it slowly inside and around a hazily lit park rotunda while Earl climbed onto railings and filmed him. Nick called out to be careful. They explained they wanted to avoid showing the skateboard, to create the illusion that Arthur was floating like a bird or someone in a dream.

  The loss of fifteen-year-old Arthur from a cliff fall on 14 July 2015 was a terrible tragedy for Nick and Susie and Earl and all the extended Cave family. By then my biography project had long unravelled as the quantity, quality and depth of Nick Cave’s output overwhelmed me. What I had started writing became a baggy and unfinished monster with all the scope and cornucopia of Moby Dick. My idea for its form had involved conventional chronology and the nine lives of a cat, but also a symbolic understructure pinned to Milton’s Paradise Lost, a work Nick had referenced repeatedly with allusions to ‘the red hand’ of God.6 I could see many easy parallels: God casts the rebellious Satan out of Heaven (Nick is banished by his father from his country home of Wangaratta); the Fallen Angel gathers his demonic cohorts to build Pandemonium (Nick meets the members of The Boys Next Door and they forge themselves at the Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda); Satan travels across space to wreak revenge on Eden (Nick travels to England to begin his assault on the garden of culture) . . . Such connections were loose and incidental, but also well mapped in song, as if Nick had been writing and reinforcing his own mythology all the way. Which, of course, he had.