Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Home. There were days when Nick had ‘this awful intuition of Melbourne’ looming over him. When it felt as if everybody was trying to own him and ‘any sign of me enjoying success is construed as me getting too big for my boots’. It makes coming back to Australia hard, even a little suffocating. It is not so far away from the ideas he played with in the old Birthday Party song ‘Sonny’s Burning’. Crime and punishment in his work were as ambiguous as the sadomasochistic twist to his heart in those days. ‘Sonny’s Burning’ enhanced the demonic sexual presence glowing around him in 1982, irradiated in the song by repressed desires that consume him. The narrative positioned the listener as complicit in a torture scenario, enjoying the warmth and light that comes from burning Sonny alive. Birthday Party performances would be incited by a ritual shout-out before it began: ‘Hands up who wants to die?!’15

  Though he played the seductive predator in the song, a carny-like presenter of a sinister peepshow, Nick was slyly sanctifying himself as the victim of an audience revelling in his self-destructive impulses. Twenty-five years later and here he is, no longer destroying himself, which seems to invite greater resentment from some quarters. His crimes in 2007 are health and happiness; his punishment delivered by friends who once supported him. Susie chides Nick for putting up with their snide comments at the Melbourne social events they are invited to: ‘Why do you bother with these people when they behave this way towards you?’ Nick is unusually silent and unable to answer. But he definitely broods on it. Friends of a world he had left behind.

  As Nick left his mother’s house for the ARIA Hall of Fame induction, Dawn sensed his troubled mood and pulled him aside to give him a tight hug and a pat on the back. ‘Hold your head up high, Nick,’ she told him, ‘and fuck them all!’

  Nick Cave laughs in the car about what he describes as his then 81-year-old mother’s ‘sage advice’. She’s a retired librarian, and it’s not her usual manner of speaking. He’ll pocket it away for future reference, ‘a maxim to keep in mind’, even tell Dawn later, to her horror, that he is thinking of getting it translated into Latin and put on a family coat of arms in England. Fuck them all! He wishes he had it emblazoned on a T-shirt right now – Fuck lemma totus? That isn’t quite right. If his old friend, the Boys Next Door and Birthday Party bassist, Tracy Pew, were alive, he’d translate it in a snap – and probably come up with a suitably ribald T-shirt design as well.

  An epileptic fit killed Tracy Pew on 7 November 1986. Nick thinks that after years of heavy drinking Tracy’s sobriety may have brought on the seizures that eventually ended his life at age twenty-eight. ‘I don’t know that for sure, but it can happen,’ says Nick, like he does know. It was yet another event that made the month of November chime with dark anniversaries. ‘Tracy’s death was a really sad business.’

  And if Tracy were alive today, what would he make of Nick Cave: The Exhibition? Ah, Nick suspects, he would probably give him shit for being a wanker. Pennants, you prick! Nick laughs at the thought, questions, ‘How you can love someone so much – and yet have so many punch-ups with that same person? We used to hit each other all the time. I don’t even remember why now.’

  Despite the gibes he’s been getting, Nick says, ‘I’m actually very proud of the exhibition at The Arts Centre. Trying to look at it from the outside, as a show about this guy called “Nick Cave”, I think it is kinda interesting.’ But the 2007 ARIA Hall of Fame induction is harder for him to come to terms with. He looks over at Bleddyn and realises his friend is rattling on about TS Eliot and the artistry of theft, a much worked-over topic between them whether they’re talking about blues music or Greek mythology or, as Nick likes to put it, ‘my favourite subject, me’.

  Bleddyn shifts his conversation to Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and asks, ‘What did you think of that vision of the fish at the end?’ Then it’s back to TS Eliot and how the world will end ‘not with a bang but a whimper’.16

  Nick feels a vague headache coming on, one of the byproducts of the insomnia he suffers when he has had a bad night. ‘Yes, Bleddyn,’ he says. ‘Cheer me up already, and no more end-of-the-world stuff, please.’ But Nick is only half-listening as he starts to jot down ideas for the acceptance speech tonight. ‘Look, do you know any good dirty jokes I can use? I think I’d like to be funny.’ He hunches over his notebook and scratches away. Bleddyn says something crude in French as their car hauls to a stop again, caught in traffic barely half a block further down the road. Nick begins to sing The Loved Ones’ ‘Sad Dark Eyes’ under his breath, till it trails off into an embarrassed croak while the car shunts along.

  The song is all mixed up inside him, the words of Gerry Humphrys merging with his own lyrical improvisations. It’s yet another bastard marriage in a classic interpretative repertoire that includes Cave’s diabolically violent ‘Stagger Lee’, a drastic rewrite of an old blues ballad formerly known as ‘Stack O’ Lee’, and a raucously possessed slant on Bob Dylan’s ‘Wanted Man’. Over the years, the way Nick Cave reworks songs and makes them his own will almost be as important to understanding him as his originals. Maybe the covers are even more revealing, as Bleddyn implies when speaking of TS Eliot’s ideas about theft and transcendence. How does one define a voice you can call your own anyway? It comes from everything you’ve borrowed.

  ‘Sad Dark Eyes’ still sounds good to Nick. It makes him think again of being a kid in Wangaratta, of his eldest brother, Tim, coming back to their home town from yet another moratorium march in Melbourne against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Tim was the real wildcat in the family. A young Nick relished hearing his teenage brother’s tales of the big smoke, as well as the black wafers of vinyl Tim returned with: LPs by Cream, Jimi Hendrix and, yeah, The Loved Ones.

  Wangaratta slides over Nick’s vision of St Kilda today and overwhelms it. Wang! The heat haze of summer rippling off the bitumen, the subzero winter mists chilling a wire fence so cold you couldn’t touch it in the morning. It’s like the country town is floating, and him as a boy along with it. ‘That town was all about walking,’ Nick says, with undisguised affection, ‘just wandering around on foot.’ More random thoughts roll by: a teacher holding up a Bic biro and explaining to the class they won’t need their fountain pens anymore; his school stopping to witness grainy black-and-white satellite footage of the first man on the moon. The closest Nick ever got to sex education, he says, was a documentary in biology class on the birth of a kangaroo. Left to his own devices, Nick liked to contemplate ‘how hot Elizabeth Montgomery looked on Bewitched, the way she wrinkled her nose’ to cast a spell. Oh boy. ‘I couldn’t work out whether it was her or Carolyn Jones as Morticia on The Addams Family that first aroused my interest in women.’ Talk about patterning behaviour. The secretarial types and the Goth girls imprinted on his formative desires – thank you, crap sixties television. Nick looks startled and says, ‘Oh my god, I married Morticia!’ Then he relaxes again and says, ‘Please stop me. I am really talking rubbish now.’

  These days, whenever journalists ask him about his past he tells them to ‘Just Google it!’17 They usually do. But it’s mostly half-truths and data, not much inner life or mystery; it all seems inadequate or wrong. It took Nick a long time to get over his disgust with himself about doing interviews during the 1980s, and the awful truth that they were among the few times he allowed intimacy into his increasingly drug-fucked life. No wonder he was so ambivalent about the process. Then to have things he said ten, twenty, even thirty years ago quoted back at him like he would never change his mind, let alone remember it? If he even meant what he said in the first place? His mother tells him that it’s his own fault. ‘You do like to exaggerate when you tell these people your stories, Nick.’18

  Dawn was right. Nick would develop a practice of rehearsing his quotes in casual conversations till he had them sounding exactly how he wanted them to be in print. Once he had them down, he’d mostly stick to the script – and would often regret it when he didn’t. Like all contrary art
ists, Nick Cave wants his tale told on multiple levels: larger than life, yet right on point; how it was, but always through the prism of how he sees it now.

  In his Birthday Party days Nick regarded his audience with something approaching disgust; these days he appreciates the communal energy that rallies around him. Now and again the old confrontational edge will rear up, of course, giving people a frisson of how it feels to be attacked as much as entertained. But the beast in Nick is well reined in. It’s getting easier and easier to forget he was never an Oz rock hero at the start; you will discover that quickly enough on Google. If anything, Nick Cave cast himself as the villain to succeed: the prince of darkness, the junkie Hamlet of rock ’n’ roll19 . . . yak, yak, yak . . . God, how the press can go on. And having become a drug-free family man, driver’s licence and all, ‘I am suddenly “Quiet and Contented of Hove”!’ Living one’s life under other people’s slogans can be a laborious business, especially when some of them have sprung, well practised, from your own lips.

  After a while the stories run on without him and seem to be about someone else. Decades of this have made him obsess about controlling his own narrative. He admits he finds it impossible to say much in public without seeing the words appearing in black and white before his eyes. ‘It can make you a little self-aware.’

  In any case, here he is in late 2007, not doing so badly: on his way to Australia’s rock ’n’ roll hall of fame. An international star with million-selling recordings, including ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ (his duet with fellow Australian Kylie Minogue) and classics such as ‘The Ship Song’, ‘Red Right Hand’, ‘Into My Arms’ and ‘The Mercy Seat’. The résumé is so rich as to be boundless: writing a row of film scores and award-winning scripts such as The Proposition (2005); soundtracks for theatre and dance projects from London to Reykjavík; invitations to curate arts festivals and give lectures; the odd bit of acting over the years (‘I think I’ve proved it’s not my forte; I’m stiff as a board’); and even a set of violent, white-trash, one-page plays he worked on with Lydia Lunch when he was off his head in his twenties. It has been a long journey from those chaotic early days to singing with the likes of Johnny Cash20 and creating songs that people ask to be married and buried to. And yet in so many ways it is all of a piece.

  ‘There’s more to come, more to come,’ Nick says, hinting at a veritable deluge: another film script in development about a sex-addicted door-to-door salesman21; more soundtracks; and a collection of poems tracing the history of violence in literature that he plans to edit if the copyright issues can be ironed out. As if that’s not enough, the singer launched a side-band project in 2006 called Grinderman. Their sexed-up, prog-rock, bluesmetal and what Nick thought were some pretty satirical lyrics are earning him a fresh round of misogyny charges from critics, as well as plenty of midlife-crisis comments. Even from his mother. Dawn told Susie, ‘I think Grinderman is Nick’s change-of-life record.’ Nick rolls his eyes. The porn-star moustache he has taken to sporting only encourages such impressions. Even so, Nick wonders how anybody could regard a Grinderman song such as ‘No Pussy Blues’ as anything other than self-mocking. A friend messaged him earlier in the day from Los Angeles about the last Grinderman show there, saying he had never seen so many girls in miniskirts in one place before. It really makes Nick laugh. He texted back: ‘It’s sexy music, man! The girls love it! I tell you, Grinderman are the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of chick lit!’22

  As usual Nick feels the old reactive surges sparking extremes in him, the desire to take things even further now that people are angry or upset. ‘If people think what I say in Grinderman is bad, wait till they see what I am doing next.’ In this Nick has long felt an unlikely bond with a renowned feminist thinker and fellow Australian expatriate. ‘I love Germaine Greer, if only for the fact she just stirs things up again. I don’t always agree with everything she says but I understand, to a degree, where she’s coming from: that it’s not always necessary to be right. Sometimes just to provoke is enough.’23

  While the self-titled Grinderman release continues to dominate Nick Cave’s life over 2007, a fresh album of songs entitled Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is ready to go with his main band, The Bad Seeds. Like the gridlocked traffic Cave is caught in today, this new Bad Seeds album has been postponed by his record label, Mute, until people digest the Grinderman recording and the plethora of interests the singer is unleashing on the world. Mute label boss Daniel Miller is worried about how to manage it all: the range and quantity of Nick’s output verges on a mania.

  What’s driving this creativity? An ex-junkie’s need to stay busy, perhaps? This theory has been doing the rounds for ages. It’s a post-rehab ‘condition’ that may have added velocity to Cave’s output since the late 1990s, but a close look at the singer’s life shows the raging work ethic was always there. For a time in the 1980s you could argue Nick Cave was the hardest-working heroin addict in showbiz. At his personal worst, during the West Berlin years, his output was just as phenomenal, even frenzied.

  People say Nick is a driven man: all those records, books, films and live shows across the planet; all the people who have fallen in his wake. Cave seems to share in Keith Richards’ hardy rock ’n’ roll voodoo in that respect, standing where others have dropped like flies. Again and again friends will note how ridiculously lucky Nick is. The guy always lands on his feet. Nine lives like a cat. Others say you make your own luck. But there was something Shane Middleton, the roadie for Cave’s teenage group, The Boys Next Door, observed a long time ago that struck a deeper nerve: ‘I don’t think Nick’s a driven man, but a fleeing man, running from the fear of failure.’24

  It’s true there’s a need to prove his talents are still there, to show that he hasn’t stopped moving forward. Maybe he is striving to prove something to his long-dead father, too? The pop psychologists would love to hear him admit to such thoughts. ‘We Call Upon the Author to Explain’, a song on Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!, goes right to the heart of that material: rock stardom, fan worship, dead-father hang-ups, disputes with God, the full technicolour yawn.25

  ‘It’s all good.’ That’s the shorthand Nick’s older sons, Jethro and Luke, use on him whenever he bugs them about how they are going. The boys were born to two different mothers in two different countries – Beau Lazenby in Australia and Viviane Carneiro in Brazil – ten days apart in 1991.26 It’s one way to start a decade. Distance would strain and complicate the relationship with Jethro as Nick reached out and tried to be a father when he became older. He would be much more involved with Luke’s day-to-day upbringing in London, and was in some ways saved from addiction by having to look after Luke. Nick valued being a father more than anything else in the world, though he may not have appeared to be the most orthodox of parents. He started making changes; he was fighting to get a few things right. But it wasn’t all good before he met Susie in 1998. Not at all. PJ Harvey ditching him over the phone because of his heroin habit had caused him to break down and cry.27 ‘Just say you don’t love me,’ he’d demanded as she gave him the bad news. ‘Just say that you don’t love me.’ She did. And that was really that. He’d halfjoke that he almost dropped his syringe when she told him it was over, but that kind of honesty was as much some bravado to mask the hurt. It was a devastating wake-up call for Nick. That and Susie Bick refusing to see him till he got clean.

  Jethro and Luke needing him, losing in love with PJ Harvey, knowing that heroin was blunting his ability to create as he got older, the sheer boredom of feeding a habit, the work that scoring involved, then meeting and keeping Susie, and the birth of Arthur and Earl – at last, at last, his world was changing, step by step. It can take a while to see that happening when it’s your own life, like starlight reaching you long after the fact. People would ask him if his music had changed because his life had changed, but they did not understand how the songs could be things made to will yourself into another state of being. It’s why art is so dangerous as well as inspirational. It can make things h
appen, terrible things. It can be your liberator. But it can be your gaoler, too, if you’re not careful. It reminded Nick of that old Tarkovsky film Stalker. You needed to develop an understanding of the difference between your deepest wish and your most powerful desire, and how much your work could fuel one or the other, if you were ever going to survive the journey you set out on as an artist.

  Sitting in the passenger seat, Nick Cave grows agitated once more about this 2007 ARIA Hall of Fame induction. He says that he has been told they won’t include The Bad Seeds because there are ‘foreigners’ in the band. Nor will they include Cave’s first great band, The Birthday Party, the Melbourne group that evolved out of The Boys Next Door and shotgunned Cave onto the English stage as the underground music icon of the post-punk era, a successor to the vaudeville viciousness of the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten and the tense interior realms of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.

  Like Rotten and Curtis, Cave became a true Romantic figure on the UK cultural scene – mad, bad and dangerous to know.28 He did not do it alone. The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds – all had given him his wings. Nick Cave considers his solitary honour tonight, and says that he regards the exclusion of his bandmates as an affront ‘typical’ of an Australian music industry against which he has always battled, an industry that has never really understood him. ‘We always had this thing, too, way back then, that anybody the Australian music industry liked just couldn’t be any good,’ he admits. ‘We didn’t want to be a part of it.’