Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Colin Cave conducting a salesgirls’ course in Benalla, Victoria (courtesy of the Centre for Continuing Education, Wangaratta)

  Woken by his insomnia after a Grinderman performance in 2011, Nick lay in bed wrestling with his complicated sense of who his father was. Eventually it was easier to just work. It may be that certain questions about those we love are never answered. ‘I fell asleep for just two hours till five o’clock in the morning,’ he says. ‘What a bummer. I woke up with Grinderman’s “Man in the Moon” in my head. Don’t know what you make of this song, but to me it’s important and one of my better songs. It crystallises something that I have written about a lot. The relationship I have as an artist towards my father, in particular, and the potential to both paralyse and energise that the ghosts of the dead can have on you. It is one of my themes, man! I mean that also in the collective effect of the dead on our world, their ghosts – I’m thinking of Ned Kelly here again – if you are writing about Wang, not just as a literary artifice but a very real thing that was passed down in the Cave family. A presence. A story. Anyway, it often feels to me like the dead are everywhere sometimes, showing the way.’

  Nick continues: ‘“Sitting here and scratching in this rented room” refers obliquely to heroin use, but it is also “scratching” out songs, “scratching and tapping” – writing on paper and on the typewriter – “to the man in the moon”.16 Grinderman play a mammoth version of this song, on the organ, followed by a superb, super-long and super-heavy mandocaster solo by Warren [Ellis]. It is seriously epic in a punked-up Prog sort of a way! It’s Warren’s solo that wakes me in the middle of the night.’

  Nick’s musical education began at age eight, when he joined the choir at Holy Trinity Cathedral. Anne Baumgarten says, ‘You have to understand what an important social and intellectual hub the cathedral was for many people in Wang. We’re talking High Anglicanism, and life in a country town. It possibly sounds silly these days, especially if you live in the city, but we’d go to church just to listen to the sermons and get ideas to talk about. It was never just about being religious. Church attendance was also a cultural experience. I think that for both Nick and me, this kind of spirituality has been an essential force in our lives.’17

  The choirmaster was Father Paul James Harvey, one of many unrelated Harveys who would pop up and play a crucial role in Nick Cave’s life. Years later, when The Boatman’s Call was released in 1997, the Bishop of Wangaratta would read a news article mentioning the influence of a PJ Harvey on the album’s songs, and would proudly mention the enduring impact of Nick’s old choirmaster to an appreciative congregation.

  Father Harvey was by all accounts a sharp-tongued perfectionist whose rigorous approach would preserve the foundations of what was then – and remains – the last cathedral boys’ choir left in existence in Australia outside the capital cities. Their repertoire included masses by Mozart and Haydn, with an emphasis on the grand liturgical performances at Christmas and Easter. Hymns such as ‘Jerusalem’, based on William Blake’s poem – ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ – were given a rousing treatment, summoning up an Anglican vision of England that was righteous and blissful.

  Nick slyly describes Father Harvey as ‘having a feyness about him’ and being ‘a little like an irritated Stephen Fry, though perhaps I shouldn’t say that’. He recalls being put at the back of the choir, where for three years he would ‘grow taller and taller’ in his lowly black cassock, while other boys would arrive and be promoted forward, where they would then wear purple and be allowed to sing solos – an honour he never received. Nick refers to this experience as ‘scarring’ to his confidence, the first of many encounters that would ingrain a feeling that he could not really sing. Somewhere in the vaults, nonetheless, there is a 1971 live recording of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) that marks Nick Cave’s debut as a recorded performer.

  To some extent, what mattered most in Nick’s time with the choir was the physical involvement with the Holy Trinity Cathedral itself. Rehearsals, and the need to attend mass at least twice a week to sing, would make him deeply familiar with both the rituals of the Church and the artistic architecture of the Anglican faith surrounding him. It is easy to imagine a young boy staring – if only in the throes of boredom – from the rear of the choir, where he would have been afforded a view of an elaborate stained-glass work that wove together images of early settlement, land clearing and modern life in Wangaratta.

  Choirmasters were renowned over the decades for exhorting the boys to sing to the back of church, where this historical diorama dominated their gaze. It is topped by a scene of a vested priest and his altar boy, their backs turned at an altar, offering up the Eucharist in praise. A liturgical text blossoms forth in capitals below them: ‘HERE WE OFFER AND PRESENT UNTO THEE O LORD OUR SOULS AND BODIES.’ The images and the moral are unmistakably theological and social: the life of the town offered up to God as an ongoing story of sacrifice to ensure His good graces. Nick would subvert this theme with grimly humorous irony in songs such as ‘God Is in the House’, the tale of a fundamentalist community possessed by devilishly claustrophobic moral certainties.

  Elsewhere within the Holy Trinity Cathedral is more artwork that influenced Nick’s later passions for religious icons, Gothic painters and Biblically inclined lyrics. A small set of stained-glass windows in the antechamber of the Lady Chapel, which depicts the four evangelists of the gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is especially noticeable. Set beside the main altar, the chapel is a shadowy place where errant choirboys would retreat in whispers, less out of prayerful reverence than childish conspiracy. There is a distinct side-of-stage feeling to it. Of the four evangelists depicted, only Saint Mark is blessed with a luminous blue robe, which attains the most striking lustre when the sunlight penetrates it from outside. Nick would later write an introduction to The Gospel According to Mark for the Pocket Canon series of books from the Bible, emphasising how ‘Christ came to me’ through Mark’s Gospel ‘with a dim light, a sad light, but light enough’.18

  Looming over the main altar of the church is a figurine, Christus Rex, by mid-twentieth-century Austrian-Italian wood carver Leopoldine Mimovich. Directly below it is where the choirboys performed, beside a huge and highly resonant church organ. Rather unusually, the carving that hung above the boys depicts Christ in priestly robes, not in any way bloodied or pained by the Crucifixion. Instead, the carving is serene and powerfully monumental, exuding an intense dignity. It is a portrait of a king unbowed by death: his palms open as if in the middle of a sermon, his fatherly teachings continuing.

  A memory of Anne Baumgarten’s gives this carving even more interesting associations. She recalls ‘how well respected Colin was at school. That’s why he taught the senior classes. I can still remember him standing on a ladder, to play God with a booming voice, in a school play. It was the first time I’d seen that sort of creative thinking and involvement from a teacher. Usually we had standard Shakespeare or Noel Coward plays.’19 Colin in his element again, a God calling his students to the divine possibilities of art, theatre and literature.

  ‘Nick always enjoyed sitting at the piano when he was young,’ says Dawn Cave. After enrolling him in the choir, she arranged piano lessons for him from around the age of nine. Nick remembers the lessons well, but not so much for musical reasons. ‘I did piano lessons for two years; it was just across the road from The Centre, where Dad worked. Next to the piano teacher’s house was a place where the town paedophile used to waylay us young boys when we walked past, suggesting we go into his house and play on his “organ”. I went in once and never again!

  ‘This was back in the good old days when being molested was simply a rite of passage. Back when you had cigarette ads on the telly and seatbelts were just being fitted but people were too suspicious of them to wear them. Ah, there is so much to miss! But let’s not make too much of the local tamperer – he never molested
me, but he did wait for me after my piano lessons and would always ask me if I wanted to go into his house. He explained to me, one time, that masturbation was very good for you and that if you did it in the right way, it was the equivalent to a five-mile run. Helpfully, he offered to show me how.

  ‘Anyway, one day he talked me into going inside the house to play the organ and, indeed, he had a little Farfisa set up. He sat next to me on the stool. I tapped at the notes. Suddenly I felt really creeped out and got the hell out of there. I was about ten years old. This is back before the media hysteria about these things, when the local paedophile was just a part of the social network, along with the lollipop lady and the policeman and the guy at the fish-and-chip shop and whoever else makes the town go around – a bent little cog in the communal machine – but one of God’s creatures, just the same. So, no, I wasn’t fondled and damaged, I’m afraid.’20

  For Nick’s fourteenth birthday, Colin Cave treated Nick, Bryan and Eddie to a screening of Planet of the Apes (1968) at the local movie house. Nick was gripped by the sci-fi fable from the opening moments when George Taylor (Charlton Heston) and his two fellow astronauts crash-land into a lake on a strange planet, after which the three men stumble across backward human beings living under the yoke of simian rule. Rod Serling, best known for The Twilight Zone, had dreamed up the Darwinian inversions on which the final script was based – a satire of racism and social stratification, and any notion that Man might be the superior species. Serling also came up with some startling scenes, including an iconic closing image of the Statue of Liberty, its snapped torso emerging from the shoreline of a deserted beach. It was an apocalyptic revelation to Heston’s character – and to the audience – that this was no alien world, but our future Earth. For the astronaut George Taylor, there would be no escape ‘home’.

  Planet of the Apes’ surprisingly avant-garde soundtrack would earn composer Jerry Goldsmith an Academy Award nomination. Atonal and percussive, with aggressively orchestrated strings and instrumental moans, it immersed the viewer in primitivism and terror. Colin Cave thought he heard elements of Stravinsky in the music the boys excitedly described as ‘weird’. And didn’t the actors dressed as monkeys look real? Dining on hamburgers and Cokes afterwards, he and the three boys had plenty to discuss. They all pictured themselves as the stranded astronauts, though each boy imagined he was the one playing the lead part of George Taylor. Only one of them would get to play that role.

  In January 2012, Nick Cave would recall his first viewing of Planet of the Apes and ‘that fucking bitch-slap of an ending’. He’d been reminded of it while watching Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2010) on DVD at home with Susie. ‘We loved it. It has always been a theme of mine – more and more, actually – of the ordinary human trauma reverberating apocalyptically.’

  If Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate was Nick’s ultimate musical bonding experience with Anne and Eddie Baumgarten, then the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album would prove similarly significant in his friendship with Bryan Wellington.

  The Wellingtons had moved out of Mepunga Avenue by 1970, to a small property on the eastern edge of town. Nick and Bryan would play in the shed, learning how to set off all the hunting traps without ever using them. The idea of hunting repulsed Bryan, and the .22 rifle his father had bought him for his twelfth birthday sat in the corner of the shed unused but for target practice. Nick says: ‘Bryan had a couple of old horses we would ride, past the “Pop. 18,000” sign, across the bridge over the Ovens River, where we used to swim, into town. I remember listening to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono album there at his place over and over again – the one with “Mother” and “Working Class Hero” on it and poring over those lyrics. That brutal vocal and the pounding piano of “Mother” used to blow me away. All of us trying to be transported elsewhere, out and away from this town, to where we thought the world thrummed with excitement!’

  It was a dream Bryan Wellington shared. ‘I do remember this one day very, very well,’ he says. ‘Nick and I both would have been about twelve or thirteen years old. I was at the Rovers Football Ground. Not that I cared much for football. It was just another of my dad’s ways of trying to keep me away from Nick. I’d hang at the front gate mostly, wishing I could leave. Anyway, Nick came looking for me at all our usual meeting places; eventually he came riding up on his bike to the football ground where he knew I’d probably be, standing there at the gate like I did. And he had this black armband on. When he got close and stopped I said, “What are you wearing that for?” He said, “Don’t you know? Jimi Hendrix died today.”’21

  By then Tim Cave was becoming an influence too. Everything from Hendrix to English progressive-rock recordings by Yes and King Crimson were entering the family home, as well as pioneering Australian music acts such as The Loved Ones and The Master’s Apprentices. Tim was also being politicised by the Vietnam War. Anne Baumgarten says, ‘Tim was like the Brad Pitt of the town. He used his cool status to lead a student moratorium opposing Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Tim got dozens of students to abandon their classes, march with him and stage a sit-in right there on the middle of the school’s football field.’

  At home, Tim and Nick were thrilled watching the first episode of The Johnny Cash Show on television in June of 1969. A poised and sober-looking Bob Dylan would make a great impact on them, singing ‘I Threw It All Away’ in the show’s debut. Tim would seek out a copy of the countrified Dylan album Nashville Skyline, and it would become one of the sweetest albums in Nick Cave’s memory, despite the critical drubbing it has always received. As a solo artist in his own right, Nick would reflect on ‘I Threw It All Away’ in the most laudatory terms some forty years after first hearing it. ‘There was always something about that song that was so simple,’ he says. ‘And an audacity to the simplicity of that song. But it was so, so powerful at the same time – for me at least. I was always ragingly jealous of that song.’

  The impact of Johnny Cash was even more profound. ‘Up until then,’ Nick says, ‘I was just listening to children’s music. I saw and thought that rock ’n’ roll could be about something else . . . I got that rock ’n’ roll could be evil, it could be a bad thing; he seemed like a real bad man. Dressed in black. At the start of the show he stood there with his back to the camera, then he swung around and said, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” I think some people thought he was selling out, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it was a brave thing for him to do. Generous.’

  Something akin to Cash’s romantic, if threatening, stoicism was native to the local character of many Australian country towns. Wangaratta took great pride in having been the home base where the 2/24th Battalion of the 26th Brigade of the Australian Army was billeted during the Second World War. Many local young men had signed up with them, earning the battalion the informal soubriquet ‘Wangaratta’s own’. It was this 2/24th Battalion that became better known as ‘The Rats of Tobruk’, fighting against overwhelming odds to frustrate the progress of Rommel’s undefeated Afrika Korps and change the course of the war. Along with the vagaries of flood and drought, this set piece of Australian military history almost rivalled that of Gallipoli, wedding itself to the Ned Kelly myth and an ongoing Wangaratta fable of male resistance and strength under pressure. This same stoicism and bravery could take on a mangled, thuggish form when there was nothing to genuinely fight for and boredom took hold in the town. People could draw on it as an excuse for anything.

  Nick watched as Tim and Peter grew older and began to fall foul of the Wangaratta law. It was not uncommon for inexperienced police, or what Dawn Cave calls ‘hard cases’ with a bad reputation, to be posted away from the city to rural towns, where local youth could be on the receiving end of rough justice. As teenagers, Tim and Peter started to stand out, their long hair distinguishing them from most clean-cut country boys. In 1969, when Tim was seventeen, he left for Swinburne College of Technology in Melbourne. Peter stayed in Wang and weathered the difficulties, by all
accounts a loner who preferred riding about on motorbikes in the bush and tinkering with their engines at home.

  ‘I saw my brothers badly treated by the police, Tim especially,’ says Nick. ‘I was too young to suffer any of that.’

  On the cusp of becoming a teenager himself, Nick was nonetheless poised for serious trouble in Wang. ‘It was your typical country town,’ he says, ‘in that everyone headed down to the main street on Saturday night and hung around and got into fights. I saw my first real fist fight outside the Greek fish-and-chip shop. This little guy was just about to start eating a hamburger when it happened. He was a nasty little fucker. I saw him stuff the whole hamburger into his mouth and start swinging. That really impressed me. Very exciting.’

  Later, Nick would eulogise his brother Tim in the Grinderman song ‘Fire Boy’ (2010). ‘“Fire Boy” is about the loss of ideals and its effect and is a ramped-up version of my brother’s escapades, for sure,’ Nick says, ‘with a bit of Baader–Meinhof thrown in!’

  Dawn Cave says ‘it’s a myth’ that Nick Cave was expelled from Wangaratta High School. Given she was a librarian there, and Colin Cave was still teaching English part-time, it would be truer to say they could see the writing on the wall. Polite hints that it might be better for Nick to leave came to a head when he was involved in an incident with two older boys who pulled down the underwear of a fifteen-year-old girl in the school playground. Nick raises an eyebrow when discussing the incident. ‘The parents of the girl tried to have me charged with rape. But I was only twelve years old, so the charge didn’t stick. The other boys weren’t much older than me. It was just a silly prank that got out of hand.’