Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Amid all these thoughts and memories, Cave suspects, lies ‘something that is driving the force of my songs’. Or some seed, at least, for the way his self-expression has developed. ‘Definitely I’m excited when I write violent and sexual stuff by the details you can insert. That create this jarring effect, or have a telescoping effect: envisaging a scene then adding a detail that zooms in. I can think of other people’s songs that do that too. An old traditional ballad like “Knoxville Girl”, where it talks about killing a girl and then the lyric comes, “I drug her by the hair”. The intimacy of detail: the songwriter is there. It isn’t an objective, voyeuristic thing. Suddenly the writer is right there in the bloody guts of it.’

  Even the novel he was reading when his dad tossed him Titus Andronicus had its virtues, he says. ‘I think it was a fifties-style crime book with one of those raunchy fifties cover illustrations on it actually.10 And on the very first page there was something about “the wicked little gun”. There was something about the way that gun was described and I think it was the use of the diminutive, something so sinister about the use of the word “little”. I’ve done that type of thing all my life. To me there is something quite beautiful in it.’11

  Dawn wept each time she waved Nick goodbye from the railway station during 1971. She was not unaware of his unhappiness as a young boarder – she could see it in his face at the window as the train pulled out. Had she and Colin done the right thing? Dawn was not so sure anymore.

  Nick would watch the world pass him by as his journey accelerated. In winter it was hard to see anything at all. The train would be very cold of a morning, his feet resting on a metal foot-warmer as the carriage rattled along, the mist outside so thick and cloudy it was as if Wangaratta had floated away. It made him think of ghost towns and tourist sites such as Glenrowan. The past could overtake the present and even be more alive. He cried too, of course.

  Her son felt cast out, but, as Dawn Cave recalls it, her husband had visited ‘every possible’ boarding school in Melbourne to find one with the right mix of academic and ‘human qualities’. What struck Colin Cave most about Caulfield Grammar School, he told Dawn, was that ‘it was the only place where they had asked him what Nick was like as a person rather than just about his grades’.12

  In retrospect, Nick is sanguine about the changes forced upon him. ‘When I think about Wang, it’s more about the freedom you can have as a child. I could go where I wanted to go: I lived my childhood by the river, under the railroad tracks, in the mountains. It’s not so much a state of bliss as a child that I remember, more the way it could be as a child compared to how it is now. When I think about my own kids it grieves me that they don’t have that freedom, that they can’t experience it. Small country towns are beautiful to grow up in – and then to get out of by the age of twelve.’

  When Colin Cave received news of his promotion to become Director of Adult Education in Victoria, Dawn was glad it would require a move to Melbourne from the start of 1972. Though they would miss Wang, it was an opportunity for the family to regroup. Nick was still boarding at Caulfield Grammar and clearly lonely; Tim was at Swinburne College of Technology studying sociology, and by his own account ‘going to moratoriums and throwing rocks, getting up close and personal with police horses during protests’.13 Though Dawn and Colin were not privy to their sons’ wild worlds, they knew enough to sense more trouble brewing. Getting Peter out of Wangaratta was another benefit of the change.

  So it was that Colin, Dawn, Peter and Julie shifted into a two-storey, five-bedroom house at 6 Airdrie Road in the middle-class suburb of Caulfield North. Tim agreed to move back in with them. Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War was winding down; a passion for Marxism was making way again in his life for musical obsessions such as The Moody Blues and Genesis. Nick returned to the fold in Caulfield North as well, absorbing big brother Tim’s Molotov cocktail of rock ’n’ roll and politics on a vaguely heroic level.

  This was Tim Cave’s heyday. Led Zeppelin had kicked open the year with a hugely powerful tour that asserted a long overdue generational shift in the wake of the 1960s. Their sound hit young people like the proverbial hammer of the gods. When Gough Whitlam’s Australian Labor Party (ALP) swept to power in late 1972, it represented the stunning end to twenty-three years of unbroken conservative rule under the former Liberal and Country Party coalition governments. The ALP campaign slogan, ‘It’s Time’, caught the public yearning for change. Whitlam immediately set about withdrawing the last troops from Vietnam, abolishing the death penalty, taking the sales tax off the contraceptive pill and making universities accessible to working-class youth by getting rid of exorbitant tertiary entrance fees. He also personally approved what seemed then to be the wildly extravagant $1.3 million purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973.

  Nick – as apolitical as his brother Tim was radically inspired – took almost no interest in anything outside of art and music. Looking back on the times, he says, ‘I must have been at rehearsals a lot.’ It would be naïve, however, to presume that this attitude meant he was unaffected. No artist escapes the landscape out of which they rise. For a start, it was the combination of free tertiary education and generous, as well as easily accessed, unemployment benefits that allowed a hedonistic and bohemian youth culture to flourish. Tim, and then Nick, revelled in this climate. Whitlam’s electrifying victory and a favourably disposed attitude towards the arts launched a visionary charge into the future that also opened Australia up to the world. A tour by the Rolling Stones in 1973 crowned this cosmopolitan zeitgeist with a jet-set thrill. Lou Reed’s 1974 tour brought a more poisonous glamour to the table, with both AC/DC and Stevie Wright acting as his supports. It was as if someone had flicked a switch from black and white to colour, a mood captured when television literally began to broadcast in colour in 1975. A relaxation of the licensing laws in Victoria in the early 1970s – associated with the voting age being dropped by Whitlam from twenty-one to eighteen – added to this youthful wave. Gigs were suddenly everywhere. A post-sixties, post-hippie sense of national identity flourished in the venues, theatres and art galleries, as well as universities where left-wing student unionism – and its entertainment tastes – seized the day. The advent of community and alternative radio across the FM bandwidth was another crucial element.

  It would become a cliché that the sixties did not start till the seventies in Australia. When punk arrived in the late 1970s it may have distinguished itself in reaction to an early-seventies ‘hippie’ scene, but the truth was that it continued to deal in the same questions of cultural identity – if from the more aggressive and pessimistic vantage point of having seen the fleeting Whitlam-era renaissance terminated in 1975 and a conservative government and its agenda reinstalled. A young, hard-drinking audience was pumped up and ready to rage. The pub rock music they wanted got faster and tougher with them. By then, AC/DC were the yardstick by which all other live bands in Australia were measured. Their ability to convert parochial brutalism into a globally transcendent rock ’n’ roll vernacular was not easily matched. The left-leaning wit and lyrical promise of inner Melbourne’s Carlton music scene seemed feeble by comparison. Australian punk would struggle with a lack of local roots as its reactionary stance towards both the industry and past countercultural models intensified its internationalism and an inclination towards exclusivity and separatism.

  Nick papered the walls of his bedroom with images that revealed a burgeoning interest in everything from German Expressionist cinema to El Greco’s View of Toledo. ‘I lifted a print of it from an art book in the school library. Best thing El Greco ever did. It was the only piece of art I had on my wall, apart from all the usual religious crap of suffering saints and the like.’14 A group photo of The Boys Next Door taken in 1979 by his friend Peter Milne gives a good idea of how his room eventually looked.15 ‘In that picture,’ Nick says, ‘I think there is [also] a pretty bad Brett Whiteley-esque etching of Ad
olf Hitler that I did at school – basically John Christie with swastikas – that everyone thought showed great promise and which Mum hung up in the house at Airdrie Road, which is only further testament to my mother’s undying love for her child – particularly as we lived in Caulfield North, the Jewish heartland of Melbourne.’16 Also on Nick’s wall was a large, framed painting of an old lady in Victorian-era garb, who seems to stare down aghast at the chaotic state of the room. ‘It may have been a relative of some sort. I just liked it because the woman looked kind of retarded and spooky.’

  Such decorations were more sophisticated than the usual 1970s teenage boy’s predilection for posters of Kiss Alive! and Charlie’s Angels’ Farrah Fawcett – not that Nick was unaware of the latter’s appeal.17 One of his favourite sex symbols of the era was Abigail, who played Bev Houghton on the risqué Australian soapie series Number 96. Blonde and busty, Abigail Rogan became such a sensation she never needed to use her full name again. Her autobiography, Call Me Abigail, sold an astounding 150,000 copies in 1973. Abigail even managed a Top 10 smash the same year with her breathy, orgasmic cover of the Serge Gainsbourg song ‘Je t’aime . . . moi non plus’. Despite the overt eroticism, Gainsbourg always claimed that it was an ‘an anti-fuck song’, dealing in physical love as an act of desperation, and ultimately something impossible to attain. Nick saw and heard something he liked, to which he would later return as a singer in 1995 on a recording with his first great (and by then estranged) muse, Anita Lane.18

  Living at 6 Airdrie Road gave Nick a degree of pop-culture kudos that he bragged about at school. The house had been the former home of World Championship Wrestling and all-round Saturday-morning TV hero Mario Milano. Nick enjoyed telling people that when the family moved into Caulfield North there was ‘a suspicious ball of wiry black hair in the shower cubicle that everyone was afraid to go near’. He was mightily pleased with the wrestling connection, though he claimed later, ‘It would have been even better if the house had belonged to “Haystacks” Calhoun!’19

  His troubles at nearby Caulfield Grammar School, however, were not over. Nick proved he was a force to be reckoned with among the boarders. But in third form he found himself a member of their hated opposition, the ‘day scabs’. Allies were thin on the ground and he lived under a thuggish cloud. Nick had now been put through the pecking-order rituals three times: commencing high school in Wangaratta, recommencing his second year as a boarder at Caulfield, then again as he joined the day students. The cycle felt endless. His unruly attitude continued in class, the rebel-and-clown act a typical adolescent bid for popularity. As Mick Harvey noted, ‘He was quite an extrovert at school; everyone knew him and he made a show of himself.’20

  Busted for carving his initials into an old dining-hall table, Nick was made to stay back after school, sandpapering the wood clear of all its marks and restoring it completely. The restoration took him two weeks of detention. When it was done, he was told to turn the table over and inscribe his initials again underneath. Nick’s mother was mortified by Nick’s vandalism. The wisdom of the punishment convinced Dawn and Colin they had made the right choice with Caulfield Grammar, despite Nick’s problems.

  Wendy Stavrianos, Nick Cave’s art teacher in 1971 and 1972, saw a very different young man to the class troublemaker and schoolyard rabblerouser. ‘Nick had this wonderful energy that not many kids have. He was engaged with things. There was a sort of intensity, an excitement there. I remember a drawing that he did, a beautiful pen-and-ink drawing of a baby in the womb. For a boy that age to do something like that, I mean it would be uncool. But Nick was never worried what anyone thought. At that time he was really all over the place – I think he was trying to work out who he was and what he was on this planet for. He was at that point where he was reacting to everything – literature, art – and trying to find a path. He was never defiant to me. I never saw him in any other capacity than being really easy to get on with. We talked; it was just like friends in the class. But I know that he probably crossed a lot of other members of staff because he was going through that stage. One day he even came in with a bit of make-up on and said, “How do I look?” It was gorgeous! I didn’t say, “That’s disgusting” – I said, “I think it looks great!”, going along with what he was actually experiencing.’21

  Nick says Wendy Stavrianos is the one who inculcated a lifelong passion in him for the paintings of Edvard Munch. ‘At school, when I was a pimply, cum-encrusted teen, my art teacher Wendy Stavrianos, who I lusted after horribly, leaned over my desk and explained the erotic symbolism of The Dance [of Life] and I was blown away. The moon and its reflection as a phallus, our dark selves and better selves in a dance or grapple to the death, the picture swimming before my eyes, her rich, Greek cigarette laugh . . . We were all floundering and she inspired us.’

  It was during his third year that Nick finally began to settle into a stable peer group, a collective of outsiders and oddballs who ‘mostly liked to hang out around the Art House’, Mick Harvey recalls. ‘We certainly weren’t interested in playing sport during the lunch hour. We’d listen to music a lot. There were probably a few good spots around the Art House as well where we could smoke without getting caught.’ It was from this Art House gang that a band started up. Mick Harvey says they were playing together as early as mid-1972, albeit in highly tentative form and without a singer. Phill Calvert was the most skilled musician by far, having taken drum lessons since the age of ten from Les Tasker, who had been a member of the Moscow Circus. Brett Purcell joined on bass and Mick handled guitar duties. Chris Coyne began playing sax soon after. With bands like Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin popular, they started calling themselves Concrete Vulture as a joke. ‘There just seemed to be all these bands around at the time with these ridiculous names based on opposites,’ says Mick Harvey.22

  Concrete Vulture started rehearsing in a classroom, then on weekends at a parish hall in Ashburton that was in the care of Mick’s father, the local Anglican vicar. Eventually, Nick tried out as a singer, arriving at the parish hall one Saturday afternoon in 1973 with a memorably surly, defensive attitude and a hip flask, from which the fifteen-year-old vocalist kept swigging vodka. Mick Harvey laughs: ‘He wasn’t that great as a singer, in fact he couldn’t sing at all, but [he] looked and acted like a front man, so he was in. Like I said, he was always a bit of a show-off.’23

  The school band at Caulfield Grammar, 1973. Left to right: Mick Harvey (seated), John Cocivera (guitar), Chris Coyne (sax), Phill Calvert (drums), some random guy on vocals who had just joined, and Brett Purcell (bass). (Wayne Purcell; courtesy of Phill Calvert)

  Cave brought someone else along to the rehearsal, a guitarist by the name of John Cocivera, who was quickly recruited. With the band gaining a much more serious lead guitarist in Cocivera, Mick Harvey could focus on his first love, playing rhythm. Things really started to move along. The boys felt excited by what they were doing. It started to all seem real.

  Back in Wangaratta, Anne Baumgarten received a letter about Cocivera she never forgot. ‘Nick told me about having met this new friend at school and how he had this incredible record collection and a record player with the biggest arm on it he had ever seen, a needle arm as big as a cannon, he said. Nick went on and on about it. He was really crazy about music by then and everything to do it with it, from magazines to clothes to record players. He’d always tell me that English music was better than American music because of how skinny the guitarists’ legs were.’24

  Nick says John Cocivera was ‘the absolute sweetest guy. He based his smooth guitar style around David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd]. Music was his absolute life. A beautiful-looking guy – the girls adored him, but he was painfully shy around them. He had a very sensitive, drifty style on the guitar. He played a maroon Gibson SG copy. All we did was listen to music together, after school and on the weekends. We were very close.’

  The question of what to name the band took years to resolve. After Concrete Vulture they decided on Madwich. Th
en they tried Quaker Lady, Caliban, and S-Bend. Heavy Freedom was floated as another possibility by Nick. Grasping at straws, an end-of-year high-school concert in 1974 would see Nick tell organisers they were called The Magic Pudding.25 Mick Harvey explains that ‘Norman Lindsay was something of an obsession for Nick at the time.’ By 1975 things really hit bottom when the band started calling themselves Café. ‘A really shit name,’ says Mick. ‘So shit I had put it out of my mind entirely.’26 Then it was Kissy Loftus Band and, at least in stupid conversations, Nicky Danger and the Bleeding Hearts.

  There were more. But these seem to be the significant ones. Calvert and Harvey claim the band had a different name every second week, usually at Nick’s prompting. Once they had well and truly mastered ‘a few West, Bruce and Laing covers’27, along with standards like ‘Johnny B Goode’ and ‘Boney Maronie’ – and realising they were incapable of playing the intricate filigrees that prog-rock demanded – the band began to pursue a passion for glam rock. The possibility of playing a few shows at nearby Shelford Girls’ Grammar School provided further motivation for everyone to improve and show off even more. It may have been at one of these shows they tried calling themselves Suffragette City. Mostly they can’t remember exactly what they were called across these early years. All agree, however, that they are heartily sick of reading that it was Concrete Vulture, when that was the first name they came up with and it barely lasted six months.