Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Nick was fixated on David Bowie and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. He remembers ‘rushing home from school, locking my bedroom door and putting David Live [1974] on the stereo, pretending I was singing to all those people’. Bowie’s Aladdin Sane (1973) had caused a rift with Tim, who was still heavily into Yes’s Close to the Edge (1972) as well as blues-influenced, psychedelic equivalents such as Australia’s Madder Lake. Tim’s music tastes fitted the dope-smoking mood of the era: an ethos of mind expansion and good times, with a hard-partying edge on the rise. Nick was stepping out of the shadow of his big brother’s authority and defining his own stomping style, even if Hawkwind’s ‘space rock’ still provided them with some common ground.28 Glam rock versus prog rock was the teenage culture war of the period, a case of pop-art trash overtaking neo-classical pomp. In simpler terms, singles rather than albums were starting to drive the market again as a younger generation of music buyers entered the fray. Eventually they had their own albums to listen to as well. Before long Nick cut his hair Bowie-style, appearing at home with a rooster-ishly feathered coiffure à la ‘Ziggy Stardust’.

  Dawn says that she and Colin ‘reacted with amusement, I guess, and wondering what was going to happen next. We were never judgemental or disapproving, as it was all done light-heartedly and a bit of a joke. Tracy, Mick and the boys were such nice boys [and] they were always good to have around, whatever way they chose to look.’ Julie recalls seeing her brother dress up ‘in little tight shorts and fishnets, a tight green shirt, braces and lots of make-up. The suits were the next thing he got into after that.’29

  Phill Calvert, drums, 1973 (photographer unknown; courtesy of Phill Calvert)

  Apart from the brilliant cosmic strut of Marc Bolan’s T-Rex, it was Nick’s hero David Bowie who dominated glam, giving it a sophistication missing in the likeable but essentially bubble-gum thrust of everyone from Slade to Gary Glitter and Australia’s own Hush. Bolan and Bowie exuded a more poetic and androgynous style with ease – the other chart-makers mostly looked and sounded like men with five o’clock shadows who wore make-up and tinfoil as the latest pop fad demanded, all the while thumping out brash and reverb-drenched hits.

  Bowie had the magpie art of appropriation and a cooler intuitive intellect in his favour, absorbing lessons from past countercultural masters: the late 1960s multi-media Pop Art happenings known as Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable; the associated songs of The Velvet Underground (with Lou Reed exploring everything from S&M to heroin as subject matter); and the outrageous garage-rock energy of The Stooges, fronted by a boyish, coiled and animalistic Iggy Pop. This combination of references had already led David Bowie to develop his breakthrough concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). According to Bowie, ‘It just seemed perfectly natural for me to put together all these odds and ends of art and culture that I really adore.’30

  For most fans of pop music the baggage behind this cultural transformation would remain obscure. But for hardcore music lovers like Nick Cave, Bowie acted as a bridge – within his music and lyrics, as well as through his flamboyant interviews – taking inquisitive teenagers from the mainstream into the rock ’n’ roll avant-garde and beyond. ‘Bowie was supposed to be a chameleon, that’s the theory. He was anything but that,’ Nick says. ‘The idea that he disappeared into his work and whatever persona he created for each record he did is just ridiculous. Bowie was many things, but the one thing you can say for sure is that he never disappeared from view.’ Bowie would later admit that in putting on his Ziggy Stardust mask, ‘I found my character – one man against the world.’31 It was almost everything Nick could have asked for in a rock star at the time.

  The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, or SAHB as they were commonly known, were something else again as a teenage influence during the mid-1970s. On the one hand they rode the glam craze, but there was none of Bowie’s androgynous and self-consciously arty vibe about them. A tough Scottish rock ’n’ roll band, they were spearheaded – as their name suggests – by Alex Harvey, a brilliant showman capable of delivering over-the-top rock ’n’ pop outlaw monologues such as ‘Framed’, followed by a piece of highbrow European cabaret such as Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’. It was an audacious combination best witnessed live, but Nick adored the recordings.32

  Almost a quarter of the school band’s set list would come from the first two SAHB albums, including ‘Framed’, ‘Midnight Moses’, ‘Isobel Goudie’ and ‘The Hammer Song’. Nick admits Bowie’s music was mostly too complex for the teenage band to master, despite their best efforts. SAHB had a bluesy directness that was much more available to the boys’ playing and Nick’s basic singing abilities.

  There’s an argument that SAHB’s theatrical music was a showy precursor to the noir aggression of the punk era in the United Kingdom. Harvey said he abhorred any violence at his shows, but there was no denying the ferocity of a SAHB performance or Harvey’s delight in being intimidating. Harvey’s own band would admit he even frightened them now and again. At a time when glam promoted a feminised masculinity, the only pantyhose Alex Harvey wore was pulled down over his head to look like the Glaswegian hoodlum he mythologised while singing ‘Framed’. Nick took to Harvey’s story-like songs of romantic thuggery like a duck to water, inhabiting their natural drama on stage.33 There was also something defiantly camp about Harvey’s performing style, a malevolent humour that only added to the edges. Reading about his larger-than-life personality in rock magazines provided irresistible material for the teenage Nick Cave. If Bowie was the androgynous alien, Alex Harvey was the erotic criminal.

  Nicky Danger, vocalist, c. 1974 (Ashley Mackevicius)

  Nick would cover Harvey’s ‘The Hammer Song’ again for posterity on his album Kicking Against the Pricks (1986). Never shy of taking a phrase or an idea and making it his own, he would even write an original song with the same title on The Good Son (1990). It is interesting to also reflect on a SAHB tune called ‘There’s No Lights on the Christmas Tree, Mother, They’re Burning Big Louie Tonight’: the tale of a criminal being sent to the electric chair, it has a West End musical theatre feel with some exaggerated rock ’n’ roll snarl. Magic Pudding did not play it, but Nick enjoyed singing along to it at home. Though more of a joke song, it may have helped seed a later Nick Cave classic, ‘The Mercy Seat’. Listening to SAHB, a young Nick Cave was learning many things: among them the possibilities of a theatricality that maximised a take-no-prisoners aggression, matched by the power of narrative song writing and a fearless lyricism that drew on base masculine resources and a goodly dose of aggressive street humour as much as any refined poetic interests.

  On a Grinderman tour of the United Kingdom in 2010, Nick Cave would have an opportunity to express his gratitude to the late and greatly underestimated Alex Harvey by dedicating a show at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow to the memory of his former hero. ‘The Barrowlands is this vast old-school venue. Alex Harvey would have played it many times,’ Cave says. ‘I explained to the audience how he changed the trajectory of our young lives. His stuff is the shit! “Midnight Moses” . . . great song. Anyway, a journalist reviewing the show took this to mean Grinderman were heavily influenced by AH. Not true, but man, did he blow my mind when I was about fifteen. “Isobel Goudie”, “Faith Healer”, “Gang Bang”, “Hammer Song” were all real life-changers for me. Especially his lyrics and phrasing. Of course, he sings in a heavy Glaswegian accent, but I didn’t really understand that at the time. I just thought he sang like someone from outer space! And the words! There was nothing like [the song] “Shark’s Teeth” around. Wow!’

  Nick says, ‘I had my first kiss with a girl called Penny in Wang when I was twelve. It was to the song “Venus” by Shocking Blue.’ When pressed, he can still echo the sentiments with enthusiasm: ‘You’re my desire!’

  He speaks of another budding romance that began by correspondence at age thirteen. Nick had cultivated a sixteen-year-old pen pal in England called Dorothy.
‘I may have exaggerated my age by a few years in my letters. Anyway, the moment came when she asked to exchange photos. Mum took a picture of me in the backyard. I had this stripy jumper on that Mum had knitted me, tucked into my jeans. I looked like the kid I was. Once I sent that I never heard from Dorothy again,’ he says, laughing.

  Though Anne Baumgarten describes their relationship as ‘mostly platonic’, she received a stream of letters from Nick, especially when he was struggling to stave off loneliness as a boarder at Caulfield Grammar. There’s something inherently romantic about this communication, as if lifted straight from a classic Australian coming-of-age film like The Year My Voice Broke.

  Nick’s correspondence with Anne continued well into his teens, maintaining his links with the Baumgartens and Wangaratta. ‘We’d write really crazy letters to each other,’ Anne says, laughing. ‘One of the things I really liked about Nick [was that] he wasn’t your average friend – he could be very intuitive and go off on any tangent or thinking. He had a lot of warmth and humour.’

  Now and again Anne would catch a train and visit Nick in Melbourne, or vice versa. He would return to Wang bearing vinyl gifts and they’d sit again in Anne’s blue-painted listening room, its window busted by a football, the wind blowing through, day into night, and no-one caring. ‘Nick introduced to me to all these bands. Especially the British ones – Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and even The Moody Blues. But more than Cohen or any others, his main obsession became David Bowie. He really liked the cover of Diamond Dogs, but it irritated me. He gave me his copy of Ziggy Stardust. I felt uneasy about this because the album I gave him in return wasn’t as good.

  ‘Nick embraced glam-rock fashion too. I still have a gold-coloured crushed velvet jacket he used to borrow when we went to The Kettle, the local coffee shop for youths, situated in the main street of Wang. He liked to wear eye make-up and bracelets, but he also wore ripped jeans and tight jumpers.’

  Anne also remembers Nick’s growing interest in ‘sketching, musical theatre, pottery and other forms of art. There was one stage when he was very much into Ray Bradbury’s books. It seemed to me that Nick wanted to cram as much experience of art and ideas as he could into his teenage years. Nick was really into the I Ching too. Zen Buddhism. He must have been about sixteen by then. It’s a very random religion.’34

  Visiting Nick in Melbourne, Anne felt very welcome, but she was slightly less comfortable at the Caves’ Caulfield North home. ‘After dinner the family would sit around the table playing civilised games of Scrabble. I agonised over these games because the family, especially Colin, had such terrific vocabularies. I struggled to find one- or two-syllable words to play. Colin had a strong character, that’s for sure. He was very committed to the subject of English. Some people could find that daunting, but I wasn’t frightened of him. Holding back his irritation in Scrabble is pretty minor stuff. Dawn was always very even-tempered, absolutely gorgeous, a really gracious lady. Julie was pretty extroverted; she had a bizarre sense of humour. Tim was right out there – with his politics, his girlfriends. Peter was quieter, he wore glasses, I got the feeling he was quiet with the others. He was studying electrical engineering. Peter was nice. They were a really nice family.’

  School band Madwich mixed Bowie, SAHB, Genesis and garage-rock influences, 1975. (Ashley Mackevicius)

  During the day while she was in Melbourne, ‘Nick and I used to go shopping in Bourke Street. He’d take me to The In Shop opposite Myer’s. And then to a coffee shop down the Spencer Street end. It was so atmospheric.’

  They were about sixteen when these visits and their letters finally faded. ‘We grew apart,’ Anne says matter-of-factly, before adding, ‘Nick really got into the music. I’ve still got his Ziggy Stardust album. Maybe I should have given it back to him.’35

  Some forty years later, Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten) wants Nick to know she’s been out living at Lajamanu in the Northern Territory’s Central Desert, ‘teaching with my husband, teaching very young Aboriginal children to read and write, and about things like nutrition and a better quality of life’. It’s been a wonderful experience, no regrets. ‘I was just happy to have known Nick and see him go into music like the people we listened to and dreamed about.’36

  Julie Cave remembers her brother showing her a tiny six-line Leonard Cohen poem that he liked at the time entitled ‘For Anne’. It was not hard to figure out why Nick was so fond of it. It’s a love poem and the name matches. With typical economy, Cohen subtly references the famed balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet – ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East and Juliet is the sun’37 – before dropping away radically to an understanding of memory as the ultimate form of awareness and a source of grieving. It seems Nick already had a highly attuned sense of the nature of loss and its inevitability.

  Nick would become an inveterate letter writer (and then emailer) for the rest of his life. Together with his notebooks, journals and numerous inky drafts of his prose and lyrics, he would place increasing emphasis on the physical act of writing as much as the words themselves, a graphomania that found its most potent embodiment in ‘Love Letter’ (2001), a song he wrote during the early stages of his courtship with Susie Bick.38

  It’s for this reason, perhaps, that Nick is especially touched to hear of an extensive and effusive thirteen-page letter written about him by his first real girlfriend, Davina Davidson (née Sherman).39 When he reads it he is amazed by ‘the accuracy of Davina’s memories, the textures, and the little things I’d forgot[ten] that were so true, like the way I would never take my shoes off even when I was inside the house’.

  Nick had only just finished fourth form when their relationship began. Davina can still picture them meeting on an intense summer’s day during the Christmas school holidays of 1973–74. Colin Cave’s role as the Director of Adult Education in Melbourne continued to give Nick entrée into all kinds of courses and subjects. Davina found herself doing a ceramics class with an intense young man hunched over a series of clay figures that she remembers taking shape as a clown, a violinist and a vagabond. Nick was inclined to dismiss his sculptures as rubbish, but Davina thought them vivid, if a little grotesque. Not so their maker, with his long legs and dark hair and a single earing. So cool. Davina fondly remembers the black clogs Nick liked to wear in summer, the sound of him when he stood to walk across a room.

  Nick Cave, sculpture course, c. 1975 (photographer unknown)

  Nick says that soon after he and Davina met, ‘We went to the Myer Music Bowl for a date and had a kiss and a cuddle. As I was walking her home, she got all upset and said, “I can’t be with you.” I couldn’t think what the problem was. Then I’m thinking it’s because she’s a lesbian. Then she says, “Cause I’m Jewish!” She had to stop going to the synagogue to be with me. She was living in Melbourne with Jewish foster parents at the time. It was a really big deal.’

  Davina was only a year younger than Nick, but a year can mean a lot when you are just fifteen. She describes her sixteen-year-old boyfriend as a deeply serious and artistic young man, exceptionally mature and sure of himself. Within a week of their Myer Music Bowl date, Nick would show her a hardcover notebook full of short stories and poems he was working on. A week after that, Nick handwrote Davina a personalised tale based on the Book of Genesis story of Methuselah. Nick took advantage of what was then his beautifully cursive and flowing penmanship to make the gift all the more impressive. A few days after that, Davina came home from school and found a single red rose Nick had left for her.

  As romantic gifts go, a rose from a teenage boy is a bit more conventional than a short story about the oldest human being to appear in the Bible. The grandfather of Noah and a connecting patriarch between the Christian and Jewish faiths, Methuselah was being used by Nick to write his way into romantic harmony with Davina, despite her family concerns over their differing faiths. Davina says, ‘I have a very vague memory the short story was influenced by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the
Sea, perhaps in style. I do not remember it having a particularly outright Biblical slant, although there was a Biblical undertow. Nick was very good at that . . . connections, interconnections, innuendoes.’40

  ‘During the years we dated I remember clearly that Nick had a turbulent relationship with God. He was not at all “keen” on Jesus and was excessively sceptical about him being “the Son of God”. He had an extensive criticism of the Church, that I remember clearly. But he was not reading the Bible much. If anything, Lolita was in his pocket, not the New or Old Testament.’41

  Somewhere between the moment of his introduction to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and the news of his imminent departure from Wang, Nick had begun to write poetry. He was twelve years old when he started. His father’s lecture on Lolita was welded into this unhappy transition in Nick’s life and how he began to process it with writing. This was well advanced by the time Nick was sixteen and falling in love with Davina Davidson. She was enchanted by his talents as the first few weeks of their relationship blossomed. Nick could sculpt and draw and paint. Nick could write stories and poetry. Nick was a romantic with his roses. And she was about to find out that Nick had musical abilities too.

  ‘Often he would write me poems and stories and draw me sketches,’ Davina says. ‘I saw them as being little parts of Nick that he gifted me.’ She remembers the very first time she visited the Cave family home and going upstairs with Nick to his bedroom, where ‘pretty much immediately he pushed into my hand a hardcover notebook with some of his writings . . . It was definitely a first to meet a boy that was happy to have you see his insides.’ Digging out an old diary from 1974, Davina finds she has written these words: ‘The figurines caught my eye, his writing has snatched my heart.’42