by Mark Mordue
By November of that same year the Sex Pistols had released ‘Anarchy in the UK’, and the explosion of punk sounds across England had prompted the London branch of EMI to force its Australian office to sign up The Saints. Countdown, the nation’s massively popular Sunday-night pop program, even screened a raw film clip of the group performing ‘(I’m) Stranded’ in a deserted, seemingly trashed Brisbane terrace house. It was actually where the band lived and staged its own shows. Suddenly there was a heroic new act in Australia that was not following any overseas trends, that was even a step ahead of the action in London and New York. The Saints had kicked a door open and they shouldered through it like no-one could stop them.
Nick and Davina would break up once and for all while ‘(I’m) Stranded’ burned a hole in Nick’s mind. The genius of the song lay in the way it evoked everything from Australia’s exiled heritage as a convict-settled nation, to youthful feelings of suburban alienation, to forcefully ending a relationship and sharing in the pain that such an act of severance involves. Davina Davidson recalls a deep tenderness from Nick as ‘I struggled with my new independence’.42
‘That summer,’ she writes, ‘I have a beautiful memory of joining Nick and his family at a beach house they rented somewhere. It was built on a hill with rooms going down the slope and stairs on the outside so that the bedrooms were like separate units, under the main living and kitchen area on the top floor. That big room was surreal, with all these stuffed-animal heads hung on the walls. Nick was not a beach person, so I don’t remember actually going to the beach with him, just lovely memories of the family in that big living area and he and I in his room. In fact, we never went swimming together, and the only time we actually did go to the beach, I think Tracy was with us. I went in the water while Nick and Tracy were sitting on the rocks fully clothed. Nick didn’t even take off his clogs. He just sat there watching from the sidelines.’43
Zoo Music Girl
MELBOURNE
1976–77
Nick Cave is emphatic. ‘I loved going to art school. I didn’t do a lot but I learned a lot. People there had a massive influence on me. Just the time spent in the pub, talking about art all the time and about what we would do. Meeting artists like Jenny Watson and Gareth Sansom and Tony Clark. I can’t begin to tell you what this was like after being at Caulfield Grammar School.’
During his first year at the Caulfield Institute of Technology (CIT) in 1976, Nick earned A-level passes for both his essays and paintings. Fellow student and future Women’s Weekly editor-in-chief Deborah Thomas recalls his work as being ‘very Expressionist, very well painted. Nick was a good artist.’ Thomas and her friends Kate Durham and Wendy Bannister were a year ahead. She would become a top model before venturing into journalism, Durham a famous jeweller, Bannister a leading stylist. ‘The three of us took him under our wing,’ Thomas says. ‘The first time I clapped eyes on Nick he arrived at art school wearing one of those vintage Hawaiian shirts. He used to wear them all the time.’ For the most part Nick was relatively studious and shy, Thomas says, ‘a good middle-class private-school boy. I would say he was a very typical Melbourne boy, in that respect, from a well-to-do family but looking to break out and find something more exciting.’1
Gareth Sansom and Jenny Watson were both teaching at CIT, though neither had Nick in their classes. Tony Clark was lecturing at Prahran Art College and yet to emerge as one of Nick’s most important mentors. Despite Nick’s track record at high school, he retained a lingering respect for the profession of teaching, a by-product of his father’s profession and philosophy that ‘education never ends, it’s life-long and it should always continue’.2 A little distance from the formal restrictions of the classroom meant relations with Sansom and Watson, and later Clark, could develop freely. The notorious legend of Nick using people was also beginning to take shape, but it’s the trope of learning from people and moving on that lies at its heart.3
Nick Cave, Caulfield Institute of Technology (CIT), 1977 (Gareth Sansom)
Nick’s ongoing passion for the art of Brett Whiteley paralleled his interest in the music of David Bowie. Both artists were dramatic, even theatrical about the way they presented themselves, with a brazen, bowerbird approach to collecting influences and claiming them as their own. By the late 1970s, Whiteley was widely identified as Australia’s most rock ’n’ roll painter. A former habitué of the Chelsea Hotel in New York during the 1960s, he’d been a friend of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and his notoriety as a heroin addict only added to his wild child image. Whiteley was an expressionist, influenced by everything from Japanese calligraphy to American Pop Art and British abstract art, and his shape-shifting obsession with landscapes and nudes was rooted in his extraordinary drawing abilities: free-flowing, hallucinogenic and erotic. His inclination towards figurative distortion and interest in macabre criminals such as the English serial killer John Christie reflected the influence of English artist Francis Bacon. But Whiteley was always a lotus-eater at heart, if nonetheless an artist corrupted and tormented by his hedonism. Bacon was not nearly so free or generously sensual, and more brutal by a country mile. Whiteley seduced; Bacon overpowered, even terrorised. Whiteley’s constantly evolving willingness to take anything from anywhere greatly appealed to Nick, who was seeking out an accord between music and painting that might determine his own future. ‘Brett Whiteley painted the way I wanted to paint, for sure,’ says Nick. ‘After I saw his work, the way I used space [in my paintings] changed overnight. He had the most beautiful line.’
Gareth Sansom recognised this early on. He describes Nick’s paintings as ‘kind of Brett Whiteley and Francis Bacon combined – all flesh, gesture and teeth – kind of cartoonish as well – talented but not very original. But he hardly attended and he failed for that rather than his paintings, if I remember correctly.’4
Jenny Watson is more enthusiastic. She recalls Nick presenting ‘a fabulous picture of a figure wrapped in barbed wire’ during his second year in 1977. ‘It was a quintessential Nick Cave image,’ she says, ‘the suffering, the helplessness. I’ve heard he still paints. I hope that’s true.’5 The image arose from a reading of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Its central character, Hazel Motes, ends up binding himself with barbed wire and walking around with glass in his shoes after failing to extinguish the notions of Christ and divinity in his life that were instilled by his preacher father. This would be the last overtly serious work Nick Cave attempted at art school.
His interests in pornography as well as religious art were intensifying, though yet to converge. ‘Then I saw this girl in third year’s work and it just blew me away,’ Nick says. ‘She was a rampant hardcore dyke. She’d do these beautiful paintings that the teachers would like, and then over the top she would draw penises in black paints and completely deface them. They were the most violent pictures I’ve seen anyone produce. I don’t even think she passed.’
Nick began exhibiting a similar desire to mock and confront that could border on the infantile. A teacher eventually told him that ‘she couldn’t relate to sleazy art and could no longer talk to me. I think this could run parallel to the way The Birthday Party developed, to a certain extent. Just the thrill that ran through me when I heard her say that, the joy of displeasing somebody, was such that she was responsible for the entire direction my painting went in from that day.’
This is one version of the story. But, depending on who Nick is speaking with, the retelling of his failure at art school can most definitely hint at his hurt and resentment as much as any rebellious pride. Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley, Nick Cave – this had been the dream pantheon he’d lined himself up in. It was never going to happen like he had imagined.
‘I had huge artistic ambitions as a kid. I liked a lot of the tortured, gothic, religious stuff – Matthias Grünewald and Stefan Lochner and the Spaniards – and I wanted to make paintings with that kind of power. There was something about just being in a room by yourself and making art that excited me. It�
�s exciting to me still, this weird medium of applying paint to a canvas and the restrictions of a square, two-dimensional frame. It’s not unlike the restrictions of a song, in a way.’6
’77. Nick’s second year at Caulfield Tech. The year that Elvis Presley died. The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten defined the new mood, and it was not one of mourning: ‘Elvis represented everything we’re trying to react against. He was a fat, rich, sick reclusive rock star who was dead before he died. His gut was so big it cast a shadow over rock ’n’ roll.’7
Punk was reaching its full, furious, singular bloom. The mainstream charts may have belonged to Boz Scaggs, Electric Light Orchestra, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles – the four biggest-selling-album artists of the year in Australia and just about everywhere else – but they were creatures of the past, not the future. Hating these acts, erasing them from the scenery, was part of the new punk ethos. The arrival of Saturday Night Fever and disco hitting its peak in the very same year as punk’s snarling breakthrough only reinforced a feeling that the old guard of rock ’n’ roll were finished. Nick, however, harboured a sneaking affection for this old guard – especially Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, as well as younger classicists such as Bruce Springsteen. In a telling interview years later in West Berlin, the Dutch documentary maker Bram van Splunteren would ask Nick about the inherent pessimism in his music. Taking umbrage, Nick would advise him to go ask Springsteen where the positivity in his music comes from. ‘Now that would be something to read.’8
Such tastes were not only deeply unfashionable in 1977, they were verboten. A purge was occurring and you had to be absolutely clear which side you were on. The Sex Pistols’ triple whammy of ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ made for a spectacular run of singles from November 1976 to July 1977. More than any other act they defined punk rock as a war on mainstream culture. In later years Nick would describe this era with a catchphrase that amused him: ‘the time when we fought the big one’.
Once punk did the demolition work, the musical clock was reset again. Many likened it to the 1950s, when rock ’n’ roll first arrived. Nick was absorbing the fresh noises and new ideas, an empowering sense that anything could – and should – happen. In this, Australia experienced the American and English scenes as they overlapped and competed for preeminence. There was great benefit in being caught between these colonising forces: between the Phil Spector–influenced, New York pop and the Eddie Cochran-ite, agit-prop rock that were respectively dominant in the self-titled debuts by Blondie and The Clash; in the energy evoked by Talking Heads’ nervy, urban claustrophobia on 77, and by Ian Dury’s ribald Cockney puns and music-hall street grotesques on New Boots and Panties!!; in what distinguished the Ramones’ delinquent humour on their sophomore album, Leave Home, from the utterly primary detonation that was Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. There were musical counterpoints everywhere from which to draw and hybridise new ideas.
For all its nihilistic affectations, punk actually played into the apocalyptic fantasies of youth and briefly empowered a generation to reboot rock ’n’ roll in a multitude of ways. It was a savage fairytale brought to life. The DIY philosophy of punk not only encouraged extreme forms of enthused amateurism and garage-rock rawness, it also sparked an avant-garde counter-movement that dabbled in everything from frenetic musical deconstructions to a pioneering use of synthesisers and tape loops that implied a sonic landscape from tomorrow. An aesthetic of malice and erasure would soon mingle with frostily Romantic and strongly Germanic brands of futurism, respectively evoked by new UK bands such as Magazine and robotic pioneers like Kraftwerk. Anarchist philosophies opened quickly to absurdist playfulness and extreme forms of performance art that used the body itself as a site for radical protest and distortion. Independently pressed and distributed vinyl proliferated, if only on a highly localised cottage-industry level. The diffuse and scattering impact of this would not be felt again till the viral age of instantly downloadable music and imagery on the internet.
The music industry reeled in confusion as a young audience developed its own heroes, and its own culture, from the pamphleteering force of photocopied, stapled-together zines to the self-adapted, safety-pinned, second-hand jumbles of punk fashion. Distance imbued the Australian scene with a driving obsession about not being left behind, smashing open parochial feelings of inadequacy and the feebler tendencies to imitate. In a published essay on Cave, rock critic Robert Brokenmouth notes:
Australia was in a lost world between the past and the present; by the time the music papers and import records arrived in Australia with the latest trend they were three months out of date – we all knew it was history. This galvanised many bands . . . to out-do what was happening overseas, because they knew they were always going to be three months behind. Positioned in the past, they strove mightily to be current. Musical history was something to be investigated in the present, a pattern which remains with many Australian ‘old punks’ to this day. This is another key to understanding The Boys Next Door and, ultimately, Nick.’9
Bruce Milne recalls the importance of the fantasy side of punk from an Australian perspective. He speaks of buying copies of the New York magazine Rock Scene as far back as 1974. It would become an extremely influential publication among the small coterie of musicians and fans who would dominate the rest of the decade in Melbourne. ‘It showed lots of photos of the CBGB New York music scene in the mid-1970s, photos of Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Neon Boys,’ says Milne. ‘We had been seeing these photos of these people for almost two years before they ever put a record out, going back to 1975 in that magazine. So we were fanatical fans of the Ramones and Television before we ever even heard them. Just because they looked so cool! At a time when everything was singer-songwritery or metally glam, they had short hair and arty retro clothing, a whole look to them. And their names, too: Verlaine, Hell . . . they just seemed perfect. When [Television’s first single] “Little Johnny Jewel” finally came out in late ’76 someone I knew had gotten a hold of it. I was so excited I got them to play it for me down the telephone line. I remember being shocked by how slow it was, like it was playing at the wrong speed or something. Until all those records came through here, everyone had had to imagine what the bands sounded like just by looking at photos of them. A lot of music got made that way. It was funny how often what people imagined was so close to being right.’10
The touchpaper in Melbourne was lit within the space of two months in early 1977: first in March with a tour by Radio Birdman; then in April with the arrival of The Saints. Nick, Mick, Tracy and Phill went to see both bands, pursuing every show they played across town. Initially, Radio Birdman blitzed them with a quasi-militaristic attack that owed as much to the hard-edged psychedelic radicalism of the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams (1969) as to their beloved Stooges or an American pop metal group like Blue Öyster Cult. Mick Harvey, in particular, was attracted to Birdman’s lethally controlled, sonically dense musical attack, though he found the invoked audience salutes and mass chants of ‘Yeah hup!’ hard to swallow. Phill Calvert recalls himself and Nick in a less discriminating mood, ‘right up the front, dancing wildly, drinking a pot [of beer] per song’.11 After the show Nick and Tracy invited the band to a party. Tracy Pew was pulled over by police and booked for ferrying Radio Birdman’s guitarist Deniz Tek and their singer, Rob Younger, on his blue Vespa motor scooter. Younger was riding pillion, Tek was right out front on the handlebars.
This camaraderie with the loyalty-obsessed Birdman would dissolve the moment The Saints hit town a few weeks later, and the heads of the aspiring young Melbourne group were immediately turned in another direction. By the time Radio Birdman came back in June for their ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Soldiers Tour’, they were aware that relations with their new comrades had cooled.
A little competitive jealousy would always be enough to pour petrol on Nick’s flame. Deniz Tek was a formidable figure in every way, and did not lack for a little attitude
himself. Born in the United States, he’d seen The Stooges first-hand as a teenager in Detroit and had become a truly great guitarist, driving Radio Birdman to its sonic heights while also studying medicine for what would become a career as an ER doctor. He would later become a Navy flight surgeon with the US Marines, his ‘Iceman’ call-sign inspiring the character of the same name in the film Top Gun. If Tek was not a real person, you’d think him an unbelievable character in a corny novel. Need it be added that he was extraordinarily handsome? His classic dark looks were reminiscent of a cooler, more contained Tom Cruise.
Nicky Danger, as Nick was calling himself then, did an interview for the punk zine Alive ’n’ Pumping, in which he gave his bile against Tek free rein. Asked what bands he liked or hated, Nick was pure punk disrespect. ‘I think Deniz Tek is an arsehole and his brain is as big as a pea. Birdman rip off everyone like The Stooges, MC5, Doors, Bay City Rollers, etc. I guess Rob Younger is a good front man, though; I mean that seriously. The Pistols are okay.’
Within a year Nick would be up in Sydney with The Boys Next Door saying things such as ‘I hate Radio Birdman’12 on stage for no other reason than to take yet another gratuitous stab at that band’s legendary status – this time on Birdman’s home turf. It was a very Nick thing to do, and not the first or last time he would define himself with an unforgiving zest against others. It all went with punk rock’s demolishing ethos of malice and disrespect, though it still must have been galling to be so obviously and quickly dropped, as well as slurred for no clear reason. To make matters worse, the ‘other’ great Australian act of the era, The Saints, had behaved boorishly in Sydney after Radio Birdman had welcomed the Brisbane band by organising live shows and accommodation.