Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  On 30 November 1977 The Boys Next Door were graced with another blessing when members of Blondie turned up at Martini’s in Carlton to see them play. Deborah Thomas struck up a conversation with the group and became lifelong friends with Blondie drummer Clem Burke, who, she says, ‘still remembers the night he saw The Boys Next Door in Melbourne. He thought they were great. He loved the rawness, and thought they had really captured something. I think he always felt happy to watch how Nick developed from afar, and to know he’d been there at the start of something.’1

  Blondie were touring the country thanks to the chart success of their chiming and seductive ‘In the Flesh’. The song was originally a B-side, but it became a fluke hit in Australia after the pop-music program Countdown played it, supposedly by accident, instead of the single’s intended A-side, ‘X-Offender’. More likely this was the decision of Countdown’s host and talent coordinator, Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum, who was on his way to becoming one of the most powerful figures in the Australian music industry. Quite apart from singer Deborah Harry’s sultry, bleached-blonde-in-a-beret-and-little-black-dress glamour, the band oozed a New York vein of CBGB’s nightclub decadence that had its roots in heroes such as The Velvet Underground. Blondie’s Brisbane show had been called off due to illness, but word on the street in Melbourne was that an excess of high-quality heroin had stupefied half the band. Their music might have sounded like an update of pop acts such as The Shangri-Las and The Crystals, but Blondie evoked something far more knowing, a Ray-Banned vision and cathedral sound that was both sugary and dark.

  After witnessing The Boys Next Door, Blondie told the host of Australia’s number-one music program they were a very exciting young band. Meldrum had been in the audience with them and mostly underwhelmed by The Boys Next Door’s original songs, despite the band’s intensity on stage. Blondie’s enthusiasm prompted him to write a brief but favourable note in his weekly newspaper music column anyway, tipping The Boys Next Door as a band to watch – and suggesting they consider recording their cover of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.

  Within weeks the band was approached backstage at the Tiger Room (which around this time changed its name to the Tiger Lounge) by Barrie Earl, who was stitching together what would become the country’s first major punk label, Suicide Records. Earl was all over town, searching for groups that fitted the mould. Nick says, ‘He was like your cartoon manager type: big turquoise Navajo jewellery, a cigar in his mouth. He comes straight into our change room like that at the Tiger Lounge and says, “Do you wanna make a record, boys?” Of course we did.’

  Earl also convinced The Boys Next Door to let him manage the band. Any notion of a conflict of interest passed everyone by. Letting Karen Marks know her services were no longer required was never going to be something teenagers handled well. The Boys Next Door arrived at her home in a prankish mood, smoking thin cigars to signal their newly corrupt involvement with Barrie Earle and the Suicide label. She knew something was up as soon as she saw the way they were carrying on. Marks remembers Nick being ‘the one who actually said I was sacked. He just sat there at my kitchen table eating Twisties while he told me. He always had that nineteen-year-old attitude – a punk attitude – it was an act, being sullen and grumpy and eating junk food. To me he was just this gangly, pimply boy with a drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend. Him and Anita were like salt and pepper shakers going everywhere together. As a couple they were like those early photos of the Rolling Stones you see with their stunning girlfriends. Anita and Nick were like that when they were out, dressed up and looking fabulous. But there was nothing much else going on. Anita gave me nothing in conversation. I never got a single ounce of personality from her. Nothing. It was all this attitude with both of them. The body language, oh God, like sulky teenagers, that was their whole demeanour sitting there in front of you. To be honest, I never liked Nick’s music that much, except for the band’s cover of “Boots”. It wasn’t my kind of thing. I was friends with JPY and Sherbet; I liked The Dingoes and The Sports. I just wanted to help, and we were all having fun. People make out like the punk thing was this big division from the scene before, but it was more like one big happy family. We were all going to the same venues and seeing the same bands, up and down Punt Road, all the same people turning up at three different gigs over the one evening. Back then I always thought Nick was a bit of a fake . . . no . . . not a fraud . . . how can I explain it? I always thought he was acting at being. Do you know what I mean? He presented himself as this writer-poet. But some of the poetry, the lyrics, I used to think, Oh my God, please! A lot of it was plagiarised, too. It was just an image. But Nick really succeeded. Over time he has become that thing he was acting. He has grown into what he was trying to do. He really did it. Good on him. He’s a true artist now.’2

  Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Phill Calvert and Tracy Pew at the Tiger Lounge, 1978 (Phill Calvert). Phill had just bought himself a polaroid camera: ‘I think I got Tracy to shoot me.’

  ‘No sooner had we signed with him than Barrie calls us into his office,’ Nick says. ‘We all file in and he turns to us and says, “Just been on the phone from London, boys. Punk rock’s out, power pop’s in!” Then he holds up all these boards with drawings and pictures of clothes that we should wear instead of the way we were dressed. Tracy’s outfit was supposed to be these animal-print, Lycra, tight-leather-trousers kinda thing. Tracy actually liked the trousers a lot – but we all said to ourselves, “We’re making a mistake here.” At least we said no to the clothes.’

  Earl had only returned from the United States and England in 1977. He’d been taking notes on how punk was exploding. A former hairdresser and self-styled impresario, Earle modelled himself on Jake Rivera (alias Andrew Jakeman), the forceful manager of Elvis Costello (alias Declan MacManus) and one of the key figures behind Stiff Records in the United Kingdom. Punk’s guiding spirits of purification and self-reinvention saw a lot of name changing, opportunism and corporate rebranding in pursuit of its reformation ethos. The walls of the music industry would not fall as the punk scene hoped, but spiv capitalism would thrive. Earl caught a whiff of these trade winds, and upon his return to Melbourne convinced Mushroom Records boss Michael Gudinski that an Australian version of Stiff – which had established a striking label identity thanks to the design work of Barney Bubbles (alias Colin Fulcher) and slogans such as ‘If It Ain’t Stiff, It Ain’t Worth a Fuck’ – should be developed locally.

  The catch was that Gudinski had only just established Mushroom as a major independent label with the massive success of Skyhooks in the mid-1970s. He had virtually single-handedly put the idea of an Australian music business and an Australian sound on the map (with no small thanks to the vernacular song-writing genius of Greg Macainsh) and was understandably reluctant to dilute the already iconic Mushroom brand. Something of a piratical idealist, Gudinski nonetheless assisted Earl in establishing Suicide as a nominally separate entity with a production and distribution deal that went through a major record company, RCA. It was an odd arrangement that was perceived as Gudinski’s way of having his cake and eating it too, investing limited resources while securing contract options for Mushroom on all the bands for recording and publishing over the next five years. Once the dust settled on the experiment, it effectively meant Mushroom could take its pick of the survivors. With a growl redolent of an ageing sabre-tooth tiger moving across the musical tundra, Gudinski says, ‘All that punk shit was only just starting to happen here.’ He recalls Barrie Earl ‘trying to be an English type of producer-manager figure. He loved that. It was Barrie’s way or the highway. That was not the most artist-friendly approach.’3

  Even so, Earl moved quickly and effectively. Before 1977 was over he had signed The Boys Next Door and Spred (soon to start calling themselves Teenage Radio Stars), as well as JAB, X-Ray-Z and Negatives (formerly Reals) in Melbourne, Wasted Daze in Sydney and The Survivors in Brisbane. The Saints’ penetration of the British Top 40 in August 1977 with their single ‘This Perfe
ct Day’4, and their appearance on Top of the Pops in the same week as both the Sex Pistols and The Jam, gave many of these young Australian groups the feeling that international success was there to be seized. Even so, the local scene was soon divided between those who were aligned with Suicide and those who stood apart.

  ‘We told Barrie that if he really wanted a punk band, there was this group in Sydney called The Filth that he should get,’ Nick says, clearly enjoying the story. ‘They were this crazy, violent, self-mutilating band. So Barrie flew up to Sydney to see them. When they met, all the singer did was keep running into a door and headbutting it, blood everywhere. They wouldn’t sign anything. They abused him the whole time and threw a chair at him. Barrie had to let them go.’

  Michael Gudinski calls Barrie Earl ‘a born loser’, but it is said with an odd grain of affection, even praise. ‘He just didn’t deal with people properly. But if you look back at who was on Lethal Weapons [the 1978 showcase compilation from the Suicide label] and what became of them – and most of the things Barrie did – he was really right on the money. Whatever Barrie did wrong, he would back people no-one else would. Unfortunately he was his own worst enemy – ahead of his time and never able to last the distance.’5

  The truth is Gudinski and Earl were part of an Australian music business that punched above its weight to shrug off overseas cultural and corporate dominance. The characters left standing could be vicious or roguishly charming on the flip of a coin. Sometimes a tag-team of that order was required. Along with Mushroom Records, Gudinski ran the Premier Artists agency, which booked most of the prime venues in Melbourne and many others across the country: bands fitted in or were deprived of the oxygen to perform and expand their audience base.

  Missing Link’s Keith Glass saw the predicament in this way: ‘Australian music could only ever be Mushroom music.’6 Like his young protégé Bruce Milne, who was now working behind the counter of his record store in Flinders Lane, Glass embraced punk rock in countercultural rather than business terms. Without intending to set themselves up as such, Glass and Milne were seen as gurus for an anti-Suicide bloc in Melbourne. Milne did try to warn bands about the Suicide contracts and getting a lawyer to check them out before signing. No-one listened.

  Karen Marks is surprisingly generous about Barrie Earle, whom she knew both professionally and personally due to the cottage-industry nature of the scene in Melbourne. ‘I had a lot of time for Barrie. I knew he had been pissing in the boys’ ears to sign to Suicide. Telling them, “I can make you a star.” But I still think Barrie was terrific. He was used by Gudinski. Barrie was always known for having great ideas. He was really good at spotting trends. He was famous for it. None of it would have happened without him. And he spotted Nick and The Boys Next Door, didn’t he?’7

  In the meantime, Nick was having one lesson ground into him repeatedly: ‘After Barrie tried to get us to change what we wore on stage, we were invited over to Gudinski’s office a few days later. He had a whole spiel about how “one day, boys, I am going to make you all stars”. I’ve heard that kind of thing with a lot of the older set over the years. “Look what I can do for you.” That kinda thing; they all say stuff like that.’

  Suicide Records immediately put The Boys Next Door into the studio with Greg Macainsh as a producer. As well as being Karen Marks’s housemate, Macainsh was the one of the most successful pop-rock songwriters of the era, thanks to the Skyhooks phenomenon. It was quite a trajectory for The Boys Next Door: here they were, just coming out of their teens and having only played six professional shows, laying down a single for national release with a genuinely original and revered figure in the industry.

  Nick’s memories, however, are less enthusiastic. He thinks Greg Macainsh ‘was obviously told to sort our music out and give it a pop edge. So, with my vocals I had to sing them, then double-track the vocals again manually to give them that pleasing edge. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have any experience to be able to say, “This is shit.”’

  ‘I wasn’t appalled by the result,’ Macainsh observes drolly. He was one of a handful of older musicians on the Melbourne scene who’d each been matched with a young Suicide band in a studio, with a view to compiling what would be the Lethal Weapons album. ‘The idea was to give the record some varied flavours – and it was cheaper than using a big-name producer, too,’ Macainsh says. ‘Suicide did have a sign-’em-up-spit-’em-out-and-see-what-sticks approach. Barrie was a hustler, but he believed in the whole thing and no-one else had any idea at all about the punk thing happening in England. Certainly not Michael [Gudinski]. Barrie was the messenger for all that. He made it happen. And Michael went with Barrie on it. Michael made a lot of records like that back then, and they would not have been made any other way without him. That needs to be acknowledged.’8

  The Boys Next Door, 1978. Left to right: Tracy Pew, Phill Calvert, Nick Cave, Mick Harvey (Ashley Mackevicius)

  Macainsh understood The Boys Next Door’s disillusionment. ‘Hearing yourself played back in the studio for the first time is always confronting and disappointing. The experience is like looking into a mirror and not liking what you see. I knew they had something to express. They knew it. But they didn’t quite know how to express it. They could only listen to it and say, “That’s not how we sound.”’ Macainsh underlines this when he says, ‘The band was still purely an expression of an attitude.’

  ‘I found Nick a difficult person. I couldn’t connect with him. That’s not a big issue. You don’t need to be someone’s best friend to work with them. But to me Nick was inside his own world. And that made things more difficult. Just a simple technical thing like the way you want the last word of each phrase to not tail off into noise; that need for a bit of intention behind what is sung – you want those lyrics to be heard. The great rock singers know how to push their voices through a wall of noise, both in the studio and live. Nick’s voice . . . had a deadness. It was quite round but it didn’t have a leading edge. That’s what I was pushing for. Obviously he has a learned a lot since those days.’

  Macainsh adds that Phill Calvert was ‘probably the best musician in the band’. Mick Harvey was ‘an earnest chap’. Tracy had a Fender Coronado semi-acoustic bass that was a major problem for the recording, as it was prone to creating feedback, despite the deep tones Pew loved when he played it on stage. Macainsh eventually loaned Tracy his famous Fender L electric bass, which featured the torso of a nude woman painted on it. It was an instrument of greater precision and Tracy took a shine to it. He took a shine to a few other things as well. ‘Tracy created some discussion, as there was something about him pinching hubcaps from vehicles in the studio car park. The studio owner was not happy.’9

  Michael Shipley was the engineer on the recording sessions. Macainsh points out that Shipley had recently finished working with the Sex Pistols in the studio, so it was not a completely ham-fisted scenario. Shipley had also worked with Queen.10 The sound is clean and sharp, and truer to the band’s spirit than what would eventuate seven months later when The Boys Next Door began recording their debut album with a different producer. What Macainsh managed to do in the interim was help them capture a brash, driving cover of Lee Hazlewood’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ as well as two lively (if stock-standard New Wave) originals, ‘Boy Hero’ and ‘Masturbation Generation’.

  The latter was yet another dig by Nick at the punk tag everyone kept labelling them with. The song had grown out of a drunken sparring match with Reals singer Garry Gray, as to who could come up with the worst song title and do something creative with it. Nick suggested ‘I’m So Ugly’11, which Gray never used; Gray gave Nick ‘Masturbation Generation’. The recorded version of ‘Masturbation Generation’ featured a spat-out pun mocking ‘Suicide’ as an option that even the most miserable of souls should give up on. It was classic Nick, biting the hand that feeds and behaving like an innocent when quizzed about the lyrical coincidence.

  Nick’s reading of ‘Boots�
� drew from Nancy Sinatra’s famous version in which she was told by songwriter and producer Lee Hazlewood to sing ‘like a fourteen-year-old that fucks truckers’.12 When it first became a hit in 1966, the song was often used as a soundtrack to news stories propagandising the war in Vietnam, adding to its aura of malice and giving it twisted punk appeal a decade later. Nick’s vocal is overtly nastier than Nancy Sinatra’s, the sound thrashier and trashier, with a pop edge still intact. It’s a good interpretation, inverting the proto-feminist S&M strut of the original to proudly signal young male narcissism and lip-curling cruelty. The sleeve notes for Lethal Weapons brag it was ‘deranged’ rather than arranged by The Boys Next Door.

  Live footage now available on YouTube13 reveals a distinctly aggressive power-pop band playing originals like ‘Secret Life’ and ‘Sex Crimes’ at Swinburne College, songs they’d say they wished they had recorded instead. But who had the talent or resources, let alone the will, to catch that sound and put it out on vinyl?

  Nick Cave at the photoshoot for the cover of Brave Exhibitions, June 1978 (Michel Lawrence)

  Maybe the band was right retrospectively, and their raw demos were better than the polished results with Macainsh. A new boutique label like Suicide – which was looking for a punk-pop crossover into the charts – was never going to release to radio songs with that rawness. In those early days of the punk era, not many people in the industry understood what it was all about, much less how to capture the energy on vinyl. Not even The Boys Next Door did, for that matter. Macainsh was quite right: the band had the attitude, but did it really have an identity?

  When Nick took the recording of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ home to his father, Colin laughed at it. Bach was in no danger of being swept aside by his son. The sting of that as much as anything else might explain why Nick had such a strong negative reaction to the whole experience. And even more to prove.