by Mark Mordue
Label camaraderie was completely dissolving by the time Suicide sent all the bands out on regional and national package tours. Pierre Voltaire, who had initially joined Teenage Radio Stars as a bassist, quickly defected to JAB. He says that on the Suicide showcase nights, ‘the focus of the audience was always on Nick. All the other bands were jealous of Boys Next Door because of Nick. Even then, though, he was fairly disdainful. He was an “art student”, not a “rock star”,’ Voltaire adds in a haughty voice. ‘That was the attitude. Nick was a big ponce . . . flamboyant and charismatic from the day he walked on stage. That side of him is one of the truest things about him, actually.’35
Playing on a triple bill with Teenage Radio Stars and X-Ray-Z, The Boys Next Door caused a minor sensation in Adelaide when they announced they were going to play ‘Masturbation Generation’ to a lunchtime crowd in Rundle Mall. Police on hand to supervise this punk event threatened to pull the plug, so Nick re-announced the song as ‘Frustration Generation’ and sang the original lyrics anyway. Afterwards, he and Tracy caused an even bigger stir by goose-stepping around the mall behind the backs of the police and giving Nazi salutes to them from a balcony. An aspiring young singer by the name of Dave Graney was delighted. The band’s set, he said, was ‘riveting’ and ‘fantastic’, with Nick by turns scarecrow-like, strangely comic and ‘exotic’. Graney would be excited enough by The Boys Next Door to hatch his own plans to head eastwards to Melbourne in search of a music career of his own. ‘Adelaide wasn’t large enough for someone to cultivate a mysterious, tubercular side to their character,’ he says.36
Jillian Burt would similarly become one of Cave’s biggest fans and most sensitive critics. In May she wrote a review for Juke magazine of a show that took place at the Highway Inn in Adelaide. In it she describes Nick as ‘somewhere between the smouldering sensuality of Valentino and the brooding villainy of Vincent Price with a dash of Chaplineseque tragic/comic.’37 Nick later protested that it was over the top; by then Rowland S Howard was at his side, archly lamenting, ‘I wish people said great things like that about me.’38
In an interview with Burt for the newly launched, Adelaide-based national music magazine Roadrunner, Nick said, ‘I get a real kick out of performing. I don’t just dance around. Most of our songs are kind of tragic little songs and I try to put that across by breaking into tears and things like that. I’ve really got a fascination with the real corny kinds of performers like Barry Manilow, with the way he skips across the stage and does all these sort of really flamboyant gestures.’39
Rowland’s high-school band The Obsessions had been supposed to perform with The Reals and The Boys Next Door back at their Swinburne College show in August 1977; instead, his group broke apart before playing a single gig. Mick Harvey was sceptical about Rowland’s credentials for much more than getting noticed for his dress sense, his cutting opinions and his memorable ability to strike poses at parties. ‘I didn’t really feel like buying it on face value,’ says Harvey. ‘I think I pretty much told him that at some party once: “Well, it’s about time you did something rather just talking the talk.” I hadn’t seen much evidence of him doing anything . . . I hadn’t seen him play a note still. I was a little dubious of whether there was anything behind it. Or whether he was just a well-read dandy.’40
Rowland convened with a similarly self-possessed Ian ‘Ollie’ Olsen from Reals at a party that same August. The pair agreed to form a new band before the year was over. Ironically, this was the same party at which Nick and Anita had got together, a measure of how small the Melbourne scene was. In 1995, Rowland would describe Olsen as ‘the most remarkable self-publicist. He had all these people convinced that he was a complete genius. He still does, to a certain extent.’41
A student of the Melbourne electronic composer Felix Werder, Olsen had an informed passion for Bartók, Wagner, Cage and Stockhausen, as well as an interest in the atmospheric and fractured approach of German rock bands such as Neu! and Can. The classical influences were not particularly obvious in his own music, but Olsen saw common ground in that ‘they were all subversive and they were all hitting out in their own way’.42 Already a formidable musician, he was particularly adept at mimicking the guitar work from Marquee Moon. Olsen even played a white Fender Jaguar identical to that of Tom Verlaine of Television. Rowland longed for an instrument just like it. His younger brother, Harry, says Rowland ‘played a red Gibson Firebird copy because Phil Manzanera used to play one in Roxy Music. The early Eno albums were big hits in our house too; those droning guitars and sustained notes were an inspiration. Rowland had just bought this Blue Box effects pedal that became one of his signature sounds – it creates this extraordinary sustain. It came with a piece of literature that said it was designed to emulate a clarinet.’43
Howard and Olsen would select their musical cohorts carefully, first conscripting Jeffrey Wegener when he moved to Melbourne to partake of the booming live scene. A highly regarded Brisbane musician, Wegener had originally been offered the role of drummer for The Saints. Howard and Olsen were not to know this gentle, thoughtful man of self-deprecating intensity could undergo Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations after a few drinks. Wegener was about to be name-checked as ‘the Professor’ in a brilliant new Saints song called ‘Know Your Product’. It was as good a reference as any young musician could hope for, but the line actually exhorted everyone to shoot Wegener, if only to save themselves from his wild side.
Party in Keith and Helena Glass’s backyard, South Yarra, 1977. Left to right: Gina ‘Red Socks’ Riley (face obscured), Tracy Pew, Ollie Olsen, Peter Milne, Anita Lane, Rowland S Howard, Nick Cave. (David Pepperell)
The three then travelled to Sydney by train to meet with bassist Janine Hall and persuade her to come south and join them. Hall was a few years older and a rising star with a few offers on the table in Sydney, but the zeal and talent of her new young friends was hard to resist. With Wegener and Hall in place, Young Charlatans rehearsed hard, and were perceived as something of a supergroup in Melbourne before they played a note. Howard would describe the anticipation around them as ‘ridiculous’. Mick Harvey recalls: ‘Everyone was waiting for them to come together and there was an inevitability it was going to be genius.’44
The fact is, it was. When Young Charlatans played their first show in December 1977, The Boys Next Door were shaken out of a prematurely self-satisfied torpor as a freshly recorded Suicide act. Young Charlatans came out fully formed, presenting a host of sophisticated songs with a driven, even possessed, musical attack that worked off the interplay between Rowland S Howard and Ollie Olsen as blazing guitarist-songwriters who shared vocal duties.
Rowland’s song ‘Shivers’ was merely one gem in a very rich set – not even their best song, fans would argue. As with any great young band, there was a feeling the amplifiers could barely contain them. Up against the rushing, jagged scope of the Young Charlatans, The Boys Next Door appeared limited, even contrived. Nick’s lyrics wilted by comparison with Howard’s sardonic and convincing love poetry and Olsen’s jump-cut visions of reality. What The Boys Next Door fought back with was the honed intensity of a former schoolboy unit that had been playing together for years.
Journalist Clinton Walker had only just arrived from Brisbane when all this started to happen. He claims that by early 1978, ‘Young Charlatan[s] was the band The Boys Next Door wanted to be.’45 As luck would have it, no sooner had Young Charlatans set Melbourne alight than their flame started to flicker and die. A whole new experimental scene enchanted by the synthesiser was developing around the squats and low-rent housing in the university suburb of North Fitzroy where Olsen lived. Howard was making serious strides with his guitar playing, but his deeply romantic songs – for all their wry asides – were increasingly at odds with Olsen’s Burroughs-influenced cut-up approach to lyrics and his deepening passion for electronics. The seventeen-year-old Howard was also sick of the nineteen-year-old Olsen’s controlling and petulant ways; Olsen had walked out on the gro
up a few times. Manager Bruce Milne – still only twenty years old himself – was powerless to stop the disintegration of what, for barely six months, had been the hottest band in town. Even the volatile Jeffrey Wegener could only shake his head and say, on reflection, ‘Fucking Ollie!’46
Mick Harvey would recall them being ‘very important’ and ‘mind-boggling’, noting the significant musical careers of each band member after Young Charlatans. ‘Quite simply,’ Harvey says, ‘I don’t see why that sort of thing should be forgotten just because there is no recorded product.’47 Olsen would continue to cross swords with Nick as he established a hardcore reputation on the Australian electronic music scene, later forming Max Q with Michael Hutchence.48 Wegener would distinguish himself as one of the key musicians of the post-punk era, playing drums for Ed Kuepper’s Laughing Clowns and briefly joining The Birthday Party (who reputedly sacked him for being too much even for them, though this is disputed). Janine Hall would go on to play a crucial role in a reformed version of The Saints under Chris Bailey’s rowdy leadership.
Apart from a barely listenable live tape and some demo recordings, the reputation of the unrecorded Young Charlatans would be sustained mainly in people’s memories, part of a moment that was briefly and hectically theirs. The Boys Next Door were about to absorb this fast-burning mythology in the form of Rowland S Howard, who would transform not only Nick Cave’s vision of song writing, but his band entirely.
By June 1978, The Boys Next Door were trapped in Allan Eaton Studio with producer Les Karski (of the British pub-funk band Supercharge), unhappily at work on their debut album. Mick Harvey would become even more depressed after playing a game of pool with Karski during which the producer denounced Roxy Music and The Velvet Underground and declared reggae his favourite music. It was hard to see where a meeting of minds might be achieved. Charged with giving The Boys Next Door a New Wave sound that matched the latest musical trends in the United Kingdom, Karski emphasised Phill Calvert’s precise drumming and guest musician Andrew Duffield’s keyboards, as well as his own backing vocal flourishes, pushing Cave even harder than Greg Macainsh had done to enunciate his vocals. In a 1983 interview with a fanzine called The Offense, Nick looked back on the recordings and said: ‘I think my singing style at that particular period was totally repulsive.’49
Nick had big visions beforehand, as usual. He’d told the Sydney fanzine Spurt!, ‘I never had much faith in punk rock at all.’ The Berlin sound of David Bowie and Iggy Pop was now all-consuming in his ears. ‘We’re getting another member,’ he said mysteriously, refusing to give a name at the time of interview. ‘Synthesiser. He’ll be playing a major role on the album. We’d like to use a lot of keyboards. My interest has always been synthetic music anyway.’50
Sadly, the struggles with Les Karski saw Duffield, the young synthesiser genius, used far more conventionally and finally sidelined. He felt jilted by Nick’s fast-moving enthusiasm and convenient disenchantment with his abilities as Karski dominated the direction the recordings took. Duffield would get his artistic revenge, playing in Ollie Olsen’s Whirlywirld before joining Models.51 He would look back on working with difficult characters like Nick Cave and Ollie Olsen and regard them as ‘visionaries’ deeply informed by the influences and tensions that were shaping so many bands across the city: ‘We were kind of drawn together by the punk movement, half of them from a new electronic music scene, half from this punk garage rock school, and an amateur kind of soif de vivre – a feeling of just going for it.’52
The Boys Next Door work in progress, dubbed Brave Exhibitions, would not emerge from the pressure cooker with Karski. RCA, with whom Mushroom had negotiated a distribution deal, were already losing faith in everyone associated with the Suicide label after Lethal Weapons had failed to make an impact commercially. They passed on Brave Exhibitions, describing it as ‘not being technically satisfactory’. As Suicide unravelled and no-one could be found to release Brave Exhibitions, the album was caught in limbo. The more The Boys Next Door listened to what they had done – and what had been done to them – the unhappier they became. Corporate boots were the ones doing the walking – and it was all over them.
Howard had visited the band during the recording process. When he, Nick and Tracy were sent to fetch alcohol, Rowland was surprised when Tracy simply broke into the nearest car and he and Nick casually piled in. It seemed to be a primary-school teacher’s vehicle, the back seat filled with children’s drawings. Once they had the alcohol and were nearing the studio, Tracy suggested they crash the car for fun. Nick agreed and, while Rowland screamed for them to stop, Tracy accelerated into a telegraph pole, cutting his head open on the steering wheel when they hit it. ‘We got out of the car and Tracy and Nick stood there pelting the car with bricks in a matter-of-fact fashion, as if this was expected of them,’ Rowland said. They all then fled the scene and walked back to the studio with the alcohol, blood still streaming down Tracy’s face. ‘I didn’t know them that well at that time,’ Rowland added, ‘and to me the idea of driving along with somebody, in a stolen car, saying, “Let’s crash the car!” was just not in my sphere of social reference.’53
Photoshoot for the cover of Brave Exhibitions, June 1978. Left to right: Phill Calvert, Mick Harvey, Nick Cave, Tracy Pew. (Michel Lawrence)
Janet Austin had begun co-editing Pulp with Bruce Milne and Clinton Walker. She says that The Boys Next Door had a big advantage over most of the other bands on the scene because they’d been a tight-knit unit since their school days. ‘They had that camaraderie that set them apart, particularly Nick and Tracy. I knew all of them before I had ever even seen them play. They were a highly visible group. I don’t want to use the word “gang”, but they had an identity even before they got up on a stage. They were tough – that’s a good word. But they had this camp way of talking, mocking the whole punk thing in a way, as well as embracing it: “Thank you, ladies and gentleman, and the next song is . . .” Early on, they’d end their first set with a mock country instrumental as if we were at a country scone bake-off.’54
The band hung out late at Topolino’s Pizzeria in St Kilda, where, Austin says, ‘they got this idea for new stage names based on the pizza toppings. Nick was “Tropicana”. Tracy was “With the Lot”. He used to call himself “Buddy Love” too, from [the 1963 Jerry Lewis film] The Nutty Professor. For a while Tracy wouldn’t answer to anyone unless you called him Buddy. Tracy used to say he looked like Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco. He did a drawing of himself looking like that. He did another great one of Nick, a caricature, it was all Adam’s apple.’55
When Tracy got too drunk to play the bass and sing at the same time, Rowland would sometimes join the group on stage at the Tiger Lounge and help out with backing vocals. Even so, he still found Pew very difficult to relate to. On one of his first visits to the bassist’s home, he discovered Pew reading Plato’s Republic while all around him on the floor were beer cans and pornographic magazines. Nick thought Rowland harboured similar impressions about him. He told the makers of the documentary Auutoluminescent: ‘Rowland had this perception of me being this inarticulate punk or something like that . . . He was impressed by the idiot savant aspect of my nature.’ When Rowland finally visited Cave’s home, he was ‘disillusioned’. Nick’s shelves were crammed with novels by Nabokov and Dostoyevsky. ‘You read this stuff!’ said Rowland, ‘I thought you were for real!’56
Despite his friendship with Rowland, once it became clear Young Charlatans were falling to pieces, Nick began making overtures to Ollie Olsen about joining The Boys Next Door. Olsen was the superior musician back then, ‘a pretty bloody good guitarist’, says Mick Harvey. Even Howard later offered backhanded praise: ‘Ollie was much more capable of doing a very passable Tom Verlaine imitation.’57 Olsen’s interest in synthesisers, the art-noise ethos of the New York ‘No Wave’ scene and a multitude of German musical acts from Kraftwerk to Amon Düül II only added to his avant-garde allure and the fantasies Nick was having for wh
ere The Boys Next Door might go.
Olsen’s intense personality made him the prince of Fitzroy in much the same way as, just across the Yarra River, Nick’s rock ’n’ roll charisma had crowned him the prince of St Kilda. Bruce Milne shakes his head as he tries to describe just how powerful they were as figures on the Melbourne underground music scene. ‘Nick was passively aggressive by comparison,’ Milne says, laughing. ‘Ollie was aggressively aggressive. Very strong, very dominating.’58
Mick Harvey confirms: ‘There was this weird period where Nick courted Ollie to be our guitar player. But Ollie was just playing a game with Nick, just tricking him and laughing at him behind his back. They were very competitive back then, and there was a basic disrespect from Ollie. When he didn’t end up joining us, that really pissed off Nick – there’s a bit of bad blood there over whatever happened. When that fell through, the obvious and much better choice was Rowland anyway. And he was always much less likely to take over the lead vocals.’59