Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  As well as consuming alcohol, Serepax and Tuinal, Nick was snorting lines of speed (amphetamines) and drinking cough mixture cheaply obtained from chemists. According to Pierre Voltaire, who was fast turning into Nick’s biggest drug buddy, ‘That’s when everyone was chugging “Tuggalugs” as we called it, Tussidex Forte; we would have bought them by the six pack if we could.’5 The hallucinogenic qualities of Tussidex Forte, when imbibed by the bottle rather than the spoonful, were not yet sufficiently widely known to see the medication withdrawn as an over-the-counter purchase. Serepax and Tuinal required a prescription. In Nick’s case, these were easy to come by. Both were antidepressants given to people suffering from sleeplessness and anxiety, but anyone able to feign tiredness and stress in front of a GP could access it. Females on the scene seemed to have an endless supply in their handbags. The magnifying effects of Serepax or Tuinal when combined with alcohol could be quite hypnotic, if not downright narcoleptic. They also took the edge off bad hangovers: the next day drifted along swimmingly.

  St Kilda was ready-made for Nick’s derangement of the senses, being populated by the kind of figures you might expect to see in Expressionist artworks. In her book The George, historian Gillian Upton describes the area in rich detail:

  With its street upon street of boarding houses, bed-sits and flats . . . [the suburb had] attracted the displaced. Many of the unemployed, elderly, mentally ill and sole parents – people on the edge of ‘normal’ society – moved to St Kilda, adding to the already variegated population. They were joined by tens of thousands of refugees and migrants, particularly Jews, from post-war Europe . . . The suburb’s already seedy reputation grew as St Kilda drew more gangs, criminals, drug dealers and prostitutes. In a spiral of reputation and reality, people came from all over Melbourne in pursuit of these things until the very name of the suburb became synonymous with sex, violence and drugs.6

  A pattern of rapid development and low-rent accommodation meant that by the late 1960s St Kilda had twice the population density of any other suburb in the city. Students from the newly opened CIT, Prahran Tech and the Victorian Colleges of the Arts frequented the bars, cake shops and takeaway food joints in the 1970s, along with daytime tourists to the seaside and nocturnal visitors curious to explore Melbourne’s red-light district. Fitzroy Street was renowned for ‘whoring and scoring’. The area’s bacchanalian freakishness was confirmed at night by the flash-lit, leering smile of Mr Moon, the iconic open-mouthed gateway that devoured all-comers to Luna Park at the water’s edge. Nick was absorbing images that would echo across songs as varied as ‘The Moon Is in the Gutter’ (1984) and his true-blue cover of The Seekers’ 1965 hit ‘The Carnival Is Over’ (1986). Details that might seem exaggerated, surreal or self-consciously symbolic were real enough. If Wangaratta was the lost world of his innocence, St Kilda was the start of his journey into pandemonium.

  The suburb’s main drinking establishment, The George Hotel, more commonly known as the Seaview Hotel, had four different bars operating out of the same building. Its whitewashed Victorian architecture could not disguise a down-at-heel character, heightened by the raffish clientele inside. Each bar appealed to its own set of regulars, from chronic boozers and students downstairs, to Maoris and bikies at the aptly named ‘Snakepit’ (which sat below street level in vaporous hues cast from orange lampshades), to various attempts over the decades to establish a high-society function room upstairs. The latter aspiration had been overtaken by weddings and social events for the local Greek community on Saturday nights, with Sunday nights reserved for a long-running strip show, Arthur Luden’s Getcha Gearoff. Despite its grand façade, The George’s reputation for alcoholism, sleaze, violence, drug dealing and underage drinking was in no danger of rehabilitation. Prostitutes plied their trade in the rear alley, escorting customers upstairs to the hotel rooms where they lived. A nightwatchman would bring them toasted cheese sandwiches while they worked through the evening. The fact that one of the Seaview licensees was a retired policeman no doubt helped tolerance levels. Patrol cars were often sighted in the alley, reputedly loading their boots with free cartons of beer or being treated to other pleasures.

  When Dolores San Miguel started booking bands into a small upstairs space at the Seaview she dubbed the Wintergarden Room in August 1978, its popularity soon made it clear she would need to use the larger function room beside it. The owners agreed ‘the Greeks aren’t drinking enough’ and pushed them out to make way for bands like The Boys Next Door and their followers. The group sold out the venue to a New Year’s Eve crowd of over a thousand people, a phenomenal feat for such an obscure act even given the end-of-year occasion. Before long, the burgeoning punk scene would take over every bar in the hotel – except the dreaded Snakepit – while a residue of hardcore drinkers sat like barnacles among an influx of the young, the weird and the beautiful.

  Mick Harvey and Rowland S Howard, St Kilda Beach, 1977 (Peter Milne)

  So it was that an entire scene, which was to become known as the Crystal Ballroom, found itself a palatial home amid the squalor of St Kilda. San Miguel describes it as being ‘a little bit like your grandparents giving you the keys to their mansion’.7 This was to Melbourne what CBGBs was to New York and the Marquee Club was to London – with the added architectural glories of a wide marble staircase and entrance hall, an array of faded gilt mirrors, red velvet curtains around the main stage, and a sprung ballroom dance floor over which hung the Venetian crystal chandelier that gave the upstairs room, and eventually the entire venue, its most famous name. This mix of glamour, hedonism and desolation would give the Crystal Ballroom a lush, edgy atmosphere and a naturally theatrical ambience. Here the audience, as much as bands such as The Boys Next Door, Models, Whirlywirld and Primitive Calculators, were on show.

  Crowds paraded between the Ballroom and, when it expanded, the Birdcage and Paradise Lounge bars on the ground floor. The stairwell was an informal stage in its own right, dominated by a stained-glass window that depicted Saint George slaying a dragon. Over the next decade, art and fashion as much as music would be affected by the ambience established at the venue. Creating a look became an obsessive pastime. This was where you became someone. Everybody looked into the faded gilt mirrors – at themselves and each other – before the venue became so packed they had to be taken down lest the mirrors fall and kill someone. According to San Miguel, ‘The Boys Next Door always filled the place and Nick was the shaman.’8

  A tour to Sydney in December 1978 had introduced The Boys Next Door to Crime and the City Solution, a dramatic young band fronted by a teenage runaway by the name of Simon Bonney. Crime and the City Solution’s music was strangely epic in scope, combining the chills-and-warmth of John Cale-era Velvet Underground with splashes of free jazz saxophone. Bonney’s lyrics and deep-voiced vocalising in ‘Snow Child’ and ‘Here Comes the Dawn’ gave the whole package a drowned poetic sensibility. Mick Harvey remembers ‘Listless, Listless’ and ‘Platform’ as songs that impressed The Boys Next Door the most. ‘They had some kind of sound,’ he says, searching for words to explain their impact. ‘It was otherworldly. Especially with them being based in Sydney, where Radio Birdman and the Oxford Tavern scene and that whole Detroit sound were so dominant. Crime were totally different to that. It was partly due to all the idiosyncrasies of untrained musicians playing together. They couldn’t sound the way they wanted to. And so they became something else.’9

  Not yet seventeen, Simon Bonney was living in Kings Cross with a middle-aged woman and proving to be a talent of dazzling possibility. Rowland S Howard, Ollie Olsen, Simon Bonney – Nick was naturally drawn to them, and being pressed to show how good he could be by comparison. Radio Birdman and The Saints were self-combusting in Europe; these young unknowns were Nick’s immediate peers, his competition at home.

  On his return to Melbourne, Nick had seemed physically changed by the encounter with Crime and the City Solution, mimicking Bonney’s flamenco-like, snaking gestures on stage: the burying
of the head in a raised arm being a favourite, if melodramatic, offering directly copied from his latest infatuation. When Crime visited Melbourne at the Boys’ invitation, Nick’s debt to Simon Bonney’s mesmerist-meets-bullfighter stagecraft became obvious. In years to come this would be viewed as a form of theft, as if anyone could copyright a pose.

  Mick Harvey laughs at the pseudo-controversy around Nick stealing anything from Bonney. ‘When I asked Simon about it, he told me he’d actually been copying Nick’s moves!’ Harvey explains that Bonney was freeze-framing particular stage gestures of Nick’s that he liked. ‘So Simon was copying Nick and performing in his own way, and Nick saw Simon and copied that. And around it went in a circle between them.’10 A decade later, each would dance on stage before the film cameras in Wim Wenders’ Berlin love letter, Wings of Desire. By then Rowland S Howard was Simon Bonney’s gun-slinging guitar foil. Many thought Crime got the better of that cinematic duel, but it was Howard more than Cave or Bonney who people felt drawn to on the screen. Ironically, the mutual enchantment between Nick Cave and Simon Bonney was first visible in the video clip that was developed for The Boys Next Door’s interpretation of Rowland S Howard’s song ‘Shivers’.

  Rowland always insisted that he had written ‘Shivers’ while he was still at Swinburne Community School. If true, he would have been only sixteen or seventeen years old when the song first came to him. He may indeed have had a draft by the time he finished high school in 1976, but according to others in his circle, the song found its full emotional realisation in response to events of the following year.

  The painter Jenny Watson identifies Lisa Craswell, of whom Rowland continued to be enamoured, as the prime inspiration for ‘Shivers’, with its references to the vanity of the beloved: ‘He [Rowland] was dead right. There was something almost creepy about her vanity. This Edwardian Gothic dressing-up thing was happening. Lots of make-up, big earrings, everyone getting clothes from op shops, which just goes to show the old adage is true: you don’t have to have money to have style. A lot of those looks have now gone into popular culture. You see it in Johnny Depp and [the film] Alice in Wonderland. But back then it was still very underground.’11

  Fellow artist Megan Bannister12, who was living with Ollie Olsen at the time, believes the final version of the song derived from a particular incident: ‘Rowland had gone to see Lisa . . . When he got there, this other guy was there. And he got really upset, and walked back to the house. But he punched a wall along the way. Rowland was absolutely devastated. He had cut up his knuckles. Where we lived was about three miles away. And he walked home. There was this verandah on the roof. Rowland had his guitar. We were all sitting on the roof. I think, from memory, he got it [the song] pretty much at that time . . . You know sometimes you do something and it just works. Sometimes it’s positively inspired. And I remember thinking, what a great pop song, because, more than anything, it was a great pop song.’13

  Photographer Peter Milne arrived at the house only moments after Rowland had finished playing it to Olsen and Bannister. He remembers, ‘There was this wonderful little stone bridge over the railway near where they lived, the Sandringham Line. Coincidently, somebody painted “The Boys Next Door” on it [later]; the graffiti was there for many, many years. Anyway, it was on that little stone bridge that Rowland, while walking home that day, punched his hand. He used to stub cigarettes out on himself, do all sorts of tragic, kind of Rimbaud, gestures of romantic love . . . It only took him fifteen minutes to write, and from the word go it was supposed to be a joke. When Nick sang it, he sang it as if it was torn out of his soul; when Rowland sang it, it was a sardonic piss-take.’14

  The ‘other guy’ Rowland had found in bed with Lisa Craswell was Tony Clark. Their relationship had begun as a student–teacher affair, and something of that air of secrecy and ambiguity clung to them as a couple, a seductive energy that pulled people further into their orbit. Rowland had read Goethe’s semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther before writing ‘Shivers’. He would have recognised echoes of his own predicament in the eighteenth-century tale of a love triangle that forms between a volatile teenage artist, the young woman who befriends him, and her older lover. Like Goethe, Howard would spend the rest of his life disowning the emotional excess of his first major work. In the novel, the young man’s unrequited feelings precipitate a decision to commit suicide, though he can barely shake off his own ennui to follow through on the act without requiring a semblance of his beloved’s permission and complicity. ‘Shivers’ shares in the same emotional torpor with a greater degree of sarcasm. The carapace of cynicism sounds like thin bragging, which is why you feel the sentiments behind it even more.

  An alert, impish presence, Genevieve McGuckin seems to conduct her conversation on two levels: the apparent, passionate one and another from which she evaluates you all the while she keeps engaging. It is an odd mix of closeness and distance, vulnerability and submerged judgement. She was not yet involved with Rowland S Howard, nor had she tried heroin, when she began a brief fling with Nick Cave towards the end of 1978 in Melbourne. McGuckin says she saw how ‘Rowlie and Nick were very different people who shared a similar sensibility with books and films. Both found it difficult to exist in a world where it is deemed wrong to be sad. Rowlie found it very hard to accept that if you weren’t happy, you should just shut up. Nick did too, but he was always more of a networker – he gathers people around him who are good for him, or who do his will,’ she says, laughing. ‘Rowland was a lot more insular in his nature, and just more sensitive. Other people’s problems tended to become his. He tended to overestimate his own failings too.’15

  When the affair between Cave and McGuckin began, it was, typically, ‘at a party somewhere’. As the two of them left, Phill Calvert stopped Nick and asked him, ‘What about Neat [Anita Lane]?’ Nick shrugged him off. McGuckin asked who Calvert was talking about, to which Nick came back with the memorably offhand line ‘She’s someone who makes clothes for me.’

  The connection between McGuckin and Cave would only last a few weeks. What stands out most in McGuckin’s memory is arriving at another party: ‘I saw this extraordinarily beautiful girl with a blue teardrop painted on her face, dressed in a man’s silver-grey suit. That was Anita. And all these girls who also looked amazing were gathered around her like ladies in waiting, looking daggers at me. That’s when I thought, “Oh no, what the hell have I got myself into here?”

  Anita Lane and Genevieve McGuckin at the photoshoot for the cover of Brave Exhibitions, 1978 (Michel Lawrence)

  ‘But that’s how I got with Rowlie, through Nick. Rowlie was always there – he was Nick’s friend, he always made sure I was fine when we were out together, he was fantastically caring, a fount of information about all kinds of things, always making a running commentary on what was going on around us, he was funny . . .’ McGuckin pauses. ‘I think I left Nick because of Nick. We lasted, like, a few minutes. He was just too much trouble. And there was obviously unfinished business between him and Anita. Nick is so charming, he is very easy to like at first, but there is so much hurt, so much fucked-up-ness. Anyway, we had stopped being involved, and I was somewhere with Rowlie where he was standing on a stool on this table and I was holding on and I just looked up at him and I realised: Oh my god, he’s the one, I’m in love with him, it’s him.’16

  Such incestuous behaviour only tightened the connections between everyone once Anita and Nick got back together and all was forgiven or forgotten. Mick Harvey was already with Katy Beale17, a young painter of aristocratic bearing with a nervy, private manner that matched his own inclinations towards separateness from the madding crowd. Tracy Pew was still dating Gina Riley, who was funny and sexy and smart, much to Pew’s taste, with a bit of sassy attitude to match. Bronwyn Bonney says, ‘Gina Riley was great. She was the only well-adjusted one out of all of us, the only person who liked herself, who wasn’t at war with herself.’18

  As for Phill Calvert, he really was th
e boy next door: blond, handsome, amenable, a heterosexual hairdresser with a line of admiring and beautiful women longing after him as the ideal boyfriend. He was, of course, in a committed relationship and just too good to be true. Quite apart from the personality clashes that were developing, it is easy to see how someone as straightforward and well liked as Calvert aroused the jealousy of such self-annihilating – and less conventionally handsome – romantics as Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard. Though Nick and Rowland would always comment that Phill had a habit of saying the most annoying things, Calvert’s dogged sense of loyalty to the group would only magnify their frustration. The more he did – from getting Karen Marks to be their first manager, to beginning part-time work behind the counter at Missing Link in 1978 and building stronger connections with Keith Glass – the less thanks he would get. The fact they were all well aware of Calvert’s difficulties with his overbearing father makes Nick and Rowland’s treatment of him seem even more cruel. It is interesting to consider how much this low-level propensity for schoolboy bullying within The Boys Next Door would animate the sadomasochistic heart of The Birthday Party, driving its violent aesthetic and finally destroying that band from within. For now, though, the gang was all here and ready for action. And Nick had plenty to give.

  When Mick Harvey, Genevieve McGuckin and Rowland S Howard were living in a flat on The Esplanade in St Kilda, Mick woke up one night and saw Nick in his room with blood all over his hand. Pierre Voltaire was there too, as was his girlfriend at the time. People had been drinking. Mick went back to sleep, already bored with the goings on. Again. Rowland was drunk and asleep in bed with Genevieve when he woke to see a policeman standing over him shining a torch in his face. They pulled him from the bed, then dropped him on his back again. Not this one, they said. Mick Harvey says the situation was very confused, with people coming and going. ‘It was quite heavy by the end, police with guns in their holsters like they were ready to use them.’