Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  A lavish red chair with gold trim had sat in the large glass window of an apartment block nearby. Everybody had noticed it, mocked its prominence to the point of it becoming a landmark. Loaded up with alcohol and speed, Nick, Pierre and his girlfriend decided to pay Mick, Genevieve and Rowland a late-night visit. As they passed the throne-like chair, Pierre vaguely remembers them breaking into the rear of a tradesman’s parked car, pulling out all the tools and ‘at some point us dancing around in the street with a saw’.19

  Pierre’s girlfriend then hurled a brick through the apartment’s large plate-glass window to get the chair, finishing the job off with a stolen hammer. In an effort to dissuade her, Nick climbed in after her, cutting his right hand on the glass. Eventually all three took off with the chair, getting as far as their friends’ apartment block just a few doors along. The chair was so big it was impossible to manoeuvre into the building, let alone up the stairs. With sirens ringing out, they managed to raise it up and dump it over the back fence before fleeing. Unfortunately they’d left a trail of broken glass and, more crucially, blood behind them.

  When the police arrived, Nick was caught, quite literally, red-handed. He took the blame, covering for Pierre’s girlfriend, who was also a close friend of Anita. Nick was arrested that night, then released the following morning to his family. While at the station organising his son’s bail, Colin Cave offered to pay for the damages in an attempt to stave off prosecution.

  A few days later, on Friday, 5 January 1979, in his role as Director for the Council for Adult Education, Nick’s father set off for the classical music song camp in Harrietville, near Wangaratta. It was not the best of times to be going anywhere. Nick was called back to St Kilda East police station for further enquiries on Sunday, 7 January. Colin was by then driving back to Melbourne from Harrietville and not contactable. Worried, Dawn decided to accompany her son to the station. While they were seated in the interview room, she was asked to step outside. Nick’s sister, Julie, and their cousin were there with what Dawn describes as ‘this awful news’.20

  Colin Cave had been killed in a car crash, inexplicably detouring along a dirt road just outside of Wangaratta. She was told Adrian Twitt had formally identified the body of his friend. Upon hearing this news, Dawn was understandably stunned. Nick came out of the interview room to find out what was happening. In an adjoining area two officers were discussing the rape and murder of a prostitute as if it were a workaday joke. Dawn could not hear the conversation, or she has blotted it out, but she remembers the laughter. All she could think, she says, was, ‘How can people be laughing? How can anyone in the world be laughing now?’21

  Nick began to shout at the police, to no avail. He had previously mocked one of them for their spelling after they had written down his occupation as ‘muskian’ on a charge sheet. The two officers continued their conversation about the dead prostitute without regard for Dawn Cave or the news the family was dealing with. Nick’s first impulse was to protect his mother – but look at where he had put her. Look at what he had done. Look at the choices his father had made, too. It was all wrong.

  The death of Nick’s father would be mentioned time and again in interviews and biographies as central to the artist Nick became, and to many of his songs and thematic obsessions. But there is another side to the tragedy that is rarely remarked on: the grief Dawn Cave felt for the loss of her husband.

  Nick seems to shake with energy when he says, ‘I was really very, very worried about my mother, and that was my primary concern and reaction, how devastated she seemed. And the inability I felt in being able to look after her – that was more the problem. Me not having a clue. Not having a clue how to approach something that was so serious. I was twenty-one years old and I was monumentally ill-equipped to deal with my mother’s pain. It was so overwhelming I never even looked at it from my own point of view. I never looked at it from how I might feel for years.’

  On the day Phill Calvert helped Nick escape from the funeral and cremation arrangements being made at home in Caulfield North, the drummer recalls, ‘We bought some beers and went back to my place. Nick was upset, obviously; he was angry too. He said a lot of things. I can’t tell you what we talked about. This is all around the time Nick had been busted for some stupid, petty thing. His dad had got Nick out when he was arrested. I know plenty of people where the dad dies and there’s unfinished business. That’s how it was with Nick,’ Calvert says of the time. ‘Then we talked about band stuff, plans. It’s funny, I don’t even relate the death of Nick’s dad to when we started recording, I don’t think I even thought about it or made any connection then. We just kicked on. It didn’t seem to stop the band at any stage.’22

  Soon after Phill’s visit, Nick disappeared for two days, completely isolating himself at the home of a female friend. According to Mick Harvey, no-one saw him during this patch of time.

  Nick says he barely remembers his father’s funeral. It would appear the whole thing is blotted out. In the wake of Colin Cave’s death and the need to complete the recordings for what would be Door, Door, Nick still had to go to court. He was given a good-behaviour bond thanks to his father’s earlier intervention and character references. Friends would claim Nick was sorry he could never explain to his father that he had done the chivalrous thing and taken the blame for someone else. Why that regret should then express itself in such an intense rage is harder to say.

  Dolores San Miguel says, ‘Nick was always an angry young man but after his father died it was like he became ten times angrier.’ News of Colin Cave’s death spread quickly through the community that gathered at the Crystal Ballroom. Though she was in her late twenties and already a mother as well as a happening venue promoter, Dolores admits, ‘I always felt somewhat intimidated by Nick and some of his friends. Apparently I was not alone. This night I was standing at the bottom of the Ballroom staircase as Nick, and some band members and friends, were leaning over the banister above. I expressed my condolences to Nick, even though I felt uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassed. Nick’s reaction stunned me. “Thanks, but I really don’t care at all. He deserved to die.”

  ‘And that was that,’ Dolores says. ‘He was obviously feeling pain and hurt, but he was a punk and had to keep that mask on – perhaps he wanted to shock me. I knew he meant none of what he said, but, still, I was flabbergasted at the time. In later days and months, I really started to sense the emotion, sadness and bewilderment Nick was feeling.’23

  Just ten days after Nick’s father was killed, The Boys Next Door entered Richmond Recorders with a brilliant young sound engineer named Tony Cohen.

  The journey back into the studio had been protracted and confusing. In the hope of recouping their investment, Mushroom decided at the close of 1978 to press ahead and release Brave Exhibitions. It was almost six months since the original June recordings had become caught up in record-company wrangling while Suicide expired as a label. The idea of finally throwing Brave Exhibitions into the marketplace was a plan The Boys Next Door argued strongly against. Mick Harvey says, ‘We were young and changing so fast we didn’t know where we were or how we wanted to sound, really. Something we had done two months ago seemed old hat to us. Six months later and it was three times old hat.’24

  Rowland Howard’s arrival had intensified the restless and radical shifts in direction The Boys Next Door were going through. ‘There was always an anger directed at the band,’ Rowland observed, ‘but after I joined, it was more blatant; people suddenly regarded us as art-house dilettantes. People who used to like the band hated the band after I joined. They’d call out for “Boy Hero” and we wouldn’t do it, and they’d come up to us afterwards and say, “You think you’re just fucking great, don’t you? We’re your fans and you can’t fucking do it!” They were just incensed, because Australian rock bands used to play what the audience wanted them to.’25 Rowland recalled, with some amusement, ‘After I joined the band, even though we were still under contract . . . nobody from Mushroom e
ver came to see us again, which was . . . nice.’26

  At a blistering show for the 3RRR-FM Christmas party on 12 December 1978, The Boys Next Door had been welcomed to the stage like conquering heroes as ‘the band that survived Suicide!’ In the broadcast, you can feel the group hitting an early, thrilling peak, poised between the power-pop of their immediate past and a fiery expansion driven by the sonic energy and melodic richness of Howard’s guitar work and song writing.27 Provocative as ever, Nick dedicated the freshly minted, Boys-own ‘Shivers’ to Mushroom’s boss: ‘Are you listening, Michael Gudinski?’

  Finally, the band and the record company came to a compromise regarding Brave Exhibitions. Mushroom would finance cheap studio time at night to record a handful of fresh tracks in the New Year. In return, The Boys Next Door would salvage the best of the material from their sessions with Les Karski. The group decided these older songs would constitute side one of a ‘new’ album; side two would be reserved for work to be recorded with Tony Cohen. In this way their rapid evolution as a quintet with Rowland S Howard could be delineated to give a more representative picture of the band as it now was – on what would become their debut album, Door, Door.

  The rejected songs from the Karski session were ‘Secret Life’, ‘Sex Crimes’, ‘Conversations’, ‘Earthling in the Orient’ and ‘Spoilt Music’. There was also an improvised duet, with Rowland (not yet officially in the band at the time of recording) bashing away on piano and Nick singing semi-coherently. They’d wanted to horrify Karski and it had worked.

  The fact that five of Nick’s songs were shunted to make way for Rowland’s compositions says something about the strength of the guitarist’s material. Live, things had gone the same way, with Nick and Rowland’s songs equally divided in the band’s set, in between covers such as Lou Reed’s ‘Caroline Says (II)’, Iggy Pop’s ‘China Girl’ and the New York Dolls’ ‘Personality Crisis’.

  Already a phenomenally experienced engineer for his age, the nineteen-year-old Tony Cohen was ‘still a hippie’ when he met The Boys Next Door. He was nonetheless the great studio collaborator of whom Nick Cave and Mick Harvey had been dreaming. Being the same age, he could understand their frustrations with how things were supposed to be done when recording – and the tame results they had achieved as a result. The relationship he forged with Nick and Mick would be one of the most important influences on their sound for the next two decades.

  ‘TC’, as he was sometimes referred to, had ‘grown up playing drums in garage bands. As I got older, I had this fascination for tape recorders.’ He was still at school when his training began at Armstrong Studios with the jazz producer and owner Bill Armstrong and an expatriate Englishman, Roger Savage, who had worked on early demos for The Rolling Stones and would go on to have a major career in film soundtracks. ‘I was that young, I think I bought lollies with my first pay packet,’ Cohen told me decades later.

  He soon became the unlikely protégé of Countdown’s Molly Meldrum, who had learned his own trade in London ‘watching the White Album get made. The Beatles all loved Molly because he was such a party animal,’ Cohen said. Meldrum invited TC to assist him on hit records such as Supernaut’s ‘I Like It Both Ways’ (1976) and The Ferrets’ ‘Don’t Fall in Love’ (1977).

  ‘Molly did take me under his wing, but it was more because I was a pretty young boy than because of any talent,’ said Cohen. ‘I was far too inexperienced to be doing albums like Supernaut and The Ferrets. Being a good Catholic boy, I didn’t even know what a poof was. But Molly never put it on you; he knew who was straight and who wasn’t. He was a shitload of fun. My main job was to pour Molly his Scotch and Cokes. Once they kicked in, he’d be playing Elton John at 1000 decibels, shouting at us all about this sound and that he was wanting. They didn’t have studio-engineering schools like they do now. It’s not like you ever saw ads for an apprenticeship or a course to do it in the newspaper. I didn’t even know the job existed when I started. I didn’t even know it had a name. Molly used to come into the studio with this seven-foot high Maori drag queen. She lifted up her dress once to show us. That was my education,’ he said, laughing.28

  One of the most important studio lessons Meldrum taught Cohen involved the virtues of volume: ‘Basically, when you’re mixing, if a guitar solo comes in and sounds nice, to turn it up stronger. Don’t be subtle. That way the guitar or vocals will jump out at you later. See, in the studio you are hearing perfect sound, but on a car radio or at home on a stereo those same things can sound flat. The contrasts need to be stronger than you think. Mixing is the tricky part of it. Things can sound good, but to get some depth to it, some things need to be in your face and others back. And that’s a lot harder to do well than most people understand. Mixing is actually where most people fuck up, even when they have made a good recording.’29

  It would take a while for Cohen to harness this understanding of volume and depth to the increasingly adventurous needs of The Boys Next Door and Nick’s later incarnations, but he and the band would serve their apprenticeship in the studio together. By January 1979 the group were desperate to capture their sound, and happy to provoke people along the way after being pushed around so much over the previous twelve months. When Cohen first walked into Richmond Recorders on the night they were booked, he found a grand piano filled with pieces of metal and paper clips. The band was half-expecting the arrival of a far more senior engineer who would have the inevitable meltdown. After his experiences with Meldrum, Cohen was not one to be fazed. He looked at the abused instrument and said, ‘Ah, that should sound interesting,’ and immediately started to set up mikes inside it. Nick Cave says he and Mick Harvey looked at each other and said, ‘He’ll do.’

  ‘There were things Tony didn’t know about as an engineer,’ Harvey says. ‘But that was good for us. We needed each other. Even just as characters who didn’t want all these boring old guys around us telling us what to do. We realised Tony was a guy who could help us control our own destiny.’30

  ‘For the sake of variety’ on Door, Door, Cohen suggested that ‘it might be a good idea if Rowland performed a few of his own songs’. That idea was put down immediately, Cohen said. ‘Nick wouldn’t have a bar of it. “I’m the singer!”’31 In the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, it is hardly surprising Nick might have been feeling vulnerable. It should also be noted that Howard’s deadpan nasal vocals were an acquired taste, his distinct, slung-out phrasing yet to fully develop. A single voice would also help ensure coherence across the extended and disparate recording process. The more obvious approach was to use Rowland’s songs with Nick on lead vocals, mirroring what was mostly happening in their live performances anyway. Rowland decided to bide his time. In the long term, however, the guitarist’s ambitions would become a source of deep-rooted tensions with Nick.

  Phill Calvert shakes his head. ‘It was never, ever gonna be Rowland’s band. It was never, ever gonna be Nick singing Rowland’s songs. It wasn’t Jagger and Richards. And Rowland was not going to be allowed to sing a song of his on every record. He believed he was going to do that. But it was never, ever going to work out that way.’32 Rowland’s brother Harry Howard indicates this was not quite the deal that was struck when Nick invited Rowland to first join The Boys Next Door. There had been ‘a promise’ Rowland would sing some of his own songs, but this understanding quickly fell away.33

  On Door, Door it was Nick, though, who suffered from the comparisons with a preternaturally ascendant Rowland S Howard. What became Nick’s side of the album as a songwriter opened with ‘The Nightwatchman’, followed by ‘Brave Exhibitions’, ‘Friends of My World’, ‘The Voice’, ‘Roman Roman’ and ‘Somebody’s Watching’. These were all a year or more old and shaped under Karski’s sterile, if crisp, regime. ‘The Nightwatchman’, ‘Brave Exhibitions’, ‘The Voice’ and ‘Somebody’s Watching’ emerged as conventional New Wave pop songs, full of self-conscious preening. Their obsession with being watched could be interpreted as political –
the woo-hoo theme of the time due to the advent of video technology and counter-culture surveillance paranoia – but even a cursory look at Cave’s lyrics revealed a fundamental, if perverse, pleasure in being observed. Nick’s diaries at the time overflow with little more than gig dates and grooming notes on what clothes and hair dye he needed. A throwaway pun in ‘Somebody’s Watching’ says it all: Nick compares himself to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

  Despite a negative self-image, or perhaps because of it, Nick was cultivating a peacock aggression that his gifts for sarcasm only enhanced. Melbourne was still a deeply conservative place in the late 1970s and it was possible to cause a commotion on the street with only the slightest deviations from normality. Nick revelled in a formative persona that not only caused people to stop and look but also frightened them. He was barely getting started on how far that could go, both on and off stage.

  With police-siren synth lines courtesy of Andrew Duffield and Nick’s vocal histrionics, ‘Friends of My World’ is positively grandiose in defining a maverick image and making those public and personal connections felt. Nick constructs a criminal fantasy for the Tiger Lounge crowd to revel in, with himself at the centre. He’s the star of the story he tells. It’s his world. What gave this narcissism real power was the stage itself, where a well-drilled band accentuated Nick’s tensely romantic delivery and flashy gift for mockery. Anita Lane had begun styling Nick from the start of their relationship and he was looking sharper than ever. Shock-haired and suited up, he often sported a bowtie and polka-dot vest for good measure, appearing as master of ceremonies with a Cabaret-inspired Kit Kat Club edge that harked back to his obsession with Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry.