by Mark Mordue
Beautiful as ‘Shivers’ was, Gudinski and Mushroom felt it would never get airplay as a radio single because it mentioned suicide. The subject matter was not only sensitive, it brought up their recent punk label’s disastrous collapse. Courting controversy with Barrie Earl had only confirmed how conservative the Australian market was, especially with spiky young acts like The Boys Next Door. It was very different in the UK, where the influence of the NME and a unique figure like BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel meant that bizarre and avant-garde songs could find themselves in the national spotlight – and even lauded. Reading the NME provided ample evidence to Nick that the music scene in Britain was much wilder and more open to new things.
The Boys Next Door’s live audience was substantial and devoted in inner-city Melbourne, but they were playing to the same crowds and their music was becoming more experimental. Their thinking across 1979 would become even more closely attuned to the British zeitgeist, where singles were less an expression of radio-friendly hopes than grenades thrown to announce a radical identity.
Nick told the journalist John Stapleton of his desire to get to London: ‘We’ve gone about as far as we can here. We want to move on, to progress.’30 Conversations between Keith Glass and The Boys Next Door confirmed their desperation to get out of Melbourne, and a hunger to make their mark overseas. Glass already knew exactly where they were looking. After all, through his store, Missing Link, he was the one supplying them with all those new singles and artistic statements they worshipped.
In order to finance the band’s trip to the United Kingdom, Glass established a regime of hard gigging and stringent saving that rationed the band to five dollars each after a show’s takings. Alcohol was usually free on the night, while fans were eager to supply them with everything from food and drink to sex and drugs. Alternative income came through a patchwork of unemployment benefits and part-time jobs. Over the previous few years Nick had done everything from manning a cigarette stand to serving as a sales assistant at Denim Den in Elsternwick. At the latter, he’d attempted to have sex in the alleyway with an equally enthusiastic customer, a story that greatly amused Pierre Voltaire. ‘Nick ended up having an orgasm before he could do anything,’ he laughs. ‘I remember him being quite upset about that.’31
Nick was the only member of the band still living comfortably at home in 1979. Mick Harvey continued sharing an apartment on the St Kilda Esplanade with Rowland and Genevieve, from where it was a mere five-minute walk around the corner and up Fitzroy Street to the Crystal Ballroom. Tracy was now living round the corner in an apartment of his own. Phill admits to being a little confused about where he was living as ‘people tended to move every six months’, but for a good while he says he held court in Richmond with the band’s roadie, Shane Middleton, and Beau Lazenby. ‘I lived upstairs so I never knew what they were doing down below. It was like having my own little place.’32
In his diary notes for March 1979, Nick makes a number of references to visiting Beau or heading back to her place after practice. Though Nick was still seeing Anita, his connection with Beau Lazenby seems to date from early that year. Lazenby would later become the mother of Nick’s eldest son, Jethro, in 1991. In 1979 she was known for attending gigs in her pyjamas, as well as carrying a teddy bear. But there was a real wildness to her. Recollections from The Boys Next Door era on Nick Cave Fixes, ‘a Bad Seeds tribute blog’, describe Beau Lazenby wearing a singlet with ‘I Hate Men’ written in her own blood. Nick Cave Fixes host Morgan Wolfe, another Crystal Ballroom habitué, makes a sardonic observation: ‘Nicky’s ego would have demanded that he conquer her.’33
In his somewhat sketchy diary notes for May 1979, Nick has an early lyric for what will become ‘The Hair Shirt’ drafted out, with the preliminary title ‘The Hair Vest (Ode to an Oaf)’. There’s another song idea entitled ‘Haunted House’ that has very little to it, other than a repeated mock-horror reference to an attic. Nick says that the band are in the process of learning a Rowland S Howard song called ‘Running Goat’ – inspired by a game Rowland used to play with his brother Harry when they were children. Nick is paying off the purchase of a new synthesiser and putting in a little practice on the instrument for use with Little Cuties. He documents films he sees at the cinema and on TV that have made an impression on him: The Deerhunter, Padre Padrone, Jane Eyre . . . Other entries are filled with ill-matched support dates The Boys Next Door are playing with acts such as Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, The Radiators, Jimmy and the Boys, and Split Enz. Because of their Roxy-obsessed, mascara-lashed early days, The Boys Next Door had been matched incongruously with the carnival-esque progrock power pop of the Enz, if only on the basis of appearances. Phill Calvert smiles and says, ‘We liked them, they liked us, there just wasn’t enough pancake to go around.’34
In an interview in Adelaide’s Sunday Mail that same month, Nick Cave claimed, ‘I never had any lyrics to most of the songs until a few months ago. I used to just have a few lines and then growl and make noises all the time.’35
From that comment, it is easy to tell that the songs for the Hee Haw EP were already taking shape – or, more precisely, unshape. In the meantime, Nick was pushing himself physically and psychologically in the same anticlockwise direction. The joker in him was only just beginning to cut loose. Everyone around him was in for a wild ride.
Nick and Tracy would often join Mick, Rowland and Genevieve at their apartment, and along with Anita Lane and Pierre Voltaire they would head off together for the evening’s adventures. They made quite a scene moving along Fitzroy Street in a pack towards the Ballroom. People would literally stop and stare.
Voltaire’s father had died when he was eleven. For all his withering humour, he was well attuned to the pain Nick was going through, and the aggressive masks one might wear to protect oneself. Tea and sympathy were never going to be part of the grief and recovery process so far as Voltaire was concerned. ‘Nick never talked much about his dad,’ he says. ‘Dawn was always around, and she was lovely. Nick would come stay with me and shag girls and do drugs, then he would go home and get his mum to cook and do the washing for him. I figured he didn’t do that much at home when Dawn was away one time and we had an Eat the Fridge Party. There was a dishwasher. I’d never seen one before, actually. Nick did not even know how to turn it on.’36
‘It was always a mystery why Nick stayed at home,’ says Voltaire. ‘None of us could understand, because we all got out as soon as we could. I was fourteen when I left home. Rowland was sixteen. You could get the dole; rent was cheap. I mean, it was kinda weird he never moved out. He is still really close to his mum for someone who is not gay!’37
After the Ballroom closed at night, Nick and his friends would head down to the St Kilda Cafe to score heroin if they had enough money. Maybe Janet Austin or Vicki Bonet would be having a party. Alternatively, they would while away an hour at Topolino’s, devouring cheap pizza or a favoured late-night snack of ice cream and rockmelon – ‘something sweet and something nutritious’, as Greg Perano puts it.38 A heroin sweet tooth was driving those cravings, and it was healthier than eating sugar straight out of the cafe’s bowls, which Pierre admits they also tried from time to time.
Keith Glass claims he never saw drugs being taken. This may well have involved turning a blind eye. As managers go, a hippie anarchist like Glass fitted right in with The Boys Next Door’s increasingly twisted ethos. ‘Nick was always a comedian. I saw him as a humorous, Dadaist sort of dude. Everyone was on the same wavelength humour-wise – mostly,’ Glass says with a shrug. ‘Phill was the odd man out in that department. Not cool. But such a great drummer; I was always puzzled musically why they got rid of him later. But there wasn’t that much mental cruelty going on then. It was more fun.’39
A tour of Tasmania was typical of the problems Glass had to negotiate. On the flight to Hobart, Nick gathered all the food scraps from everyone’s plates. ‘He built this kind of meat sculpture,’ says Glass, ‘and plonked it down in front of me to show the
y were dissatisfied with me about something or other. I thought it was hilarious.’40 The shows went well, but after the last performance Nick and Rowland headed off to a party with a local. Nick insisted he could drive the girl’s car. Drunk and unlicensed, he proved so frightening behind the wheel that Howard asked to be let out. The guitarist promptly staggered back to the band’s hotel and fell asleep. When Nick could not be found the next day, it emerged he had been arrested after driving the wrong way down a oneway street and crashing into a parked police car. Nick had initially fled the scene and hid behind some garbage bins. Mick Harvey says, ‘From the way Nick described it to me, the police walked by him in the dark and said quite loudly, “Oh, I can’t see him here.” Then they just stood and waited while Nick came out from where he was hidden so they could grab him: “Aha, gotcha!”’ Harvey smiles. ‘When Nick was drinking he would get very naughty, very cheeky, very funny. I used to enjoy him drinking.’41
Miraculously, Glass was able to bail Nick out, cover the cost of the damages to the police car and avoid a prosecution that would have caused serious problems, given Nick’s good-behaviour bond back in Melbourne. The prospect of charges involving interstate paperwork had meant the Tasmanian police did not take their enquiries far and were simply happy to see the back of the singer and his driving skills.
Nick’s run-ins with the law did not make him any quieter in Melbourne. He had developed a habit of taking off his clothes at parties, an act usually inspired by plenty of drinking and taking speed. Nick would still hang out sometimes with Ollie Olsen, their friendship running hot and cold and having its own weirdly competitive symbiosis: ‘I don’t know why I took my clothes off. But Ollie started calling me “Nick the stripper”. The phrase stayed in my mind.’
Melbourne punk singer, musician and stirrer Ron Rude enjoyed watching them become real presences on the scene. He first remembers meeting Olsen one morning in Hawthorn at the peak of the Young Charlatans hype. ‘It’s like 11 am and Ollie looked dressed to play Madison Square Garden. He was immaculate and handsome with an otherworldly voice and a hint of conceit. A thin white duke in a pink suit with a sneer.’ He describes Rowland Howard as ‘Ollie’s fellow Martian, with pointy ears to boot, glaring vampiric eyes, and black shoes so shiny you could use them as a make-up mirror.’ As a pair, they made quite an impression on him. ‘I’d never seen anything like this.’42
As for the young Nick Cave, Rude can see how the idiot savant impression may have stuck to him at the time. ‘In the early days, when folks knew Nick only as that loud, crazy drunk at parties screaming hog calls à la “Suey [sic]”43 with Tracy, it wasn’t apparent that he would become a successful singer, songwriter, piano and guitar player, novelist and screenplay writer, all at an international level . . . I presume that Nick knew of hog-calling from his youth. I wonder now whether Nick’s upbringing in rural places that have a hint of that weirdness precipitated his ongoing fascination with the American Deep South? My ex-wife said to me that when she read And the Ass Saw the Angel the landscape and people reminded her of the various Victorian country towns that she had lived in. Back in those days, Nick definitely sought out grim comic movies about the Deep South like Wise Blood [1979], but I don’t know exactly where he got the hog-calling from . . . It might have been from TV’s Green Acres? I knew I’d seen it somewhere, because when he and Tracy were doing their drunken hog calls at parties, I recognised it as that.’44
Given Nick’s attention-seeking spirit, it’s hardly surprising he was becoming a fan of Ron Rude, who continuously struggled to get his music career off the ground despite being something of an established cult figure. Rude’s act often involved stirring up abusive slanging matches with his audience, which could bring his shows to a hilarious, if grinding, halt. He was as much a performance artist and village idiot as musician. To get Eon FM45 to play his singles, Rude went on a hunger strike in the window of Missing Link, Keith Glass’s store. Phill Calvert says, ‘Helena [Keith Glass’s wife and business partner] was getting him Maccas after hours.’46 When the hunger strike failed, Rude went into the lobby of Eon FM with a bucket of water and threatened to place his head inside it and drown himself. It may have been ridiculous, but Rude had enough intensity to make it seem within the realms of possibility. After that he chained himself to Molly Meldrum’s fence, much to the horror of the Countdown host. The Boys Next Door took a big shine to him and invited Rude to play as their support act. ‘Ron used to do this song I liked called “I’m the Best Orgasm You Will Have on a Saturday Night”. Great title!’ says Nick.47
To speak only of the rages of punk and the artiness of post-punk is to lose sight of a subversive stream of humour that distinguished the era and brought together many kindred spirits. Rude was just one of many anarchist spirits mining comedy and confrontation as a vein of energy in the punk era. Phill Calvert says, ‘I remember funny things like being in a van on the way to somewhere and Nick singing “Take It to the Limit” by the Eagles. He also liked “I Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow – I think it was more for the super-cheesy [film] clip that went with it. Shit like that would crack us all up. We were funny. Nick was funny . . . He had this line he always used when cadging a fag: “I’ll shower you in cigarettes when we hit the big time.” I wonder if he ever will?’48
Nick was far from being the only comedian in the band. Despite Tracy Pew’s air of freewheeling criminality, and a capacity to intimidate that excess drinking and the wrong circumstance could uncork, he was generally considered extremely loveable and downright hilarious by his friends. In an intensely image-conscious band, Pew would get purposely bad haircuts and turn up to shows wearing his pyjamas or brightly coloured polyester suits that were deeply unfashionable rather than coolly ironic. The more pretentious Rowland and Nick got, the more inclined Pew was to play the buffoon. At times he could push it to breaking point with everyone. Nick laughs. ‘He used to introduce his girlfriend as his cock holster, just to wind people up.’
Pew’s bass playing was yet to find the stripped-back and menacing, sensual depths around which The Birthday Party would be built. But no-one ever underestimated the power and versatility of Phill and Tracy as a rhythm section, anchoring and propelling Nick, Rowland and Mick’s increasingly abstract and jagged musical creations in The Boys Next Door. Rowland was never really sure where he stood with the bassist and tended to keep his distance; Nick had rather the opposite blessing. ‘Tracy could always cut me down to size . . . if I was getting carried away with myself. He was always funny. It’s something I miss, actually. I don’t think I ever found that with anyone ever again. He always kept my feet on the ground.’49
Melbourne underground cartoonist Fred Negro drew an amusing strip called ‘One Nite after the Ballroom’ that nonetheless captures how pretentious things could get. Negro depicts a party in Acland Street where everybody is having a great time dancing to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Nick and Rowland turn up, with Nick scratching the Stones record on purpose before throwing it off the turntable and replacing it with Brian Eno’s ambient masterpiece Music for Airports. Nick dramatically declares it to be ‘the future of music’ and everyone nods dutifully, sinking to the floor to contemplate what was on offer. Negro, however, tires of this after a few minutes and puts on Kiss’s ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’, loudly declaring it to be ‘the future of this party!’ After which he and Nick dissolve into what he calls ‘the most pathetic bitch slap fight in the history of St Kilda’. Fred Negro can laugh. He still dines out on the tale as people clamour to hear of ‘the night I punched Nick Cave in the head’.50
Though yet to record Hee Haw, Nick envisaged it as ‘far less clinical . . . The way we’ll do these ones is just a real spontaneous sorta thing. With each song I’ve been writing, the lyrics are becoming more and more meaningless. The main reason for that is I don’t think anybody ever really draws anything from lyrics anyway. Only that they like them. I don’t think lyrics ever affect people in any way or affect their lives.
’51
Howard was thinking similarly: ‘In my old songs there used to be common images like mirrors and broken glass, but I’ve grown out of that,’ he told Roadrunner. ‘A song, as I see it, should be like a dream that you can hardly remember and they spark off something in the back of your mind, a series of half-familiar images.’52
Creatively, Nick and Rowland were right on each other’s wavelength. ‘We were definitely into the same sorts of things,’ Nick observed. ‘You know, left-field literature, the Dadaists. He [Rowland] himself was a huge Duchamp guy, much more than I was, actually. Alfred Jarry. This had a big influence over what he did for a long time and over what I did for a shorter while.’53
In 1979, Alfred Jarry was the philosopher king of Nick’s universe. The French writer would exert a big influence on him for the next two years. Jarry’s play Ubu Roi had caused a riot when it was first staged in Paris in 1896, opening with the word ‘Merdre!’ – the French word for ‘shit’, merde, with an extra ‘r’ added. The main character was based on a schoolboy caricature of a physics teacher, raw materials with which Nick could very much identify. In the play, Pere Ubu appears as a revolting old man nagged by his wife into attempting to become the king of Poland – effectively the king of nothing at all. A satire of greed and power, Ubu Roi developed as a bombastic yet sinister Punch and Judy parody of Macbeth. It took an audience through foulmouthed scenes that featured an orgy, de-braining and shit-eating, adopting an aggressive absurdist stance the likes of which had not been seen on stage before. The characters wore distorting masks, with the corpulent and squeaky-voiced Pere Ubu distinguished by a large counter-clockwise spiral – more classically the sign of a spiritual quest when it flowed clockwise – marking his ‘gidouille’, or belly, into which everything was taken and, of course, excreted. Eventually, Pere Ubu shoves his conscience down the toilet as well. That always made Nick laugh.