by Mark Mordue
Jarry’s work preceded the Theatre of the Absurd and influenced writers including Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, even paving the way for a whacked-out vein of twentieth-century humour that ran from the Marx Brothers through to Monty Python and Spike Milligan. Ubu Roi was such a succès de scandale it was said to have consumed Jarry himself. He began to imitate the Pere Ubu character and speak in a strange little voice, helped along by an excess of alcohol and absinthe that finished him off at age thirty-two. The poet William Butler Yeats, who was at the riotous opening night of the play, is reputed to have turned aghast to another audience member and said, ‘What more is possible? After us, the Savage God.’ A savage god in whom Nick found a few angry and sardonic prayers creatively answered.
One of his and Rowland’s most revered musical contemporaries, the American group Pere Ubu, had taken their name from the play. This only fuelled Nick and Rowland’s craze for all things Jarry. Pere Ubu had come bursting out of Cleveland, Ohio, with a sound that suggested an absurdist garage blues band penetrated by distended surf rock sounds and freaked-out, metallic folk influences that seemed to have drifted in from an industrial no-man’s land. Their albums Modern Dance and Dub Housing stood outside of any musical movements apparent at the time, and would be studied by Nick and Rowland like holy texts. Pere Ubu’s sonic influence on Hee Haw is unmistakeable, from the jerking and breaking melodic structures and wild musical tangents to Nick’s vocals, which took on a yelping, epileptic quality directly indebted to vocalist David Thomas’s bird-meets-dog tonal affectations, not to mention the Pere Ubu singer’s capacity to balance childlike enthusiasm with apocalyptic lamentations.
Although the avant-garde shell of The Boys Next Door’s Hee Haw EP would be critically acclaimed (at least by those it did not mystify or repel), there is a case to argue that it was actually more derivative than the exuberant pop-punk of Door, Door. Mick Harvey would come to see Hee Haw as a critical step in the evolution of the band. Even so, Harvey was bothered at the time by how steamrolled The Boys Next Door’s sound had been by the Pere Ubu obsession. Nick’s goals were not intentionally imitative, but were as rudely driven and surreally profound as the philosophies of Alfred Jarry, his new French master. ‘It is conventional to call “monster” any blending of dissonant elements,’ Jarry wrote. ‘I call “monster” every original inexhaustible beauty.’ Nick lapped up that stuff. Jarry’s confrontational attitude to bourgeois aesthetics – ‘The work of art is a stuffed crocodile’ – was also much to Nick’s own taste. Ubu Roi’s juxtapositions of surreal violence, Shakespearian plot and character elements, and crude street-level humour pushed Nick further to break down walls – between high and low art, as well between the performer and the audience – in order to create something that had a similar bite.
Nick had also started reading the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning work, The Denial of Death. Published in 1973, it posited an anxiety about death as central to human identity and our social constructions, from religion through to art. The book describes how we build heroic narratives to ease our mortal fears and seek out consoling illusions of meaning and immortality. Becker’s work built on the work of Freud and his former right-hand man, Otto Rank, as well as European philosophy; one of the epigraphs was from Spinoza: ‘Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.’ Nick would pass through all those feelings, and the proverbial five stages of grief, in the most human and messy ways most people do after a traumatic loss. But Becker’s thesis that our consciousness and creativity give us an awareness of being that is unique and godlike, yet equally frustrated by our awareness of death – and with it, the nature of our bodies at their most basic, and even repugnant – struck Nick as deeply true. Becker’s statement that we are ‘gods with anuses’ would stay with him.54 He only had to look around him at the Crystal Ballroom to see that mix of glamour and horror playing out as a human grotesque. Beauty was transient. Decay and change were inevitable.
‘You probably don’t need to wade through the book to get an idea of what Becker is talking about,’ Nick says. ‘There’s this academic, you see him in shorts and tie-dye T-shirts raving about Becker in lectures and stuff. Sheldon Solomon. TMT. Terror Management Theory. Google him. Really interesting. There is also a great documentary that used to be on YouTube that explains it all. It’s called Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality. The title says it all.’
The production for Hee Haw is credited to The Boys Next Door and Keith Glass. Glass certainly boosted everyone’s confidence and encouraged the path they were on, but it was mainly engineer Tony Cohen who helped the band get the sounds they wanted or imagined. The band worked through July and August, at a pace that became feverish, entering the studio on midnight-to-dawn shifts after playing gigs. The first crucial decision they made was to record in a live situation rather than compartmentalise each instrument separately in a pristine but sterile isolated taping process. Though this meant sacrificing stereo fidelity, it brought a new level of dynamism to the performance of the songs. Together with Cohen, Nick Cave and Mick Harvey would develop this live approach into an ongoing practice they would perfect in Berlin in the mid-eighties at Hansa Studios.
TC had to puzzle out how to take advantage of The Boys Next Door’s momentum as a performing unit – and still bring space and depth to their studio sound. On Hee Haw, he and the group attempted this with distinct pauses in both the individual playing and the song structures, and toying with overdubbed dissonant aural textures to enhance the contrasting patches of moodiness and mania.
The whole process built on Nick and Rowland’s interest in an aesthetic that tilted towards the burlesque, admitting plenty of randomness and playfulness into their creative process. Nick loved the unsettled, wise-cracking energy that this stimulated in the new songs they were creating. Their approach was influenced by Nick’s interest in Jarry’s anarchistic humour, and Rowland’s love of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, which he’d been pushing Nick to take note of. Duchamp’s ready-mades consisted of found objects – such as a bicycle wheel, a comb, a snow shovel or, most famously, a urinal – that were then transformed into artworks through the simple act of being signed, given a witty title and placed in a gallery. Wasn’t it possible to do the same kind of thing musically, Rowland suggested, puncturing the expected with the unexpected, the refined with rough and ready, the high with the low?
There was nothing particularly intellectual about Cohen’s approach in realising those goals, however. He was pure sonic enthusiasm, aural genius. After the Hee Haw recordings he would state: ‘The total disrespect for how things were supposed to be done was just fantastic.’55 Excited by his new friends, the one-time hippie had cut his hair and ‘started wearing shoes’. For the backing vocals on ‘The Hair Shirt’, Cohen recorded Nick singing through a telephone line. Alfred Jarry himself could have been yelling down the line. ‘It was this squeaky, horrible voice. If you turned it up it would absolutely blow your head off. We were trying out all kinds of shit like that on Hee Haw,’ says Cohen. ‘Now if you want to exaggerate something you can dial it up with Pro Tools. But there’s just something fun about putting people in concrete corridors or stairwells to get a sound that can’t be got any other way.’56
Even the mixing of the songs was a source of entertainment for all concerned. ‘It was all very analogue. In those days you didn’t have computers to do it for you,’ Cohen says, hammering his point home. ‘I think Nick still uses tape now.57 It just sounds better. We’d have all hands on deck; we’d all have our channels that we were each controlling. And we’d have to try and get through mixing a whole song without anyone making a mistake. But it was great. Everybody was making a performance of the mix.’58
The opening track on Hee Haw, ‘A Catholic Skin’, begins with the epic, swelling shimmer of Rowland S Howard’s guitar, then breaks into a jerking, off-kilter song marked by Nick’s newly hysterical vocal style – half-shouted and shrieked – before jumping
into falsetto and being sheathed in echo effects, with Howard’s high-fretted, scraping guitar behind it. Nick repeats what sounds like a nonsensical question about sin and describes being Anglican as akin to being spiritually filleted. The energy of his vocals and the lyrics invite an absurdist sense of being possessed, or a notion that Nick has somehow been born into the wrong religious body. The blunt force of the music’s rhythm has a slapstick quality, a comic and violent awkwardness that would become a Boys Next Door trademark.
Rowland’s song ‘The Red Clock’ follows, mechanistic-sounding and sci-fi paranoid, with the guitarist singing along in his droogy style as if pursued like an outlaw through the relentless tick-tocks of time.59 ‘Faint Heart’ is another Nick Cave composition, and the EP’s most extreme decomposition, as an apparently simple and fast-paced rock ’n’ roll song about Nick’s ghostly sense of self. It breaks down into studio voices and random sounds, a pounded poltergeist piano, with a lyric about loneliness and darkness at its anarchic centre. Nick chants of death and a need to pray with your truest feelings. ‘Faint Heart’ then reprises its conventional form before the song ends, as if the recording tape has been scorched off by Howard’s guitar noise. What a strange amalgam it is – perhaps an effort by Nick to communicate with his dead father? Phill Calvert says ‘dub freakout stuff by white guys’ affected the song recording. ‘We’d been listing to the album Y by The Pop Group a lot. No-one knew how to make those sounds in the studio with delays and tape stuff like the reggae guys use, so that was probably our attempt.’60
It is followed by another Rowland song, the lugubrious ‘Death by Drowning’, with Nick singing as if caught inside the soundtrack to an imaginary film adaptation of Albert Camus’ novel The Fall. Rowland had collaged the lyrics together from phrases he’d found in a French–English grammar book to create something apparently meaningless and yet ominous, his own little satire of Existential literary style. It probably drowns itself – and marks the beginning of Rowland trying to accommodate Nick as a singer by creating a decentred lyrical base that had little to do with Rowland personally.
Nick’s song ‘The Hair Shirt’ closes the EP with what is the only undisputed triumph of the entire recording. ‘The Hair Shirt’ was a lighter pop-rock preview of The Birthday Party beast to come, but for an obsessively repeated lyric about the colour of a corpse and an act of murder. Waves of guilt and, queerly, waves of triumph wash through it. Nick was getting better and better at this kind of negative duality.
Tracy Pew remained unconvinced about the artier direction the band was taking on Hee Haw, but he was such an adaptable, sinuous bass player he was able to work with everyone and give these jarring, self-conscious songs added meat. His clarinet playing on ‘Death by Drowning’ had more of a midday-movie, Arabia feel than anything a free jazz musician such as Pharoah Sanders might foment, but this only added to the alienating brashness and quirky humour that ran through the music.
Calvert had been going through a fanatical stint of playing along to James Brown albums at home, one of the reasons Hee Haw has a strangely funky, swinging dynamic that would continue into Birthday Party days. On ‘The Hair Shirt’, that early groove is self-evident. English groups of the moment such as The Pop Group and Gang of Four were similarly discovering this danceable direction with scarifying edges and chopping, aggressive rhythms. In terms of where things were heading musically, The Boys Next Door were right on the money.
Even so, Hee Haw can come off as annoying listening, a capricious outburst of energy and ideas from young wannabes. In a live setting the story was very different, with songs from the record taking on a surprising power, furiously expanding the band’s palette. Keith Glass is still very fond of the EP, and took a highly strategic view of its possibilities while the band were recording. ‘Hee Haw was totally experimental,’ he says. ‘I saw it as a Captain Beefheart kinda thing, and I half-suspected Gudinski would hate it, which he did, and that it would help get them off the Mushroom label. Which is exactly what happened.’61
Nick and Tracy’s taste for practical jokes was another factor in their ultimate departure from Mushroom. Glass recalls Tracy getting down on his hands and knees behind Gudinski while Nick approached him from the front at a Mushroom record launch. With a hearty, ‘How are you going, Mike?’, Cave pushed Gudinski backwards, sending him tumbling over Pew. Nick and Tracy thought this was hilarious. Gudinski did his best to laugh it off. Glass says, ‘Gudinski almost broke his fucking neck.’ It would be the first in a string of pranks that Nick Cave calls ‘a kind of band tradition where we assault Gudinski whenever we run into him’.
Already their manager, Keith Glass could now sign the increasingly loutish band to his formative Missing Link label, giving them carte blanche to record and release music in whatever form they wished. Ollie Olsen’s Whirlywirld was about to release their first single through his label, and Glass would soon sign The Laughing Clowns and The Go-Betweens to make albums too. He scored an unlikely hit that year by licensing an obscure single, a cover of ‘Money’ by The Flying Lizards, which surprised everyone by going to number one in the Top 40 charts. As if to cement his kudos, Glass visited the United States to negotiate releasing the entire back catalogue of the resolutely anonymous, quasi-anthropological avant-garde rock band The Residents, as well as the American hardcore punk protest music of Dead Kennedys. It was in this company on Missing Link that The Boys Next Door felt they were at finally at home.
Initially there was some tension between Mick Harvey’s talents as an aspiring musical arranger and budding producer, and where Rowland Howard was taking the group as an innovative instrumentalist. To portray Harvey as the deacon of order and Howard as an angel of chaos is simplistic, but the archetypes suggest something of how the pair played off one another – and finally converged behind Nick in their vision. ‘I actually entered into the studio process pretty slowly,’ Mick Harvey says. ‘Rowland had a much stronger understanding of sound than I did. It wasn’t till 1981 that I started to be much more hands-on.’62
Rowland told a slightly different story. ‘See, when I joined the band, Nick had ideas and stuff but they were fairly unmusical ideas. I remember talking to Mick Harvey when I was still in Young Charlatans and he used to laugh about how some things I played on guitar were musically incorrect. So I think in a way I gave weight to Nick and his ideas and so when he’d say, “Let’s do this,” and Mick would say, “You can’t do that,” and I’d say, “So fuckin’ what, that’s irrelevant, the rules are what we make them, not what somebody else says.” Also I showed Nick different ways of being able to write songs. Like, you could write songs with one chord or with one riff going all the way through them, which became a Birthday Party trademark. So I guess I gave Nick a crash course in doing things differently to the way he had been doing them.’63
‘Through a mixture of ignorance and blind self-confidence I just did things ’cause I thought they sounded good,’ Rowland said, ‘and Nick would really encourage me to do things, like making ridiculous noises. I remember at one stage that every song Nick wrote for ages he would say, “And when it gets to this part I want you to make a really horrible noise; it has to be completely different from any horrible noise you’ve made in any of the other songs.” So I used to rack my brains thinking of how I was going to make a noise singular to that song and not just the same as I’d done before.’64
Despite a deep competitiveness with Whirlywirld and Primitive Calculators, The Boys Next Door increasingly shared in the same aggressive attitudes to experimentation. The fractured warehouse surf sounds of Pere Ubu – and the squalling, brawling New York jazz punk of James Chance and the Contortions – worked as a visceral counterbalance to the more cerebral influences Nick was absorbing through John Nixon’s Arts Projects and the poppier, even consciously kitsch synthesiser and imaginary film soundtracks emanating from the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, which were likewise on the receiving end of Primitive Calculators’ class-war hatred.65 The Pop Group’s ferocious
blend of dub reggae production and free jazz punk continued to be an influence on The Boys Next Door. Out of this rapid realignment of influences, Rowland increasingly believed the experimental direction Nick was searching for could be achieved without the use of synthesisers or taped effects. ‘I think the beauty of electric guitars is you can defeat their original purpose to a huge extent . . . they’re incredibly live and you can get a lot of sounds out of hitting them,’ he said.66
Nick Cave and Mick Harvey, The Boys Next Door, Crystal Ballroom, 1979 (courtesy of Phill Calvert)
Nick and Rowland’s history with Ollie Olsen, meanwhile, gave them more personal reasons to topple his avant-garde throne. People could talk about the influences of Kraftwerk, Marxism or French theories of structuralism and postmodern quotations all they liked: this was also about who was going to be top dog on the scene. ‘The big difference between what we did and a band like Whirlywirld was that we’d progress quickly from one thing to another, but it was a very natural, organic shift,’ said Howard. ‘Whereas Whirlywirld would go, “Okay, now we’re this.”’67
Mick Harvey explains: ‘As much as Nick says Rowland appeared fully formed – and Rowland’s attitude certainly did – Rowland hadn’t arrived fully formed musically. In the early days his playing had that trebly sound, that Television influence, the spindly riffs and strummy guitar. The signature things he started developing in 1979 were quite different to what he did at first. Because Rowland was put in the position of being the guitar player and not the singer, he started developing an invasive style of guitar playing that was like being a lead singer. By the time he got to the end of that with The Birthday Party he had sacrificed what he set out to do for himself. But that was his choice. He was the one who had put himself in the position of being frustrated.