by Mark Mordue
‘I can still remember when Nick had just written “The Hair Shirt”. He’d written it on piano, it went round and round and round,’ Harvey says of what he considers to have been an unevolved work. ‘Originally it had a “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor” rhythm. It would have been developed from there by the band. We had this gig at the Kingston Hotel in Richmond. And Rowland hits a vibrato pedal through an amp, and it went into feedback and just took off. It was really fantastic. We’d been playing it live like that and had enough experience in that process to bring that into the recording.’68
Tracy Pew likewise noted, ‘The songs are becoming more and more band compositions. Nick’s offerings are getting less and less substantial. He doesn’t bother composing them or arranging them.’69 In the same interview with Clinton Walker, Nick agrees with Pew’s observations, emphasising the open and organic process the band was developing. ‘It’s much easier, I think, to feel out an arrangement, as opposed to doing it beforehand,’ Nick says. But no sooner is Pew openly identifying the outline of ‘The Hair Shirt’ as ‘a sort of bastardised version of “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”’ than Nick cuts him off and reasserts his creative authority: ‘I had the tune, and an idea of how the tune should be played, and the words, and the vocal melody.’70
Nick would have grown up listening to a Burl Ives album at the Cave family home. The answer to the sea shanty question ‘What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?’ is him needing to drink the hair of the dog that has bitten him. It’s interesting how Nick adapts this drinking song to his own purposes in ‘The Hair Shirt’. Among heroin users, it’s known that the better the quality of the drugs being injected, the more likely you are to itch due to the release of histamines into the body. Some addicts grow to enjoy the itch as a sign of first-class heroin; most cannot stand it. Nick had been bitten, all right, and ‘The Hair Shirt’ was an early creative response. In medieval religious history a ‘cilice’ or ‘hair shirt’ was made of coarse animal hair and worn close to the skin like a singlet. Its purpose was to cause great discomfort as punishment for one’s sins. In more extreme cases, twigs and even wire were used, intensifying a mortification of the flesh redolent of the Crucifixion, with the express aim of helping a wearer move closer to God through constant penitence. In Molière’s comic play Tartuffe (or The Imposter), however, the hypocritical and manipulative title character wears his hair shirt inside-out. Tartuffe’s penance is witnessed by everyone, but never actually felt. Theatre audiences roared with amusement. Nick had seen an old German silent film version of the play not long after the death of his father.
Nick’s best songs would evolve as highly personal explorations that took in wide-ranging influences and paradoxical associations like these. As he said upon the release of Hee Haw, which wouldn’t occur until near Christmas 1979, ‘A lot more of our own . . . obsessions, I suppose, are coming out.’71 Nick was discovering a form he could write in, where all was revealed and everything was still a secret.
Crime and Punishment
MELBOURNE
1979–80
Hee Haw redefined Nick’s vision for The Boys Next Door. ‘When you’re younger you tend to write more seriously. That’s the way it worked with us,’ he said at the time. By then a serious comedian, he spoke of trying ‘as hard as I can to be as wicked and funny as possible with my lyrics’, while taking pride along with the band in ‘putting a certain amount of tension and unease in our music and doing it in quite original ways . . . I’d really hate our music to lose the potential for an audience to let itself go, but at the same time I would hate the music to be just that. I’d like to maintain the primal type of reaction to our music but at the same time I’d like them to get more out of it.’
Once again Nick disowned their polished beginnings. ‘Door, Door was controlled, tame, stilted, organised and heavily structured. This is a lot freer musically, more spontaneous, more chaotic, a lot more interesting. I’m very excited about it, very proud of it. It’s far more adventurous; the band as a whole is becoming a lot looser. There is a lot more basic experimentation and improvisation, both on stage and on record.’1
Rowland Howard was similarly acidic about the band’s start – ‘Door, Door was the last dregs of our Roxy phase’ – while his enthusiasm for Hee Haw matched Cave’s and proved to be more enduring. Tracy Pew secretly preferred Door, Door. At least it had songs you could sing along and drink to. He would be a lot happier once a more brutal aesthetic had forged them into The Birthday Party in the United Kingdom. Then he’d look back on their ‘wank’ days as The Boys Next Door and say, ‘We became a pack of snivelling poofs.’2 He was reacting to English critics who mistakenly associated the group with the New Romantic pop movement during their first year in London. Nick agreed with Tracy’s revisionist judgement, confessing to NME journalist Barney Hoskyns in the same interview, ‘I used to wear frilly shirts and pig tails before all that shit [the New Romantics].’ Then he added, as his conversation closer on the subject of those one-time wimps The Boys Next Door, ‘We made the unpardonable error of playing to the thinkers rather than the drinkers.’3
Cave would spend much of the coming decade demolishing past efforts in the wake of his latest creation, wiping the slate clean to exist in a perpetual Year Zero. By the time Howard started to question this constant push towards historical demolition and a life of pure exile, the guitarist would be well on his way to becoming a casualty rather than an ally. Nick had a way of not so much ending relationships as steadily grinding them down. Rowland carried the wound for a very long time. He would always feel Nick owed him something that was never paid back in full.
But fifteen years after Hee Haw galvanised their partnership in the studio with The Boys Next Door, Rowland S Howard could look back on happier days with Nick and say, ‘When we made that record we were just trying as hard as we could to make a really adventurous record. After what we considered the humiliation of Door, Door, which is like the tamest thing possible, we just reacted very violently against that record in the most extreme direction away from that . . . [Hee Haw is] like a psychedelic record. A Texas psychedelic record. Very naïve but very enthusiastic. I think it’s really good personally.’4 Rowland would also admit to just how much he and Nick were obsessed with Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing and The Pop Group’s Y at the time of making Hee Haw. ‘You could hear the David Thomas influence in Nick’s vocals on things like “[The] Hair Shirt”. I think Nick tends to write off that period of the band because he finds it difficult to listen to himself being so blatantly influenced by somebody else. But it doesn’t mean the whole thing has less value.’5
Nick’s immediate lauding and then long-term disavowal of Hee Haw signal his preternatural awareness of the need to edit his canon from very early on. How much anger and chance drove him along that path, and exactly when Nick began asserting himself as the author of his own destiny, is hard to determine. Listening to the 2008 track ‘We Call Upon the Author’, you hear Nick attacking not only an absent God and his departed father for the loss of meaning in the universe, but mocking anyone who would demand similar explanations from him. He may as well have been shouting, ‘I can’t hear you!’
‘I remember the [Hee Haw] sessions and the stuff we took to England, as well as Prayers [on Fire], as when we were the most creative and interesting as a working unit together,’ Phill Calvert says. ‘Everyone had input and all ideas were tried and tolerated in the interest of seeing how things would turn out. There was no friction between Nick and Rowland at this stage and stuff just flowed. We also worked incredibly fast – and mostly all night as well. I always thought Nick and Rowland’s songs were incredibly complementary during this time.’6
It was Mick Harvey who was able to see the whole thing with equanimity after everyone’s agendas dissolved and both The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party were history. ‘All of the late seventies was like our apprenticeship,’ he says. ‘Hee Haw is definitely us dabbling with things and working out what to do
with all that. “The Hair Shirt” is the most successful example. On Hee Haw it was the final track, the punctuation mark where we could say, “We’ve pulled it off here.”’7
By then part of The Boys Next Door’s inner circle, filmmaker Paul Goldman was often in the studio watching the band at work. He and Evan English’s next project after ‘Shivers’ was meant to be a video for ‘The Hair Shirt’. They collaborated with Nick on his idea to ‘build a set that looked like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’. New German Cinema was all the rage in Melbourne – directors such as Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were making their mark – and with them came an interest in 1920s Weimar-era forebears such as Fritz Lang and FW Murnau. Nick was hooked on the noir-ish nightmare qualities of the old silent films. It took him, along with Goldman and English, almost a week to construct the set he envisaged for ‘The Hair Shirt’. The band then stood and played amid a jigsaw townscape, with its claustrophobically tilted planes and distorted perspectives, while Goldman moved the camera around, he laughs, ‘at insane speed’.
Hee Haw’s experimental mood had infected the filmmakers, but the clip was too manic by half, and virtually unwatchable. Goldman had been suspended for breaching the copyright of Swinburne film school after releasing ‘Shivers’ for television broadcast. Despite that institutional rap across the knuckles, and the failure of ‘The Hair Shirt’ as a visual exercise, he and English were on their way with Nick.8 John Hillcoat, then an aspiring editor and director at Swinburne and another future Cave collaborator, describes how Goldman and English ‘made everyone see it was possible to get a film clip on national television with “Shivers” and that you could do things outside of the accepted industry fashion. It was very exciting to all of us.’9
Inspired by this community, Nick, Mick and Tracy attempted to make a short film of their own. Based on The Doors’ ‘Unknown Soldier’, it was meant to take place at a deserted beach, but not even Nick could take his Jim Morrison fantasies that seriously. The three of them gave up the project for an afternoon drinking session. Even so, Nick and Mick’s burgeoning interest in filmmaking and film music was not about to abate.
The band was evolving rapidly. Jenny Watson’s portraits of the group during their Tiger Lounge days – an individually framed set of what looked like Polaroid snaps done in gouache – now seemed a far-sighted gesture barely two years on from their teenage beginnings. At Nick’s suggestion, Watson produced a painting for him to use at the Crystal Ballroom during a 1979 performance of a song called ‘Let’s Talk About Art’. Watson titled her work An Original Oil Painting (Black and White) (For Nick Cave) and set the words in type across the canvas. Nick held the flag-like, Mondrian-ish painting high above his head, threatening to destroy it while he chanted and shrieked the song in a furious manner that suggested art was in fact the last thing anyone here wanted to talk about.
Despite the sophistication of the audience, Nick was well aware of a deep anti-intellectual streak in Australia that could masquerade as an abhorrence of pretension. The strange thing about his performance was that Nick did not make it clear if he was attacking this anti-intellectual streak or the pretensions of those people in front of him, who very much wanted to have that art conversation. Watson was renowned among the crowd, not just as a teacher and mentor to many of them, but also as an artist on the cusp of international recognition, with gallery shows opening in Berlin and London. The nervous tension in the room as Nick manhandled the picture was palpable. No-one was really sure what he intended to do with it, or what he was saying. Nick would grow fond of leaving his riddles unanswered, or of letting people live with what was only half the picture until a day came when they saw the other side. On the night in question he simply threw the painting from the stage at the end of the song. It survived the hard landing and skidded on into art history.
The Boys Next Door at the Crystal Ballroom, performing ‘Let’s Talk about Art’. Nick Cave holds Jenny Watson’s painting An Original Oil Painting (Black and White) (for Nick Cave), 1979. (John Nixon, courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery)
A host of young fashion designers were also taking notes at the live shows, drawn to the band’s increasingly striking look, much of it put together by Anita Lane (with Lisa Craswell and Genevieve McGuckin contributing their own Gothic and impishly post-punk influences). Composed of many former audience members from these flamboyant Boys Next Door performances, the Fashion Design Council would launch itself at the Crystal Ballroom in 1983 as the defining guild for cutting-edge Australian fashion in the 1980s. Designer Alannah Hill mainly remembers Nick Cave striking poses in The Birdcage bar, sniggering and ‘flicking wads of paper dunked in beer at me’. There’s a suggestion that all he and The Boys Next Door stood for was a bullying form of cool that people were only too happy to be liberated from once the group left town. ‘I thought they were dickheads,’ she says.10
Phill Calvert insists that ‘Nick had plenty of style before he met Anita’11, but there’s no doubting her originality in designing shirts made of everything from Christmas decorations to sleeping pills sewn into plastic pouches and attached to the material. Jenny Watson believes ‘Anita basically set the scene for how people wanted to look. How people wanted to dress. And that included anti-glamour too. When all the girls started wearing little dresses and high heels like her, she turned up at the Crystal Ballroom wearing old school shoes and men’s second-hand pants. She was . . . the sort of girl who could have done anything. Anything. I used to say to Anita, “What are you going to do for yourself?” That question of what women were going to do for themselves was a very big question in the culture. I think it’s always very hard for women to be assertive and say, “I’m the genius.” And I just think being in love with any of those guys in that band was a full-time job. She’s a chanteuse, Anita. I love the records she ended up making with Mick Harvey.’12
‘Anita was more than just a “muse”,’ Tony Clark agrees. ‘She was like an image adviser to Nick, a collaborator. Anita was very funny, too; she had this oblique and interesting take on things. She understood kitsch, the power of dagginess. They all did. It was something distinctively Australian about them. Anita and Lisa Craswell both had this incredible feel for op-shop stuff – they were great stylists, and just effortless with it too. Effortless. There wasn’t the pretentiousness of the European dandy in the aesthetics of what they created, but they were still contributing to the overall intensity of what was being projected. They were all steeped in these shitty children’s TV shows too, the whole gang. It was really interesting. Instead of being embarrassed or running away from cultural phenomena that were debatable, they were very good at being able to use [them]. The English don’t have that feel for the daggy that Australians have. English punk was more ruthless, in my experience. The scene here had a lot of sentimentality, not just violence. And it had a sense of comedy. Anita had that, Nick had it – it’s one reason why they made such a great couple. Nick’s got funny bones, as they say. I don’t think the European understanding of his work has ever really got the comedic element that was there from the start and running through everything he did. Anita was able to tune in to that. Nick and Anita shared a language.’13
At this point, The Boys Next Door’s squirting and writhing funhouse sound was exploding inside the pressure cooker of influences. Nothing about them was fixed, and it was in the live arena – rather than on record – that they rushed forth and thrilled an audience. The musical fracturing, song variety and intense delivery were capped by a haughty, sardonic presence that centred on Nick and Rowland as the city’s definitive poètes maudits.
The Boys Next Door at the Tiger Lounge, 1979 (Peter Milne)
Bronwyn Bonney sums up their gravitational pull in this way: ‘Our friends originally banded together under the punk-rock banner, but it was never about Mohawks and safety pins and working-class angst. The ideal was more genius-poet than tower-block delinquent. It was romantic, literate, aesthetic, all-dressed-up but raggedy too, subversive
and inspired, hedonistic and out-on-a-bender.’14
Simon Bonney of Crime and the City Solution and Ollie Olsen of Whirlywirld could only look on as their mighty bands stalled while The Boys Next Door accelerated past them. Nick took an even more commanding stance on the scene. According to Rowland, there was a simple formula for what was going on: ‘One of the reasons we progressed quickly is that we worked a lot.’15 The Boys Next Door were playing three times a week, sometimes performing two sets a night, as well as continuing to record in the studio on midnight-to-dawn shifts, thanks to Keith Glass’s largesse, all while assorted members also experimented in side projects. Most of the other bands on the scene performed sporadically at most. Models were the only other group who were playing as often and showing similar determination.
The Boys Next Door encouraged a performance-art element to their shows by selecting opening acts such as Ron Rude and the multimedia artist Marcus Bergner, who had supplied the weirdly pagan and coded illustrations for the cover of Hee Haw. As part of the artwork for Hee Haw, Bergner, who was close to Rowland, drew a face with five sets of legs attached, each with a band member’s name. Phill Calvert’s legs are the only ones headed in the opposite direction. It suggests Calvert was a marked man from early on and that Rowland was already working on his demise.
A rowdy spirit of experimentation filtered into every decision, every move Nick was making in this company. On stage he sometimes played blurting sax like his latest, violently confrontational hero from the No Wave music scene in New York, James Chance. During a song called ‘Safe House’, Nick even strapped on an accordion to make a terrible, wheezing racket. Pew would ask, ‘Where is the grinderman?’ before they started playing the song. It was partly a dig at Nick turning them all into monkeys, if not ‘poofs’. Tracy had that kind of thing down to an art, getting under Nick’s skin in the same way he could rile the others: by using a barbed half-truth inside a joke. A lot of people would find it hard to tell if Tracy was being funny or on the verge of threatening them. Nick would absorb this humour into his own repartee, much as he absorbed everything else that came his way. But it always seemed as if Tracy had the edge on Nick. Always warm and a little melancholy in his recollections of Tracy Pew, Nick says, ‘Like Anita, he did have an ability to eviscerate you with a single comment, sometimes just a single word. I’d be all dressed up to go on stage in a purple suit, thinking I looked pretty cool, and just as we were about to go on Tracy’d say, “Knock ’em dead, Willy Wonka.”’