by Mark Mordue
In the middle of recording Hee Haw, the band had spent a day crammed into Phill Calvert’s bedroom, where they used their loyal roadie and sound mixer Steven ‘Groper’ Colgan’s 4-track recorder to put down a host of other musical ideas and new songs, including Rowland’s ‘Scatterbrain’. Despite antagonism from Primitive Calculators and the Little Band scene towards The Boys Next Door, Groper was a key figure in facilitating these nights. He could quietly bring his equipment, experience and skills to The Boys Next Door, adding another edge to their live sound, just as Tony Cohen did in the studio.
In November The Boys Next Door combined with their erstwhile competitors Models to release a giveaway 7-inch single at the Crystal Ballroom, sharing a side each, respectively dedicated to ‘Scatterbrain’ and ‘Early Morning Brain’ – and the art of the modern hangover song. It arrived in a picture sleeve with the words ‘A genuine relic from “the show”’ typed across it. Nick was becoming so postmodern that even his sarcasm was ironic, posted in quotation marks to let you ‘know’. ‘Scatterbrain’ would appear on a rare Missing Link cassette compilation known as From the Archives that same year.
Under the name Torn Ox Bodies, a rough anagram of The Boys Next Door, the band also recorded ‘Show Me a Sign’, an old punk tune of theirs with a bit of Saints attitude that Nick felt had real value. Surprisingly, they also did a cover of an Ollie Olsen song called ‘Enemy of the State’. Caught in a cheap studio with two Italian brothers who were heavy-metal freaks in charge of the production, Nick and Rowland decided to turn a bad day to their advantage and wreak a little revenge on their annoying frenemy. Olsen’s anarchist anthem was rendered as a laughably paranoid barricades melodrama, a dumb-ass 1984 theme. It was a measure of the band’s prankster aesthetic, as well as of Nick’s political ambivalence – and perhaps even gave a hint of his reactionary streak. Nick had always been inclined to vandalistic impulses with Tracy, and with Rowland’s encouragement these were finding another form artistically.
Harry Howard saw a more playful side to it all. He recalls that when he was around ten years of age, he and his older brother ‘just sat around making howling, weeping noises for twenty minutes. I do relate that to Rowland’s guitar playing sometimes, that he had a sense of noise as opposed to what is thought of as music. And how he incorporated noise into music. So we would be rolling around laughing at the most absurd noises we could make, howling with exuberance.’16
In that same free spirit, Rowland, Mick and Phill went off to form a studio band of their own, with Keith Glass joining them on guitar. This unit played on ‘Samurai Star’, a single by the singer-songwriter Peter Lillie. An archetypal figure in the Carlton renaissance, Lillie wove a New Wave pop sound into something that was uniquely Melbourne-flavoured. Lillie was practically a wall fixture at the Crystal Ballroom. He was also struggling with a raging heroin habit, which had brought Nick and Rowland into his wisecracking poetic orbit. As part of R&B cult legends The Pelaco Brothers in the early 1970s, and again as a solo artist at the close of the decade, Lillie continued to exhibit a wry lyrical grasp of local culture. It plugged him into a milieu that embraced everyone from The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band and Dave Warner’s From the Suburbs to Mental as Anything and even Men at Work. Though less recognised than those names, Lillie was at the forefront of a sly new vernacular in Australian rock ’n’ roll. Greg Macainsh of Skyhooks was the most famed exponent of this consciousness in Melbourne and, indeed, nationally at the time.
Across the Yarra River in Carlton, the figure who would ultimately prove to be Nick Cave’s greatest competitor for the crown of Australia’s rock ’n’ roll poet laureate, one Paul Kelly, was being forged in a radically different furnace to that of the internationalist St Kilda scene. Nick was not a fan of that music, but he would take from the likes of Lillie and the entire Carlton scene – not least via his connections with Keith Glass and Stephen Cummings (another Pelaco Brothers alumnus) – an appreciation for its rapier lyrical thrust and colloquial assertiveness, not to mention its offbeat sense of humour with a sometimes knowing, druggy twist.
Bands in Carlton had discovered a joy in being Australian that was a million miles from any inflated chauvinism. While Lillie, Cummings and others were trying to uncover and articulate a fresh and more immediate sense of home, Nick was doing his best to hide or bury it in something abstract and mythical. Originality came from somewhere else – it seemed like the opposite of home to him, and yet everything he wrote was dogged by home’s shadow.
Nick would ultimately translate his troubled identity fable into a faux-grotesque Deep South language that he’d picked up from reading William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor novels. Birthday Party songs such as ‘Deep in the Woods’ and the Bad Seeds album The Firstborn Is Dead, not to mention his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, are saturated in that shift. But his immersion in fantastically violent and mythic slices of Americana across the 1980s does not lessen the impact of those local artists defining themselves so vividly and originally in Carlton, often out of the same blues and roots music influences Nick would also adapt and melt himself into.
Eventually Nick would fight to have his Australian heritage acknowledged. It would prove to be a long journey back home for him. His 2007 induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame would mark the start of that rekindled hunger to be recognised for his true origins. It was perhaps a case of beginning to see himself again in a way he’d somehow become separated from. By then, he and Paul Kelly had emerged as the pre-eminent songwriters of their generation.
In mid-1979, Nick’s Duromine-and-pizza-driven Little Cuties project had come to a grinding, noisy and anarchic halt. There were only so many PA systems left in Melbourne to blow up. Later in the year Nick persuaded The Boys Next Door (minus Tracy, who preferred to stand at the bar and drink) to form a backing band for Ron Rude. Nick dubbed them The Fucking Homos and assigned himself the task of playing loud, amateurish organ lines while Rude sought to transpose the sound and vision of Berlin-era Bowie onto songs about his life in outer-suburban Melbourne. Never far away from Rude’s striving towards grandeur were the faint cackle and melancholy kitsch of a satirist such as Barry Humphries. On his more paranoid days Rude wondered why a band as good as The Boys Next Door indulged him. According to Rude, The Fucking Homos ‘all swapped instruments to play ones they couldn’t really play. Maybe that was why they did it?’
Rude says that Nick was the ‘absolute stand-out figure’ on the local scene: ‘Punk rock was etched into his features. He was tall, and looked like a cross between Bryan Ferry, Chuck Berry, Genghis Khan and a drunken puppet from Pluto. He wore a white suit, like Bryan Ferry, flicked his leg up behind him like Chuck Berry, and had a wail like a banshee from hell. That wail is produced by inhaling against a Shure SM58 microphone, the standard rock microphone. If you imagine you are sucking the proverbial chrome off a doorknob, in other words, suck as hard as you can, then the diaphragm in the mike kinda implodes, producing the mother of all satanic screams. Possibly Nick Cave invented this, though I suspect he may have been informed by Lux Interior of The Cramps . . . Correct me if I’m wrong.’17
It would take longer, however, before Rude understood how the dual energies of Howard and Cave were combining to forge something truly great. Rude writes: ‘The BND with Rowland was a metamorphosis from a punk pop outfit to a noisenik post-punk horror show . . . [and it] was already fully formed by the time they arrived in England [later] as The Birthday Party. It’s uncanny that it was so fast you could regard it as an overnight transformation, yet it was also so gradual that none of us locals here noticed. Who drove that evolution? Was it Rowland? Was Rowland like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey that by some strange power inspired the “cavemen” [no pun intended, but it sure reads as one] so that they would discover fire? You have to be fair to Nick, as well as Mick, Tracy and Phill. They were all up for some rapid evolution. Rowland told me that Nick once said to him, at rehearsal, “Last week you came up with a horrid, grating, otherworldl
y sound. Come up with an even more horrid, grating otherworldly sound that’s different to that first one!” The drive toward intense originality was there.’18
Paul Goldman is unrestrained about Rowland’s influence. ‘I think he emboldened Nick,’ Goldman says. ‘But Nick is a consumer of anything and everything. He is the only person I have ever seen where everything – everything – is grist to his mill. Look at what happened to Phill Calvert, who was a very good drummer. His greatest crime was that he was a very sweet guy. He was a very faithful servant to that band and they treated him like a servant too in the end. They were very unkind. Keith Glass would end up getting an enormous caning as well. But the facts speak for themselves. No other band of their generation would spend so much time in the studio being so indulged, and Keith Glass supported that. He understood he was dealing with a ferocious talent that needed to be fed. He understood he was involved with a monster that needed to be indulged. Keith loved that band. And he was dedicated to letting them record and play and be as troublesome as they wanted. Can anyone imagine Nick was a sweet angelic boy? He wasn’t. Rowland wasn’t. Mick wasn’t. Tracy wasn’t. By the time they got to Hee Haw that band was shape-shifting so fast. Fucking hell, who else was gonna let them into the studio? They were just consuming ideas and people around them. It’s not surprising they ended up consuming each other.’19
Nick and Rowland formed something of a Three Stooges act with Ron Rude on the few occasions they played with him. Rude remembers how they responded to crowd antagonism when they were on stage with him, Rowland sarcastically saying, ‘Wait till you hear the next one,’ and Nick chipping in with, ‘It’s even better.’ Rude felt a little attacked from the front and the rear, but he took it on the chin and was delighted to have such a great band behind him. He’d always be a little upset that they never recorded with him later that year, despite promises made by Nick. Instead the band would take off for London and Rude would have to form another group and make his own way forward. Looking back at The Boys Next Door and their frenzy of activity at the time, at what eventually became of Nick, he is, however, only generous in his memories: ‘All the less successful artists, the under-realised artists, the failed artists and the would-be artists who mope around under his enormous shadow, jealous of his success, wondering why they didn’t get the same breaks, should reflect on whether they had anywhere near the degree of persistence, focus and determination as Nick Cave.’20
In her memoir The After Life, the poet and novelist Kathleen Stewart recalls being nineteen years old when she encountered Nick Cave. Two years had passed since the end of a previous relationship that had pushed her to attempt suicide, after which she’d been hospitalised for two months while being treated for depression. Six months later her father had killed himself.
When she met Nick at a gig in Sydney, the attractive energies between them were immediate and intense. ‘We fell madly in love,’ Stewart says. ‘He carried me down to Melbourne a few nights later, sitting on his lap in the back of an off-white station wagon, driving down the Hume all night squeezed in with the rest of the band.’21
Stewart’s poetic writing style is not served well by extracting her reminiscences from their larger, flooding context. Behind the youthful feeling, a genuine intensity is nonetheless palpable as the relationship accelerates:
Nick tells me he loves me and he takes me to live with him in Melbourne. We sleep wrapped in each other breathing each other’s breath. I am too frightened to make love with him in case he finds out there is something wrong with me or the way I do it or both. I am too frightened to tell him this. I am too frightened by the idea of what happened before happening again. I lie awake one night and I have a premonition. He will be unfaithful to me and I will not survive myself. I tell myself if I stay with him I will become silence. I will never fulfil myself to somehow find the truth and write it down.
Stewart continues in words that have the energy of being torn from a diary at the time:
He has a girlfriend, who he expects to be happy that he has found me now. She smiles vaguely and follows us around. I find her hairs wound into my clothes. She is everywhere. He says it is okay with her. Why then does she come one night and lie beside our bed and cry? I cannot take it. One night when he is out I pack my small bag and leave. He is wretched, I later learn. He combs the city for me. I sit up all night in bars and then all the next day in parks. I go to an art gallery and sit, and then I board the night train back to Sydney. I do not leave him an explanation. It is better like this. I do not imagine his hurt and confusion. He is better with her. I am saving my life.22
Trying to keep Anita Lane and Kathleen Stewart apart was a nightmare for Nick’s friends. Phill Calvert describes Stewart as ‘a lovely person, great eyes, but she was a packet of trouble back then’.23 Her arrival in Melbourne, he says, ‘caused a big ruckus’. Drugs added to the complications of the love triangle, pulling everyone into the emotional dramas around them.
Writing again from the present day, Stewart more calmly reflects that, ‘When Nick and I first met . . . we both had dead-white skin and blue–black dyed hair. His father, whose name [like Stewart’s father] was also Colin, had died a few months before. Now that Nick is the same age my father reached, now that his hair has receded into a pronounced M-line and he has grown a moustache and likes to glower in photographs, I realise he looks exactly like my father slimmed down.’24
Nick would pay belated tribute to Stewart in what became a Birthday Party track called ‘Kathy’s Kisses’. The lyrics have a creepy, insidious energy as her kisses become animate things left on his floor that he must sweep away with the dust. Nick becomes more manic as he repeats this haiku-like verse over and over. The end result is so overtly sexual, as the exaggeratedly sleazy saxophone lines being played by Nick himself suggest, that it is laughable. The lustful voodoo of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins from the closing moments of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ is an obvious inspiration for Nick’s singing style. And yet despite the hint of self-aware comedy, the song still sounds like an addiction of its own peculiar and desperate kind. The entire scenario has the shifting mood of a David Lynch film moment where you are amused, turned on and disturbed all at once. Calvert thought the song cheap and ungracious, and told Nick so. His comments were not appreciated. The words are reproduced in Nick Cave’s The Complete Lyrics, 1978–2007, but there’s a sung couplet that is not included in the official print version. In those unpublished lines Nick refers repeatedly to the nature of Stewart’s mouth as the song veers from wanting to escape the mythical Kathy’s kisses to a wild and infinite need.
‘Nick said, when I drily mentioned that song, that there were other Kathys he’d been involved with over the years. I give him poetic licence,’ she says.25
He and Kathleen Stewart would meet a lot over the years in Melbourne, Sydney and London, though only as friends. But the relationship would be rekindled almost a decade later in Berlin, where he would once more play Henry Miller to her Anaïs Nin. All it took was a phone call out of the blue from Nick to reignite things and entice her to Berlin. Listening to Nick sing Tim Rose’s ‘Long Time Man’ on Your Funeral . . . My Trial in 1986 would have been enough to give her strange chills.
The Boys Next Door spent a good deal of late 1979 and early 1980 going in and out of the studio thanks to Missing Link. In total they were involved in at least four major sessions at Richmond Recorders after completing Hee Haw. Tony Cohen said, ‘Richmond Recorders was actually a pretty shitty studio but it was renowned [as] a great place to score drugs. You’d see traffic arrive like pizza delivery all the time, day and night. All the bands knew about it; that’s why a certain type of band liked recording there.’
Speed was Cohen’s drug of choice. It helped pull him through the long overnight recording hours – usually from midnight till 8 am. It was not uncommon to find a previously bug-eyed Cohen asleep under the mixing console after being worn down by a particularly gruelling series of late-night recording sessions. This practice o
f his was known to one and all as ‘checking the wiring’. Phill Calvert says, ‘Tony always had an answer or an idea to top anything we were coming up with, and he had the ability to get it onto the tape.’ He describes one example of Cohen’s wildly lateral approach during the Hee Haw sessions. It involved the engineer ‘attaching a PZM mic to the glass of the control room and then getting Nick to sing at it from the other side’.26
Drugs are a nebulous influence on any artistic enterprise, but it’s possible to hear the amphetamine corollaries in Hee Haw’s jumpy, driven attitudes and tendency to unhinge itself with relish. Not to mention fracturing heroin withdrawals. Another shift in The Boys Next Door’s sound came with Keith Glass’s purchase of Howard’s dream instrument, a white 1966 Fender Jaguar guitar.27 Howard had seen it hanging high in a shop, but the attendant refused to countenance hauling it down from the wall unless a sale was in the offing. Glass intervened and bought it for Rowland on the spot, with a deal to dock his gigging wages on a weekly basis to recover the cost. It was a barter the manager knew he would never make the guitarist follow through on. Glass was investing in something bigger. He was also settling into a paternal role for the band that was becoming quite intense.