by Mark Mordue
Rowland had frequently invited his father, Jock, to come to see The Boys Next Door. Jock never showed much interest. The guitarist would be wounded early on when his father responded to yet another request from Rowland by asking his son, ‘Why?’ Jock explained he had already seen them perform once at the Tiger Lounge. True to his word, Jock would not see Rowland play again on a stage until his son’s life was almost over. It’s natural anyone dealing with this level of parental indifference, let alone a figure as hypersensitive as Rowland S Howard, might then gravitate towards the likes of Keith Glass. Nick was similarly susceptible to a kinship he’d felt more in the form of a competition, and then lost altogether that January with Colin Cave’s car crash, and Phill Calvert’s and Tracy Pew’s experiences of violence and separation had alienated them from their respectively dominating and detached fathers. Even the emotionally reticent Mick Harvey was drawn in by Glass’s energy. There was no-one the band trusted more that year, and for a brief moment the relationships were deeply felt indeed. The plain fact of it is The Boys Next Door were still just boys, and Glass was a man on whom they could depend.
The band had already worked hard through the recording of Hee Haw EP. Howard’s playing, and more importantly his sonic palette, had advanced considerably with his new Fender Jaguar, and the group responded in kind. Glass was so excited by the outcomes – and by the energy flowing between their intense gigging and studio schedules – that he pushed The Boys Next Door to make even more demos. He saw how the recording process was opening up the band, and he actively sought to influence them further. ‘I played them all this country music,’ Glass said. ‘Nick always liked Johnny Cash, the George Jones thing and the death-song thing; Gene Vincent’s “Cat Man”. When I was a kid it was the scariest song I’d ever heard. “What the fuck’s a ‘cat man’?” They grabbed that, they were grabbing things from anywhere and utilising them to their own purposes.’
As well as arranging interstate tours, including to Sydney and Adelaide, Glass got the band playing more regularly in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, where they continued to encounter uninterested audiences. It was a sobering experience. People would cheer when they finished their set at nightclubs, glad it was over. They returned to their fan base suitably chastened and toughened, and all the more restless to expand. ‘From St Kilda to Carlton, though, they were the kings, the most popular, highest‑drawing live band in the city,’ Glass says. ‘No-one could hold a candle to them on their home turf, not even Models, who were outwardly more successful.’28
Even so, the suburban shows made The Boys Next Door even more conscious of preaching only to the converted. This feeling was confirmed when they were invited to play bottom of the bill below Cold Chisel, The Angels and Flowers as part of a massive event at Festival Hall on 25 November 1979. The line-up cherry picked the most promising and commercially happening new generation of bands in the country. Unfortunately, when it came to The Boys Next Door, with the freakier treats of Hee Haw not yet released, the organisers were still responding to the relatively poppy promise of Door, Door. During the opening moments of their very first song at Festival Hall, a new one called ‘The Friend Catcher’, Nick says, something happened to Rowland’s amp, pulling the band up to a halt. The audience thought this pretentious overture of sonic humming was the band’s arty idea of a punk song. Nick laughs and says he could hear this slow rumble building until The Boys Next Door realised the entire hall of 10,000 people were booing at them. He answered the antagonistic crowd by smiling and striding over to the microphone to ask, ‘Do you hate us as much as we hate you?’
From then on the booing never stopped. Glass was strangely impressed. ‘Look, I’ve seen bad responses to bands. It happens to everybody and it had happened to The Boys Next Door before. But I’d never really seen a band booed so totally and so aggressively from start to finish like that. The crowd just hated them. Nick didn’t seem to care at all. In fact, I think he got off on it.’29
Following their response to the debacle at Suicide, the creative battles over Door, Door and their departure from Mushroom, there was something contemptuous to the manner in which The Boys Next Door reintroduced themselves to the music industry with such an aggressively contrary EP as Hee Haw. ‘Do you hate us as much as we hate you?’ could have been their mantra.
If Door, Door was a flop commercially, Hee Haw really was career suicide. The album prompted industry consternation and horror as the kind of release only rock critics could possibly love. Nick told Rolling Stone, ‘We let mistakes lie. We thought that added character.’30 In Roadrunner he went further: ‘Our records are never final statements. Other groups put out albums that are so definitive that they betray themselves, whereas we’re really open-ended.’31
Missing Link only pressed a first run of 500 copies. Keith Glass was a dreamer, but he wasn’t a fool. There was no rush to press more. Due to a printing error, the labels on each side were around the wrong way. The music seemed so off-the-wall it took a while for many listeners to notice. Fans rationalised it as another one of Nick and Rowland’s Dadaist jokes.
A new band was being born, a band that acted as a law unto itself. Overseas groups such as Pere Ubu, The Pop Group and The Fall had arrived with the force of deconstructive genius, suggesting that the most unconventional of vocalists, the most uncomfortable of rhythms, the ugliest and most amateurish of sounds could build another musical world. These were the bands The Boys Next Door regarded as their true peers. Hee Haw was all about that push and strain for an international style, precipitating an increasingly confrontational attitude from Nick towards audiences who failed to respond to such ambitions. The die was cast: fans had to come with them. The Boys Next Door would not work to please anyone. Sitting in his bedroom at home, Nick no doubt crossed that concern off his list of band weaknesses. Things were improving.
And Nick’s confidence as a singer was building. Michael Hutchence, for one, was blown away by Nick Cave’s presence on stage. He was then the singer for an unknown band from the northern beaches of Sydney. Like The Boys Next Door, INXS had formed as a schoolboy unit, making their official debut at exactly the same time, August 1977. Unlike The Boys Next Door, INXS did not immediately gain attention and a recording contract. By late 1979, however, they were poised to make their first single at last. Always hungry to take in what was happening, Hutchence made a point of frequenting the Crystal Ballroom whenever he visited Melbourne. Though they did not know each other, he and Cave shared a mutual passion for sixties group The Loved Ones, whose front man, Gerry Humphrys, was the last word in coiled dynamism on Australian stages. Even on record, Humphrys’ emphatically theatrical and sexual baritone was a thing to behold. Both Hutchence and Cave took a lot from Humphrys’ bluesy, expressive way of possessing a song and twisting a lyric into a limbo between seduction and menace. It might even be said Hutchence and Cave became a little trapped in the former and latter territories. Both were destined to wish for a touch of what the other had when they finally became friends in London decades later, though in Michael Hutchence’s mind Nick would always be the bigger talent.
‘In the good old, bad old days, when Australia was way ahead of the rest of the world in music, the Boys were in front of everybody,’ Hutchence observed. ‘I remember seeing them in Melbourne’s Crystal Ballroom, which was sorta like CBGBs or The Marquee. The stage was the size of a couch and there was Nick shaking it up. Johnny Rotten was a clown compared to what he was doing, he was so wild! And the music! I’d never experienced anything like it!!!! This sort of haunting, knife-stuck-between-your-ribs music. It was like highbrow meets lowbrow in a beautiful nightmare, but a nightmare where you go, “Oh I’m scared! But actually could I have that again!!!” He was a big influence on me. Whaddya mean it doesn’t show?!’32
Dolores San Miguel understands the comparison entirely, though many would at the time see Michael Hutchence and Nick Cave as more like opposites in their careers and their presence. It’s perhaps easier now to appreciate them as th
e greatest front men of their era in Australian music. Dolores certainly remembers that from the very start with Nick, vividly describing the experience of him walking on stage with The Boys Next Door at the Crystal Ballroom as ‘like a cold blast of air that makes your heart jump’.33
If Hee Haw was deemed an adventurous misstep, it nonetheless opened the doors to a stubbornly idiosyncratic run of singles that freed the band from their provincial horizons. ‘Happy Birthday’, ‘Mr Clarinet’ and ‘The Friend Catcher’ were recorded in Melbourne, with Tony Cohen again engineering. All were features of The Boys Next Door’s live set in late 1979, though the latter two songs would not be released till they were making themselves known as The Birthday Party in England in 1980. ‘I think they capture a part of the band that we moved away from,’ said Rowland. ‘It was a transitional phase. They were funky, but at the same time it’s very light and nimble. It’s not at all heavy or plodding. The songs are really short and concise even though we were experimenting in the confines of basically pop music.’34
Keith Glass was given a production credit on Hee Haw and these ensuing singles, but on later re-releases of the material his name would be deleted, an action he describes as ‘churlish and petty, but a measure of what they could be like once you got on the wrong side of them. You were just written out of the story.’
Glass still exudes a mix of frustration and pride regarding his associations with a band he says wiped him out in more ways than one. There’s an air of triumph as he recounts how he announced to leading industry figures in Australia in 1979 that The Boys Next Door were on their way to the United Kingdom and destined to be regarded in the same breath as The Easybeats. ‘People thought that was a bit strong and they laughed at me, but time has proven me right. Weirdly, all the people in the industry that I was trying to get interested in The Boys Next Door were actually all five years younger than me. In spite of the falling-out we had, I don’t regret a thing. The Birthday Party’s success, Nick’s success as a solo artist – it vindicates everything I tried to tell people back then. I actually don’t have any problems with Nick anyway; the last time I saw him was in 1988 and he needed money and I gave him $5000 and he took it and went away. It’s Mick who always complains and keeps on complaining – about money I never had and money that never existed. But that’s who Mick is and that’s what Mick does: he whinges.’35
Nick Cave with The Boys Next Door, Crystal Ballroom, 1979 (courtesy of Phill Calvert)
Mick Harvey admits Glass did get them to England exactly as he had promised. Though not in anything like the conditions they may have hoped for. ‘It’s really hard to describe this air about Keith. He can be very convincing.’ Stated in the present tense over thirty years later, there is an immediacy to Harvey’s words that is a sign of how persuasive and charismatic Glass could be.
It was only with Mick Harvey holding the wheel as manager during the 1980s – a role that would be forced upon him by circumstance – that the band’s course began to sail straight. Not that the unruly crews Harvey was given in the form of The Birthday Party, and then The Bad Seeds, ever gave him much of a hand when it came to stability. Let alone having Nick as the nominal ship’s captain, a drug-spun Ahab running amok on stage and off.
Nick Cave takes a less conciliatory view of his old manager, though he can admit that it was never easy. ‘It’s true Keith helped us out a lot at first. And he did introduce us to a lot of cool music. He says he never ripped us off, I know, but . . .’ Nick takes a long breath and starts to laugh.
The story has got so old, the people involved can almost remember how it was when they first liked each other. Until they remember why their relationships ended. Is it any wonder that spiral on the belly of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi character became such a potent symbol for the band and everything they stirred up around them?
Over August and September 1979, The Boys Next Door had returned to the studio to record ‘Hats on Wrong’, ‘Guilt Parade’, ‘Riddle House’ and ‘Happy Birthday’. ‘Guilt Parade’ was a driving and dramatic pop-rock song, but it lacked the swing and intense presence of ‘The Hair Shirt’. Rowland’s words are typically oblique, though there’s an implied scenario of drug taking. The lyrics of ‘Guilt Parade’ also sound like faint imagistic precursors to Nick’s later and better song ‘The Friend Catcher’. ‘Riddle House’ had a herky-jerky rhythm that could prove wearing, another of Rowland’s self-consciously off-centre musical contributions.
‘Hats on Wrong’ highlighted Nick’s similar taste for absurdist boofhead scenarios and the band’s interest in what might be described as ‘drongo jazz’, treading the line between an avantgarde style and the purposely ridiculous. It was ‘Happy Birthday’ that marshalled the nervy, clattering music, the cryptic lyrics and the increasingly dark humour into a hysterical balance. As ‘Happy Birthday’ draws to a close, what sound like clap sticks give off a harsh, spacey rhythm. They are in fact handclaps that Tony Cohen has jacked up the treble on, then soaked in reverb to create a cold metallic edge that sounds at once Aboriginal and industrial. The song was another breakthrough for the band. ‘It was really unusual,’ says Mick Harvey, ‘because Nick and Rowland wrote the lyrics for “Happy Birthday” together, and I did the music. It was the first time that had happened with Nick and Rowland, and it would be the last time too.’36
The guitarist and singer had indeed got so tight that even Nick’s penmanship appeared to be merging with Rowland’s. Critic and biographer Robert Brokenmouth claims that ‘during this period Nick stopped using his favoured narrow-nibbed r0tring Rapidograph pen and took up a blotchy “dip into ink” fountain pen. Nick wasn’t intending tidy copperplate or polite calligraphy, quite the opposite.’37 Bruce Milne noticed it too at the time – and reflected on it again after Howard died at the end of 2009. ‘When I see Nick’s writing it often reminds me of Rowland’s: that handwriting that is like early Andy Warhol mixed with Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman. A Jack the Ripper style that looks like an intelligent person who is a bit psycho.’38
It was in this ‘psycho’ hand that Nick scrawled the lyrics all over the front cover of ‘Happy Birthday’. The song would be released as a giveaway single at the Crystal Ballroom on 16 February 1980, just two weeks before the band’s planned departure for the United Kingdom. Howard would remember people openly scoffing when he told them they were going to London. ‘Their attitude was, you can’t honestly expect anyone over there would be interested in you!’39 Clinton Walker in RAM described the ‘Happy Birthday’ single – which was backed on the flipside with ‘Riddle House’ – as ‘The Boys’ parting gesture to their Australian fans . . . a culminative statement – thrusting, splintered music of irony, melodrama and the absurd.’40 The song demonstrates a malevolent, if still rowdy, sense of humour – and something of the old private-schoolboy nastiness for which the group were already known. Once more there’s a Punch and Judy feel to this, a slapstick quality to the delivery. And with that a strengthening sense in ‘Happy Birthday’ of the performative quality in Nick’s writing, of a song not delivered straight, but presented as a story from an unstable and unreliable narrator.
The lyrics are a twisted account of a boy’s eleventh birthday party. They list an array of gifts, from a punch in the belly to a samurai sword. To free things up, Howard had originally encouraged Nick to improvise on the words he had written, but Nick’s guiding consciousness inevitably pushed the lyric back towards a narrative form despite the seemingly dislocated images he stacked together. Tracy Pew possessed a samurai sword at home on his bedroom wall. This and other details imply the song is actually an account of the band members’ various birthday gifts, coalescing around a nightmare of what should be – but are clearly not – many happy returns. Nick sings obsessively of a chair that is his own special surprise: a chair that can count. Then he barks to eleven crazily like a dog parodying intelligence and desiring to please. The red chair Nick helped to steal was obviously playing on his mind. At twenty-two, he was exactly twice th
e age of the protagonist of ‘Happy Birthday’, who is half-delighted and half-horrified by the special throne he receives. Nick’s bark gives the song a demented, if comical, edge, further intensifying a mood of unease and bullying. Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are springs to mind as a parallel and partially inspiring entity, with its covert message of a boy’s anger and loneliness released by an otherworldly parade of anarchic caricatures. Rowland would look back at ‘Happy Birthday’ and many other songs he and Nick wrote in their youth – of which ‘Shivers’ was the benchmark – and quietly observe, ‘Of course, humour is a form of defence.’41
As for the red chair that had caused them all so much trouble, the story was always that ‘Pierre’s girlfriend’ had smashed the window that night. Ask Pierre, Mick Harvey, Genevieve McGuckin or Nick Cave who that mysterious girlfriend was and no one wants to give an answer. Rowland never did while he was alive. It’s such a petty crime you’d think it mattered little, but of course the repercussions and timing were enormous in Nick’s life and in many ways determined the direction he would take.
Inevitably you start to run through the names of the women who were close to Nick at the time, wondering who it was. But something in the details never quite rings true. What kind of young woman would smash the window of a tradesman’s vehicle and then the larger plate-glass window of an apartment block and have the strength to carry a large, heavy lounge chair the distance she, Pierre and Nick managed before raising it and throwing it over a fence? It sounds more like the kind of thing Tracy Pew would do, someone who already had form when it came to smashing windows and taking what he liked, when he liked. By the time the police arrived, Nick would have realised that another such conviction might well have meant prison time for his friend. If that’s true, the sacrifice was a measure of how much Nick loved Tracy. And it gives new meaning to the song ‘Happy Birthday’, with its list of childish gifts and the suffering they symbolised, and to the origins of what would become The Birthday Party.