by Mark Mordue
As the countdown to leave grew closer, the band continued working with Tony Cohen at Richmond Recorders. Over January and February 1980 they recorded Nick’s latest songs, ‘Mr Clarinet’ and ‘The Friend Catcher’, as well as Rowland’s ‘Waving My Arms’ and an update of Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps’ ‘Cat Man’. Though the band was keen to develop originals, Mick Harvey says the cover was done at Nick’s particular insistence. ‘Cat Man’ followed Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’ as another influential song that set Nick thinking about aural tattoos of desire, where each letter of a word becomes an anthemic thrust into the audience. Lyrically and, more importantly, vocally, Nick was interested in the way a single word could break down and mutate while retaining traces of its meaning or intention in nothing but sound. He continued to handwrite his lyrics in a demonically inky style; a shift back to working on a typewriter in the mid-1980s would intensify an almost chemical interest in words as compounds as he punched out each key. Nick finally consummated the ideal of an erotically charged, letter-by-letter chant in his song ‘Loverman’ (1994): ‘L is for LOVE, baby / O is for OH yes I do / V is for VIRTUE, so I ain’t gonna hurt you / E is for EVEN if you want me to . . .’42
The Boys Next Door played two nights in a row at Hearts in Carlton immediately before they were due to fly out to London. After the second show they spent the rest of the evening in the studio with Tony Cohen, mixing ‘Mr Clarinet’. Down to their very last hours in Australia, all their energy was poured into the music. They had never stopped. If anything, the band’s creativity and work ethic had intensified.43 After completing ‘Mr Clarinet’, the band drove home in the dawn and packed hurriedly.
Missing Link had paid for a bus to take everyone to the airport, but only Tracy Pew boarded it with a group of close friends and fans. ‘It was a sweet idea,’ says Phill Calvert, but the rest of the band members opted to travel with their families.44 While his mother was driving the car to the airport, Nick looked out the window to see a sign at the turn-off indicating where the highway continued on to Sunbury, the site for Australia’s definitive musical festival of the early to mid-1970s. Sunbury had crowned everything from the crunching high-volume boogie of pub rock to the last idiosyncratic gasps of the Carlton sound in the glam-pop form of Skyhooks. The Boys Next Door had never fitted into these competing streams of brutish suburban hedonism and questing cultural identity. His band looked out into the world instead, searching for a sound and an audience to call their own. Now they were going to find out if there was an audience overseas waiting for them.
Defunct as a music festival, the very word ‘Sunbury’ evoked how quickly many local heroes faded, an irony that did not escape Nick. Heavy rains and Deep Purple’s lavish performance fee had sent the iconic festival bust in 1975, though not before AC/DC had joined their road crew in a legendary stage brawl with the overseas visitors, whose indulgences had prevented them from performing afterwards. AC/DC’s attitude yielded its own international rewards in the long run. Something about their yahoo toughness and humour excited Nick in much the same way The Saints had. You had to be ready to take the fight to anyone.45
At Tullamarine Airport people were crying in small mobs at the terminal as girlfriends, family and fans said their goodbyes to The Boys Next Door. Someone gave the band red carnations to pin to their lapels as they passed through the departure gate. It made them look like ratty high-school debutants: Nick and Tracy were barely twenty-two years old, Mick and Phill still twenty-one, Rowland just twenty and so birdlike you’d think he had fallen from a nest.
Keith and Helena Glass felt as if they were throwing their own children into the void. They’d spent every dollar they had to get the band onto the plane. It would cost the couple even more dearly than they imagined. For now, they felt so sick they could barely speak. Phill Calvert writes, ‘Helena Glass told me that she and Keith cried on the way back from the airport thinking, “What have we done to those poor kids?” It was the best thing that ever happened to any of us . . . We would never have got on that plane at that point in time, in music . . . There wouldn’t be the Nick Cave that we know today, if it wasn’t for Keith. Thank you, Keith Glass.’46
At a stopover in Perth, Western Australia, the band were told the coffin of AC/DC’s singer, Bon Scott, had just passed through the terminal on its way to being cremated in Fremantle. Scott’s death from ‘acute alcohol poisoning’ was understood to have occurred when he choked on his own vomit while passed out in the back of a friend’s car during a sub-zero London winter’s night. The return of this fallen warrior’s body was of immense concern to the whole nation, but Scott’s family insisted on keeping it a private affair. His gravesite would nonetheless become the most visited in all of Australia. ‘It felt kinda strange for us,’ Mick Harvey says. ‘Not that we ever compared ourselves to AC/DC. We were just a bunch of shit-kickers compared to where they were at by then. But it was a funny connection, crossing paths like that. February twenty-ninth it was; I’ll never forget it. A leap year, a leap day.’47
Something about this moment, the build-up to the trip and the endlessness of the flight prompted the band to consider changing their name. It was an opportunity to become something new – ‘to draw a line the sand’, as Mick Harvey puts it. They’d toyed with calling themselves The Birthday Party at a gig before they left. But the idea had remained vague. Nick initially preferred The Friend Catchers, a phrase Anita had used to describe and title one of Nick’s most impressionistic new songs. Though there was no such phrase in the lyric, Anita had a way of seeing into what Nick was doing and capturing it in a finger snap, sometimes acerbically – in this case a lyric about heroin use. It didn’t sound quite right to the others as a band name, though. Later, Rowland, Mick and Nick would each claim they had been the first to seriously promote the idea of calling themselves The Birthday Party. The reference to ‘Happy Birthday’ is obvious, and the Harold Pinter overtones immediate. ‘We were quite obsessed with a film of it [Pinter’s play The Birthday Party], a Billy Friedkin thing that was on late TV all the time,’ says Mick Harvey. ‘It has this great opening sound with a tracking shot, the sound of tearing paper.’48
The Boys Next Door at Tullamarine Airport with Missing Link founder and band manager Keith Glass, 29 February 1980 (Helena Glass; courtesy of Phill Calvert)
Wearing red carnations, the band head for the departure gate at Melbourne, en route to London, 29 February 1980. (Helena Glass; courtesy of Phill Calvert)
The film adaptation of Pinter’s play The Birthday Party (1968) depicts a one-time piano player who appears to be hiding out at an English seaside boarding house after an unnamed crime or shameful act. Caught up in an increasingly sinister atmosphere, he is forced to partake in a birthday he keeps trying to explain is not his. This sustained and sadistic joke ends with him being taken away from the boarding house by two characters who may be gangsters preparing to execute him and whose actions are veiled in the mundane intentions of a few lads who’ve invited him to ‘go out for a while’ and continue the celebrations. Both the play and the film, for which Pinter also wrote the script, ooze with the writer’s themes of guilt and retribution, not to mention director William Friedkin’s flair for supernatural intensities.
These energies were very easy to relate to for a piano-playing lad on the lam like Nick Cave. As if to seal the deal, the gangsters in the film reminded Nick of the cops who’d arrested him for stealing that chair not so long ago in St Kilda.
Mick Harvey says he and Rowland talked with Nick on the plane about their new name and what The Birthday Party symbolised for them: ‘No band that we were aware of had given themselves a name that inferred that they were an event in themselves. We kinda liked that. It’s always had that aspect to me.’49
‘Happy Birthday’ would become the earliest of Nick Cave’s songs to gain a place in The Complete Lyrics. Everything written prior to it is dispensed with as unworthy juvenilia. The song remains a case study for Nick’s nascent mash-up of literary references wit
h autobiographical hints. This may explain why he was oddly evasive when talking about it later: Nick would tend to avoid emphasising the significance of the Pinter play or film when discussing how the band name was invented. But if not directly inspired by it, ‘Happy Birthday’ was thematically close enough to Pinter’s work to warrant Nick and Rowland referring to the song as ‘The Birthday Party’ when they first wrote it.
Later, Nick preferred to speak of scrambled associations he had made with Crime and Punishment, and a wake scene from the novel, which he had misremembered as a birthday party. This was a very unlikely mistake, given Nick’s multiple readings of the book. Like so many of his habitual twists in telling a story, it’s the truth wrapped inside a lie.
Mick Harvey remembers Nick becoming ‘totally obsessed by Crime and Punishment again’ in 1979. Nick had been rereading Dostoyevsky’s novel slavishly, seeking meaning, if not quite consolation, in its pages. It does not take a psychology degree to equate Raskolnikov’s murderous acts, ensuing guilt and compulsive need to confess with Nick’s own existential predicaments in relation to his father’s death and the nature of his creative acts in public. This contrary motion would see Nick burst forth violently as a songwriter and a performer, only to retreat in denial or confusion – not to mention a good deal of haughty resentment – depending on how he was being received.
A close examination of the long build-up to the relevant scene in Crime and Punishment shows how complex Nick’s biographically laced literary associations could be. It begins with Raskolnikov befriending a drunken public servant in a bar by the name of Marmeladov, whose name not uncoincidentally echoes the word ‘marmalade’. Despite Marmeladov’s filthy, even repulsive, appearance, he retains his middle-class pride and an unsettling theatricality with it. ‘But there was something very strange in him; there was a light in his eyes as though of intense feeling – perhaps there were even thought and intelligence, but at the same time there was a gleam of something like madness.’50 The gleam of something like madness . . . it’s a description that could fit Nick at his performing height, or even, for that matter, the extremes of his father’s vocational zeal.
For all his self-recrimination, Marmeladov is happy to let his wife and daughter sacrifice themselves to his drunken compulsions. Raskolnikov helps him home and, in a fit of pity, leaves money behind for the family. His mindset takes a misanthropic spin afterwards as the encounter regenerates his contempt for all human weakness, especially his own. Marmeladov confirms a belief in Raskolnikov that he must renounce his compassionate nature to become a higher man, superior to the common and the weak, and justified, therefore, in doing anything he wishes, including committing a murder to advance his own interests and live freely. After the trauma of a violent crime that was supposed to release him into this mastery, Raskolnikov comes across Marmeladov again, who has fallen down drunk in the street and been crushed beneath a horse-drawn carriage. Raskolnikov sees to it that the dying man is taken home. In these persistent gestures of compassion there are hints of redemption for both men, but the darker, greater truth is that Marmeladov is first a warning and then a premonition for Raskolnikov. Good and bad are twinned together; Jekyll and Hyde are never separated. The funeral feast for Marmeladov is, accordingly, a grotesque affair, a Last Supper in reverse. Marmeladov serves as a Christ-figure who dies not to save Raskolnikov from his sins, but to unmask his delusional belief in a brutal and transcendent will: a will that is caught up in compulsions that will prove Raskolnikov’s undoing. Nick had locked on to Raskolnikov’s ‘superior man’ philosophy before his father’s death to justify his own inflamed pride and rebellious ambitions; afterwards, he saw things with different, but perhaps even darker, eyes. Raskolnikov was more like Marmeladov than he ever imagined. Nick was likewise still his father’s son.
Any suggestion that such story elements in Crime and Punishment could end with Nick confusing the wake with a birthday party only reveals how attuned he was to the driving forces behind what was happening to him. In the long run, the title of a solo album, Your Funeral . . . My Trial (1986), would make such double-edged associations explicit. Nick nonetheless claims, ‘I really wasn’t that conscious of how much it was influencing me at the time.’ If that’s even half-true, his unconscious must have been on fire. As Nick would often assert over the years: ‘My father read the murder scene in Crime and Punishment to me when I was young. He told me to study it as a great piece of writing. Which I did do.’ This study would continue to infiltrate everything from Birthday Party songs such as ‘Deep in the Woods’ to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ ‘The Mercy Seat’.
There’s another level to all this that is broadly true for Nick and his formative interests as a lyricist. It involves what can only be described as the aural intensity of Crime and Punishment, an ongoing sense of being able to hear Raskolnikov’s voice, the fevered workings of his mind and those of his antagonists as they rise up from the page. Dostoyevsky sustained this burning orchestral intimacy across most of his work – a sense of being overcome by the permeating force of others, and by what may have been one and the same thing, the ferocious nature of his own consciousness, as embodied in his vivid characters and their capacity for a nihilism and evil well beyond his own Christian morality. Dostoyevsky hears and feels the voices of the many. At times this can be so intense it becomes a conflagration of everything and everyone around the great Russian author as he writes the people and the times into his work.
When asked if ‘Mr Clarinet’ or later songs like ‘Sonny’s Burning’ and ‘Gun’ were about people he knew, Nick would be evasive. But Rowland was happy to say the songs were, almost literally, ‘his friends’. Nick jested they were his ‘little bedfellows’, to which Rowland added ‘friends who live in his closet’.51 The songs, their characters and the real people they were based on were no longer divisible.
So much of Nick’s art had sprung from the communal wildness of the Crystal Ballroom scene in Melbourne, and the tumult of his own life story all the way from Wangaratta to the present moment of leaving. What could London possibly add to that? How might things change for him again? Nick says he was not feeling the least bit blue when he hugged his mother farewell and kissed Anita Lane goodbye at the airport in Melbourne. The town – indeed, the whole country – had become a dungeon. He’d formed a gang around him and was making his escape, off at last to storm another world and make it recognise him. ‘Everything I held precious in music, except for The Saints, seemed to be across the water and waiting for me somehow. I had an idea it was gonna be paradise.’
The Boys Next Door returned from London after a year away, reincarnated as The Birthday Party, here preparing to film the video for ‘Nick the Stripper’ at a rubbish dump. Cover try for Prayers on Fire, 1981. (Peter Milne)
EPILOGUE
The Singer and the Song
I’m in a conversation inside a car inside a song. I say we’re inside a song – as much as a car or a conversation – because the lyrics to ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ seem to define what Nick Cave and I are passing through as we cruise on up a highway north of Sydney towards a show with his band, The Bad Seeds, in the coastal steel town of Newcastle.
In the song, Nick Cave fantasises about taking a car journey to Geneva, where scientists anticipate an experiment that will isolate the Higgs boson or ‘God particle’ that is the subatomic building block of all matter. A litany of historical and pop-cultural images are mashed together into the archetypal ‘hero’s journey’, in this case a road trip through a universe being steadily emptied of all spiritual illusions.
Right now, I feel strange echoes of the same dark road that he sings about, half-inviting, half-swallowing us, of all those ‘tableaus of spiritual collapse’ – as Nick has previously described ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ to me – fleeting past the corners of our eyes in new ways on this oppressively warm afternoon.
It’s about a year and a half since Nick and Susie’s fifteen-year-old son Arthur died. Nick’s made the documentary One Mor
e Time with Feeling about the recording of his album Skeleton Tree in the wake of that tragedy. Now he is beginning to accept dealing with the media again, and I am invited along with photographer Bleddyn Butcher on the ride north to help in this process. As usual, it’s another Australian summer tour for The Bad Seeds: in the last four decades Nick has rarely missed a chance to be with his mother, Dawn, on the anniversary of Colin Cave’s death. He really is the good son.
For all his recent talk of no longer writing narrative lyrics, the truth is Nick Cave is still telling us stories in songs such as ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ and eerie stunners such as ‘Magneto’. They’re just more expressionistic, subconscious, dreamier and deeper, maybe, than before. It’s certainly interesting to hear Cave admit, ‘I can’t write a song that I can’t see.’
He nonetheless insists, ‘I haven’t much time for overtly narrative songs these days. It has felt hugely restrictive for some time. The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and more than anything a kind of intellectual convenience. I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux.