by Mark Mordue
‘So, to apply that to song writing, [in] a song like “I Need You”, off Skeleton Tree, time and space all seem to be rushing and colliding into a kind of big bang of despair. There is a pure heart, but all around it is chaos.’
As it so happens, Newcastle is my hometown and the first place I ever saw the much-hyped Birthday Party, who’d only just changed their name from The Boys Next Door and returned from England in late 1980. I hated them, Nick most of all, whom I regarded as a poseur and someone who held the audience in contempt. It was clear none of the band wanted to be in Newcastle at an RSL, playing to a half-empty room. Musically, they were hedged between the power pop of Door, Door, the Jarry-esque experimentalism of the Hee Haw album and a pale vein of primitivism yet to open up with their Prayers on Fire recording. It’s likely Newcastle was just a warm-up show, testing out the old and the new and deciding what they would do next.
Out of anger as much as anything else, I wrote one of the first rock journalism articles I ever had published for a great new underground arts magazine called The Virgin Press. I was very much under the sarcastic sway of NME writers such as Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, and the destroy-to-create ethos still resonating out of punk. My review included a sneering line that was pulled out and used as a headline: ‘Screaming Tom Waits and the Cacophony Kids’. I didn’t tell Nick about that review when we met, and I always worried it might crop up in some obscure Google search by him one day. It’s just not the kind of thing you tell someone when you’re about to start writing their biography.
Barely a year or so later, in early 1982, I saw The Birthday Party in full bloom at a venue called the San Miguel Inn in Sydney, and found myself terrified by the tension in the room. There was a crackling sense of violence in the air, actual as well as artistic. I did my best not to catch anyone’s eye as I moved about, seeking out a safe corner and then staying there. A young band called Hunters & Collectors were the support act, playing epic rock songs pierced by clanging industrial percussion on gas cylinders. They were like some heavyweight boxer flooring us with metallic punches that came slamming in from across a vast landscape. In the media, Nick had warned everyone, ‘Hunters and Collectors will blow us off stage.’ It seemed he might have been right about that. But then came The Birthday Party.
The only word that defines how they were that night is ‘demonic’. Leaving the San Miguel Inn, I questioned the morality of the band’s right to exist, but not their power. And they were only at the midpoint of their reincarnation. Bleddyn Butcher tells me it was around this time that the editor of the NME began to argue against giving the band publicity in the United Kingdom because they were ‘evil’.1 There’s quite a funny interview with Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, in which he reminisces about seeing The Birthday Party. ‘I’m not going to say “scary”,’ he says, then laughs and continues, ‘but . . .’ The rest is left to your imagination.2
I genuinely felt as if I had entered into the music of the Inferno. And, yes, an evil heat wafted off their performance and into my body like nothing I’d experienced before. As I look back on that night, filmmaker Paul Goldman’s comment about The Boys Next Door consuming everything around them to become The Birthday Party, and then consuming themselves in doublequick and ferocious time, seems especially apt.
Much later, in Wangaratta, I sat in the park beneath the giant tree that Nick and Bryan Wellington and Eddie Baumgarten had climbed. The tree beneath which Nick had sat and talked with Anne Baumgarten about what was inspiring him. The wind shook its mighty trunk; I stayed there a long while and felt its trembling inside me. It was as if something had called me there.
I came to know Wangaratta well. It echoed my own childhood in Newcastle, an edge-world where the residential tailed off into the semi-industrial. I knew the dream Nick had of himself like I knew my own dream.
There were other coincidences along the way, things I would rightly or wrongly read as having mystic significance. Nick driving me to the airport after a visit to Melbourne to interview him, sensing the difficulties I was in and the negative impact the book was having on me. ‘You have to be careful of what you write, you know,’ he told me. He arched his eyebrows a little, but he wasn’t joking. ‘Sometimes the things you create can make things happen. I’ve seen it with people. Seen it in my own work too.’ And that recurring scene of us inside vehicles going somewhere and nowhere, passing through one limbo state after another, before or after a show usually. Sharing eternity for an hour or two. Up to this ride together to Newcastle, by which point I have atomised myself and lost all control of the biography and my life – though anything I have suffered seems like nothing next to Nick’s losses.
Growing up in Wangaratta, the rapid evolution of The Boys Next Door: it was only the start. Nick was going on a long journey. Right through the heart of darkness and back out the other side. Ahead of him were London, Berlin and São Paulo, then Britain again. Ahead of him were full-blown heroin addiction and a mighty artistic career.
Picturing my biography of Nick Cave, I saw each era as having its own colours and textures. The Birthday Party period in London was akin to a photocopied leaflet or an inky copy of the NME, all grainy and dotted, a Rorschach test of blood spatter across a primary canvas. Berlin and Nick Cave’s solo career were a deeper red and heavier blue, Expressionist cabaret, David Lynchian dream-nightmare. Brazil was hangover yellows in strong sunlight, night-sweats, cooling shadows in a church. And so on.
As I battled to complete my biography, people were not surprised by my struggles: He’s still alive. He does so much. How can you reach an end? But keeping up with Nick’s linear progress was never the biggest problem, though it has certainly been a challenge. It’s the depth, how far down into Nick’s work you can go, that causes you to get lost in rabbit holes, chasing artistic influences, secret connections and cross-references that never seem to end. As I told Mick Harvey once, each of Nick’s songs is like a Russian doll, inside which there is another thing, and another and another, being revealed. Mick replied in a tone that suggested not only the depth, but an almost eerie capacity for the words to reach out beyond the moment they were created: ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve had that experience with Nick’s songs many times over the years.’3
On our road trip to Newcastle, Nick tells me that ‘the notion of an idea within a song is very important to me. That a song has a greater meaning than its parts – its words and melody. But the idea is a tricky thing to catch, as it recedes as you approach it. So these days I tend to write words around an idea, kind of ring-fence it with words, because the idea disappears when you acknowledge it. It is very important for me to be able to access the idea when I play live – to fall deep into the song. It took me a long time to understand that the greater meaning of the song was not the words themselves, but lived behind the words or inside the words. I think my audience helped me understand this.’
The idea of something receding from you as you approach it and try to define it makes a lot of sense to me. I’d irritably tell people who wondered how I would end my biography that I was going to finish like 2001: A Space Odyssey – with a hundred-page hallucinogenic trip about Nick being reborn as he slips through a black hole and re-enters the cosmos. People did not take to this idea, or even follow what the hell I was talking about, but to me it wasn’t a bad concept.
After all, one of the strongest impressions I’d gained from my relationship with Nick was how hard he had worked to become a decent human being, if not exactly an ordinary one. Three or four times over the eight years that we corresponded he emailed me a copy of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Mower’, a depiction of minor suburban trauma that ends by invoking kindness as a way to help us make it through our daily lives. I figured Nick was sending this message to himself as much as me, but it was interesting to see how much the poem meant to him. It was like a mantra.
Between leaving Wangaratta, and then losing his father, something had happened to him that had bent him out of shape. After The Boys Next
Door, some intensely dark and brutal, as well as wildly humorous, music with The Birthday Party was on its way. It would be followed by a cinematic expansion of everything Nick had begun, with his next great band, The Bad Seeds. It certainly wasn’t for nothing that he launched his solo career with ‘Avalanche’, a Leonard Cohen song about a hunchback. But along with the miscreant darkness and violence, the most marvellous and beautiful things emerged. As well as a rich array of finely drawn, almost literary characters who hark back time and again to Wangaratta and Melbourne and every place he has inhabited.
As the landscape rushes past us and we approach Newcastle in the late afternoon, Nick admits to me, ‘I’ve worn my characters like armour. They protected me and allowed me to write about certain preoccupations without feeling implicated. The truth of the matter is there is much of me in the characters I have invented, as morally suspect as some of them are!’ he says with a laugh.
Ages ago Nick told me, ‘I have always been more of a style over content man.’ So I wonder now if too much of a carapace has developed. A favourite poet of his, Frederick Seidel, mixes style with savagery. Can something like that set hard if you’re not careful, and entrap you? In much the same way as he warned me a few years back about the emanations that can come from one’s work? The softness in Nick’s writing has always been there, but somehow it is stronger now. Is he breaking things open?
‘It is not unusual to want to protect yourself,’ he replies. ‘We all have our identities that shield us from the world. [With Arthur’s death] my shell was ripped off, suddenly and without warning, and I was basically a shivering slug and there were a lot of big, black birds in the sky. It still feels like that, really, on a daily basis. But to answer your question, I don’t see style in poetry as a lack of courage or honesty, or that it is something you hide behind or that in some way gets in the way of basic truths. Some of the most moving and tender thoughts are contained within a stylistic savagery. Look at Seidel’s poems. Look at Lolita. In regard to my stuff, a certain savagery is necessary because it makes the opposite more affecting. But ultimately it is the softer and more tender gesture that I am concerned with, and it is the ability to survive in sometimes extremely brutal landscapes that makes it all the more heroic and valuable.’
We arrive in Newcastle and any conversation of depth has to cease. Nick needs to prepare for the concert. The venue is a large amphitheatre in what feels like a fairly soulless and concrete entertainment complex. It jogs my memory, as it was in these same grounds that the Newcastle Show used to take place when I was a kid, one of those hybrid annual events that was part agricultural exhibition, part fairground entertainment, part freak display, with all the rides and carnies so harsh and shining in the artificial light.
I figure I’ll take a walk around, through this very suburb I was raised in, where I used to cut through the stormwater drains and sing David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ to myself and imagine I was some kind of dolphin swimming my way into another world. There’s not much for Nick and me to say now, other than that form of goodbye that promises another day without guaranteeing it will be there: ‘See you later.’
So I walk through my home town, with Nick’s words ringing in my head, about how the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck, with the vibrations endlessly spreading outwards, affecting everything – our present, our futures, our past. Everything changing and vibrating and in flux. One emotion ringing in my mind above them all, as much a question as a calling note in the air: tenderness.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Biographies are built on worlds. The world of your subject, yes – in this case, one Nick Cave. But also the overlapping worlds of many others as they unite and part again on their journeys: how they influence one another, the way they combine to affect the culture they operate in, and the inheritance they leave behind and how that resonates in the lives of those who follow, sometimes for generations. I’ve always viewed this project as a social biography, with Nick at the centre of a kaleidoscope of stories. I hope there is some value in that as a picture of Nick’s youth – and as a history of the places and times he moved through to become who he is today.
Writing a biography can be a fraught enterprise, as I have learned. One of the great ironies of the task is that life gets in the way. But here I am, indebted, likewise, to a kaleidoscope of people and stories. It is first of all important to thank Nick Cave himself for his cooperation and trust across almost a decade of communication, as well as the generous access he gave me to his family, especially his mother, Dawn, and his elder brother Tim, and younger sister, Julie (elder brother Peter preferred not to take part).
As I write these words, the morning news tells me that Nick has just posted on his website The Red Hand Files that his mother has passed away at the age of ninety-one. Sad news. I would have liked Dawn to see Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave. Not that she needed anything more to affirm her justifiable and inextinguishable love and pride in her youngest son. One of my fondest memories is of sitting at the kitchen table in Dawn’s home after Nick and I had fetched a takeaway Thai meal for afternoon lunch, debating with some hilarity ‘the New Atheism’ of Richard Dawkins and the films of Clint Eastwood. For the record, I was the only one at the table pro-God, if only for the sake of art and architecture, rituals and archetypes. Dawn navigated a middle ground with a nod to the poetry of TS Eliot; Nick relished batting everything down with arguments so hyper-rational an element of comedy was inevitable. God got a mixed review, The Gospel According to Clint more regard.
Certain people make a mark on you when developing a biography. Certain moments too. Dawn Cave was definitely one of those people. Others who helped me immensely were Bleddyn Butcher, Mick Harvey and Phill Calvert. All three have been generous and precise in ways I hope I have honoured. The contributions of some people can be as emotionally meaningful as they are materially useful: even just a few words or an encouraging kindness can be small keys that open doors to how you might continue. To be honest, almost everyone I spoke to was like this in one way or another. One of the things that most impressed me about Nick’s life was how many incredibly talented, sensitive and brilliant people he had connected with. If our friends – and, for that matter, our enemies – are the measure of us, then Nick has done well.
As Boy on Fire is a portrait of the artist as a young man, this is not where I can thank all those who have assisted in my research into the later stages and landscapes of Nick’s life and career. Perhaps one day I will get the chance to do so. In the meantime, for their own unique and heartfelt contributions, I must thank Edward Clayton Jones, Harry Howard, Bronwyn Bonney, Polly Borland, John Hillcoat, Ross Waterman, Hugo Race, Genevieve McGuckin, Dave Graney, Clare Moore, Ron Rude, Ken Gormly and Caitlin Crauford. I also must thank Nick’s management team, principally Rachel Willis and Suzi Goodrich, and Brian Message at ATC Management, as well as Ton Maessen, the Bad Seeds’ brilliant tour manager, and all the members of The Bad Seeds themselves, not to mention Rowland S Howard and Tracy Pew from The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, whose voices are here even if they are not.
HarperCollins Australia have been fantastic to work with, most of all my publisher, Catherine Milne, senior editor Scott Forbes, and copy editor Claire de Medici. In every way possible, they have brought sympathy and rigour to my project, and an energy that has helped carry me through, making this book into something better than I could ever have hoped for. Thanks also to proofreaders Julian Welch, who has improved my ability to spell ‘dog’ in Latin and find the Yarra River, and Madeleine James. A special thanks to Gary Seeger for tracking down lyrics permissions, and to Mute Song for their assistance.
My biography has had a long, even epic gestation. I’d like to thank people involved at earlier stages, including Jenny Darling, Fiona Hazard, Bernadette Foley and Matthew Kelly. We started together; we parted ways. The book became something else. But your contributions are appreciated.
The first part of my introduction, ‘The Journ
alist and The Singer’, was adapted from my essay in the literary journal Meanjin entitled ‘Nick Cave: Man or Myth?’. Portions of the epilogue, ‘The Singer and The Song’, are drawn from my interview with Nick Cave that appeared in different forms in The Guardian UK and Neighbourhood Paper. I am also indebted to the Sydney Review of Books for publishing an earlier draft of my chapter on Wangaratta, ‘Down by the River’.
I was fortunate to be a co-winner of the 2014 Peter Blazey Fellowship, awarded annually to writers in the non-fiction fields of biography, autobiography and life writing to further a work in progress, which helped me advance this project.
I am extremely grateful to Davina Davidson for permission to quote from her letter outlining her teenage relationship with Nick, and to Kathleen Stewart for likewise granting permission to use material from her memoir, The After Life, detailing her later relationship with Nick. In both cases I appreciate the trust they put in me.
It would be remiss of me not to note a special debt to the writers who mapped out and laid down the roads I was able to travel on, principally Nick’s previous biographers Robert Brokenmouth and Ian Johnston. Their works are referenced, but that feels a little inadequate – your excellent books gave me an east and west from which to orient myself in my attempt to find yet another Nick Cave story. Clinton Walker, the great oral historian and sociologist of Australian contemporary music, also deserves a special mention for preserving so much of what so few bothered to take care of. Music historian Ian McFarlane’s vital preservation of our cultural heritage and his important in-depth interviews with figures like Rowland S Howard have been likewise significant. Mat Snow, Jillian Burt, Barney Hoskyns and many other journalists, great Australian rock magazines like RAM and Roadrunner, and dedicated fanzine makers and obsessed bloggers have all been invaluable to my work, too. Danijela Miletic’s Facebook page ‘Nick Cave, Wanted Man’, Melynda Von Wayward’s website Punk Journey (www.punkjourney.com), and the exceptional From the Archives (www.fromthearchives.org), and Outta Black & Into the Ether (rowland-s-howard.com) were particularly useful resources and distracting rabbit holes!