Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  18Nick Cave, ‘Introduction’, The Gospel According to Mark, Pocket Canons, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2010. Reproduced with the kind permission of Canongate Books Ltd.

  19Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), correspondence with the author, email, 23 August 2020.

  20A less dismissive autobiographical account can be found in the song ‘Do You Love Me? Pt 2’ on Let Love In. One of the most dreamlike and shadowy in Nick Cave’s repertoire, it gives seductive as well as sinister voice to a child molester at work. When I expressed a general unease around the subject in an informal car conversation with Nick, he was adamant about the need to explore this issue rather than sweep it under the carpet because it is just too difficult and dark to deal with.

  21Bryan Wellington, interview with the author, phone, 16 November 2011. Hendrix died on 18 September 1970, four days before Nick’s birthday. Thereafter as a teenager, Nick would celebrate and mourn his hero on that day each year, listening to songs like ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Stone Free’, ‘Little Wing’ and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.

  22Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 November 2010.

  23Julie and Dawn Cave, interview with author, Melbourne, 21 October 2010.

  PART III: SONNY’S BURNING

  The Word

  1Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 11.

  2Mick Harvey, interview with the author, Sydney, 17 January 2012.

  3Bryan Wellington, interview with the author, phone, 20 January 2012.

  4ibid.

  5Bryan Wellington, interview with the author, phone, 16 November 2011.

  6Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), correspondence with the author, email, 23 August 2020.

  7Bryan Wellington, interview with the author, phone, 20 January 2012. Note: Bryan Wellington would pass away in 2013. He was tremendously helpful about Nick’s early years and their shared life in Wangaratta, granting a number of interviews and offering highly sensitive, searching insights into events that may have shaped various songs by Nick. When my essay ‘Down by the River’ was first published in Sydney Review of Books on 29 January 2019, it was dedicated to Bryan’s memory. One area that Bryan hotly contested was Nick’s story of jumping off the railway bridge over the Ovens River. Bryan felt this was not only an exaggeration or a myth: ‘It’s a dangerous lie. Someone could kill themselves trying to imitate it. I don’t believe he did it, and certainly not more than once.’

  8Nick Cave, ‘The Flesh Made Word’, BBC Radio 3 Religious Services, London, 1996; the story can also be heard on The Secret Life of the Love Song/The Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave, King Mob Spoken Word CD, 2000.

  9Nick Cave can be seen with his twin sons, Arthur and Earl, in the documentary 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), eating pizza with them as the soundtrack to Scarface blares out from the television over their laughter. This particular conversation took place with Nick in Brighton in 2010.

  10It’s likely the crime novel was by the British author Gerald Kersh. Kersh was a pulp writer with real literary flair at his best. Some of Kersh’s seedy moralising influence can be felt in Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2009).

  11This fascination would reach its height with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads (1996). Nick would find reviews of it limited, even annoying, because they focused invariably on the violence documented in the songs. He had thought ‘the album was really about language’.

  12Dawn Cave, interview with the author, phone, 18 May 2015.

  13Tim Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 20 November 2010.

  14El Greco’s stormy and menacing View of Toledo likely served Nick as a visual premonition for the song ‘Tupelo’.

  15Boys Next Door photo session in Nick Cave’s bedroom, 1979. Photo by Peter Milne. See p. 269.

  16Nick misremembers this detail. It is actually in an earlier photo from 1976 by his friend Ashley Mackevicius that Nick’s etching of Adolf Hitler appears on the wall. See p. 151.

  17In 2009 Nick would dedicate the Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds set at Glastonbury ‘to the late, great . . . Farah Fawcett’. News of her death had been swamped by Michael Jackson’s overdose.

  18The song came out as ‘I Love You . . . Nor Do I’. Lane had come up with the idea of doing a purely English-language version. Working as her producer, Mick Harvey thought the idea impossible, citing ambiguities in language that did not translate from French into English. It was a strangely effective and autobiographical release, and very Anita Lane.

  19William ‘Haystacks’ Calhoun was famous for being the biggest wrestler there was, reputedly weighing in at ‘over 800 pounds at six-and-a-half feet in height’, or so Jack Little, the MC on World Championship Wrestling, liked to bark on TV. Calhoun’s technique for defeating opponents largely revolved around manoeuvring them into a position where he could fall on them, a move Nick Cave recalls enthusiastically as ‘the Big Splash!’. Calhoun dressed in overalls and wore a beard, a look that evoked a combination of Southern backwoods hick and giant baby. Mario Milano was Italian, and of more classical proportions.

  20Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, 1996, p. 30.

  21‘Class Acts’, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 November 2009, p. 32.

  22Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 27 August 2020.

  23Mick Harvey, interview with author, Melbourne, 5 April 2012.

  24Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), interview with the author, phone, 8 March 2012.

  25A reference to Norman Lindsay’s 1918 classic Australian children’s book The Magic Pudding. It is a mix of rhyming stories in sea shanty form, anthropomorphic characters and illustrations. Lindsay was later renowned for his outré obsession with sketching and painting nudes.

  26Mick Harvey, email correspondence, 21 August 2020.

  27West, Bruce and Laing were a blues rock supergroup of the early 1970s who formed from the ashes of the supergroup Cream.

  28Hawkwind’s heavy psychedelic futurism would be a keystone to understanding Nick Cave’s 21st-century vision for Grinderman.

  29Julie and Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 October 2010.

  30David Bowie, The Ziggy Stardust Companion, www.5years.com/quotes.htm, accessed 19 August 2020.

  31ibid.

  32A SAHB concert was broadcast live late at night in Australia on Channel 9 during the early to mid-1970s, thrilling Nick Cave and his schoolmates.

  33It’s of note that Alex Harvey’s Glaswegian background and the gravelly, committed quality of his vocals were a defining model for a generation of gritty Australian singers, among them the Scottish immigrants Bon Scott of AC/DC and Jimmy Barnes of Cold Chisel. Mick Harvey thinks Skyhooks, Australia’s biggest band of the mid-1970s, built their whole image around the example of SAHB. By 1974 Nick was beginning to track down rock magazines, devouring their features on Harvey, who had become known for his saying, ‘A Stratocaster is more powerful than an AK-47.’

  34Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), correspondence with the author, email, 23 August 2020.

  35Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), interview with author, phone, 8 March 2012.

  36ibid.

  37William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 2–3.

  38Nick’s fascination with epistolary relationships continues right up to the present day in his online correspondence with fans via The Red Hand Files.

  39Davina Davidson, correspondence with the author, email, 6 January 2011.

  40Davina Davidson, correspondence with the author, email, 28 January 2012.

  41Davina Davidson, correspondence with author, email, 28 June 2012.

  42Davina Davidson, correspondence with the author, email, 28 January 2012.

  43‘Nicholas Edward Cave’, Term 2, Year 10 report, Caulfield Grammar School, 1974. Courtesy of Dawn Cave.

  44Tim Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 20 Novembe
r 2010.

  45Hair was banned in Queensland and New Zealand, and Victoria’s conservative premier Henry Bolte was encouraged to send the vice squad along to theatre previews to police any outbreaks of indecency or obscenity. Producer Harry M. Miller and a brilliant young director, 24-year-old Jim Sharman, must have been delighted by all the attention and free publicity.

  46Davina Davidson, correspondence with the author, email, 6 January 2011.

  47ibid.

  48ibid.

  49ibid.

  Double Trouble

  1Phill Calvert, correspondence with the author, 15 June 2020.

  2Nick Cave’s reflections on the nature of influence and plagiarism were dealt with uniquely in a fan correspondence on The Red Hand Files; see www.theredhandfiles.com/originality-hard-to-obtain, accessed 21 August 2020.

  3Nick first heard ‘I Put a Spell on You’ via a gutsy Creedence Clearwater Revival version. The song was never a joke to him. It’s possible to see The Firstborn Is Dead as an album seeded in his youth by Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Doors as much as it connected, when he was an adult, with John Lee Hooker’s spooky intensity. Nick was never at ease with it being seen as a blues album so much as an ‘idea of the blues’ transplanted into the European Cold War context that defined West Berlin as a frontier town.

  4Dawn and Julie Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 November 2010.

  5The Good Son, VPRO Dutch Television, 1997, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaJQwsLw5bg (accessed 21 August 2020). Nick’s comment about being nineteen at the time of his father’s death, not twenty-one as he actually was, is often repeated by him in interviews.

  6Norman Kaye would become a highly respected Australian actor thanks to his roles in Paul Cox–directed films Lonely Hearts (1982) and Man of Flowers (1983). His abilities as a piano player and organist would also see him write a number of film scores, available on the retrospective Move Records CD The Remarkable Norman Kaye (2007).

  7See p. 153, interview with Nancy Pew, Melbourne, 18 November 2010.

  8Sinatra had toured Australia in July of 1974, describing the male journalists as ‘parasites’ and the female journalists as ‘broads and hookers’ at a press conference. His abuse precipitated a targeted national strike against him and his entourage by various unions, in sympathy with the outraged journalists’ union. This immobilised and isolated Sinatra in Melbourne, where he was denied everything from hotel room service to a flight out of the city. Though the matter was eventually resolved, it was comical evidence that Ol’ Blue Eyes had lost none of his spite, despite the smooth vocal tones and sharp suits.

  9Mick Harvey wryly describes the artwork for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Kicking Against the Pricks as ‘Nick wanting to look like Bryan Ferry on those solo albums of his’. (Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 27 July 2020.)

  10Mick Harvey, interview with the author, 10 February 2010.

  11Phil Sutcliffe, ‘Nick Cave: Raw and Uncut 2’, in Mat Snow (ed.), Nick Cave – Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, Plexus Publishing, London, 2011.

  12Jeff Duff, sometimes referred to as ‘Duffo’, was the lead singer of the early 1970s band Kush and has enjoyed an equally eccentric solo career. Blessed with a deep tenor voice, Duff could sing like Sinatra but came on like David Bowie, albeit in a warmer cabaret vein. ‘I always dress as if I am performing on a stage, even if I am just going out to do the shopping,’ he once told me after popping by my house for an interview in a three-piece white suit with a matching cane and fedora. Duff would befriend Nick Cave and Anita Lane in their early days in London and, concerned for their well-being, bring them croissants at their ‘terrible’ squat. Seemingly ageless, he remains a fluid combination of Quentin Crisp, Count Dracula and Peter Pan.

  13Nick Cave’s choice of Darian Leader as a psychotherapist is a fascinating one. Leader’s book The New Black: Depression, Mourning and Melancholia (2008) challenged the idea of depression as a purely negative state that needs to be immediately fixed through prescription drugs. Leader is interested in the way mourning and melancholia (his preferred terms to depression) can cause us to lose our form, or sense of identity, as well as the ways in which society rejects any long-term relationship with mourning as inappropriate and negative. He moves towards a concept of creativity through mourning, in which the arts and culture are the best means to communicate with a damaged selfhood and reshape oneself. There is an apparent rejection of the well-rounded individual as little more than a fantasy.

  1420,000 Days on Earth, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Pulse Films, London, 2014.

  15Ashley Mackevicius’s schoolboy portrait of Nick Cave (see p. 151) is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. In taking up photography, he’d been influenced by Tracy Pew, who’d been more heavily involved in it at the time. It was his friendship with Tracy that created the bond with Nick.

  16Phill Calvert, interview with the author, Sydney, 26 June 2012.

  17Bruce Clarke taught many notable Australian guitarists, among them Robert Goodge (I’m Talking), Andrew Pendlebury (The Sports) and Anne McCue. Clarke himself was greatly influenced by the swing-era guitarist John Collins, who worked with Nat King Cole. Collins was renowned for rarely soloing and staying focused on rhythm playing. It was a distinct quality that Clarke absorbed and passed on to his students. The likes of Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Collins himself would invite Clarke to join them on their Australian tours. A well-regarded orchestra arranger for radio during the 1950s and 1960s, Clarke also made pioneering use of the Moog synthesiser.

  18Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 27 July 2020.

  19True to his word, Chris Coyne would return to play sax on The Boys Next Door album Door, Door. He’d also play live with The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, work with Paul Kelly on his album Gossip (1986), and record with Phill Calvert’s post–Birthday Party band in Australia, Blue Ruin, playing sax on their debut album, Such Sweet Thunder (1986).

  20Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 2.

  21Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr would describe James Williamson’s playing style as ‘both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band’. (Will Hodgkinson and Alex Petridis, ‘The World Was Not Ready for Iggy and The Stooges’, The Guardian, 11 March 2010, available at www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/11/iggy-and-the-stooges-raw-power) Marr is reputed to have been inspired to play a Fender Jaguar after seeing Rowland S Howard with The Birthday Party. You can hear this influence in the glacial start to The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’.

  22Phill Calvert says Nick’s concerns about his bad reputation with parents were well founded. Phill’s father did not like Nick or, for that matter, any of the band. He told his son, ‘I wish I had never sent you to school where you met those bums; it ruined your life!’ (Phill Calvert, correspondence with the author, 15 June 2020.)

  23Mick Harvey would revisit this event for his song ‘The Ballad of Jay Givens’ on his album Sketches from the Book of the Dead (2011).

  24Mick Harvey, interview with the author, Sydney, 17 January 2012.

  25Nick’s memory is incorrect here: Phill Calvert’s father was English.

  26Nancy Pew, interview with the author, Melbourne, 18 November 2010.

  27ibid.

  28ibid. There’s no denying the shadows at work in the band’s formative identity. To overstate them becomes deterministic and even shallow. But every one of us has a share in Tolstoy’s opening wisdom from Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ If one were to extend this perception beyond their individual backgrounds to the band itself as an extended family drama, it’s true to say Nick, Mick, Tracy and Phill were bonded by a history of personal pain as much as by any wild yearnings for pleasure and release. The arrival of guitarist Rowland S Howard, and the death of Colin Cave in a car crash,
would intensify this alchemy, as the title to a much later Birthday Party compilation video and record release signposts: Sometimes Pleasureheads Must Burn.

  29David Bowie and Mick Rock, Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust, Hardie Grant Books, Sydney, 2005, p. 61.

  30Dee Dee Ramone’s song ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ inspired the name of one of the most famous zines (self-published, usually photocopied fan magazines) of the British punk era. Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue was launched in July 1976 with fifty copies. Perry would soon have 15,000 readers with ink stains on their fingers embracing a DIY aesthetic.

  31One in four Australian homes would reputedly own a copy of Hot August Night by 1975.

  32Nick and his friends referred to arts-oriented Swinburne as a ‘free school’. It was part of an alternative and community school movement within the government sector in the 1970s.

  33Bronwyn Bonney (née Adams) paints a picture of working hard with Nick on the manuscript. She would not appreciate his tendency in interviews to portray the novel’s development as lacking in any substantial editorial guidance. Nick would later apologise personally, but he failed to give her any credit at the time (Bronwyn Bonney, interview with the author, Sydney, 28 March 2011). Nick’s general comments also suggested minimal input from Black Spring Press publisher Simon Pettifar, who had originally suggested the writing of a novel.

  34Bruce Milne, interview with the author, Melbourne, 26 February 2010.

  35ibid.

  36After Rowland S Howard died, he would be remembered by Mick Harvey in the song ‘October Boy’.

  37Bronwyn Bonney (née Adams), interview with the author, Sydney, 28 March 2011.

  38Davina Davidson, email correspondence with the author, 6 January 2011.

  39Mick Harvey amusingly recalls Nick’s capacity for ‘swearing badly in front of people, in front of someone’s family, then saying, “Oh, excuse me,” very politely. It was water off a duck’s back.’ (Interview with the author, phone, 27 July 2020.)