by Mark Mordue
A Caulfield Grammar school report for Term 2 in 1974 contains a revealing list of complaints and praise from those less loved. An unnamed art teacher thinks Nick uses the classes as ‘little more than an escape’. Various other teachers suggest that Nick’s grades are below what he is capable of, or above what he deserves. Cave’s English teacher goes into the details: ‘Though he has not done all the set written work, Nikolas [sic] has achieved some very interesting results particularly at home. His attitude to the subject and the teacher is subject to moods brought into class. He’d make it easier for others if he withdrew into a book to allow me to help others who have not yet finished.’ Below this grievance, the English teacher added a somewhat surprised note: ‘NB Nikolas’s [sic] poetry is due to be published in a school magazine and reflects a profound craftsman!!’43
Tim Cave saw the provocative side of his brother’s language abilities. He recalls disputes with Nick in which ‘he would say things and call you names where you weren’t really sure what he was calling you. I remember us arguing one time and Nick saying something to me like, “You’re pernicious.” I had to check it in the dictionary. That was the kind of thing Nick would come out with all the time.’44
Nick and Davina lived only a few blocks apart and the habits of their romance quickly took shape. ‘I used to pass her and her girlfriend on the way to school,’ he says. ‘They’d sit on the fence and titter as I walked by.’ Come the end of each weekday, Davina would rush over to the Cave residence. ‘I can still remember her clacking up the driveway in her Dr. Scholl’s and her school uniform to meet me.’
While the bond with her Jewish foster parents was strained by the ongoing relationship with Nick, Davina found herself happily accepted, even adopted into the Cave family. Her memories of Nick’s mother are domestic and warm: Dawn kneeling on a mat and weeding and planting in her garden, or simply sitting in the kitchen, working on a crossword puzzle in the daily newspaper. Davina recalls Nick was supposed to mow the lawns, but it was a duty he was dragged to and tended to avoid.
Colin was often not home. As well as working in the city with Adult Education, in his spare time he was heavily involved with the Malvern Theatre Company as a director. Nick remembers his father being around more at the weekend, when Colin liked to sit outside ‘in the backyard, under the apricot tree doing his crossword and looking at the birds in the aviary he built. Must be why I like birds so much.’
There was a small room beside the kitchen with an old upright black piano that Nick liked to play. Davina would sit there for hours with him. Nick sang songs such as Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ – a tune Davina still thinks of as the proverbial ‘our song’ – and composed his own early works beside her. On Saturdays she would go with him to band practice, where Nick and his friends worked with mixed success on covers by David Bowie, Lou Reed, Bryan Ferry, Genesis, Queen. These were all favourites of Nick’s back then, Davina says. She began to notice that although he was not the leader in any apparent way, Nick was becoming the centre of the band, exerting an influence that affected and drove everyone. One thing she recalls, absolutely, is ‘Nick’s desire to be famous’. A desire she dismissed, even with all her admiration for him, as a typical teenage fantasy. Looking back, she believes Nick knew he was indeed exceptional and was already working hard towards the destiny he had mapped out for himself.
Each member of the band had their quirks. Mick Harvey was thoughtful and quiet, Davina says. John Cocivera shy and a little vulnerable. Phill Calvert somewhat cocky and sure of himself. Tracy Pew, who was only hanging around, but soon to join the band, was wilder and different to the others. As an outsider observing them, Davina felt that each of the boys was so distinct in his personality that they hardly made any sense as a group of friends, let alone as a band that might stay together.
Mick Harvey, Roxy Music fan, 1975 (Ashley Mackevicius)
Davina and Nick would spend hours and hours in Nick’s bedroom, chastely listening to music, she insists. Going to a concert by Queen was their most memorable live event. The young couple loved Freddie Mercury’s singing, but what really fascinated Nick, Davina says, was Mercury’s ability to play the piano and yet dominate the stage as a performer. Davina and Nick saw a lot of theatre, encouraged by Colin Cave’s connections to that world. Melbourne productions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the musical Hair45 were the shows that impressed them the most, until they saw Lindsay Kemp’s fairy-tale version of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Kemp had been an early mentor of Nick’s hero, David Bowie, and not for the first time Nick would be hypnotised by the ambiguous sexual energy and other-worldly fluidity that such artists conjured.
Sundays were reserved for visiting art galleries. Davina remembers Nick being so obsessed with Brett Whiteley that they would have to search the city for his paintings, hunting out any place they might be shown. She remembers, too, Nick’s love of Francis Bacon, an artist whose cold theatricality and biomorphic horror she could less relate to. There was a stream of others they discussed at length, Klimt, Schiele, Munch, Picasso and Degas among them. One of the few times they argued about art was over Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, which, as noted, had recently been purchased for what seemed an astronomical sum ($1.3 million) by the Australian government for the new National Gallery in Canberra. It was one of those rare occasions when a work of art had become a front-page news item and part of common conversation. Davina just couldn’t see the value in it. Eventually, Nick pulled out a huge book of Pollock paintings that he seemed to have permanently borrowed from the library. He went through them in detail, discussing the painter’s life and how his work had developed. Davina thoroughly enjoyed the art lesson, but she was struck by how adamant Nick was about the boundary-pushing skill behind the work and its importance in the face of public ridicule. It was as if the ridicule drove him all the more strongly to understand and defend the work.
Davina would see even more intense intellectual debates happening between Nick and Colin at their kitchen table. Father and son never seemed to agree on anything. She felt that Nick admired his father to an extreme degree but had a habit of taking the opposite position to anything Colin said – sometimes purely for the sake of winding his father up. And yet there was a curious form of love and attentiveness thriving in the friction between them. Colin was an absolute classicist in his tastes, be it music, literature or art. Nick was all for the modernists, favouring the abstract and the avant-garde. Underlying this was what Davina calls ‘Nick’s love of loves, anarchy’.46
Nick’s competing interests in order and disorder were only just beginning to emerge. Davina had already seen that Nick’s favourite book, thanks to Colin’s guidance, was Lolita. She can remember Nick reading it and rereading it at least three times over the two years they dated. Nick never seemed to let it go. He wasn’t just enjoying it, he was studying it. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Crime and Punishment, Waiting for Godot, Othello, Macbeth, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Stranger – they all came up in conversations between Nick and Davina, and more especially between Nick and Colin. Davina thinks Nick was always running his ideas by his father. They would dissect the characters and their plights ‘down to minute details’, she says. Colin was in his element in these discussions: informed, energised, commanding in his analyses. Davina felt Colin ‘knew his stuff upside down and back to front’.47 Her image of Colin and his son hunkered down in a match of wits over art and literature, with Colin pointing the way, echoes the frequent guru references that Nick makes in songs much later, notably the sinister yet attractive figure in ‘Red Right Hand’ and the God-like presence who has disappeared and taken order and meaning with him in ‘We Call Upon the Author to Explain’.
When it came to music, the conversations between Nick and Colin moved from discussion and debate into openly fierce clashes. There was very little common ground. Colin thought of pop and rock music in the lowest of terms. Nick defended his heroes to the hilt. Davina found these arguments a little frighte
ning, even ‘unforgiving’.48 But deep down she thought Nick did influence his father’s perspective on the likes of David Bowie, Bryan Ferry and T-Rex, if only because Colin saw aspects of his son more clearly through Nick’s love of their work. Colin was extremely proud of Nick – that was never in question. Nick, in turn, kept seeking his father’s ‘appreciation’, Davina says, through the arguments they had.
‘I am careful not to use the word “approval”, for that I never saw,’ Davina says. ‘Nick trusted himself when it came to things of the mind and spirit. What do I mean by this? It’s hard to explain. He knew what he knew and he didn’t doubt his opinions, theories and choices. It’s not that he was arrogant or self-assured. He wasn’t overly confident, but he knew what he knew and I don’t remember him needing anyone’s stamp of approval. I also remember there was a charm to him. Nick was soft-spoken, polite, a gentleman through and through, especially around adults. But among his peers or once he got on stage, he was a whole other Nick, loud and untameable. It was an amazing mixture. After Lolita I think his next favourite book was the Roget’s Thesaurus! He had a vocabulary from here to forever and his favourite word was “fuck”.’49
Double Trouble
MELBOURNE
1975–76
At Caulfield Grammar the Art House gang had long ago begun to conduct themselves as a separate entity from the student majority. Just before Nick and his friends were due to take their exams for their graduation in 1975, a lower-form student was cajoled into running into the Art House and shouting, ‘Poofs!’ as loudly as he could. Unfortunately for the student, Nick and the others caught him, leaned him over a table and threatened to ‘pants’ him, all the while muttering feverishly about how they had been ‘waiting for the buttocks’ of a juicy young lad with which to pleasure themselves. Eventually the boy was released, unharmed but terrified. The story spread like wildfire.
On their last day of school, traditionally a muck-up day, Phill Calvert says, ‘A mock awards ceremony was held at the final assembly. I was given “The Handbag Award” for dressing too gay or something. I was later taunted for carrying it round at recess as part of the joke.’ In response, the Art House gang ‘hatched a plan to put a brick in it and when taunted I would let them have it with the bag. They thought a handbag wouldn’t hurt . . . Surprise!’1
The Art House gang in 1976, including Mick Harvey, seated left; Phill Calvert, bottom left; and Nick Cave, head of hair. Nick made the sign. The young women were student teachers. (photographer unknown; courtesy of Phill Calvert)
By the end of high school, the group had improved markedly and their playing already hinted at the band that would evolve into The Boys Next Door. Later, Nick would reflect on the next five years of covers and experimentation as a time when the band were ‘nothing more than the sum of our influences’. Each original song that emerged was just an attempt to be like something they admired. This would continue, he felt, until The Boys Next Door evolved into The Birthday Party. It would not be till the latter’s Prayers on Fire that they would begin to find what Nick calls ‘a voice of our own that was recognisable’. And yet Nick would return again and again to the Promethean theme of artistic theft as fundamental to everything he did.2 Patching things together, stealing fragments and whole ideas, transforming them . . . it would be part of a lifelong creative approach.
The sum of Nick’s formative influences was made obvious in the heartfelt origins of his first band. Them’s ‘Gloria’, a rock ’n’ roll chestnut, had entered their repertoire over the summer of 1976 after being given a new lease of life by Patti Smith on her startlingly poetic debut album, Horses. It was ironic that one of the heralds of the punk revolution to come – a supposed Year Zero for a new generation’s artistic expression – should choose to open her recording career with a hoary old standard such as ‘Gloria’. But Smith’s trip would always be about transcendence, her ethos a return to Romantic Classicism (New York style) rather than politicised nihilism and anarchy (London calling). Her free-form poetics atop the persistent, galloping beat of ‘Gloria’ sent Nick back to Van Morrison’s ferocious 1964 recording, which he much preferred. Both interpretations were irradiated with vocal attitude, a sense of each singer having swallowed the song whole and then let it burst like a fire from their chests. The gospel form that ‘Gloria’ insinuated – the spelled-out, call-and-response chant – evoked desire as a raw form of spiritual ecstasy. ‘Gloria’ may have appeared a clichéd cover choice, but it provoked a similar urge in Nick to improvise at the microphone while the band punched out the brutally simple rhythm-and-blues foundations. Though they would disown a live bootleg of them doing this song as mere juvenilia – and much else about their 1970s evolution besides – ‘Gloria’ was a copybook lesson in how a one-time classic need not fade into a nostalgic retread.
Alice Cooper’s song ‘I’m Eighteen’ added more swagger to the band’s set list, a metallic pop ode to feeling confused and indifferent at once. Cooper’s bittersweet lyric received a vocal from Nick that took on a self-flagellating pride, most of all as he celebrated his own eighteenth year. Cooper is one of the great vocalists of rock ’n’ roll and his singing is no easy thing to emulate, despite the hard, flashing swagger that made the song seem so loose and edgy. Nick chose to overwhelm ‘I’m Eighteen’ with autobiographical energy in order to compensate for any lack of vocal command. He’d just about scream the chorus at people. The Who’s ‘My Generation’ was a cover in the same vein, another teenage soundtrack for prancing around your bedroom letting no-one in particular know that you have had enough. Nick, however, delivered this one with an element of sarcasm, as if it were a satire rather than an anthem. There was a precocious sense of being both inside and outside the music, a theatrical quality that could be underestimated when compared to the more direct performance heat Nick was generating. The band’s interpretation of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’ should have had more hoodoo than voodoo in the same sideshow magician vein, but it was treated very seriously: a spatially barren as well as bluesy, if amateurish, precursor to Nick’s later interests on classic Bad Seeds album The Firstborn Is Dead.3
It is startling to recognise how much of what was to come was present in these teenage beginnings, including Nick’s paradoxical approach to interpreting the songs on stage. Nick speaks of seeking out ‘music I could get lost in’. Lost, but not oblivious. There was something similar to the way Colin – deaf in one ear since a childhood illness – would turn up Johann Sebastian Bach before dinner, refusing to come to the table, his daughter Julie says, until the music had passed through a series of peaks to its ultimate climax: ‘He’d have the music blasting. “Wait for it,” Dad would say, “wait for it. Here it comes, listen . . . now!”’4
‘Dad was a conservative in his tastes, but a progressive in the sense that he loved art and experimentation,’ says Nick. ‘He didn’t have much time for rock. And he loathed shock value for the sake of it.’ Clashes were inevitable. ‘We had to play all our music in the lounge room on our family gramophone. I took perverse pleasure in it.’ Julie remembers endless rounds of ‘us playing pool with The Doors just blasting all the time’. Colin would have recognised The Doors’ version of a Brecht–Weill show tune, ‘Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)’. He may have hated shock value for the sake of it, but he loved drama with purpose – and so did his son.
Despite Davina’s memories of affection and respect in the way Nick and his father Colin exchanged ideas, there was a counter-current of hurt developing and intensifying beneath their differences. Nick would always pay tribute to the influence of his father as essential to who he became. But in a remarkably candid documentary in 1997 called The Good Son, he’d hint at Colin’s overbearing qualities and his father’s tendency to define parenthood, and even love itself, as little more than another form of teaching. ‘He was probably a great teacher but not perhaps the best father,’ Nick says. Sitting beside a garden waterway as he talks, it’s hard not to imagine it as a trickling echo
of the Ovens River of his Wangaratta childhood. The flow of the water soundtracks his words and his boyhood reflections. He becomes distinctly emotional as he explains, ‘When I stopped wanting to be a student of his, when I started having ideas of my own, then things became very complicated between me and my father. At some point I started saying, “Look at this,” and he would dismiss things I brought to him. And that’s when the trouble started.’ Nick goes on to say, ‘And then he died when I was nineteen [sic] and he never really saw me amount to anything.’5
Without school to bind him to the group, Brett Purcell lost interest in the weekend rehearsals and left in early 1976. Nick was glad. Purcell had only encouraged him to keep on being the vocalist ‘because you don’t have any other musical abilities’. ‘He had always let me know what a poor singer I was,’ Nick says. ‘He told me I was dead wood when it came to the group achieving anything.’ On a few occasions the pair came close to brawling. Purcell’s opinions and schoolboy backhanders opened up wounds from Nick’s days of being banished to the back rows of the cathedral choir in Wangaratta. Nick’s experiences at Caulfield Grammar under music teacher Norman Kaye had done nothing to dispel this lack of confidence as a singer (if not a lack of enthusiastic posing whenever the band played a dance at Shelford Girls’ Grammar). His early stint with the school choir was short-lived from the moment Nick was asked to open his mouth and sing a note. All Norman Kaye could do was wince.6
With Purcell gone, that mate of Nick’s who’d been lurking around at band practices volunteered to replace him on the bass guitar. Unlike his more bourgeois friends, Tracy Pew was a suburban boy from Mount Waverley who had won a scholarship to study at Caulfield Grammar. He arrived in fourth form in 1973 as an outsider, much as Nick had been when he had landed there an unruly country boy. The two established an immediate rapport, partners in crime quite literally, their misdeeds heightening as they went from underage drinking sprees to acts of casual vandalism. Knowing that even their close friends might disapprove, they kept much of this destructive behaviour to themselves. Cave and Pew were tight indeed, but each was also a world unto himself – so much so that when Purcell left the band, no-one knew that Pew was learning the bass guitar, not even Nick. Thus far Pew had only distinguished himself in their music classes with cursory, almost sarcastically bad efforts on the clarinet, an instrument at which he was actually quite adept. Not only could Pew play rudimentary bass, his partnership with drummer Phill Calvert would develop into one of the best rhythm sections in Melbourne.
