Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  To perform with the band in public, however, Pew needed his own amplifier. He was with Cave one night when they spotted one in the window of a music shop. Pew simply smashed the glass and took what he needed. Nick was surprised, but also impressed that Pew could be so brazen. They had destroyed a few telephone booths together, but this was a step up in intensity. ‘I was with him on another night when we walked past a bakery. Tracy was hungry, so he smashed the window and took some rolls to eat. I thought that was getting a little extreme.’ Before school was over, Nick would join Tracy on joyrides in cars Tracy had stolen.

  ‘I was a loudmouth smart-arse,’ says Nick. ‘Tracy was much more clever and in his way more subversive. There were things going on in Tracy no-one will ever understand. I think some terrible tragedy happened at home, where he saw the accidental death of his baby sibling.7 On some level he was deeply disturbed – but the warmest, funniest guy in the world when he wasn’t being witheringly sarcastic. He was a natural scholar who didn’t go to classes. Pissed everybody off. Didn’t attend any English Literature classes and got straight As. When he was told to get a haircut, he shaved his head and was suspended as a result. He wore a skullcap to school for a period of time, said he had converted to Judaism, and was eventually suspended again. He drew penises on every blank piece of paper he could find. Obsessively. Weirdly, I had a thing for drawing naked women at school that became quite a problem for me as well. Tracy eventually had to go to the school “psychiatrist” about it. The psychiatrist, who was sucking a pencil, asked Tracy what things reminded him of penises. Tracy said, “Balloons . . . and . . . pencils.” He was suspended again. He was suspended quite often, actually.’

  Despite her sense of the band’s almost overwhelming differences as individuals, Davina began to realise that Nick and Tracy were actually the most alike in character. It was something that would vaguely bother her, as Nick would be different in her company, so much softer and more sensitive. Coincidentally, Tracy began dating a Jewish girl as well, bonding them together as a happy foursome. Tracy’s intelligence and humour calmed any reservations that Davina had. He and Nick kept their wild world very carefully to themselves. Of course, the secrecy only made their boyish villainy all the more fun.

  Considering their lack of focus on their studies, the band members surprised even themselves by getting reasonable passes for their Higher School Certificate. Mick Harvey notes he had ‘done the bare minimum’, and he didn’t think the others made much more effort. Predictably, Nick did well in English. Pew shone in English, French and History, an outstanding student above all of them. At the start of 1976 the group had to face up to what they ‘really’ planned to do with the rest of their lives. Nick set off for art school at the Caulfield Institute of Technology (now part of Monash University) with ambitions to be a painter; Mick took up a position as a clerk in the tax office in order to postpone committing to a university degree; Phill started at teachers’ college, before dropping out to become an apprentice hairdresser; Tracy got work doing graphic design and paste-up for advertisements for the Dendy Cinema chain, exploiting a natural aptitude for art and illustration.

  Nick Cave entertains the Art House Gang, 1976. Nick: ‘I just hate that photo but somehow it makes its way back out in public again.’ (photographer unknown)

  Mick Harvey’s plan was to earn money and get the band happening while taking what he told his father was ‘just a gap year’. But as 1976 progressed, their reliance on playing covers was becoming wearying to him. Nick’s voice, meanwhile, began to develop a pronounced Bryan Ferry quiver that saw less-informed detractors continue to denounce him as a Bowie imitator. It was a confused, if backhanded, compliment. Much like his first chameleon hero, Nick was willing to use anything and everything around him in order to grow. Perversely, Bowie was lifting some of his own look and gestures from Bryan Ferry too. Nick’s feathered hairstyle and heavy use of mascara perpetuated the Bowie comparisons. Both Ferry and Bowie were actually putting a contemporary spin on what old-time crooner Frank Sinatra represented at his 1950s height: the existential romantic with enough detachment to put every nuance of a story across in song, an aural stylist painting himself into the picture with words, all the while creating an illusion of intimacy.8 At a far more amateur level, Cave was likewise trying to become a better singer, rather than just belt out a tune with bravado. Rock ’n’ roll was all about abandon, but Nick saw this could be controlled. His father’s theatrical sensibilities were an influence on this.

  Roxy Music’s ‘Love Is the Drug’ had throbbed like a pulse out of radios everywhere over the past year. Bryan Ferry’s new solo single, ‘Let’s Stick Together’, confirmed him as the sex-addicted playboy king of art pop. It was a pose Nick rather liked the look of.9 Eventually Nick’s obsession with copying Bryan Ferry and suggestions from the band for even more covers to play caused a boil-over from Mick Harvey, and in late 1976 he left them in a huff over their lack of commitment towards developing original material. Mick had observed ‘Nick’s tendency to arrive at practice with lyrics and interesting ideas for songs. I could see the potential in that, in him, quite early.’ Harvey felt that these ideas were worth taking further, rather than moving on to a new batch of covers by their favourite artist. ‘I just didn’t think that was the right way to go at all,’ he says. ‘I thought they [the band members] were just being lazy.’10

  Dating Nick Cave’s beginnings as a songwriter is a difficult task, not least because it is complicated by his teenage romances and a tendency to blur dates and details. Allusions in the British media to his first serious girlfriend being a radical lesbian and him not losing his virginity till he was nineteen are typical of Nick’s capacity for half-truths with a twist of humour. In an extensive interview with English journalist Phil Sutcliffe, Cave admitted the first song he ever wrote ‘was very much based on this Australian singer Stevie Wright’s “Evie (Parts 1, 2 and 3)”, an epic love song in three parts. I had a girlfriend in school I fancied called Julie, so I wrote “Julie (Parts 1, 2 and 3)” . . . It was heavily derivative!’11

  Nick confirms that as fact. ‘It’s true. The girl’s name was Julie and she lived in Wangaratta and went to the high school while I was there. I always thought she was very beautiful – black hair and pale skin – but never spoke to her and she never spoke to anyone. In Melbourne (after Davina), I ran into her, as she was friends with a girl called Janine, who was the girlfriend of a guy called Howard, who was maybe twenty-four or so – much older than I was – who kind of adopted me. He had an Afro and wore Staggers and was, I thought at the time, extremely hip. He got me into the Alex Harvey Band, for example, and turned me on to smoking pot and we let him play tambourine in The Boys Next Door – in my Bowie phase – kabuki make-up and acne and dyed red hair – for a gig or two.

  ‘Anyway, Julie was Janine’s friend and I fell for her hard. She was much better-looking than I deserved at the time, but the three of them, Howard and Janine and Julie, were involved on some level with the Melbourne underground – which seemed to operate out of the Station Hotel in Greville Street, Prahran. We used to go there every Saturday afternoon and Julie would dress me up in drag – hot pants and clogs and Duffo12 stuff, I guess – and we would hang out with the fags and the psychos and the Maori gangs, listening to Renée Geyer and The Angels and stuff like that. I was a complete babe in the woods and was so besotted with Julie that I let her do whatever she liked with me and so they had their young schoolboy they could play dress-ups with. Anyway, one day we had a date and Julie didn’t turn up and I realised it was over and I was heartbroken and ran around to Howard’s place and he tried to tell me not to worry and women come and go and all that sort of thing, but I was devastated. After that I dyed my hair black – which had as much to do with trying to become Julie as it did with seeing the cover of “These Foolish Things” by Bryan Ferry. Have dyed it ever since. It was through that period that I wrote “Julie (Parts 1, 2 and 3)”, which when you think about it was pretty savvy for a sixteen-
year-old – even then I understood the lure of the song and how if you wanted to win the girl all you had to do was to immortalise her.’

  In the 2014 documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, Nick remembers Julie in a very different way. For the sake of the cameras, he sits down with his real-life psychotherapist, Darian Leader13, and openly discusses his first sexual experience in the darkness of Julie’s bedroom. Though they would not consummate the act, there is an intensity to the intimacy, a strange merger or communication that clearly impressed itself on Nick. ‘There was something about the shifting of her, she turned it back on me. I could see this face in the half-light, this white face. And that had quite a big effect on me.’14

  This image of a luminous woman would be repeated throughout Nick’s life: it was a mirroring he would toy with overtly in the video of ‘Henry Lee’ with PJ Harvey and in many photo sessions with his wife, Susie Bick. It’s something echoed in both the brutal and romantic extremes of his song writing. Where is his luminous feminine side? How can he find it? Polly Borland’s art photography (as much a collaboration as anything like a conventional portrait in a comically warped yet unsettling image like Untitled, aka ‘Disco Nick’, of Cave in a blue wig and dress) offers a fluid expression of this searching and mutable identity within. It might also explain the deeply rejected nature of some of Nick’s former male collaborators, as well as the energy of his most virulent antagonists, who seem to respond less like friends and enemies and more like embittered lovers.

  A few months after leaving the group, Mick Harvey saw them in a Battle of the Bands competition at Mount Waverley. ‘And they were playing originals again!’ he says with a laugh. Mick wasn’t sure how much he had inadvertently inspired this redevelopment, and how much it came down to thoughtless teenage perversity on the part of the band. In any case, he rejoined – much to his and everyone else’s relief; his temporary replacement, Ashley Mackevicius, bowed out to pursue a career in photography.15

  Harvey was by now developing into an extremely strong rhythm guitarist, his sound indebted to Velvet Underground-era Lou Reed – if sharper and more sheared in character, terser and more mindful. His brief but important absence from the group had only further defined what Mick was now able to do within it.

  Phill Calvert says, ‘Mick had decided to get serious. He’d taken guitar lessons.’16 Largely self-taught, Mick Harvey appeared to have made great strides in technique after going to the well-known jazz guitarist Bruce Clarke.17 Mick is not so sure of any grand progression occurring at the time. ‘It was only half a dozen lessons. Bruce taught me how to hold my pick properly. And how to play chords the right way. But I went back pretty quickly to the finger formation that was most comfortable for me,’ he says, laughing. ‘I still play the D major with the wrong finger.’18

  Throughout these comings and goings, the band was learning about the power of subtractions as much as additions. Pew’s arrival was the first revelation, a sudden anchoring of the sound and a tightening of the gang camaraderie that had threatened to unravel in the wake of graduating from school. Mick Harvey’s departure and return clarified his sonic purpose, giving them a renewed cohesion and musical direction. Chris Coyne had stopped playing saxophone for them, though he promised to help out if needed.19 No matter: Nick could play a little sax and add the odd blurt if necessary, and Tracy had years of practice on the clarinet to call on too, not that anyone was especially interested in that.

  Nick was also a competent pianist, but it was a skill this guitar-dominated band didn’t require. The line-up was firming, their sound more their own, even if a sped-up Roxy flavour was prevalent in everything from the grandiose edges of the music to the boys’ passion for wearing eyeliner on stage. It was an image and sound that made them seem ‘New Wave’, even ‘New Romantic’, before such terms had even been coined.

  Guitarist John Cocivera was a fine musician, but it was increasingly obvious his dense and ethereal playing style was ill-suited to the group’s direction. Matters got worse, Nick says, when ‘me and David “Dud” Green and Tracy dropped some acid around my place in Airdrie Road and John came around and we kind of coaxed him into joining in – he was pretty conservative in such matters – and it had a devastating effect on him. I think he kept having flashbacks for years, the poor guy. On the upside, that day I discovered the wonderful Carpenters on the test pattern on the TV – I sat there watching it for hours – and have loved the band in a special way ever since.’

  Cocivera’s father was desperate to get his son away from Nick, and so sent John on a long recuperative holiday to the United States. Cocivera returned in ghostly shape and with a love of disco and much else besides, instilled in the hard-partying nightclubs of Philadelphia. He jammed with Nick on his return, but his absence had made it obvious they no longer gelled. Cocivera’s guitar came down like a funky jumbo jet over Nick’s increasingly nervy and angular pop-rock songs. Nick had begun cultivating a more deliberate (as opposed to amateurish) garageband edge, inspired by obsessively listening to The Stooges’ Raw Power (1973) and a new ‘punk’ band from New York with whom Nick had become besotted, called the Ramones.

  It was Cocivera’s departure that caused the group’s first real problems, pushing Mick Harvey out of his rhythmic comfort zone and back onto the frontlines playing lead. Many of their original songs had been developed with two guitars in mind, and the loss of Cocivera forced a retreat from these during late 1976 and a reintroduction of the covers. Harvey wanted more from, and for, the band. For him it was like recutting a jigsaw to make the pieces fit again. His guitar sound broadened to fill the space Cocivera had left, and his playing became even more driven, gaining what some fans described as ‘a sinister, snarling’20 quality by mid-1977, thanks in part to the fresh influence of The Stooges’ guitarist James Williamson, whose jagged, expressive style Harvey was absorbing.21 This would be the start of Harvey’s adaptations around any musical obstacles that were put before him and the band, a facility for expansion or contraction that would mark him out in the longer run as a formidable instrumentalist and ruthlessly selfless song arranger. Phill Calvert noted it: Mick Harvey had a unique capacity to see the music in a material way that none of the others had. It was a real gift.

  Though they had grown apart musically, Nick confesses to ‘feeling sad’ that Cocivera was gone for good. He had lost another friend and it reinforced an unsettling truth he had previously tried to ignore: ‘I got the very strong feeling none of my friends’ parents liked me very much. That I was not welcome in their homes. Mick would tell me later that most of the parents thought I was the ruination of their children’s lives.’22

  Coincidentally, the members of the band were all estranged from their fathers in different ways, and correspondingly close to their mothers. Mick Harvey’s Church of England minister father moved his family around to various parish postings until they settled in Ashburton, near Caulfield North, in 1969. The Reverend Arthur Harvey’s best friend had committed suicide back in the mid-1950s after an unsuccessful affair destroyed his marriage. It was something that added even more weight to the minister’s already sober presence.23 Mick observes that: ‘Colin [Cave] was very similar to my dad – an intellectual with a potbelly and a bit of white in his beard who was also a bit unreachable. Both our families were made up of three sons and one daughter, of which Nick and I were both the third-born. Both our mothers are called Dawn. There were a lot of strange coincidences like that with Nick and me.’24

  What Mick and Nick shared most of all was a stable and well-educated family background they could depend on, however much they chafed against its patriarchal order. Relations between Phill Calvert and his father were far more difficult. Robert Calvert – known as ‘Captain Bob’ to his friends – would at times forbid his son from attending rehearsals, and, on at least one occasion prevented Phill from turning up for a gig. Tracy Pew was the most sympathetic to this situation. Nick recalls Tracy tiring of the parental bullying and leaping into his car to go and get Phill. �
�So Tracy drives his car right up Mr Calvert’s driveway and takes out one side of the flowerbeds he has planted there beside it. Out comes Phill’s dad ready for a fight. Tracy says he’s here for his drummer! But then Phill sticks his face out the door looking pretty upset and shakes his head “no” to us from behind his dad’s back. So, Tracy jumps back in the car and reverses. Takes out the flowerbed on the other side on the way out. To be fair to Phill’s dad, he did let us practise in his shed for a while, so he wasn’t all bad. He was a weight-lifter, Scottish [sic]25 . . . I just remember that air of suppressed rage about him. He certainly never had a problem telling me to get off his property!’

  Nick and Mick continued to live at home, while Tracy and Phill moved into a flat in Windsor. It was opposite the Redd Tulip factory in High Street, and near Prahran Tech. The sickly sweet smell of confectionary being manufactured hung heavy in the air. During band meetings at their flat, Nick was faintly reminded of the abattoir smells that flooded Wangaratta when he was a boy.