Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  The Saints’ loose, gang-like image and unruly humour were always going to appeal to the likes of Nick Cave – right down to singer Chris Bailey’s Irish background and the way he echoed the Ned Kelly fantasies of Nick’s Wangaratta childhood. While Radio Birdman’s intensity demanded a regimented, even cultish fandom that drowned itself in their maelstrom13, The Saints’ sprawling menace and innate lyricism celebrated a far more reckless and poetic individualism. Nick would later recall his excitement at seeing his favourite band: ‘The Saints would come down to Melbourne and play these concerts which were the most alarming things you’ve ever seen, just such anti-rock kind of shows, where the singer wouldn’t come on stage. When he did, he was this fat alcoholic. It was so misanthropic, it was unbelievable, and the whole band was like that. They were so loud!’14

  Chris Bailey of The Saints makes a powerful impression on (front row, left to right) Ollie Olsen, Nick Cave and Garry Gray, 1977. (Rennie Ellis)

  He cut out a rock-magazine photo that caught him standing front-of-stage in The Saints’ audience, staring boyishly agog at a prone and still-singing Chris Bailey bathed in sweat and glory. It remained in his wallet for years, becoming crumpled and faded, till it finally disintegrated in his fingertips as he stood, disoriented and stoned, on a snowy street in West Berlin in the mid-1980s. By then many considered Nick the most dangerous and exciting rock star in the world. He was a right mess as well.

  One night in 1977, Nick took a tab of acid. It was warm and the music was loud, the air thick with sound. Radio Birdman’s ‘TV Eye’, Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’, Richard Hell’s ‘Love Comes in Spurts’, The Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’, the New York Dolls’ ‘Personality Crisis’ – the songs kept coming in waves. According to fellow partiers, a nineteen-year-old Nick tried to use his bare hands to pull a sink away from the bathroom wall. Everyone thought he was a maniac. But it was a very ‘punk’ thing to do.

  Rowland S Howard stood in the hallway, listening to the music as it rolled out of the lounge room. He was seventeen and straight as a die; these were his pre-heroin days and he was not even drinking. Suddenly someone grabbed him by the suit lapels and pushed him hard up against the wall. A still rampaging Nick Cave stared into his face from about an inch away and blurted, ‘Are you a punk or are you a poof?’

  Rowland had seen Nick’s band play a show at another friend’s party just a few weeks before. He didn’t think they were particularly good, but the singer had something. Nick was well aware of Rowland’s presence on the scene. Rowland’s teeth, his ears, his eyes: like some punk-rock Nosferatu in an op-shop suit, Rowland was an effete and pale-skinned poseur who was hard to miss. Nick was monkey-handsome by comparison, Rowland’s feral opposite: taller, darker, more boyish and wild. Pinned to the wall, Rowland didn’t answer. So Nick loomed into his face again and asked him a second time, ‘Are you a punk or are you a poof?!’

  Television’s mighty signature track for Marquee Moon crashed over them as Nick released Rowland during a pause in the song. Then those duelling guitars started up again, a classic reprise. Nick staggered off into the party without waiting for a reply or saying another word. The music kept going, ascending and falling away till it broke completely on some imaginary shore above them all. Nick felt as if it were made of glittering particles that were coming apart in his ears. It was Rowland’s favourite album that year and came to define his early sound as a guitarist.

  ‘The next night I was at a gig and he [Nick] apologised profusely and gave me a little hand-drawn map of how to get to a party,’ Rowland said. ‘I went there and the same thing happened again. Tracy was there as well and I thought he was a complete psychopath.’15

  It was in early August 1977 that a group calling themselves The Boys Next Door officially entered the fray. Up until then, Nick says, their sporadic appearances at school dances, friends’ parties and backyard barbecues had been ‘complete fiascos . . . Phill could drum okay but the rest of us were totally incompetent. I was a terrible singer.’ The Reverend Arthur Harvey gave his son permission to stage a public event at the church hall in Ashburton where the freshly re-christened The Boys Next Door had been rehearsing during the previous few years. The event was advertised through the usual process of hand-distributed leaflets and word-of-mouth. The band may have been inexperienced professionally, but Phill Calvert recalls Mick Harvey’s ‘drive’, along with weekly rehearsals that were now being taken very seriously indeed. Contrary to the reckless image Nick and Tracy Pew projected, the group was acquiring a strong work ethic and a certainty they had something worth pursuing.

  The departure of both The Saints and Radio Birdman for the United Kingdom by the middle of 1977 left a vacuum that was immediately felt in the Australian underground music scene. For all their ‘punk’ qualities, Radio Birdman and The Saints were bands of adroit, forceful musicians fronted by deeply charismatic singers and marked by generation-defining guitar players. This was no everyday combination to pull together. Whether they knew it or not, The Boys Next Door had those base materials at hand. And while The Saints and Radio Birdman made their names from Brisbane and Sydney, Melbourne still lacked a punk band of national prominence. This seemed to confirm the annoying northern prejudice that Sydney was a city and Melbourne was just a town.

  Rowland S Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane and Bronwyn Adams at Nauru House, Melbourne, 1977 (Peter Milne)

  The church hall show at Ashburton was to be The Boys Next Door’s first step towards putting themselves forward. It was aided and abetted by Tracy Pew’s friend Chris Walsh, who had temporarily become their ‘manager’. Walsh’s own punk band, Reals, which featured guitarist (and future Melbourne electronic music guru) Ian ‘Ollie’ Olsen and singer Garry Gray (later infamous as the chainsaw-wielding vocalist for The Sacred Cowboys), would be the support act on the night. Reals specialised in trying to out-Stooge The Stooges. They failed, but they could still generate enough thudding, ominous aggression to get a punk crowd slamming.

  Nick had come up with the new band name as ‘a reaction against the names that were going around at the time’, he says. ‘The more vulgar names.’16 Mick Harvey admits, ‘We didn’t know what we were [then], we’d been doing this kind of stuff which was a precursor to punk, to some degree, so when punk came along, we thought, Oh, that’s what we must be, but of course it wasn’t. We twisted what we were doing a bit.’17 Harvey indicates it wasn’t just a groovy mix of Roxy Music affectations, garage rock thrashing and Nick’s half-baked reading of Alvin Toffler’s sociological philosophies in Future Shock: ‘We used to include “To Sir, With Love” in our set for a while, you know.’18

  In naming the group The Boys Next Door and mocking the punk context around them, Nick was as conscious of their middle-class origins as any of their earliest critics. Yet even their roadie, Shane Middleton, remained cynical. ‘They were a bunch of pussies,’ he said. ‘They’re all private-school boys, a bit like Hugh Grant. Upper-middle-class, close to peerage, don’t know the seamy side of life. In a popular movement, you adapt your looks and behaviour to fit in. That’s what they all did.’19

  Nick is more circumspect on how The Boys Next Door evolved: ‘We weren’t swept along by the whole punk thing, thinking, Oh, punk rock, everything is great, let’s get everything, let’s listen to everything . . . We did listen to everything, but we were able to differentiate. The Pistols we thought were great, and the Ramones we thought were a great band, but The Damned were shit. And we didn’t reject everything else wholesale when punk came along, so we were still listening to The Stooges, Alex Harvey, a lot of country music, blues music, other stuff. So there was all that kind of thing mixed together.’

  Novelist Michel Faber recalls meeting the young band for an interview with the University of Melbourne’s student magazine, Farrago. Faber describes Melbourne back then as ‘a city whose centre was roughly a mile square. Surrounding this modest metropolis were endless acres of suburbia characterised by eucalyptus trees, milk b
ars, carpet emporiums, scout halls and local chapters of the Returned Servicemen’s League. Music venues where anything more radical than Doobie Brothers covers, heavy rock or blues could feasibly be attempted were few. When Nick Cave . . . refers to an audience of “Homesglen skinheads”, he doesn’t mean skinheads in the British sense. He means the denizens of a suburban wasteland of shopping centres and barbecues, the natural fans not of ska but of Suzi Quatro.’20

  It was these denizens who had gathered at Ashburton Parish Hall for The Boys Next Door and The Reals. If their previous appearances as Concrete Vulture et cetera had been ‘fiascos’, this night would be a sign of times to come, turning into an all-in band-and-audience brawl. Nick told Faber that, on the night, ‘All these skinheads – Homesglen skinheads – were screaming at us, “Punks!” and stuff like that. And it suddenly occurred to me that we were punks, because everyone said we were. So, I just sort of thought, “What do punks do? Will I fart, shit, gob, spit or whatever?” So I spat, and consequently got beaten to a pulp.’21

  Julie Cave was in the audience and gives what appears to be the more reliable account. ‘I was there at the fight,’ she says. ‘Nick had been singing and spitting all night, and the majority of it was landing on this one guy. And he kept directing his comments and all that spitting at this one guy, who was actually a fan of what the band were doing. He wasn’t trying to cause trouble. I kept thinking, Nick, stop doing that to that poor guy. But Nick just kept at him. Then Nick asks for a drink and this guy passes him something like an ouzo and Coke; Nick takes a drink then pours the rest over him. That was the last straw . . . the guy grabbed him and all hell broke loose. Everyone was grabbing everyone else. I always thought a boy would never hit a woman, then I saw this girl getting cracked over the head with a bottle of beer. Some local skinheads were on Nick, and I jumped in and was screaming, “Leave my brother alone!” It was chaos. Chris [Walsh] had an indentation mark from getting elbowed so hard in the chin it stayed there for days after, this knitted-jumper elbow mark.’22

  Due to noise complaints, the police were already on their way, arriving at the scene within minutes to close the evening down. Ashburton Parish Hall was no longer available for the band’s shows.

  The immediate interest The Boys Next Door generated says something about their charisma. The fact that their debut had ended in a mini riot ensured word-of-mouth notoriety in a small underground scene. Their second public performance, and their first ever professionally, was on the middle of the bill one week later, on 19 August 1977 at the ‘Cheap Thrills New Wave Rock Show’ at Swinburne College (later Swinburne University), put together by the ever-supportive Bruce Milne. Rowland S Howard could only laugh about the way Nick Cave described it to him later. ‘Nick told me it was the best night of his life. He’d played a gig, got drunk and got laid.’23

  Tracy Pew and Nick Cave, Boys Next Door gig, Swinburne College, 1977 (Peter Milne)

  Milne had become a DJ at the college radio station, 3SW, and had already taken a crack at a fanzine called Plastered Press, singing the praises of the New York Dolls and The Modern Lovers to all who would listen. He was now co-producing a locally oriented fanzine entitled Pulp, in partnership with Brisbane’s Clinton Walker, who would go on to become the Australian post-punk music scene’s most important historian.

  In the interest of pre-promotion for the Swinburne show, Milne had offered The Boys Next Door a free full-page ad in Pulp. Over pizzas at Topolino’s in St Kilda, the band drafted a rough advertisement based on their zest for fantasy identities: ‘Nicky Danger (vcls), Johnny America (Ld gtr), Phill Thump (dms), Mick Harvey (gtr) and Buddy Love (bs). These guys have been together for a while . . .’ As well as listing covers such as ‘Andy Warhol’, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ and ‘I Put a Spell on You’, they alluded to originals entitled ‘I’m So Ugly’ and ‘Thalidomide Babies (Have More Fun)’, along with ‘a Cliff Richard influence’. As the ad shows, The Boys Next Door were still coming out of their Nicky Danger phase.

  With Milne based in Melbourne and Walker living in Brisbane, Pulp took a twin-cities approach. Brisbane’s The Saints and The Leftovers, and Melbourne’s The Boys Next Door and the yet-to-perform Young Charlatans would soon dominate the content. The masthead was designed by Rowland S Howard, with Clinton Walker writing a review in the February 1978 issue praising The Boys Next Door as ‘the best practising rock ’n’ roll group in Melbourne’. Though it was nothing more than a Xeroxed-and-stapled-together affair lasting four issues and fifteen months, Pulp was a surprisingly important building block in the social networks that would flourish between the Melbourne and Brisbane music and art scenes over the next five years. It also sowed a few seeds of an alternative music press that flowered with the formation of editor Donald Robertson’s free-spirited national rock magazine Roadrunner in Adelaide in 1979. The scene was so tiny in Australia that an individual’s actions had seismic potential.

  What Bruce Milne remembers most about The Boys Next Door at Swinburne was how ‘the band were musically not very good. And Nick could not sing a note.’ He laughs. ‘But the band – and Nick – had some interesting pretensions, and I say that in a good way. They had a vision of what they were doing. And that vision did not look like they had just looked at some photos of the Sex Pistols. Which is how an awful lot of bands did look and sound. Nick was actually very shy off stage. He’d often come across . . . you’d think he was . . . “dumb” is not the right word, but you would not be aware of the intellect he has since revealed through his music and writing. Looking back, he was very good at presenting himself as a blank canvas and absorbing what was around him.’24

  The set list for The Boys Next Door that night was: ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ (Ramones), ‘Ain’t It Funny’, ‘I’m Eighteen’ (Alice Cooper), ‘Gloria’ (Them), ‘Masturbation Generation’, ‘Who Needs You?’, ‘I Put a Spell on You’ (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins), ‘Commando’ (Ramones), ‘My Generation’ (The Who), ‘Big Future’, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ (Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra) and ‘World Panic’, with an encore of the garage-rock perennial ‘Louie Louie’ (Richard Berry/The Kingsmen) served up à la The Stooges. Mick Harvey is mildly affronted by Bruce Milne’s description of them. ‘Rowland used to say the same thing about seeing us. I don’t think we were that bad. We could play okay. I thought we did all right.’25 The songs played again serve as an early template for Nick Cave’s future aesthetic: from the shock-rock romanticism of Alice Cooper and the cartoon aggression of the Ramones, through to the street-tough Irish rhythm and blues of Them and the stagey sexual voodoo of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. ‘Ain’t It Funny’, ‘Masturbation Generation’, ‘Big Future’ and ‘World Panic’ were all band originals featuring Nick’s earliest lyrical efforts, much of it surprisingly sociological and satirical, if not downright comedic. The exception was ‘Who Needs You? (That Means You)’, the first and last song penned entirely by Mick Harvey that the band – in any of its incarnations – would ever do, or for that matter would ever have offered to them by Mick. It was a bold move for a teenage group of this era to step out with a set that was even close to one-quarter originals, and to attempt to make the covers their own.

  Nick Cave, Boys Next Door gig, Swinburne College, 1977 (Peter Milne)

  Rowland was there in the audience watching. Years later he would compare Nick’s presence that evening with his stage control as a consummate performer in the mid-1990s with The Bad Seeds: ‘They [The Boys Next Door] were just a garage band doing “Gloria” and I remember I was pretty unimpressed with them musically, but they did have real spark. And Nick was doing things with “Gloria” and injecting himself into the songs. He was always very good at improvising lyrically, which he doesn’t do so much anymore, which is a real shame ’cause he rejected a lot more of the spontaneous elements of his performance. Not in terms of how he presents himself visually, but it’s a little more stilted . . . His song writing is more formalised now.’26

  A bootleg recording of the Swinburne show r
eveals a surprisingly confident young band, with an astounding degree of commitment from Nick as the vocalist. He blurs the lyrics for ‘Gloria’ with a confrontational spoken-word improvisation that references The Stooges’ ‘Loose’ to evoke an on-stage sex act of prolonged and savage intensity. You had to wonder: where was so much erotic fury coming from? And who could possibly absorb it into a loving relationship?

  Anita Lane was the kind of girl everybody noticed. Rowland provided Nick with an introduction to her about a week after The Boys Next Door’s Swinburne performance.

  ‘I met Anita at a party,’ Nick says. ‘Rowland was there too. I think he was always kinda in love with Anita. And she was this incredible force of nature. There was very loud music playing in this front room. And for some reason she started talking to me. You might not believe this, but I just assumed at that point in my life women weren’t that interested in me. I had my talents, but women were definitely not one of them. Anyway, she started talking to me and I could not hear what she was saying; she was so beautiful I just kept nodding my head and saying, “Yeah,” for hours. Then all of a sudden she leaned in close to me and said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” I just grabbed her. I took it that the floodgates were opened. And we danced off into the night. And at that point, on that night, we became completely connected.

  ‘Tracy had a really nice girlfriend at the time too [Gina Riley, of Kath & Kim fame]. You have got to remember we had been to an all-boys school – we hadn’t known that many girls in our lives. I remember early on driving with Tracy to get them both. Anita and Tracy’s girlfriend were at a bus stop, waiting for us. Anita was wearing chocolate suede knee-high boots and a miniskirt. Tracy’s girlfriend had on something like that too. And I looked at Tracy and said, “Fuck me, it doesn’t get any better than this!”