Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  ‘Anita and I both wanted to be painters. She had this very delicate line, very confident and sure, but very vulnerable and beautiful and without any artifice,’ Nick says, tracing his finger through the air. ‘Me, I was always trying to have that sensitive line. But the way I draw is not like that. It’s bold and hard and it’s ugly. Anita’s always had something magical about it I didn’t possess. Brett Whiteley had a beautiful sense of line like that in his paintings too. These days I can work some of that into a [handwritten] lyric or a doodle. But Anita had the raw talent to be a great artist. She’d do pastels that were extraordinary. She could do the cruellest caricatures, too. She was someone who never tried. There was something criminal about the whole thing, that there was so much talent in her. But there was also something that prevented her from applying herself to the task. I think it might all stem way back . . .’

  Nick stops and thinks about what he is going to say. He starts again. ‘We were just different people. Maybe that’s why we worked so well together. I remember one time she said to me, “If you were hit by a car, you’d reach for your pencil and try to write what it was like before you died.” I don’t think I was so much like that in the early days, actually, but I did develop a way of applying myself no matter what was going on. I think you need to feel it is a part of who you are, for sure. And I think Anita felt there were greater issues at stake than her creativity. It was very frustrating – because she was better than everybody else. And by that I mean more naturally gifted than almost anybody I ever met. She was incredibly interested in ideas and it was really, really exciting to be with her. And she was full of the same irreverence towards things too. After that first night we were inseparable. Until we got separated . . .

  Anita Lane, Seaview Ballroom (Crystal Ballroom), late 1970s (Peter Milne)

  ‘She influenced a lot of people, not just me. Everyone will tell you. Anita was an amazing person. Anita is an amazing person. I think it might be difficult for her now. And that it has been difficult for her for some time,’ Nick says. ‘Time has moved on. And she is still dealing with her demons . . . It’s quite difficult to talk about. I don’t have any great love for what I was doing back then. But I couldn’t stop doing it.’

  The Boys Next Door’s third show was supporting Keith Glass and The Living Legends (soon to become KGB or the Keith Glass Band) at the Tiger Room in Richmond on 14 September 1977. Glass was among those smitten at the start with The Boys Next Door, though his significance to the group would not be immediately obvious. Glass was ‘cool’ in the classic sense, and not the type of guy easily impressed by radical poses, punk or otherwise. A talented musician and songwriter, he had done everything from playing in a baroque 1960s acid-pop band to starring in the Sydney production of Hair – a role that made Glass the first man to ever appear fully nude on an Australian stage.27 A passion for obscure rockabilly, country, blues and 1960s Australian garage-rock bands would inspire him to open Melbourne’s leading alternative music store in the early 1970s, Archie ’n’ Jugheads. With a shift in location to Flinders Lane, the record shop changed its name to Missing Link in 1976 and became, he says, ‘Punk Central’.

  As soon as Glass saw The Boys Next Door, he liked the way ‘the band was . . . witty. They were doing the punk thing but they were trying to avoid the clichés. It’s hard to see that now.’ He immediately sensed ‘an Elvis sorta thing about Nick that I loved’. At his invitation, they became KGB’s regular support act at the Tiger Room. Glass jokes that ‘within six months our [KGB’s] residency was overrun by all these pogo-ing punks demanding we play faster. We decided to go perform somewhere else and let them have the place to themselves.’28

  Deborah Thomas was there on the first evening at the Tiger Room. Nick was ‘very entertaining and staggeringly drunk’, she says. ‘He’d only just told us he had a band and that they were going to play there . . . We all went along thinking how shy he was and wondering how he would go. But it was like, wow, so much energy. They introduced this woman called “Vulva” on stage, a rather large girl, who started throwing mincemeat from the stage at everyone while he sang “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”. It was really quite a performance. Shy Nick.’29

  Jenny Watson perceived ‘showbiz’ characteristics. ‘He was and is a consummate performer, almost like a comedian. In those early Boys Next Door shows at the Tiger Room there would be red neon on stage flashing in time to the music. It was a show in the Las Vegas sense of a show. And that’s what happens with success, especially mega-success, you become an entertainer.’30

  Novelist Tobsha Learner became an early habitué of the Tiger Room and, later, the Crystal Ballroom, where The Boys Next Door would rule over their own private kingdom. ‘Mr Cave always had an extremely conscious sense of the projection of his image,’ she says. ‘And it was very structured from the get‑go. He was very self-conscious, very self-aware. The way he articulated himself, his look, his movements, it was very staged. I did think Rowland was the most beautiful man of them all back then – he looked ethereal in those days. But Nick had a narrative for himself, and that’s what lifted him out of Melbourne and out of Australia so quickly. It separated him from almost everyone. You could see it.’

  Learner describes the early Nick Cave on stage as ‘God under a follow spot’, and speaks of how all the women on the scene ‘would be enthralled going to see Nick. You’d feel this core of sex and desire running straight from his movements right into you. He really was absolutely captivating. But he was very on, and very off.’ She implies something tantamount to an ability to throw a switch at will. After a while Nick learned to exploit this to the maximum, sometimes brutally. ‘He was the singer. He embodied the inaccessible,’ Learner says, ‘and with that he had that whiff of someone who was going to be great. You knew you were watching the runaway train pulling out of the station even then. Right at the very start.’31

  Karen Marks had been fulfilling the role of manager for The Boys Next Door since the start of 1977. Marks was just a few years senior, but for the band that was enough to make her part of an older generation. She had already begun making a name for herself as a rock journalist. and was quite a presence on the scene. During the time she managed The Boys Next Door, Marks was dating the legendary musician Ross Wilson of Daddy Cool (who became a fan of The Boys Next Door)32, then the equally regarded Greg Quill of Country Radio and Southern Cross. She was also share-housing with Greg Macainsh of Skyhooks fame, and Jenny Brown, one of the leading rock journalists of the era. ‘It was just one of those houses,’ Marks says, laughing.

  What she remembers most clearly is Phill Calvert being the first to approach her about managing the band. ‘Phill knew I had all these connections. He was quite open about it. That was fine. I was surprised, but I thought why not? Ross really encouraged me. You know, I was on a panel recently and someone got up to say how chauvinistic the punk scene was at the time, but I don’t agree. The fact the boys came to me and wanted me to be their manager was pretty unusual. There were lots of girls around in bands playing like it was no big deal too. I remember it mostly as the opposite of chauvinistic. I look back and think there was me and Caroline Coon early on in the UK managing The Clash. Two women looking after what would turn out to be two of the most important bands to come out of that time.

  ‘I have to say, Phil was the most together, the most professional and the most ambitious,’ Marks says. ‘It was him. Him and Mick Harvey made that band happen. In my opinion, without Mick Harvey musically there would not be a Nick Cave. I see Mick the same way as I see Lenny Kaye with Patti Smith. History would be a lot different without those underestimated relationships. It’s something people don’t always understand or see. But it’s so important and it needs to be said.’33

  After her night with Nick Cave, Anita Lane told her friends she’d just met the ugliest boy. This was by no means an insult. If anything, it was her idea of flattery. Nick, too, regarded himself as ugly. But not in the original or quirky way Anita Lane celebrat
ed. Contrary to later perceptions of him as one of rock ’n’ roll’s ultimate portrait subjects, Nick was prone to taking slights with disproportionate resentment and would be uneasy with having his picture taken when not performing. Photographers such as Anton Corbijn and Polly Borland, a close friend of Nick, saw what a difficult subject he could be even at the height of his fame. ‘People think Nick is very photogenic,’ Borland says, ‘but the truth is that he isn’t. He doesn’t like the way he looks and that can create a lot of problems. It took Nick years to trust me, to believe that I would get a good picture of him. He was so self-conscious, and he could be a really hard taskmaster about it. There were many times when I swore I would never photograph him again. I can still remember the day when I first put something in front of him that he liked. “You see, Nick, I can actually take a good photo.”

  ‘Really it’s only in the last ten years that he has been able to relax in front of a camera. It just wasn’t something he could do. And he was always difficult when he was on drugs. He never really felt or understood that he was beautiful. He is more handsome in the flesh. Unusual and handsome – it’s hard to get that mixture. I don’t think growing up that he liked himself or got much positive affirmation. He even describes himself as a freak. I liken Nick to Marilyn in The Munsters – because he is a freak: he grew up in this suburban, very normal family environment. Look at the rest of his family and look at him. Where does he come from?’34

  Like Anita Lane, Polly Borland first met Nick in late 1977. Her boyfriend at the time was Pierre Voltaire (the stage name for Peter Sutcliffe, who was also known as Mr Pierre). Already evolving into the scene’s court jester, Voltaire’s humour had a vicious, irreverent edge that went with the era’s confrontational punk attitude. Borland herself had only just returned from London at the height of the Sex Pistols explosion. Her hair was dyed shocking pink, her stockings lacerated. ‘I have this thing about my weight, which has gone up and down all my life,’ she says. ‘I still remember when I first met Nick. Pierre said to him, “This is fat Polly.” Nick has always been really kind and understanding of how I feel. As soon as Pierre said that, Nick said, “She’s not fat.” I know what people say about Nick, that he’s a misogynist, things like that, but it’s something he explores in his work. It’s not how he is. Nick has always been very kind to me from the start, very sensitive. That’s who he really is.’35

  Nick’s empathy for artistic outsiders would only grow keener. He admits, ‘I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way I am – I’m still learning to be comfortable with certain aspects of what it’s like to live and be a human being. The more well-known you become, the less possible it is to have a normal relationship with the normal world – not that I am complaining, I’ve got it pretty good. You can’t imagine how isolated Michael Jackson must have been.’

  Though he was speaking about the nature of fame as much as his own physicality, the two have a corollary in Nick’s background. ‘In school I was an anti-magnet for women,’ he would say, only half-joking. It was after joining a band that things ‘immediately changed in terms of my attractiveness’. When Anita Lane started dating him, Nick had already done what she describes as ‘a lot of self-portraits at Caulfield Tech. They were very unflattering, Expressionistic paintings, figurative in style. He was a great painter. I still think he is. The art school teachers didn’t like him very much at all.’36

  By then Nick was well on the way to failing. Too lazy to stretch a fresh canvas over a frame, he’d slap a new painting over the top of an old one. For his major project at the end of second year in 1977, he submitted a picture of a circus strongman looking up a ballerina’s dress. A dotted line connected the strong man’s eyes to what Nick called ‘the ballerina’s fundaments’. To his teachers it was a bad joke, even a sign of contempt for the institution. Typically perverse, it echoed an event in Nick’s family history: a badly behaved boy at Wangaratta High School who had been forced, as a disciplining action by Nick’s father, to star in one of Colin Cave’s student theatre productions. According to a school magazine article, the boy had ‘totally upstaged all the other actors by very obviously bending down at the front of the stage and looking up the dresses of the girls who were fairies. He got a huge laugh.’ Behind what Nick himself now calls ‘a pretty stupid painting’ it is possible to perceive another gesture: the resentful son constructing a work that helped ruin his future at art school and sent a covert message to his father.

  Nick’s relationship with Anita Lane, a Lolita come to life, must have given him one more edge in the frictions he actively sought with Colin Cave. Ned Kelly, Crime and Punishment, Brett Whiteley, The Stooges, the New York Dolls – Nick was building an artistic identity that grew out of an inherited and subterranean dialogue more felt than fully understood. Ironically, Poppa Frank Cave had been irritated and mystified by Colin’s preferences for classical music over the popular songs and folk tunes he enjoyed. Poppa was also ‘very materialistic’, Dawn Cave says, and determined that his son should ‘never preach or teach. He had wanted Colin to get into advertising.’37 Colin would, of course, become vocationally obsessed with education after a brief flirtation with journalism. His struggle to go his own way despite Frank Cave’s demands was one of the reasons for Colin’s tolerance of his own son’s wayward self-determination.

  Anita Lane has stated that when she and Nick met, she was seventeen and he was nineteen. Within a few weeks of their first encounter Nick turned twenty; details of her birth date are not available, and estimates of her age vary, due in part to her babydoll image and voice. Most people indicate Lane was sixteen, not seventeen as she claims. ‘You haven’t decided on anything at that age,’ she says. ‘You’re all open and you want the world to show you everything, having rejected what your parents had planned for you. That was the springboard: rebelliousness. You just jump into the arms of whatever comes along and so we did . . . I guess everyone came to life out of punk rock, all that feeling that was going round at that time. It was funny for us because we weren’t poor, working class or upset. What were we? I don’t know. I never cared what anyone was doing or what the fashion was. The tastes I had then happened to be in fashion, and that’s probably the case with Nick too. We were accidentally in time.’38

  Dawn Cave says that when Nick first brought Anita home, ‘she was like a little doll in a yellow raincoat with black piping’.39 Davina Davidson likewise remembers meeting Anita Lane in late 1977, just after Nick and Anita started dating. The three were walking through the streets of St Kilda together. ‘Anita was wearing skin-tight black leggings, black long-sleeved shirt, dark eyeliner around her eyes and bright pink rubber boots on her feet. The effect was stunning,’ Davina says. ‘This was thirty-five years ago. Nobody dressed like this. It was art in every sense of the word.’40

  Anita was the apple of her father’s eye. He was a much older man who doted on his only daughter, driving her all over town. Her only brother, John, two years her senior, was similarly amenable to indulging his sister’s needs. The product of a Steiner school education, Anita was a free spirit destined for an artistic life. Her mother, Pearl, was renowned for her intelligence and saucy wit. ‘Pearlie was fun to be around, quite flamboyant,’ says Dawn Cave.41 Anita, unfortunately, clashed with her mother, whom she sometimes referred to as ‘Dirty Pearl’. Pierre Voltaire describes Pearl Lane more flatly as ‘a total bitch’.42

  It is unusual to hear a conversation about Anita Lane in which her beauty and unusualness are not the leading subjects. Nick’s two closest friends of the era – apart from Tracy Pew – Rowland S Howard and Pierre Voltaire, were enchanted. They were just the start of a long line of men to have been dazzled by Lane’s promise and, in recalling her presence years later, strangely saddened by what became of it. Lane’s most memorable attribute appears to have been her voice, high and tiny and whispered like a child’s. It masked what Nick describes as ‘Anita’s ability to eviscerate people with a single comment’. He’d later write the Birthday Party song
‘Zoo Music Girl’ for her. Set to a jungle rhythm, it blurted out a sex-mad B-movie horror story celebrating the wild at heart.

  Deborah Thomas says Anita had ‘big eyes, and an innocent, beautiful face. She was the first of those girls to have a vaguely mystical air – not in a hippie sense, more off with the pixies. She was not an outgoing person in a group. You know, here I am thinking back to art school and she was there every day with Nick [though not attending CIT herself], and I can’t think of one conversation she and I ever had. But she was young. A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old mixing with twenty-year-olds, which is a big gap now and back then was even more so.

  ‘When she got with Nick, it was something introverted. They became a little unit, locked away and quite separate. I hate to describe it like this, but it was a little bit like Yoko Ono. He was certainly besotted by her. She had a Jane Birkin look, twisting her hair, those big eyes staring out from under a fringe, the short skirts, a slightly dishevelled air. There was a Nico thing going on with her as well, that look. I don’t think his friends liked her very much at first. She took him away from them. She was besotted with Nick, too – in that handmaiden style. But there was obviously more to her than that. Nick was too intelligent and creative to have a long-running, intense relationship with someone who was vacuous. She was one of those girls who would have made sure she was surprising. She reminded me in a way of Rodin’s muse, Rose Beuret. There was just something about her.’43

  Boy Hero

  MELBOURNE

  1977–78