by Mark Mordue
Gudinski, Earle and Macainsh were soon all in the hit-maker Molly Meldrum’s ear, telling him to pay even more attention to The Boys Next Door. The band were becoming a Suicide cause célèbre and generating much interest, especially whenever they played live. At the 1977 New Year’s Eve street party called ‘Punk Gunk’ – where Nick’s father saw him perform – they were forced to ignore antagonism from their peers about them becoming ‘sellouts’. All the hype and marketing that Barrie Earle was building around the coming Lethal Weapons compilation had prompted a word-of-mouth anti-Suicide slogan around the traps: ‘Sign to Suicide, or suicide to sign?’ Karen Marks says ‘a lot of the bands began to feel embarrassed about being involved. It was really stupid.’14 Nick’s reaction was to give an especially wild performance at Punk Gunk, singing and rolling around in the gutter like a man possessed (much to Colin Cave’s dismay). He took it right into the faces of everyone who was doubting them.
Three months later ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking [sic]’ was released, launching the Suicide label in March 1978. The Boys Next Door were able to stride in and play ‘live’ on Meldrum’s Countdown, an unheard-of coup for a group of upstarts so fresh to the scene. It was somewhat anticlimactic to find they had to mime to a tape of their spiky interpretation of ‘Boots’, while an audience of twelve-year-old girls did their best to wave their hands in the air as instructed by the program’s floor manager.
The band had wanted to launch themselves on the public with an original song, but here they were being chewed up and doing exactly as they were told. Nick had fantasised about being as risqué and dangerous as his latest favourites, the New York Dolls. Instead it felt like they were following in the footsteps of teenyboppers like the Bay City Rollers. The fact Blondie had digested some similar influences to The Boys Next Door and achieved something original and subversive was a reminder of other possibilities. Nick sat in his bedroom blasting the New York Dolls’ ‘Personality Crisis’ over and over after returning from the Countdown performance. Its lyrics are about getting so caught up in popular culture you lose sight of whoever you thought you were. They also reference a then popular notion in psychology that focused on teenagers and how their roleplay in society advanced or damaged their ability to evolve into adults. ‘“Personality crisis”, whatever happened to that term?’ Nick asks, still flogging the song on his car stereo at high volume as he drives around St Kilda forty years later. ‘It just disappeared into a whole bunch of other terms. But maybe it was more accurate.’
A sharp film clip by Chris Löfvén of The Boys Next Door performing ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ – not screened at the time – shows them on a white set decorated with cardboard cut-out hearts. Anita Lane had come up with the bold red-and-white set design. Nick stands on a heart that is uniquely pierced by a Cupid’s arrow; Lane has hung another heart, half-broken, on the wall behind his head. The band members behave as if they were pumping out the song with all the terse and bright ferocity of old-school Australian rock ’n’ roll favourites like The Easybeats. Suited up and tensely theatrical, Nick even looks like a mod-meets-glam-meets-punk evolution of The Easybeats’ singer Stevie Wright, with a defiant, spread-leg singing posture that owes more than a little to The Saints’ Chris Bailey as well. This bad-boy-for-love image confirmed Nick as an early presence; it’s a convincingly stylised picture, and one that shows that The Boys Next Door had the goods – as the members of Blondie believed – to do things their way, if they could only stick to their guns.15
Nick’s mind drifted back to Alex Harvey’s remark that a rock ’n’ roll guitar was more powerful than an AK-47. Yeah, he really needed more firepower.
With his blazing eyes, goatee beard and mane of grey hair, the painter Tony Clark looks the part of a Mephistopheles ready to roll. It is not hard to imagine his more youthful charisma decades earlier. In the summer months leading into 1978, Nick Cave fell under his sway as an inner circle established itself during late-night drinking sessions at Clark’s tiny St Kilda flat.
Anita Lane provided the introductions. The artist was an early mentor to both her and Rowland S Howard, teaching them art history during their first year at Prahran Technical College in 1977. ‘I was only a few years older than them, so it was not the normal teacher–student relationship,’ Tony Clark emphasises. ‘You know, it is only with the passing of the years that I have realised how special this particular group of people were and how incredibly lucky I was to meet them all.’16
Like Nick, Anita had a habit of bucking against hierarchies and rules. Clark remembers Lane trying to take advantage of their extracurricular friendship by refusing to submit her end-of-year essay. She seemed to be going out of her way to fail, and to provoke Clark into the bargain. ‘Well, Nick was absolutely devoted to her at that point. So he went off to the library and wrote an essay on Egon Schiele for her so that she could pass,’ Clark says, laughing.17
Both Lane and Howard would drop out before their second year got underway in early 1978, but they would stay close to Clark – as would Lane’s best friend and fellow Prahran art student, Lisa Craswell, with whom Howard was infatuated. Where Lane was a punkish red-headed Pre-Raphaelite beauty with Lolita overtones, Craswell was her opposite, a dark-eyed brunette of equally stunning looks who assumed the mantle of black queen to Anita Lane’s off-kilter and ethereal white.
As a group, these powerful individuals forged an informal salon that pushed Nick to reconsider all his ideas – none more so than Anita Lane. ‘Nick told me how Anita had stayed at his [family] house,’ says Howard, ‘and, coming back to his room from a shower, she was reading his lyrics to “Joyride”18 . . . And he was mortified that she was laughing at them and saying, “This is stupid.” He went out of his way to write to impress Anita [after that]; the band was becoming more than a joke and a hobby, and it hadn’t been necessary for him to apply himself seriously before. Suddenly Nick was meeting people who expected more of him.’19
‘Meeting Tony was like entering into an alternative art history course,’ Nick says. ‘The painters I was looking at, and Tony too, they all worked very hard. They did it every day, all day in their studios, working and painting. I learned a lot from that. It was something I held onto. It’s not like rock musicians are known for working hard,’ he says, laughing. ‘That discipline and practice were definitely things I took note of.’
Despite having failed at CIT, Nick excelled in essay writing and art history. He and Clark could talk for hours. ‘When I grew a moustache, Nick used to like to tease me and tell me I looked like August Strindberg,’ Clark says.20 As could sometimes be the case with Nick, this comment was three parts flattery and one part dagger to the ribs. Clark could take it. Clark’s encounters with the nascent punk scene were confirming his passion for ‘outsider art’ and raw forms of expression that converged with his idiosyncratic interests in classical art. In this convergence Cave and Clark discovered a mutual interest.
Nick’s favourite painting at the time was Matthias Grünewald’s The Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altar. He was also a fan of the Spanish Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic periods: the dark mysticism of El Greco; the sensuous, confronting portraiture of Diego Velázquez; and Francisco Goya’s nightmarish Black Paintings. These were very old-fashioned obsessions in a cultural environment leaning towards the early stages of a conceptual shift known as postmodernism. As with the music scene, there was the sense of a changing present at war with the weight of the past. But in this battle, Nick was well on the side of the traditionalists, and even a radical conservative. Apart from the works of Francis Bacon and Brett Whiteley, the closest Nick got to enthusing about anything contemporary was the Berlin and Viennese Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century.
‘It’s no accident Nick chose Egon Schiele to write about [for Anita Lane’s essay],’ Clark says. ‘He was plunged into the revival of Expressionist art at the time. People were rejecting the art of the 1970s in favour of art from the 1920s and before. And Nick himself
appealed to visual artists as well. Jenny Watson did those portraits of him and all of The Boys Next Door very early on [in 1977] because they were so strong visually.’21 A budding, if aberrant, classicist like Nick Cave was bound to find a maguslike figure such as Tony Clark highly attractive – and helpful to his own development. Jenny Watson observed Clark at close quarters and the way he took a leading role. ‘He had the same advantages I did,’ she says, ‘and that lay in him being just a little older and having a degree of remove that an art historical view can give you.’22
Born in Canberra to a diplomat father and educated in England, Clark had spent most of his adolescence in Italy during the 1960s. ‘I grew up in the Fascist quarter of Rome, and that was a showcase for Fascist classicism. And some of that had an Expressionist element to it too; it wasn’t just all polish, some of it was kind of Art Deco,’ Clark says. ‘All these unexpected elements that don’t fit the stereotype of the classical world, I liked that. Particularly towards the end of the Roman Empire, you could see, right where I lived and walked the streets, how it just got rougher, [and] that’s the kind of classicism I love the best – when it’s really on its last legs and getting rougher and rougher, and [artists, sculptors and architects are] referring to their past artistic history in a very schematic way that is also very intense and expressive.’
Clark links this savage classicism to his own experiences witnessing the genesis of punk in London in the mid-1970s, before he returned to Australia in late 1976. After spending a few months living with the pop artist Martin Sharp in Sydney, he finally wandered down to Melbourne to take up his teaching post at Prahran in 1977. Everything was primed. Rowland S Howard would invite Clark to come along and see The Saints early that same year. ‘They were really the beginning of something significant for everyone,’ Clark says firmly. ‘It was like a light went off in people’s minds.’ Though actually an accomplished jazz bass guitarist, Tony Clark decided to apply punk’s DIY philosophy to making art, utilising canvas boards and painting materials that were considered the province of the rank amateur. While Nick was leaving art behind for music, Clark was heading in the opposite direction. They crossed paths at an ideal time for both.
‘Events in Melbourne,’ Clark says, ‘gave me the confidence to really kick-start my painting. My angle at the time was that I was nostalgic for, and involved in, high culture – a lot more than most of my peers were – but I didn’t want to do nice, refined things with it. I was trying to look for, or look at, if you like, Expressionist and outsider art as another side of classicism. At one stage I called it “St Kilda Classicism”, which doesn’t mean anything now, but at the time St Kilda was full of drug users and prostitutes and general deadbeats – so the meaning of “St Kilda Classicism” was referring to that classical world which I was familiar with because of where I had grown up in Rome – but putting that reference down in a way that was completely rough and almost kind of psychotic-looking, like very, very crude images of temples and very, very crude representations of the classical landscape. And Nick, it has to be said, was extremely supportive of all this stuff that I did and took a genuine interest in it.’23
According to Nick, ‘Tony was never a loud or demonstrative person. But he knew about things we didn’t know about. He was someone we listened to. Lisa Craswell, Anita and me, Rowland, maybe Genevieve [McGuckin] too . . . we were all hungry. I was hungry. I still am hungry. And Tony was always articulate and hugely intelligent and just really knew his stuff. The way he talked about particular painters and the originality of his viewpoint were such that even to this day those artists he introduced me to I still have a . . . special place for in my heart. Louis Wain is the obvious example. Alberto Savinio is another one. Tony would be like, “Sure, there’s De Chirico, but have you seen what his brother does?” So I had Tony Clark showing me how there’s great art, yes, but there’s this other stuff out there that is equally as valid and exciting. I think his pictures are exciting too. All that was having a huge influence over the way I saw myself. But I don’t think I knew how to work that out with what I was doing personally or in my music.’
In light of that comment, it’s interesting to reflect on Tony Clark’s updated term for his own aesthetic and what sprang from the time and place that formed him and Nick as artists: ‘punk classicism’.
Nick’s delinquent musical friendships with the likes of Pierre Voltaire and Tracy Pew seemed to carry on in some other parallel and, indeed, rougher world. Voltaire says he found the endless conversations on art ‘a real snore’.24 Neither he nor Pew was fond of visiting Clark’s eyrie. The journalist Clinton Walker, who was very much a part of The Boys Next Door’s hard-partying Tiger Lounge scene, thinks the art school and intellectual emphasis on their origins is way overrated. ‘There was just as much naughty schoolboy and Billy Bunter to them as David Bowie’s Low,’ he says.25
This mischievous side emerged on at least one memorable occasion at Clark’s home during a long conversation on the connections between the French composer Erik Satie and Brian Eno’s ambient experiments. Tracy Pew was finding the discussion a little precious and he piped up that he heard a wonderful album of piano music recently that might interest them all. Knowing what Pew was like, Nick played the straight man and asked Tracy what this wonderful music was. Pew deadpanned, ‘The Sting.’26
The Lethal Weapons compilation was released in May 1978, recycling The Boys Next Door single ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’, the B-side ‘Boy Hero’ and the as-yet-unreleased ‘Masturbation Generation’ as their representative tracks. The album cover featured blood oozing from the barrel of a revolver, a comic-book pastiche based on a Barrie Earl concept and realised by the graphic artist John CJ Taylor. It made for a striking package, with the record itself pressed on milk-white vinyl rather than the usual black. The music, however, was less developed than the promotional campaign, which featured slogans such as ‘Progressive Pop for Modern People’ and ‘Revving Towards Tomorrow Today’, as well as giveaway packets of ‘Suicide’ cinnamon-flavoured chewing gum bullets to match the gun imagery. Punk’s anti-establishment stance always had a symbiotic relationship with the evolution of guerrilla marketing, but Earl had overdone it. This looked like a record company trying too hard, with the logo and gimmicks evoking an opportunistic budget label like K-Tel Australia rather than anything as cool as Stiff in the United Kingdom. Many of the bands reacted with shame, even outright antagonism. The fact Nick had fallen in with such sophisticated cultural company, thanks to his relationship with Anita Lane, only made everything about Suicide appear crasser to him.
‘Boots’ remained The Boys Next Door’s best track on Lethal Weapons for two obvious reasons: it was better written than their originals, and it was delivered with a Nuggets-like presence that was hard to top.27 Satirical as it may have been, ‘Masturbation Generation’ was basically a sub-Ramones singalong that was begging for attention. Being with Suicide compromised its rebellious stance, however much Nick tried to throw out a knowing lyrical wink that no-one owned him. Along with their intensifying live shows, Nick was reconsidering his relationship to the audience in ways that would have long-term implications, ultimately leading to the confrontational style of The Birthday Party. For now he kept himself busy making lists, such as one entitled ‘things I am not happy with, within the boys next door’. One of the most heinous crimes was how much his band wanted to please its audience.28
‘Boy Hero’ was unique for being the first Nick Cave/Mick Harvey co-write. The song’s proto–New Wave sound featured frenetic, buzzing Formula One racetrack guitar work from Harvey, and it again drew lyrically on Cave’s desire for attention with the parallel story of a hero who drowns in his own acclaim. Reputedly based on a banal newspaper item about a swimming accident, the song could be read as a fable inspired by Nick’s own hero, the increasingly coked-out David Bowie.29 Sonically and lyrically, however, ‘Boy Hero’ was light years behind the Thin White Duke, who was well into his Berlin phase with conspirators such
as Iggy Pop, Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, all of whom Nick would continue to study closely. From the start, Nick was tuning in to a mythology that could envelop him and take him forward. He seemed to be looking for stories he could attach himself to and somehow enter or absorb around him. Years later, Mick Harvey would remark on another aspect to ‘Boy Hero’: how it echoes the tale of a teenage Ned Kelly saving a boy from drowning, an interpretation that connects Nick’s lyric to the Wangaratta mythology that shaped his boyhood dreams.30
All three songs on Lethal Weapons revealed an awareness of the gap between public display and what passed for self-revelation, with a knowing way of addressing, involving and accusing an audience during the interplay. For now, this look-at-me, don’t-you-dare-look-at-me narcissism was flirtatiously adolescent, an aggressive pose bordering on camp. Nick’s lyrics and performance nonetheless showed there was something going on with The Boys Next Door that set them apart from every other band showcased on Lethal Weapons. Nick told Roadrunner journalist Jillian Burt, ‘A lot of the songs are about being a star and drowning under it. Real corny sort of stuff.’ Then he summed them up more simply: ‘The songs are kind of sad and tragic, but they’re treated with a sort of sarcasm.’31
When Lethal Weapons was released, Nick did an interview with the Sydney Mirror in which he once again did his best to separate The Boys Next Door from the punk marketing around them. His refutations were starting to exhaust him: ‘We’re not talking about society,’ he said. ‘We have nothing to direct to the audience in the way of complaints – we are not really angry young men.’32
On Lethal Weapons, only Teenage Radio Stars (featuring Sean Kelly and James Freud) matched The Boys Next Door for star power, cloning their own Bowie-meets-T-Rex pop sound with a garage-pop sneer. JAB made pioneering use of Ash Wednesday’s33 synthesiser playing as well as the thin, dirty guitar work and Cockney accent of their English-born vocalist Bohdan X (Bohdan Kubiakowski). They sounded legitimately punk and a lot of fun too, if not particularly complex; their ‘Blonde and Bombed’ was almost a Calypso-Cockney rap song, as well as a hilarious celebration of X’s desire for Deborah Thomas. Humour was close to the surface of what many Australian punk bands were developing as an ethos. The grey-faced anger of English punk could not be adopted entirely seriously in a sunny Australian context. If you didn’t listen too closely to the Jim Morrison–lite lyrics, Chris Walsh’s new band Negatives (with Garry Gray once again on vocals) nearly stole the show with a brooding, cinematic piece called ‘Planet on the Prowl’. Negatives would bitterly disown it due to the imposition of Eric Gradman’s production effects and ambient violin without their permission, but the awful truth was these were probably the song’s best attributes. After slagging off Gradman and Macainsh all over town for their studio efforts, Walsh’s gang and The Boys Next Door retreated to Walsh’s house on a regular basis, stewing over his Stooges and Bowie albums and how their grand vision had been frustrated by fools.34
