Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  This history would be simplified once Rowland S Howard’s entry into The Boys Next Door was announced in August 1978: it would even be seen as a seduction by Nick, a long game crafted in Machiavellian fashion to destroy the Young Charlatans. Rowland, however, was far from oblivious to his own merits and the new possibilities on offer. ‘Nick really wanted to change what the band [The Boys Next Door] was and how it sounded, but he didn’t know how to. So, getting me into the band was a shortcut.’60 The guitarist explained, ‘He [Nick] wanted to move away from poppish-rock music and towards something a lot more like his paintings. They were splattery and grotesque, and the music he was making at the time had nothing to do with that sort of thing.’61

  As well as a host of fine songs such as ‘Shivers’ and ‘A.K.A.’ that The Boys Next Door could adopt as their own, Howard had half a dozen fresh pieces, including ‘Guilt Parade’, that he was working on. Phill Calvert laughs at what was an embarrassment of riches for the band. ‘It was like all of a sudden we had fourteen new songs to choose from.’62 Nick was pushed not only by the quantity of Rowland’s output, but by the quality as well. Mick Harvey was adamant: ‘Nick changed his style of song writing totally. Because Rowland’s songs sounded so much more refined than his.’63

  It would take a while for Rowland to establish himself in the band’s pecking order – even with Nick in his corner. ‘I was feeling my influences; Rimbaud, for example . . . Tracy used to mock me mercilessly and I was generally considered pretentious.’64 Pierre Voltaire remembers ‘sitting in the Cave family’s backyard on some swings and talking to Rowland. He told me, “I’m worried about Tracy, he’s being mean to me.”’65

  Nick’s relationship with Howard developed as the first of a handful of platonic love affairs in which a creative sidekick complemented his own vision. As if to emphasise how passionate this type of male bonding with Nick could be, Voltaire laments, ‘Nick and I used to be best friends before Rowland came along and Nick fell in love with him. But we were all like that, really. Obsessed with an idea of ourselves and each other.’66

  Peter Milne, Bruce Milne’s younger brother, recalls the energy, week to week, as the band caught fire. ‘They [The Boys Next Door] made great music and they had great songs, as much as they might try and disown that stuff now,’ he says. ‘Every time they played, it was like a gathering of the clan. It’s where you went and your name would be on the door. Of course, being seventeen, the fact that you didn’t have to pay the $4.50 cover charge was important. They’d come up with new songs, or reinvent old ones; there’d always be a development. I used to go see them rehearse as well, it was interesting to watch them work on new material. That’s why I became a photographer, so I could become a fly on the wall and watch things go on. Mick Harvey was always working on the music, making it more interesting.’67

  Nick’s relationship with Mick Harvey operated on a cooler level and would continue to work that way. As Howard asserted his presence, Harvey appeared to become sidelined. Sometimes he was forced off guitar altogether and onto synthesiser or other keyboards. Ironically, it was Harvey who had helped in this process, working hard to integrate Rowland into the band. Both guitarists were heavily influenced by the clipped feedback screams and elegant, neo-psychedelic textures of Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera. The sonic similarities would further obscure Harvey’s contributions as Howard took more of the improvising limelight live and their dual guitar interplay became difficult to unthread on record. ‘I superseded Mick’s position; all of a sudden I was the guitarist,’ said Rowland. ‘And that must have been hard on him, but his reaction was, “I don’t care. I’m not looking for attention. I don’t care if I get to play in the songs, if I don’t play guitar; I don’t care if someone sings the backing parts because I’m just happy for the group to be as good as it possibly can be.” But of course he fucking cared.’68

  With Suicide falling apart as quickly as it had come together, the Australian music industry flirtation with ‘punk’ appeared to have culminated in a spectacular disaster for all concerned. Sales of Lethal Weapons were poor, despite Countdown appearances by both The Boys Next Door and Teenage Radio Stars, peaking at around 7000 units. A minor tabloid controversy over the Suicide label’s name failed to translate into substantial radio attention. The album received lukewarm reviews that added to the marketplace bruising it received, not to mention the cult disrespect. Neither the chewing-gum bullets that were given away with early copies of Lethal Weapons nor the ‘collector’s-edition’ white vinyl had made much of a dent in the public interest. The masses sat at home, oblivious to the Australian New Wave’s call to arms, content instead with the unstoppable Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell. If Nick later felt they had ‘fought the big one’ in an artistic revolution driven by punk rock, the truth is that in Australia they resoundingly lost the first battle in this culture war. Sadly, a listen back to Lethal Weapons today shows it to be a pretty good barometer of the times.

  In an interview for RAM, Barrie Earl was scathing about the end of Suicide. He had a message for all the punks he’d worked with: ‘The dream is over, the dream is over because of their [the bands’] attitudes of “fuck the world, fuck the establishment”; the industry is part of the establishment and that attitude never has and never will work in rock ’n’ roll. What it boils down to is that those bands have not happened. If they had a hit single or a big following, they wouldn’t be complaining! Affinity and strength lies in a band itself. I think they have made a lot of mistakes, they’re fucked and so is their attitude! The last person a band ever blames is themselves . . . We’ve had more press for our bands than any Australian band since the sixties – no band is going to get better treatment. The guys had it dished up for them on a silver platter, they went from playing in their bedrooms, to identity and recognition throughout the whole industry!’69

  After that tirade, journalist Miranda Brown was ‘reminded of a spurned parent’.70 It was a feeling Nick had a special knack for stirring.

  One of the most important things The Boys Next Door gained from the Suicide debacle was a determination to control their own destiny. The other benefit was more basic, but just as significant: stepping outside their comfort zone, which they did while touring hard and playing live in Melbourne’s outer suburbs as well as in Sydney and Adelaide, often to uninterested, if not downright antagonistic, audiences. Clinton Walker observes: ‘Unlike Young Charlatans, The Boys Next Door did not arrive fully formed. They had to go out and play to become the entity they grew into. In 1977 they did, like, six shows. In 1978 they did 100. In 1979 I think it was closer to 200 . . . That’s what made The Boys Next Door and helped lay down the foundations for what became The Birthday Party. It’s exactly what George Young [of The Easybeats and mentor to AC/DC] says, “You’re not a real band till you’ve done 200 gigs.” That gives you real strength. Working in the pubs makes you real tough real fast, if it doesn’t destroy you.’71

  The band was fortunate to gain another crucial supporter in the form of Stephen Cummings, singer for The Sports. An R&B pop band of considerable talent, The Sports were signed directly to Mushroom in Australia. When their Fair Game EP was named ‘Record of the Week’ in the NME back in early 1977, the group was quickly licensed to Stiff Records in the United Kingdom to record an entire album. This was theoretically a good match. Stiff had caught the crossover between joyfully tough English pub rock bands such as Dr Feelgood and Brinsley Schwarz and the punk-rock explosion, pushing artists such as Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Wilko Johnson, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads. The Sports had risen out of the ashes of The Pelaco Brothers in Melbourne and the 1950s-inclined, bohemian counterculture of the Carlton scene. Despite the Suicide label’s fantasies of being just like Stiff, it was actually Mushroom itself and the Carlton scene from which it had grown that were a better match, at least in terms of a crossover musical heritage that involved pub rock, R&B sounds and punk attitude. Bands such a
s The Sports, Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, and a young Paul Kelly walked the line between tradition and this punkier feel, roots rock ’n’ roll with a smirk, a twist and a dose of lyrical intelligence that played well to the university crowds around Carlton throughout the 1970s. According to Stephen Cummings, ‘At the time Australian writers and artists were examining our culture, and celebrating it. We weren’t embarrassed by it.’72

  By 1978, The Sports’ single ‘Who Listens to the Radio?’ would be charting in the American Top 40. Tracy Pew and Phill Calvert could be seen in a video clip dancing along in the chorus. Cummings’ pent-up, alarm-clock stage gestures channelled the best of a neurotic personality whose decisions would unfortunately be the undoing of his very fine band. By way of thanks a decade later, Nick Cave put pen to paper when Cummings was a solo artist: ‘Stevie puts on quite a live show. His signature surrealist wit flashes between songs, reminding me of someone trying to repair a watch wearing boxing gloves!’73

  The Sports took The Boys Next Door on the road with them whenever they could. They also offered them support slots at the Kingston Hotel in Richmond, where The Boys Next Door eventually got a gig of their own. Nick says, ‘We had a residency [there] for about a month on Saturday afternoons . . . where we played two short sets so that the owner could keep the bar open through the day. Live entertainment extended his licence. This bar was truly fucked up. A mix of white trash, derros and a handful of punks who would come along to see the band. It was great actually. I remember walking into the toilet to take a piss between sets and there were two guys in there – one had stabbed the other in the arse with a knife. The stabbed one was walking around with blood running out his trousers going, “He stabbed me in the bloody bum!” The manager sticks his head in the door and I’m like, “I think you’ve got a situation here.” And he says, “Yeah, and you’re supposed to be on stage now.”’

  Nick has what he calls ‘another colourful story’. The Boys Next Door were supporting The Sports in Canberra in mid-1978. ‘We were travelling in the gear truck. We were the support band, so we weren’t living it large,’ says Nick. ‘There was no more room in the front, so me and Tracy were put in the back where all the equipment was piled up, along with an enormous amount of alcohol. Anyway, we started drinking. At some point we thought we needed a piss. We waited and waited for an opportunity, till finally we were on some country road. And right at the moment when we had lifted the roll-up door up fully and started to piss, the truck accelerated and overtook a car. We were like, “What the fuck!” But it was too late for us to stop. We had drunk a lot. Anyway, we finally finished and closed the door again. As it happened, it was a woman who was driving the car behind us, and as it happened, she was also the local policeman’s wife.

  ‘The next thing we knew we were being pulled over by the cops and hauled off to a country jail cell. They knew we had a gig that night in Canberra – and they kept us in the cells long enough to fuck it up for us. Anyway, a court case came out of it, where we had to return. The woman had made a statement that we “masturbated for seven miles” in front of her. They threw that out of court for obvious reasons. But we did miss the show, so the cops did get to punish us in their own way. When we finally got to Canberra on the night itself, hours late, one of the guys in The Sports gave us this big lecture about how “if you ever want to make it in this business, don’t ever do that again”.

  Tracy Pew at the photoshoot for cover of Brave Exhibitions, June 1978 (Michel Lawrence)

  ‘It’s these experiences that form you,’ says Nick. ‘I mean, we did vow never to masturbate for seven miles again, for a start. And after our history with Greg Macainsh and the problems we were still going through then with Les Karski, the other thing we vowed was to never hand over ourselves to a producer again, or to anybody telling us what to do. In future we’d only work in a collaborative way. It took us decades before we let someone come into the studio again . . . We figured we could do it better ourselves if we had the right help.’

  The Suicide label would be officially wound up in December 1978. An embittered Barrie Earl turned to managing one-time Teenage Radio Stars member James Freud as the boy most likely to succeed. Earl had seen early potential in making Nick a pop star by zeroing in on the fact he appeared to cry on stage. A by-product of too much make-up and sweat, those crocodile tears were precisely what the label manager loved to exploit as a marketable gimmick. It was not to be. Pierre Voltaire was amused: ‘Nick was just so difficult compared to James Freud, who did whatever he was told. Nick really frustrated Barrie.’74

  Before the year had ended, every band on the Lethal Weapons compilation bar The Boys Next Door had broken up. This alone gives an indication of their will as a unit. Members of Teenage Radio Stars and JAB mutated into the group Models, a nervy pop-rock band distinguished by Sean Kelly’s nasal, barking snarl and Andrew Duffield’s synth propulsions. They would give The Boys Next Door a run for their money on the live circuit during 1979, and arguably overtake them. Olsen disdained Models and The Boys Next Door as commercial pawns, and took up a more vanguard post with his pulsating new electronic act, Whirlywirld. Three great bands were now taking shape on the Melbourne scene, each seeking to establish their hegemony.

  PART IV

  GOD’S HOTEL

  Shivers

  MELBOURNE

  1978–79

  Bad dreams. Ever since Nick had been sent away from Wangaratta to attend boarding school in Melbourne his sleep had become increasingly disturbed. Now, at the age of twenty-one, the restless nights could beset him for prolonged stretches. There were more reasons than usual for another bout of insomnia at his parents’ house in the second week of 1979. On Wednesday, 10 January, after being awake for days, Nick had finally slept through the morning, or at least experienced an unconscious state that was as good a sleep as any he could have in the circumstances. That afternoon he sat on the balcony outside his bedroom smoking a wake-up cigarette, staring up into the branches of the huge deodar cedar that dominated the front yard. ‘I used to like sitting on the balcony having a fag, so no one would know,’ Nick says. ‘Just sitting there . . . looking at my dear old tree.’

  Downstairs, strangers were speaking to his mother in hushed tones. Smoke curled through Nick’s fingers while he felt the vibrations coming from below.

  ‘I remember it was summer,’ Phill Calvert says. ‘Nick only lived three blocks away in Caulfield North. I caught a tram to his place. I went through a little gate into the backyard and up to the back door. I could see Dawn and Julie through the window, and all these guys in suits. I went in and said, “Hi, Mrs Cave.” Dawn said, “Oh, Phill, we’ve had some bad news. Colin has been killed in a car accident.”

  ‘You’re twenty, twenty-one, you haven’t got the presence of mind to respond. All I could say was, “Is Nick around?” I was just overwhelmed. You think you’re a man when you’re twenty-one? You’re not. Dawn sent me upstairs. I found Nick in his room. The first thing he said to me was, “Let’s get out of here. This is doing my head in.”’1

  There had been a marked acceleration of Nick’s unruly behaviour in the years before Colin Cave’s death. It now looks like someone heading towards a precipice. What that precipice turned out to be no-one could have predicted. It is, of course, easy to turn facts fatal once you cast a retrospective light over them. But it is this way of reading into events that is important to understanding what came later. Two simple but powerful questions emerge across all the years since: Did you forgive your father, Nick? Did you forgive yourself?

  Nick had been wilder than ever during 1978. Given his attitude while attending CIT, he admits, ‘I was outraged that I failed art school [in 1977]. I was mortified that these fuckin’ professors could fail me.’ It’s not hard to see this as a reflection of the paternal conflict Nick was engaged in with his own teacher-father. His anger and recalcitrance, combined with the early success of The Boys Next Door, was like a double-shot of adrenaline.

  Rowland continued to
be stunned by his behaviour. ‘Nick was a real tearaway,’ he says, describing how Nick would climb out of a car Pew was driving and ‘just hang there like a big black spider’2 as they careened on down the sweeping curve of The Boulevard in Port Melbourne. ‘We’d be on our way to a party in two cars that Tracy Pew had stolen,’ confirms friend and fellow musician Greg Perano, ‘and you’d look across and see Nick on the roof. He used to do it all the time.’3

  One incident stands out. Pew, unfortunately, was not behind the wheel. Rowland and Nick had been drinking and taking Serepax. The pair hitched a ride with a fan after a Boys Next Door show at the Tiger Lounge. Nick did his usual trick, opening the car door at high speed and clambering out on top of the vehicle. For a joke, Rowland told the driver to hit the brakes, not really expecting him to do so. In one version of the story, Rowland admits the driver probably hit the brakes ‘because he was so scared of us’. Nick came off instantly, rolling over the bonnet and skidding across the road on his back. ‘I don’t think he was wearing a shirt at the time,’ Rowland said, ‘or if he was, he wasn’t afterwards.’ It left a permanent scar down Nick Cave’s back. More than fifteen years later, Howard would say, ‘He’s never forgiven me.’ In telling this story, the guitarist emphasised, ‘Nick enjoys taking risks. He probably wouldn’t take a risk if he thought he’d wind up dead. Nick doesn’t have some asinine “death wish”, but a craving for more . . . It’s as if real life just doesn’t measure up, so he feels obliged to increase its sensory qualities.’4