by Mark Mordue
Rowland Howard always insisted that The Boys Next Door had a finely tuned pop sensibility. The show-stopping intensity of ‘Somebody’s Watching’ live, with its fearless use of Beach Boys–style backing vocals, confirms this perception, however gun-shy the band were about being perceived as just another pop group. There certainly weren’t many acts coming out of the local punk scene making sophisticated use of vocal harmonies and viciously camp showmanship. Nick’s emphatic singing style drew on repeated listenings to what became known as ‘the Berlin Quartet’ – Bowie’s Low and Heroes and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and Lust For Life – which had all come out in 1977 and were, Clinton Walker says, ‘totally part of the air around Melbourne wherever you went’.34 Given his aspirations to be a Sinatra of darkness in the same futuristic league as Bowie, Pop and Ferry, Nick was going to find appearing like yesterday’s power-pop man on Door, Door very hard to swallow when the reviews came in. What really made him and the Boys sneer at Karski’s production was that it put all the focus on their professional shine and none on their artistic shadow.
‘Roman, Roman’ was the throwaway anomaly in Nick’s suite of songs, a hyperactive punk polka eulogising the renowned film director who’d fled the United States after being charged with the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977. This was Nick flexing his Lolita obsession, as well as a schoolboy humour in lyrics that would not be out of place in Viz magazine35, even if the polka tune showed a surprising conceptual wit given Polanski’s Polish background. Playing it live with the band, Nick freely adapted the chorus into an on-stage declaration of love, changing Polanski’s first name for ‘Rowland, Rowland’.
On the album version of ‘Somebody’s Watching’, Nick buried the word ‘Mona’ with a groan and emphasised ‘Lisa’ with a sexual gasp. Rowland was obviously not the only one to have noticed Lisa Craswell moving through their midst. It’s unlikely Nick wrote the line for her, but he was becoming adept at retooling a reference to any moment that suited him. Be it for Craswell, Howard or the entire Tiger Lounge scene, Nick was nothing if not charming when he chose to be, drawing in everyone and everything around him.
Side two was Rowland S Howard’s turn to display his wares. ‘After a Fashion’ opened with a blatant Richard Lloyd–Television guitar sound. Phill Calvert admits, ‘When Rowland started playing it we all looked at each other and thought, “Can we do this?”’36 The influence of Marquee Moon on Rowland’s playing may have been obvious, but it was addictive to hear and highly confident. Tony Cohen’s engineering work also gave the music a presence that was lacking on side one. ‘After a Fashion’ would become a staple of the band’s set, with Michael Gudinski of Mushroom keen to make it the first single off the album. ‘I Mistake Myself’ was the most startling of Rowland’s new songs, an awkward, brooding contemplation of the nature of identity, suspended over Tracy Pew’s stealthy bass line. It made Nick’s lyrics seem decidedly shallow. Philosophically, the album was a battle between side one’s ‘How do I look?’ and side two’s ‘Who am I?’
One was more energetic and fun (Nick), but the other cut much deeper (Rowland). ‘I Mistake Myself’ was the most English-sounding track on the record, and would not have been out of place on an early album by The Cure. Howard was bringing an even greater pop sensibility to the band, but his perspective had atmospheric and existential qualities that felt very contemporary. The Boys Next Door gained new poise in the process. The band began to look like a serious proposition, and Nick’s star would shine all the stronger as a result of Rowland’s song-writing sophistication.
The lack of fresh material from Nick was odd in comparison to Howard’s rush of blood. Rowland was progressing and producing at a rate of knots; Nick seemed to have stopped altogether. Never previously unproductive, Nick would excuse himself by saying, ‘I went through a dry spell.’ Come early 1979, the wind had been taken out of Nick Cave’s sails for very understandable reasons. Apart from the sudden death of his father, a number of other factors were in play: Anita Lane’s noted distaste for Nick’s ‘stupid’ lyrics; the highbrow influence of Tony Clark’s salon; the battering of Nick’s vocal confidence at the hands of Macainsh and Karski as producers; and, finally, Rowland’s vividly superior swathe of songs. All of this caused a withdrawal by Nick as he reassessed what he was capable of, both as a writer and, just as importantly, as a singer.
Early photo session in Nick’s bedroom just after Rowland S Howard joined The Boys Next Door, 1978 (Peter Milne)
For the new sessions with Tony Cohen, Nick had only one worthwhile contribution, the off-kilter fairground swirl of ‘Dive Position’ – an erotic lament inspired by his passionate, if already stormy, relationship with Anita. The song’s dissonant organ-grinder construction was a naïve hint of the dark circus Nick would later bring to fruition in ‘The Carny’, while its connections between grief and sexual comfort – with a sly lyrical reference to The Doors’ ‘Touch Me’ – suggested it was a very new song for Nick, and a radical advance on anything he had written before. The use of abstract and fragmented imagery to camouflage, as well as broaden, his intimate concerns would be an important strategy in the future. Strangely, the song was written a few months before Nick’s father was killed, not afterwards, as the lyrics might imply. It’s hard to know who is crying for what in the song, only that an immersion into pleasure is needed to exorcise uncertainty and pain, and that this pain can even heighten ecstasy as Nick cries out to be touched again. Horror and desire are never far from one another, a tension that would stay with Nick for a long time.
The last track on the album was to become Nick Cave’s first transcendent moment as a recording artist. Yet when he was interviewed for the 2011 memorial documentary Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard, Nick admitted to regrets over his decision to sing ‘Shivers’. ‘I was never able to do that song justice, especially back then. Rowland must have been squirming,’ he said, laughing, ‘every time I sang it . . . I wish he had sung that, actually. I wish he had sung that when we recorded that because it was his. It was his song. He should have sung that.’37
Howard came to despise Nick’s ‘hammy and overblown’38 reading. In Young Charlatans, and again when he was a solo artist, the guitarist’s vocal put a caustic spin on the words. Cave’s interpretation withdraws Howard’s stinging disdain, although the guitarist’s flattened voice tended to give everything that same droll edge. Demos recorded for a never-undertaken Young Charlatans album reveal that Howard was just as capable of taking his own snarl to camp extremes, but he gets it right, too. Howard’s best interpretations make it clear that ‘Shivers’ is a fuck-you song: a revenge fantasy that says, ‘I could kill myself for you, but you are not worth it’ – and notes how amusing it is even to have considered such dramas. Nick croons ‘Shivers’ in a way that is singularly haunted and grand and right on the edge. Oddly, it is this same excess of passion – an almost marble sheen to Nick’s quavering baritone – that brings the song closer to the theme of death, even if it obscures the snarling energy Howard felt it required.39 Ollie Olsen would find it strange that what became the definitive punk song of the era was in fact a ballad. But he would also pinpoint something very precise: ‘It captures that whole St Kilda thing. Historically, that’s where the song lives.’40
Pierre Voltaire disputes Howard’s assertions as to how it should have been delivered. ‘Rowland only decided the song was meant to be ironic after, you know. I don’t think that was necessarily how it was when he first wrote it.’41 Rowland’s former Young Charlatans bandmate Jeffrey Wegener continued to describe ‘Shivers’ over thirty years later as ‘absolutely romantic’.42 Bruce Milne says, ‘Listening back to it, I realised “Shivers” is very directly an attempt at writing a song in a Roxy Music style – it has that whole ennui, Roxy kinda vibe. You can imagine Bryan Ferry in a suit singing it. But Rowland was not really comfortable with doing that sort of thing. Nick had that self-confidence, the sense of movement on a stage, the charisma to pull it off.’43
Mick Harvey do
esn’t accept anyone’s recriminations – or regrets. ‘When it comes to the singing of “Shivers”, Rowland should have been more vocal about it at the time. I think he is right about Nick’s singing of the song, but he is turning around and saying it with the benefit of hindsight. He let it happen, so he is culpable too. I was sitting there as a passive observer and I could hear how Nick was singing it. Which was not tongue-in-cheek. But where were those criticisms of Nick at the time when, perhaps, they were needed? You do have to be careful where and when you choose to criticise a singer; you can’t be on their case all the time because it will create fractures. Nick now thinks he overemoted? When did he stop over-emoting!’ Harvey laughs. ‘Being overblown is a part of Nick’s historical practice. The thing is, I think most singers do over-emote. A part of what is great about Nick is his vocal performance, and the way he pushes it hard into an area where you have to deal with him. There’s a purpose behind what he is doing.’44 Clinton Walker believes that Rowland had ‘already peaked as a songwriter. At that stage he was way ahead of Nick. Nick and Mick, of course, would overtake him.’45
‘Shivers’ would emerge as the anthem of the Crystal Ballroom generation, a sob-soaked love ballad from what sounds like the hallowed halls of St Kilda’s punk-rock mausoleum. The song defined Nick as the Romantic hero of the era and a star in the making. ‘It was something so total, and it was loved by everybody,’ Nick said, ‘and it talked to everybody like a great song is supposed to do. But, on the other hand, you write that, you can hang your fucking guitar up and do something else, it’s so accomplished.’46
Rowland would see this very differently. He’d find himself harnessing, and eventually suppressing, his talents in order to write only songs that Nick could sing. Within a few years he’d admit to forgetting how to write anything that came from inside him. His guitar would have to do that soul work for him. And he’d make it cry and scream.
Though Door, Door would carry a dedication of gratitude to ‘our mentor, Barry [sic] Earle’, the reality was they were completely without management by the time of the January recordings.47 For all their popularity at the Ballroom, The Boys Next Door were caught in a record deal they didn’t like with a company they had not originally signed to, and had been buffeted from one studio to the next without much ability to assert their own direction. The decision to self-produce side two of Door, Door with Tony Cohen’s engineering assistance was a step towards autonomy, but, as Mick Harvey says, ‘we were still tripping over our own feet. We didn’t really know what we were doing in the studio.’48
Keith Glass had always liked The Boys Next Door, but now he was starting to perceive greatness in the band. ‘I remember going to see them one of the first times Rowland played with them,’ he says. ‘It was a fairly dramatic improvement and change in direction. But it wasn’t all Rowland. They’d got him in so the rest of them could grow musically.’49
The Suicide label had taken a short-term and gimmicky attitude; Mushroom, according to Glass, ‘had no idea’. ‘The band were turning into the biggest drawing act in the city and no-one knew what to do with them.’ He couldn’t stand it. Having just returned from a visit to London in late January, Glass was convinced The Boys Next Door needed to get to England as soon as possible. His record store, Missing Link, was booming; Phill Calvert was keeping him in the know about the band’s plight. ‘So I made an offer to manage The Boys Next Door, with an eye to eventually recording them as well.’50 He also promised to have them in London before another twelve months went by.
Glass’s plan was manna from heaven. Though they’d slowly come to regard each other with suspicion and even contempt, Mick Harvey admits, ‘Keith was “cool”. He had this aura about him that is hard to put a finger on. He was probably only in his late twenties when we met him, but he’d done so much compared to us. He had a business, a record shop, and he was going to start a record label of his own. He seemed to know everyone worth knowing in the music industry, and a lot about music too. He always used to say to us that one of our biggest advantages was that we had a really strong rhythm section, that a lot of punk bands didn’t have a strong rhythm section. He said it’s what makes you convincing. And he was right. With a great rhythm section, even if your ideas aren’t strong, you have a strong platform from which they can spring and develop.’51
The Missing Link record store owner began his management tenure by expanding the band’s musical palette considerably. Glass introduced The Boys Next Door to the obscene agit-prop folk collages of The Fugs and to Captain Beefheart’s surreal rock-blues-jazz abrasions, along with obscurely comic, thuggish and horny rockabilly songs. Glass rolls his eyes and says, ‘The Bowie thing was so prevalent then among all the young bands. If you think Bowie is the lynchpin of modern music, you’re in serious trouble.’52
Nick and Rowland were meanwhile immersing themselves in Dadaist art and literature, and this, combined with a passion for radically new young bands such as The Pop Group and Pere Ubu, tilted them towards weirdly primitive funk and garage jazz sounds that splintered what they were doing musically. Glass’s ‘little record-playing sessions’ emphasised a renewing physicality and aggression to match the intellectualised and fey deconstructions that were taking root. A strong sense of musical history was being developed that was counter to the obsessions with art theory, fragmentation and futurist progress. Mick Harvey says, ‘We took all these different directions. We were very impressionable at that time. A new record would come along and Nick would write three songs like it. But they are all kind of accidental developments anyway. As much as Nick and Rowland were overly influenced by Pere Ubu and The Pop Group, it was nonetheless a kind of freeing up in the way you could approach things.’53
Nick was thoroughly into The Pop Group’s first single, ‘She Is Beyond Good and Evil’, a bass-shaking 12-inch vinyl release that used its dub-production sound like a weapon. But he would describe their second single, ‘We Are All Prostitutes’, as ‘the great Pop Group song’. A deeply political act who combined free jazz and funk influences with a ferocious punk sensibility, The Pop Group would be credited by The Guardian with ‘almost single-handedly’ jolting the era into its post-punk phase. ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ stepped up their assault on consumerism as a disease of complicity. Songwriter and singer Mark Stewart was into revolutionary ideals, ideologically and aesthetically. Nick was taken in by the anger, if not the politics. ‘It had everything that I think rock ’n’ roll should have,’ he said. ‘It was violent, paranoid music for a kind of violent, paranoid time. I’ve been listening to a lot, actually, recently, and it just gets me in exactly the same way. Even talking about it.’54
Ironically, Nick had nursed a distrust of the punk phenomenon, dating from the day Elvis Presley died and Johnny Rotten declared his joy. Both he and Rowland were conscious of punk becoming a genre rather than a philosophy, a packaging that ensured its limits rather than its possibilities. The evidence of that was made explicit to them when Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ iconic former bassist, was found dead from a heroin overdose at the Chelsea Hotel in New York on 2 February 1979. He had allegedly committed suicide after murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, the previous October in a death pact gone wrong. This murky, inept story played into a ghoulishly moronic reduction of punk’s formerly subversive edges. By then cast as ‘a leading punk in Melbourne’, Nick Cave was contacted by both The Truth newspaper and the Willesee at 7 news show to offer his comments on the death of Sid Vicious. He wisely refused the opportunity to be identified as a grieving spokesperson for the so-called ‘Blank Generation’. Soon afterwards, Nick told Roadrunner, ‘The people who don’t know anything about young music still consider us punk.’55
Mick Harvey states: ‘There were a lot of groups around. The initial excitement of ’77 had kind of given way to a mixture of pragmatism and delusion, and a cynicism about movements. So many groups had their own vision by 1979. Instead of being derivative, they really found their feet, their own voice. But they seemed t
o have a common purpose, which was to present something original.’56
Of much greater interest to Nick than the death of Sid Vicious that February was the painter John Nixon’s newly opened Arts Projects, an exhibition and performance space in a rundown office building at 566 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. Together with Tony Clark and others, Nixon encouraged a passion for muzak and the tape recorder in performance pieces and installations at his gallery. Clark and Nixon came up with exhibition projects such as Invisible Music, which ‘denied to any piece of music injected into the public domain any autonomy or authorship’.57 They also developed what they called an anti-music opera entitled Towards New Horizons. Their manifesto favoured minimal and ‘roomy’ sounds, to use a favoured buzzword, emphasising amateur and random creations from a non-studio environment. The outcomes were surprisingly ambient and tuneful, akin to crudely realised Brian Eno compositions. Clark would take Nick down to Arts Projects of a weekday afternoon, where Nick was fascinated by the idea of random music by nonmusicians. In some cases this was completely self-generated once the cassette player and synth technology had been switched on and programmed. Suitably impressed, Nick began to practise synthesiser himself.
Lyrically, Nick was feeding off similarly radical influences at work on the Melbourne poetry scene. On his gallery crawls he picked up random copies of Born to Concrete, a literary magazine dedicated to ‘concrete’ poetry (later known as ‘visual’ or ‘shape’ poetry). The movement had originated in Brazil in the 1960s and had an enduring impact on the more avant-garde corners of the Melbourne writing world. Exploiting typography, visual puns, word games, collage and repetition, it appealed to the artist in Nick as much as the poet-lyricist. The emphasis on the written word as a physical entity supported the absurdist and futurist doctrines he and Rowland were exploring, and appealed to their innate graphic-art interests.
