Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Increasing competition with Ollie Olsen’s Whirlywirld and the burgeoning North Fitzroy ‘Little Bands’ scene on the other side of the Yarra River underlined the need to absorb such new possibilities. Sometimes dubbed ‘the North Fitzroy Beat’, the Little Bands were floating, anarchist-inspired aggregations that performed rapid-fire, fifteen-minute sets (or less) under names such as Thrush and the Cunts, The JP Sartre Band, Oroton Bags and Too Fat to Fit Through the Door. Even Whirlywirld, who were based next door to the shopfront warehouse where all these acts germinated and disappeared again, were considered refined and careerist by comparison with these built-to-self-destruct acts.

  One Little Band, however, emerged with a more dedicated agenda: Primitive Calculators, who practised relentlessly with their drum machines and synthesisers. Clinton Walker reckons ‘seeing them live was the first time I ever saw a band use a drum machine’.58 Ardent communists, they had been the prime movers behind the whole Little Band concept, sharing their instruments and warehouse so that what were often pretty chaotic performances could take place. Despite the anti-professional ethos, two major groups would evolve out of the creative debris: Hunters & Collectors and Dead Can Dance.

  Primitive Calculators regarded the Crystal Ballroom gang in St Kilda as bourgeois lightweights. To them, The Boys Next Door were about as musically radical as Duran Duran. Ironically, Richard Lowenstein’s filmic tribute to the Little Bands era, Dogs in Space, leaned on The Boys Next Door glamour via the true-life narrative of another quasi–Little Band act called the Ears, who had a foot in both the St Kilda and North Fitzroy camps. In the film, Michael Hutchence’s character is based on the Ears singer Sam Sejavka, who in turn was channelling a young Nick Cave at the time in his own performances.

  As for Primitive Calculators, they conceived of themselves as a nasty electronic ‘boogie band’, according to central figure Stuart Grant, dedicated to ‘setting people free of the capitalist yoke’ and ‘trying to find a note to make people shit their pants’.59 Live, this meant they could be devastatingly intense or dominant to the point of repugnance. Soon enough their nihilist musical revolution would see them consume themselves in heroin and speed use, wiping out whatever promise Primitive Calculators might have allowed for themselves. Perhaps they were not so different from their bourgeois enemies after all.

  Nick may have felt some kinship with the raging Dadaist imperatives that drove the Little Bands scene in North Fitzroy, but he was made well aware ‘that we [The Boys Next Door] were not welcome there’. Even so, the activity and friction fuelled the energy of both scenes and further inspired the direction The Boys Next Door were headed in.

  Nick had formed a muck-around band called Little Cuties with Vicki Bonet. This was the same woman Deborah Thomas had seen throwing mincemeat from the stage during The Boys Next Door’s debut performance of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ at the Tiger Lounge. Pierre Voltaire says, ‘Vicki was quite overweight. She dressed like Divine. She had a doctor who prescribed her Duromine, which was pure amphetamine, in vitamin-sized bottles, the most phenomenal speed. She’d share them with us.’ In Little Cuties, Pierre says, ‘Vicki sang, Nick played organ, Rowland played bass, Gen [McGuckin] guitar, Mick drums, and I played guitar. We did [Kraftwerk’s] “Hall of Mirrors” and “The Model”, but they were like AC/DC versions, and then we did a really soft version of an AC/DC song, I can’t remember what. We collapsed the speakers at a rehearsal studio in North Melbourne we were so drunk and playing so loud. We were just enjoying the freedom of instruments we didn’t know how to play. We crashed the sound system at a party. We crashed the sound system at the Crystal Ballroom. It was great. It was really just this altruistic thing of doing for the love of each other and to thank Vicki for all the pizzas she bought us.’60

  Door, Door would not appear till the end of May 1979. Dave Graney describes the relationship between the album and The Boys Next Door’s live shows as ‘really schizophrenic, they’d changed so much live since recording it’.61 By then the band was exploring more abstract and experimental territory in new songs such as Nick’s ‘A Catholic Skin’ (Nick was Anglican, but no matter, it sounded good) and Rowland’s ‘Death by Drowning’. Jim Thirlwell, later to start making his reputation overseas as a brutalist composer under pseudonyms including Clint Ruin and Foetus, thought ‘Door, Door did not capture just how good they [The Boys Next Door] really were. They had already stamped their own identity on their sound. They were extremely charismatic and exciting. You didn’t get that, it was not even close. Not even 50 per cent.’62

  Asked to help devise an advertisement that might promote the album, Nick and Rowland came back with the slogan ‘Drunk on the Pope’s Blood’. This was not quite the tagline Mushroom were looking for. As Howard said, ‘They thought we were completely insane. We thought it was really funny. It didn’t occur to us that anybody would be offended by it, ’cause the only people who read the rock press . . . well, I guess Catholics read the rock press too.’63 Pope’s Blood was actually pink gin, a cocktail mixed at the Ballroom.

  It would not be long before Nick began what would become his standard process of destroying anything in his history that he felt did not warrant further investigation. In a 1982 edition of Rolling Stone Australia, he looked back on 1979 as if from an eyrie on a faraway past. ‘We were adolescents and very late developers. There was a period where we were confused and had a lot of problems and we put out an album like Door, Door which is a product of all those things. I mean, it was a complete wet dream that record. I hate it. It reeks of a band trying to be musically intelligent and write clever, witty lyrics. It’s a complete wank.’64

  The album sold dismally, only 2000 copies. Nick told fanzine The Offense, ‘It was obvious we were a flop. A big flop.’65 Many years on, he laughs about that and says, ‘Michael Gudinski was disappointed we didn’t sound like Plastic Bertrand and that no-one on the record had a song like “Ça Plane Pour Moi” [aka ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’].’

  Tony Cohen was less dismissive of Door, Door. ‘You know, even though the guys say it is not a great record, we were learning. It changed my life, man. Just the total disrespect they showed for how things should be done in the studio. Overnight I went from a hippie to a punk because of it. They changed too. We all did as time moved on. It was a constant thing,’ he said. You could still see the enthusiastic boy in Cohen as he spoke about those early days: the long, lank dark hair, by then streaked with grey, and a teenage hunched quality, as if the boy he’d once been was suddenly time-warped forward into the body of an older man. ‘Door, Door was the beginning,’ Cohen said, with what seemed like a note of ominous idealism. ‘And I still like those songs. I think we did pretty good overall. I mean, we did “Shivers”, for a fucking start.’66

  Viewing Door, Door through the lens of The Birthday Party’s later achievements, the English critic Barney Hoskyns later described it as ‘a spite marriage of the Ramones and XTC’.67 Clinton Walker would reflect that ‘it was one half of a good record’, that half being ‘Rowland’s side’. Reviews were positive at the time in Australia, but the fact none of those reviews arrived in the mainstream music press till December 1979, more than six months after the album’s release, indicates how insignificant The Boys Next Door were to the local industry. In Rolling Stone Australia, Toby Creswell pinpointed a few obvious references: David Bowie, Roxy Music and Ultravox. That last comparison horrified the group, who always conceived of themselves as standing apart from the punk mob and felt they were already pushing into avant-garde territory – only to be now cast in with Ultravox and the latest pop fad, New Romanticism.

  The most telling insight into Door, Door came from Andrew McMillan in RAM. He saw the record as highly promising, if hamstrung by what he called ‘the English sound of ’77’. He linked this to Nick’s vocals and made a surprising comparison with Jim Cairns, the idealistic anti-Vietnam campaigner, left-wing economist and former Labor Party deputy prime minister of the Whitlam era. McMillan likened Nick’s singing
in 1979 to Cairns’ iconic resignation speech in 1975, hearing in each case the sound of man who ‘believed in himself so much you could hear him bleed’.68

  The cover art for Door, Door was drawn from an obscure 1934 Expressionist play called The Hangman. Nick borrowed the image from a book owned by the girl who had smashed the glass to get the red chair on the night he was arrested. The play is based on a 1933 novel of the same name by the Nobel Prize–winning Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist. A deeply anti-totalitarian work, it combines visionary and philosophical passages that merge Lagerkvist’s trademark black humour into a stream of haunting loneliness. Lagerkvist influenced Camus, encouraging the notion that rebellion could be a creative act in itself, a necessary path to take against overwhelming despair and meaninglessness. Certainly, Nick’s self-belief helped him to rebel against the harrowing set of circumstances he’d just come through. As Anita Lane later observed, ‘Nick’s got this incredible drive that’s got him through everything. He’s a workaholic. When we were younger I thought it was something he’d grow out of and get over. He really wanted to impress his father and wanted him to think he was clever. His father would just laugh at him, he wouldn’t take any notice. When his father died I wondered what was going to happen to Nick’s drive, but it just got stronger.’69

  Flight from Death

  MELBOURNE

  1979

  The crowds flooding into the Ballroom meant big money. Within six months of opening its doors to Melbourne’s underground music scene, the hotel’s managers told Dolores San Miguel she would no longer be needed. The Boys Next Door and Whirlywirld played a farewell show for her on 13 January 1979, five days after the death of Colin Cave. Recordings for Door, Door filled out the rest of the month. On 3 February The Boys Next Door joined with The Sports to relaunch the venue under Laurie Richards, an innovative booking promoter who had been running the Tiger Lounge with an ear to Keith Glass’s sage advice. San Miguel was a little surprised by the speed with which she could be dispensed. After successfully launching a series of smaller rooms around the city she would be invited back in March the following year to help manage Ballroom bookings again: a marriage of her taste and connections with hard-hearted business, though of course it’s never that simple.

  It was Laurie Richards who officially renamed the venue the Crystal Ballroom; Richards who brought in closed-circuit televisions so people downstairs could watch what was happening in the main room above; Richards who invited the postmodern pop artists Philip Brophy and Maria Kozic to paint a mural in the newly opened lounge area. In every way he enhanced the voyeurism and spectacle, escalating the mood and expanding the venue’s possibilities. ‘But you wouldn’t imagine Laurie was a mover and shaker,’ Mick Harvey says. ‘He just saw the numbers and followed his nose. Dolores knew what needed to get booked, and the venue had that feel, some sensitivity to what was going on there.’1

  Artist Jenny Watson agrees: ‘It was a wonderful vision Dolores had.’ Despite her ousting, the Crystal Ballroom continued to feed off San Miguel’s original vision for the rest of the year, following her lead on acts such as Crime and the City Solution, the Ears (who would inspire the 1986 Richard Lowenstein film Dogs in Space)2, and, upon her return, a promising Brisbane band called The Go-Betweens. Bronwyn Bonney says: ‘The air was charged, like some weird alchemy was going on – rare qualities gathered, concentrated and combined in one bunch of people who seemed all sparkling with brilliance. Like a little treasure trove of gems – so beautifully cut, so eye-catching, and giving off a lovely prismatic light. That was how the Ballroom felt to me.’3 Off to the sides, Bonney admits, shadows were looming: ‘There was a lot of damage in there too, a lot of mental fragility, an undercurrent of nihilism that got stronger as the initial energy wore off. And there was a cliquey, snobbish incrowd thing socially. And in time there was a horrible epidemic of addiction. But that was later.’4

  Cultural critic Ashley Crawford was just becoming immersed in the scene. Compressing the next five years of the Ballroom into what feels like one dazzling evening, Crawford describes how ‘a smattering of artists who would become substantial if not major figures in the Melbourne, national and, at times, even international art world made up a good percentage of the audience. John Nixon, then dating Watson, would attempt to outdo Tony Clark in melancholy black. Clark would stand to the rear, arms crossed in regal bearing as though passing judgement over some Grecian legal ritual, a perpetual scowl imprinted on his visage. [Painter] Howard Arkley, with spotted tie, would sport the only facial hair in the room. The venue would be filled with younger art students, a veritable who’s who of new talent, including Brett Colquhoun, Jon Cattapan, Greg Ades, Stephen Bush, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Nick Seymour, Maria Kozic, Peter Tyndall, John Matthew, Megan Bannister, Peter Walsh, Stephen Eastaugh and Andrew Browne, along with playwright Tobsha Learner, photographer Polly Borland, writer Stephanie Holt and filmmakers-to-be Richard Lowenstein and John Hillcoat; it was, in effect, a breeding ground for a new generation.’5

  When speaking of The Boys Next Door and the circles that moved around them, Bruce Milne smiles uneasily. Speed and booze were enough for him; mixing cough syrup with alcohol had never appealed, and when people began shooting up, Milne says, ‘I started to back off. Everyone in that gang was always looking for a new kind of kick.’6 How much Nick Cave might be blamed for those kicks is hard to say. ‘Nick definitely started the Faulkner craze,’ Pierre Voltaire says sarcastically. ‘The old novel-in-the-back-pocket trick, we all tried that.’7

  According to Rowland S Howard, ‘Nick tried heroin some time in 1979.’8 Anecdotally this date can be narrowed down to between early January and Door, Door’s release in May. ‘Nick always drank and took speed a lot,’ Howard said. ‘He’d tried heroin a few times before introducing it to me through a friend who was a part-time user. Heroin came at the right time for me, and for an extended period of time I was able to take it on a daily basis, leading inevitably to a habit. The effects of speed and alcohol can be devastating in concentrated amounts, but since heroin lets you keep going and makes you feel good without apparent side-effects [sic], it’s easy to keep taking it if the supply is there.’9

  Any suggestion that Nick took heroin to anaesthetise his grief is something he disputes strongly. ‘I was already on my way. It was going to happen,’ Nick says. ‘Certainly within the crowd I operated in, heroin was the drug of choice. It was cheap and it was effective and it was freely available. At that point it felt like something I wanted to dedicate myself to. And there was a seismic shift in my whole life. Funnily enough, I thought everybody shot up, I just assumed with people I moved around in that was the case. But that wasn’t the case.’

  Mick Harvey and Nick Cave at the Crystal Ballroom, late 1970s (Peter Milne)

  Nick can still remember the first time he tried it. ‘I was standing on the corner where the National Theatre is, at the crossroads . . . Pierre rocked up with his . . . girlfriend and said, “We’ve just been down to Fitzroy Street and bought some heroin. You wanna take it?” I said, “Fuck, yeah.” I chopped it out on the fire hydrant right there and then on the street. Of course it didn’t do anything. It doesn’t do anything for a while. You have to be quite dedicated to be a junkie, really. Anyway, we did that and then we found Genevieve [McGuckin] and Lisa [Craswell] and went and got another $50 bag. For me it seemed to be the logical step.

  ‘Some weeks later, we were at a friend’s house. These bikers were there. We had bought some smack. Anyway, we stopped in the lounge room to find somewhere to start chopping it out. This biker looks at us and says, “What the fuck are you doing? Come over here.” And he got his syringe out and’ – Nick makes a stabbing gesture into his arm – ‘BANG. Something happened in that moment. Everything changed, at the time I thought for the better, I’m not so sure now . . .

  ‘The thing about it is, it for me was a way to separate myself from what else was going on around me. And that’s what happens for sure with heroin. Alcohol initially makes you
more gregarious. It integrates you into society. Heroin separates you, and on some level that was really attractive.’

  Anne Tsoulis was an aspiring filmmaker working on the door at the Ballroom. As the girlfriend of Garry Gray of Negatives (née Reals), she had watched The Boys Next Door go from debuting rowdily at Ashburton Hall to dominating the Tiger Lounge, before bursting onto the Crystal Ballroom stage and stretching their tentacles across the country, all in barely more than a year. Tsoulis was not impressed. ‘Nick knew he was a star at nineteen. He’d visit our flat and he’d always come with an entourage; it drove me crazy. He’d make the same type of entry at the Ballroom: Nick, followed by Rowland, followed by admirers, followed by the girls,’ she says. ‘I have memories of walking over Nick Cave and his mob passed out on my loungeroom floor as I’d be scrabbling over them to get to the door to work – that’s when I was living with Garry Gray. Garry used to make me hide my Joni Mitchell and Tim Buckley and Carole King albums before they came over. It was all so self-conscious, and it was Nick that set that elitist bullshit. Too many drugs were going down and, really, Nick was at the centre of it all, because if you didn’t take heroin you weren’t cool like Nick – a very sad fact, and why I’ve never been a fan.’10

  The flow of heroin into the Crystal Ballroom increased rapidly as 1979 progressed. Bruce Milne says, ‘It seemed to happen overnight and suddenly it was everywhere.’11 Legend has it that a spoon was permanently hidden in the last cubicle of the women’s toilets to facilitate cooking up the drug. The nature of heroin married itself to the venue’s atmosphere to confirm a submerged and otherworldly intensity. Everything was blossoming and getting darker. Ashley Crawford writes extravagantly of how the Ballroom’s entrance was ‘via a gamut of passed-out drunks, semiconscious junkies, syringes piercing skin, a slick swamp of vomit, and a littering of Victoria Bitter cans. This was the St Kilda of the damned, long before polished floorboards and café latte. This was still the St Kilda of [painter] Albert Tucker’s visions of Good and Evil, prostitutes loitering in the dim light of tram stops, a world of the living dead. At the time Tucker still lived around the corner and could often be spied stalking the streets, glowering at all around him.’12