Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  It’s not uncommon for heroin users in the early stages of addiction to experience visionary side effects, or what are described as waking dreams. Going ‘on the nod’ can involve the illusion of things continuing after one has unplugged from the world; returning to consciousness can have a slipstream effect, your dream extending into reality before dissipating. It is possible that initiations into heroin had social, and even cultural, equivalents to these ‘waking dreams’ at the Crystal Ballroom when so many people began experimenting with it at around the same time. Disorders such as insomnia are the flipside to this during withdrawal from the drug, when users are locked out of sleep and any sweetness it may have once offered. For Nick, the lockout would become a way of life. He’d turn to his father’s literary light, Vladimir Nabokov, for insight into the problem, if not quite consolation. ‘I call insomnia my third life. Waking life, sleeping life, and the in-between life. Nabokov talks about insomnia and always wished he had a third side to roll on to,’ he says. Nick may have learned to live and work with his insomnia in the longer run, but in these early days he was only just beginning to ‘wake up and crawl the walls’.

  The insights of William Burroughs, one of the most articulate modern writers on addiction, have special resonance for such drug-fuelled highs and lows among the crowds entering the Ballroom. In a 1965 conversation with The Paris Review, the Junky author discusses the nature of morphine and heroin as painkillers, and their inherent tendency to disable and anaesthetise creative activities and dreaming. And he describes the phenomenon of ‘heroin dreams’, a kind of afterburn image or effect that involves hallucinations in day-to-day life. But, as Burroughs rightly points out, this is merely an interim state before heavy addiction sets in and the capacity for all dreaming – conscious and unconscious – is for the most part extinguished, and one becomes truly stoned.13

  Nick was paying a lot of attention to the heroin-warmed, dreamlike spaces he was starting to move through, even if hindsight imbues his vision with a curious documentary flatness many years later. ‘The prostitutes used to work what was loosely called the Devil’s Triangle – Fitzroy Street, Acland Street and Barkly Street,’ he says. ‘Running through the centre of the triangle was Grey Street, where most of the hooker cruising action was. There were motels along Carlisle Street that rented by the hour, or just quick car jobbies. It wasn’t organised like the Cross – no neon, no glamour, no tourists – just hookers and junkies and wasted youth and businessmen getting into trouble, fish-and-chip shops selling dim sims – which we lived on – pawn shops where I would hock my rings and studio equipment later, over and over again, to get money to score – the best ones were in Prahran. When I started, it was pre-AIDS, so there wasn’t even a needle exchange. On the corner of Grey Street and Fitzroy Street was the strip bar with a giant sign that said “This Is The Show” – capitals HUGE, so it said ‘TITS’. Fitzroy Street is where smack was dealt, in particular the St Kilda Cafe, a fish-and-chip shop that eventually drilled holes in the spoons so the junkies couldn’t use them to shoot up in the toilet out back or, indeed, steal them.’

  Greg Perano, who would go on to co-found Hunters & Collectors, describes the St Kilda Cafe as ‘not that big, and a little claustrophobic. It was a classic fifties cafe gone to seed, not unlike the one that Iggy [Pop] and Tom [Waits] meet at in the Jim Jarmusch film Coffee and Cigarettes [2003]. It had those high-backed chairs up against each other and tables with Formica surfaces. A view of the street didn’t come into the equation. You didn’t stay long. Most people were in and out for the “special” sugar with their take-away coffee.

  ‘I didn’t partake myself,’ Perano emphasises, ‘as my first experience was a near-death one which put me off the stuff for life, but it did not seem a big deal at the time. The people who owned the place were pretty heavy but they treated us well. They would always give you a coffee or a snack if you were broke. I guess it was a good way to keep in with the clients. The local street girls were always in there as well. They were all good to us, really. At that time, if you were Mr or Mrs Suburban Straight Citizen, you did not really fit into St Kilda. The underworld has always seemed to treat eccentrics with a little respect. No-one from the Ballroom was ever going to muscle in on the drug scene in St Kilda! They were great days. Those suburbs are always at their best when they have gone to seed and the bohemians move in.’14

  Bronwyn Bonney says, ‘I have many memories but they are fused into a swirl – that high speed reel of endless drunken music and parties and intense self-regard of coolness and of belonging, and the glittery social bubble that was filled with so much chaotic youthful burnout and the mental pain of those very artistic, very fucked-up, very brilliant kids. It’s not a coherent linear unfolding of moments for me in my memory. It’s more immersive. It is like a blender. Being inside a blender of the times and the people and the sounds and the smells. It was the cross-pollination of ideas. All very open and comradely at the beginning. I was only very young when it started. I was only fifteen. Younger than everyone else there at the very start, which were not so many. But it grew big very fast. And other young kids appeared. It happened at breakneck speed before the drug plague wrecked everyone.’15

  Greg Perano is sceptical of hyped-up portrayals that depict the Ballroom as a fantasy palace for heroin, with a young Nick Cave reigning over the transformation like a rock ’n’ roll Lucifer on the rise. ‘I think the only reason the Ballroom crowd loved heroin was because it eased the boredom between the exciting moments. The Ballroom itself was never filled with people nodding off. They tended to do it at home during the day.’16 Genevieve McGuckin saw the seeds of happiness. ‘Nick, Rowlie and Pierre being like a little gang in their own right, all tall and dark and handsome and funny.’17

  Pierre Voltaire’s memories initially match Greg Perano’s analysis of the early days. ‘Nick and me and Rowland was becoming a drug thing. We weren’t using that much, or so often, it was an after-gig sort of thing, after you got a couple of dollars, you’d go down to Fitzroy Street and score, then go back to Rowland’s flat or something. And it just snowballed from there. We’d just hang around drinking cider in the afternoons – because none of us liked beer – and shooting dope.

  ‘You’d give the guy who made hamburgers at the St Kilda Cafe fifty dollars and he’d give you a tinfoil of heroin. There’d be all these urban myths about tourists and old ladies getting them by mistake. Maybe we thought we were punk rock and able to handle it, I don’t know. The first time we sniffed it and stayed up all night, it was euphoric, blissful, it was really very different to what I thought it would be. I think that was with Nick and Anita, the next night Rowland and Genevieve were with us. It was all innocent – like a flirtation. We were sniffing, not injecting. That was for months and months. Then it became this thing we did every night. You’d wake up next day in the afternoon, read the paper, go down to Fitzroy Street, wearing a suit if it wasn’t too hot, and start all over again, drink, party, shag . . . The heroin went from being a nightcap and moved up the food chain. Snorting is slow. Shooting up blew our heads off. We got a lot more high. This is before AIDS; it was hard to get fresh needles, we’d have to use old blunt ones that we sharpened on the sides of matchboxes and shared with each other. That’s why Hep C is so widespread now. Anyway, people started having their own private drug time. They’d turn up at gigs already stoned. It just became a bigger part of the scene. You’d have to admit that it was glamorous for a while.’18

  It must have seemed that way when Tom Waits, who was touring off the back of Blue Valentine, appeared at the St Kilda Cafe one night in early May 1979. Only thirty years old himself, Waits was at the peak of his game artistically. He was also in the middle of what seemed a stalled career commercially, as well as majorly damaged by his recent break-up with singer Rickie Lee Jones. ‘He was sitting in the cafe by himself waiting and we sat down with him,’ says Greg Perano. ‘We were not really big fans at the time, but he was an interesting character. I think it was Nick, Pierr
e Voltaire, Rowland, Genevieve, and me and my girlfriend Vanessa. You know why everyone went there. Tom had obviously been given the word by someone. What I remember of the Tom Waits encounter was a group of brash young folk exchanging witticisms with a very intelligent eccentric. I think Tom Waits looked for those seedy little places in every city because it is where he would find the real characters. He was quite interested in the post-punk crowd there, but he seemed like he could hold his own with anyone. Rowland and Nick liked to challenge people back then, so they were probably quite cynical about someone like Tom Waits, although that would all change. At that time the only music that existed for us was music that we saw as challenging what had gone before. That meant Pere Ubu, The Pop Group, The Fall, Suicide, The Cramps, Can, The Raincoats, The Contortions, The Slits . . . all that period. Of course, people began to listen to Tom when he released Swordfishtrombones [1983] and Rain Dogs [1985], but I still think Blue Valentine [1979] is one of his best.’19

  Tracy Pew was the one who educated Nick’s ear to the charms of Tom Waits, and to Blue Valentine in particular, which the bassist adored. Waits’ booze-hound version of ‘Somewhere’, a ballad of star-crossed lovers and their beautiful but futile dreams of ever making an escape from their circumstances in West Side Story, would be played at Pew’s funeral in November 1986.20

  Blue Valentine is a record Nick still likes to listen to every now and then. When he hears it, it is like Tracy is back in the room. ‘Yeah,’ Nick says. ‘I still miss him.’

  Paul Goldman had been following The Boys Next Door around since seeing them at the Tiger Lounge. He was a film student at Swinburne Institute of Technology, and for a television assignment requiring a shoot inside a studio he decided to approach Nick with the offer of directing a video for the band. In the pre-MTV age, this was not as obvious a move as it might now seem. The form was new and few people regarded it seriously. Goldman filmed ‘After a Fashion’ and ‘Shivers’ in a single day, with Evan English assisting him on lighting.

  Goldman’s clip for ‘After a Fashion’ was done on an all-white set and has now been ‘either lost or destroyed’, he says.21 He’d spent most of the day working on it. His video for ‘Shivers’, shot in just two hours, survived, and remains one of the most iconic in Australian music history. It opens with a close-up of the 21-year-old Nick Cave as he reaches out of the darkness to grip a microphone and sing of suicide, style and a heart on its knees. A wan Rowland S Howard emerges in the background, looking on as if wounded, playing his slow-chiming guitar. Both he and Nick are wearing buttoned-to-the-neck frock coats like nineteenth-century artists. A rosy-cheeked, hesitant Tracy Pew appears beside Rowland, then Mick Harvey, barely discernible in the middle distance, and, briefly and more dramatically, Phill Calvert on drums. It’s a clip for The Boys Next Door – but the focus is almost exclusively on Nick, and he gives a tour de force performance, creating odd, angular poses with his arms and hands, a one-man procession of romantic hieroglyphs and bullfighter semaphores.

  The debt to the stage moves of Simon Bonney was apparent to fans. Bonney had just shifted base to Melbourne and was making waves as he set about reforming Crime and the City Solution in that city. He liked marching through the streets of St Kilda wearing a long, dark naval jacket, as befits a poet ready for a storm. ‘Pierre Voltaire, who was like the knave of the scene,’ says Bronwyn Bonney, ‘nicknamed Simon “Tess”.’22 Like Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard was sanguine about any copycat crimes: ‘Both Simon and Nick saw things in each other that they wanted to be.’23

  It was an observation that might have equally reflected the relationship between Rowland and Nick. One of Rowland’s favourite books growing up was Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. A classic French coming-of-age tale, the book had helped inspire F Scott Fitzgerald to write The Great Gatsby (another Rowland favourite) and was similarly constructed, with a passive narrator observing and fatally absorbing the life of his friend, the novel’s dynamic yet tragic hero. In a similar way, there’s an unmistakeably wounded quality to Rowland as he stands in the background, observing Nick sing what had once been among the most personal of his songs in the film clip for ‘Shivers’.24 It’s as if a gate was being slowly shut on Rowland S Howard with ‘Shivers’ and he knew he could only ever look on sadly at was happening around him, his dream having been absorbed into someone else’s adventure. He was a critical part of that adventure, of course, but destined to be a creature living in its aftermath, struggling to come out from under a larger mythology.

  Watching ‘Shivers’ still entertains Paul Goldman, who says, ‘The reason Nick gets himself tied up in knots in that clip is because he insisted on having a mirror on the camera so he could see himself. So throughout he is actually watching himself, the great narcissist that he is.’25

  Nick was also inspired by the album cover art for David Bowie’s Heroes and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. He had spent many long hours dwelling on these images as he listened to the music in his bedroom. Both Bowie and Pop based their strange photo-portrait poses on the early-twentieth-century German artist Erich Heckel’s painting Roquairol. Nick recognised this visual language immediately. Intensely conscious of his own Expressionist influences, he wanted to physically announce himself as a rock ’n’ roll Egon Schiele. Ever since becoming an art student, Nick had been intrigued by Schiele’s obsessive self-portraiture and disconcerting paintings of the human figure, many of them pubescent youths the artist had seduced before being driven out of his mother’s hometown for his scandalous behaviour. Schiele demanded his models strike uncomfortable or extreme postures so that what he believed to be the body’s essential qualities of sex and death were revealed. ‘The picture must radiate light,’ Schiele philosophised. ‘The bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from outside.’26 Schiele’s attraction to bodies that were physically contorted and in erotic torment had a corollary with martyrdom, of course, though they also came to be seen as premonitions of the Holocaust. It’s no wonder this appealed to Nick more than ever in 1979, however temporary and self-conscious the manifestations may have been in shaping his stage moves. Thirty years later, the film clip for ‘Shivers’ would feed into academic analyses of Nick’s early performing style, aligning it with gay identity and queer dance philosophy.27 If all that seems strained, the fact remains that Nick was well aware of the Expressionist history behind the gestures he was making and the image he was creating. Hence that mirror to get it exactly right. Goldman may have been directing, but it was Nick who was certain of the role he wanted to play.

  Nick was also familiar with the manner in which Schiele had died at the age of twenty-eight, during the Spanish influenza plague that swept Europe in 1918. The artist could only communicate with his last models, and eventually his loved ones, through a mirror placed in the doorway between two rooms. What was played out in Nick Cave’s mirror in 1979 was another conversation, another dance with death. Perhaps Nick caught a glimpse of his father – if not in the mirror that day, then through a conversation the song’s recording had first allowed him to have with a self-obsessed, forever out-of-reach object of love. Rowland might have intuited some of this as he watched Nick becoming a star right in front of him on the day that ‘Shivers’ was filmed. After all, Egon Schiele was his favourite painter too.

  Rowland’s close friend Bronwyn Bonney tells of how ‘Nick had the right formula: very charismatic + not mentally ill + had family support + work ethic + personal creative vision + sense of chosenness + right place right time. Everyone else lacked two or three of those ingredients. Nick also has the ability to glamour [sic] people, to dazzle or hypnotise them. He is a natural tantric, he has sexual magnetism without consciously fostering it, and that gives him a lot of personal power. He can both give – and take away – many people in his orbit’s sense of their own self-worth. He is also ruthless enough to prioritise his own work above all else, which is important to big success, unless you have a spouse or manager to do it for you. And he
feels very invested in his own primacy and importance, without it being hollow or dumbly delusional. Yes, Rowland was always going to be sad – because he lacked a few key ingredients. Nick is innately very gifted, but he also marshals the talent around him so that it becomes his. Having talent by itself is nothing, even if it is an immense talent. That is why Anita is an obscurity. And many others from that talent-studded dysfunctional scene. Nick was not the most talented – but his other gifts were more crucial. It is also the times and the place that determine who is lost as it depends on the cultural values around the person too. What is deemed important can vary a lot. Every zeitgeist has its own particular heroes and dogs and baddies. People are partly angry at Nick because they envy him. He works like a demon. He deserves his success.’28

  Just prior to the release of Door, Door in May 1979, Nick had complained to Jillian Burt of Roadrunner that ‘Gudinski still considers us a punk rock group . . . He doesn’t think any of our material is single quality. In England there are singles that come out every week that will obviously never be on radio – and I’m not even sure that the bands consider that they would be on the radio – but they’re still interesting and prestigious singles, which is mainly what we’re concerned with.’29