Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Janine Barrand, Director of the Australian Performing Arts Collection at The Arts Centre Melbourne has also been of great assistance, allowing access to the archives from Nick Cave: The Exhibition. Murray Bennett, with his superb collection of live recordings from The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, bent my ear with his sonic rarities. Andrew and Lynne Trute, devoted fans and collectors of Nick Cave memorabilia, were generous with their knowledge and good humour.

  Photographers Ashley Mackevicius, Peter Milne and Michel Lawrence have helped me shape a visual narrative. My thanks also to Manuela Furci, Director of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, and John Nixon, represented by Anna Schwartz of Anna Schwartz Gallery, for their images. Additional photos came from varied sources, not all of them easy to track. Phill Calvert, Keith Glass, David Pepperell, Bryan Wellington, Anne Shannon and Corin Johnson kindly provided photos from their collections.

  Thanks, too, to Margaret Brickhill and Adrian Twitt; Ken Goodger, the Dean at Holy Trinity Cathedral; and Felicity Williams, Kim Gregg, Kris Penney and everyone, past and present, at the Centre for Continuing Education in Wangaratta. Anne Shannon’s memories, along with those of Bryan Wellington, were vital to bringing Wangaratta and Nick’s time there to life. Great people and a great town.

  I’d also like to express my gratitude to John Corker, my lawyer (‘I guess I must be your agent too now’) for making this book happen when the whole project seemed lost – and more importantly for being my friend.

  On a more personal level, I want to thank those close to me who have offered their love, friendship and support over the years, most especially Samantha Hutchison, Robert Miller, Michele Elliot, Dominic Lefebvre, Rika Wedlock, Beau Sevastos, Marcelle Lunam, John Stewart, Lucia Elliott, Virginia Fay, Aden Young, Lo Carmen, Beth Dyce, Russell Cheek, Jonathan Samway, Nerissa Kavanagh, Jarrad Ainsworth, Rosanna Barbero, Michael Wee, Andrea Healy, Trent McGinn, Carolyn Constantine, Nicole Lobegeiger and Matthew da Silva. I sincerely hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. It’s been a long haul and it’s Friday night now, so forgive me.

  In closing, I want to thank my brother and sisters, and my mother and father (RIP), who always had my back and believed in me. Life is long, as the saying goes, and the path here has not always been so straight or obvious. I have dedicated this book to my children – and to the dreams that we share and are all part of in some way. I hope some of my gratitude comes through in the way I have conveyed the stories told to me. I return again with final thanks to Nick Cave and Susie Bick, and to the affirmations of beauty and kindness we make each time we create something worth living for.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Books and essays

  John Barker (ed.), The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, Intellect, Bristol, 2013

  Janine Barrand and James Fox, Nick Cave Stories, Nick Cave: The Exhibition, Victorian Arts Trust, Melbourne, 2007

  Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996

  Colin F Cave, ‘Introduction’, Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1968

  Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel, Blackspring Press, London, 1989

  Nick Cave, The Complete Lyrics 1978–2013, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2013

  Nick Cave, ‘Introduction’, The Gospel According to Mark, Pocket Canon/Canongate, Edinburgh, 1998

  Nick Cave, The Secret Life of the Love Song/The Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave, King Mob, London, 1999

  Nick Cave and Christina Back, Stranger Than Kindness, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2020

  Maximilian Dax and Johannes Beck, The Life and Music of Nick Cave: An Illustrated Biography, Die Gestaltan Verlag, Berlin, 1999

  Amy Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks: An Armchair Guide to Nick Cave, Helter Skelter Publishing, London, 2005

  Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, 1996

  Sam Kinchin-Smith (ed.), Read Write [Hand]: A Multi-Disciplinary Nick Cave Reader, Silkworm Ink, London, 2011

  Peter Milne, Juvenilia, M.33/Perimeter Books, Melbourne, 2020

  Dolores San Miguel, The Ballroom – The Melbourne Punk and Post-Punk Scene: A Tell-All Memoir, Melbourne Books, Melbourne 2011

  Mat Snow (ed.), Nick Cave – Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, Plexus Books, London, 2011

  Kathleen Stewart, The After Life: A Memoir, Vintage, Sydney, 2008

  Gillian Upton, The George: St Kilda Life and Times, Venus Bay Books, Melbourne, 2001

  Clinton Walker (ed.), Inner City Sound: Punk and Post-Punk in Australia, 1976–1985, Verse Chorus Press, Melbourne, 2005

  Clinton Walker, Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977–1991, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 1996

  Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziel (eds), Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave, Ashgate Publishing, Surrey, 2009

  Documentaries

  20,000 Days on Earth, directed by Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Pulse Films, London, 2014

  Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard, directed by Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein, Ghost Pictures, Melbourne, 2011

  The Good Son, VPRO Dutch Television, 1997 (available on YouTube)

  We’re Livin’ on Dog Food, directed by Richard Lowenstein, Ghost Pictures, 2009

  The Boys Next Door: Discography

  Lethal Weapons (Suicide, 1978) – compilation, three tracks: ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’, ‘Masturbation Generation’, ‘Boy Hero’

  Door, Door (Mushroom, 1979) – debut album

  Hee-Haw (Missing Link, 1979) – EP

  ‘Scatterbrain’ – giveaway single at Crystal Ballroom. ‘Early Morning Brain’ by Models on flipside – rare

  ‘Happy Birthday’ / ‘Riddle House’ (Missing Link, 1980) – single

  The Birthday Party by The Boys Next Door (Missing Link, 1980) – compilation album of Hee-Haw material with unreleased Boys Next Door recordings and early singles by The Birthday Party

  ENDNOTES

  Prologue: The Journalist and the Singer

  1Nick would repeat this phrase about being ‘more of a writer’ in various interviews at the time without fully believing it. Much later, in his 1996 essay ‘The Flesh Made Word’, he would look back on writing And the Ass Saw the Angel and regard its mix of Biblical language, Deep South vernacular and rampant obscenity as manifestations of artistic breakdown and creative blockage. If it wasn’t already obvious from the book itself, Nick reflects in the essay on Euchrid as a kind of negative Jesus figure. Though the novel is densely overwritten, it offers a genuine yearning for redemption in the author’s quest for a new language. The message would seem to be that Nick is trapped inside himself, or trapped inside a pain he is still finding the right words for. Loneliness is the major theme.

  2Strangely, Nick’s disgust with rock ’n’ roll reflected his father’s classical tastes and disdain for popular forms. Nick would rebel against the influence and return to music as his true heartbeat.

  3Nick Cave, ‘Readings from His Forthcoming Novel: And the Ass Saw the Angel’, Mandolin Cinema, Sydney, 23 and 24 March 1988. Along with guest artists who embarrassed themselves trying to mock and upstage Nick, the event featured a special screening of John Huston’s adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. The film and the book both greatly influenced Nick at the time.

  4Mark Mordue, ‘Let Love In’, Juice Magazine, Sydney, April 1994.

  5There are many levels to this: the secret messaging that occurred in paintings back then, as well as our later understanding of the unconscious and what we project of ourselves onto others. For artists in the time of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, there was a conviction that all of God’s secrets reside within us, and thus the mysteries and magnificence of Creation can be revealed if we look truly and deeply enough, finding in this our larger unity.

  6As well as in ‘Red Right Hand’ and the name of the Red Hand Files mailing list, the line is quoted in ‘Song of Joy’, where the killer references Mi
lton by writing the phrase ‘his red right hand’ on the walls in the victim’s blood. ‘Mutiny in Heaven’, one of the very last Birthday Party songs, uses the narrative of Paradise Lost as a covert metaphor for the story of The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, as well as painting a fetishistic picture of heroin addiction and alluding to Nick’s exile from his boyhood hometown of Wangaratta.

  PART I: THE RIDER

  Such Is Life

  1Nick Cave, Dawn Cave and Bleddyn Butcher were each interviewed independently by the author about the day of the ARIA Hall of Fame induction and events surrounding it.

  2Nick’s off-hand reference to the seventh circle of hell comes from Dante’s Inferno, with which he is well familiar. Dante reserves the seventh circle for those who have committed crimes of violence: against people and property, themselves and God.

  3AAP, ‘Nick Cave, reluctantly famous’, The Age, 23 October 2007. Also ‘“Arias bore me” – Nick Cave’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 October 2007. Nick also discussed how he was feeling in a conversation with the author. Kebabs seem to be his favoured pre-awards snack.

  4Mick Harvey, interview with the author, Melbourne, 11 February 2010.

  5Nick Cave, ‘Notes’ (hardcover notebook), dated 1996–1997, Nick Cave: The Exhibition, The Arts Centre, Melbourne, Box H000653, File 2006.019.040.

  6Murray River was a favourite pseudonym Michael Hutchence used when booking hotel rooms.

  7Nick Cave, ‘Notes’ (hardcover notebook), dated 1996–1997, Nick Cave: The Exhibition, The Arts Centre, Melbourne, Box H000653, File 2006.019.040.

  8William Faulkner created an imaginary place called Yoknapatawpha County based on Lafeyette County, Mississippi, where he was raised. Almost all his novels would be set in this fabled version of his past, requiring Faulkner to create a ‘map’ of the landscape he rewrote, remembered and transformed. It helped Nick to see how he might unify his songs alongside the world he was developing for And the Ass Saw the Angel.

  9Bleddyn Butcher, interview with the author, Sydney, 5 May 2010.

  10Bleddyn Butcher, interview with the author, Sydney, 8 September 2012. Nick ploughed through a safety barrier and knocked down a Sussex Safer Roads Partnerships camera in 2010. He told the UK Sun, ‘I became a local hero. I took out the camera along the sea front with my Jag. I was the toast of Brighton for about five days. Little Goths came and prayed at the scene and wrote, “Nick Cave was here.”’ – see www.nme.com/news/music/nick-cave-25-1252104, accessed 6 September 2020. Nick was not entirely joking. Graffiti had appeared on the sorry-looking camera pole: ‘Nick Cave wuz ere Xmas 2010’. To avoid prosecution, Nick was offered a driver training course. He references these lessons in his song ‘Mermaids’.

  11Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 27 March 2010.

  12Nick Cave: The Exhibition, The Arts Centre Gallery, Melbourne, 10 November 2007 – 6 April 2008 (then Adelaide, Brisbane and finally Canberra in 2010; now preserved in The Arts Centre’s permanent archives). Curated by Janine Barrand in partnership with Nick Cave, it would form the basis for Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, developed by Christina Back and Nick Cave for the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, originally set for 23 March – 3 October 2020 before COVID-19 delayed the opening till 8 June 2020. It was accompanied by a lavish hardback catalogue, Stranger Than Kindness (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2020).

  13Viviane Carneiro, interview with the author, London, 4 June 2010.

  14Interview with Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan, MTV Europe, 1993, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbOxwLkXRmE

  15‘Sonny’s Burning’. Lyrics by Nick Cave. Published by Mute Song Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by kind permission.

  16Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2007. TS Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, 1925. Bleddyn and Nick’s conversation about The Road, apocalyptic futures, the nature of fatherhood and the search for spiritual consolation in art would help set Nick on a path towards writing the soundtrack, with Warren Ellis, for a 2010 film version of The Road, directed by Nick’s friend and cinematic collaborator John Hillcoat. The story’s intense focus on the relationship between a father and a son, and how one dies while the other must go on, naturally had an impact on Nick Cave.

  17Simon Hattenstone, ‘Old Nick’, The Guardian, 23 February 2008, available at www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/feb/23/popandrock. features, accessed 4 June 2012.

  18Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 27 March 2010.

  19Nick’s Shakespearian song references go beyond the direct influence of his teacher father, his own literary interests, or the construction of any romantic mythology. The Elizabethan villain-hero was usually stained by a crime of some cosmic order, and capable of great as well as terrible deeds. In this regard, Nick seemed to believe he was fulfilling something predestined in his relationship with his father.

  20Seriously ill due to diabetes and with not much longer to live, the ageing Johnny Cash would record a powerfully redemptive, anti–capital punishment reading of ‘The Mercy Seat’. He would also accept Nick’s idea for their duet: the old Hank Williams number ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’. They also had a crack at the old folk song ‘Cindy, Cindy’. When Cash entered the studio, he was almost blind and unable to deal with the stairs on his own. He called out, ‘Are you there, Nick? Are you there?’ Nick had to help him down the stairs and give him time to sit down and let his eyes adjust. ‘I was thinking, fucking hell, how is this guy going to sing anything?’ But Cash changed with the singing of the song, Nick says, became something majestic. Ironically, Nick had been terrified of duetting with his hero and singing well enough to warrant the honour. After their first take, producer Rick Rubin asked for another. Nick said to Rubin, ‘I was flat, right?’ Rubin laughed. ‘No, Johnny was.’ June Carter told Nick, ‘Get back in there with Johnny and sing those harmonies.’ When Nick tells the story there is a deep reverence to it. ‘Once Johnny started singing it was like the illness just fell away. It was incredible. I know some people were critical of Rick Rubin for bleeding the guy dry at the end of his life. But that’s totally wrong. It wasn’t like that at all. He was energising Johnny. It was a beautiful thing.’

  21A script outline was initiated at the request of John Hillcoat, with whom Nick had written the script for the movie The Proposition. The pair would research the project in depth, including doing interviews with door-to-door cosmetics salesmen. Hillcoat was interested in developing a ‘kitchen-sink drama’ that harked back to the gritty social realism of British movies of the 1950s. When the project failed to evolve, Nick was able to retool the research and outline into his novel The Death of Bunny Munro (Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2009). He frequently described the story as a hybrid of the Gospel of St Mark and radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto. By then, Nick had taken the material to a more hallucinogenic level. Even after the novel appeared, he hoped to see it developed into a television miniseries with Ray Winstone, but the project ran aground on issues of taste as well as vision. The video for ‘Jubilee Street’ gives an idea of how it might have turned out visually.

  22Phil Sutcliffe, ‘Nick Cave: Raw and Uncut 2’, in Mat Snow, Nick Cave: Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, Plexus, London, 2011, p. 231. Nick’s original text is lost, but the gist of the message was repeated, as jokes so often are, in interview with the author.

  23Stephen Dalton, ‘The Light in the Cave’, The Age, 19 September 2004, available at www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/17/1095320941733.html#, accessed 4 June 2012.

  24Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 64.

  25Nick Cave, ‘We Call Upon the Author to Explain’, Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!, Mute Records, 2008.

  26Nick’s relationship with Beau Lazenby dated back to The Boys Next Door era and an off-and-on affair that saw them spend time together in Melbourne when Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds toured in 1990. He’d admit to ‘eternal regret’ over not having muc
h to do with Jethro when younger, and working hard to make up for lost time. Most of the father–son relationship healing would take place after Nick freed himself from his heroin addiction, when Jethro was entering his teens. His eldest son’s path would prove especially difficult, as he lived in Melbourne, where Nick is an iconic figure. As Jethro said, ‘It didn’t start off great, having all this shit with my dad and being in his shadow.’ (Hermione Eyre, ‘Models and Rockers: Jethro Cave and Leah Weller’, ES Magazine, London Evening Standard, 12 November 2009, www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/models-and-rockers-jethro-cave-and-leah-weller-6729475.html, accessed 7 September 2020.)

  27PJ Harvey appears to document her relationship with Nick Cave and her problems with him in ‘The Garden’ on Is This Desire. A close listen suggests Harvey is referencing the Birthday Party song ‘Mutiny in Heaven’ and sending Nick a haunting correction on the story of Adam and Eve.

  28‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’ was the phrase Lady Caroline Lamb used to describe the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Some literary historians say Lamb was really describing herself. A married woman, she rejected his early advances with these famous words, then succumbed to Byron’s increased ardour, immersing herself in a passionate affair. Lovers of the time commonly exchanged a lock of hair; Lady Caroline Lamb sent him a clipping of her pubic hair. Unfortunately, Byron was already struggling to end their relationship. His demonic social reputation and self-mythologising poems such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), were only enhanced by Lamb’s pioneering Gothic novel Glenarvon (1816). The book featured a thinly veiled and highly negative portrait of her ex-lover that, ironically, helped foment the grand Byronic archetype: solitary, brooding, cunning, rakish, self-destructive and mysterious. The German writer Goethe became a big fan of the novel. Nick would delve deeply into both Goethe and Byron. It’s worth recalling that, as well as being the great Romantic archetype, Byron was also a very witty and humorous lyricist, delighting in puns and wordplay across a mock-epic such as Don Juan.