by Mark Mordue
40Davina Davidson, email correspondence with the author, 6 January 2011.
41Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge, Penguin, London, 2008, p. 52.
42Davina Davidson, email correspondence with the author, 6 January 2011.
43ibid.
Zoo Music Girl
1Deborah Thomas, interview with the author, phone, 8 March 2012.
2Mary Brown, ‘Introduction – the 60s’, Centre History, The Centre for Continuing Education, Wangaratta. n.d., p. 5.
3It’s interesting to consider this as a misapprehension or limiting of love itself, inculcated by Colin Cave’s lessons. Nick would be critical of his father’s tendency to define parenting as teaching alone, but it may be that the habit flowed on in the form of relationships that were dropped by Nick once the learning was over.
4Gareth Sansom, interview with the author, email, 1 June 2012.
5Jenny Watson, interview with the author, Brisbane, 17 March 2010. Within a year of meeting Nick Cave at art school, the young teacher and artist would be so impressed by a performance of The Boys Next Door at the Tiger Lounge that she’d do pencil and paper portraits of them all in 1977. Her friend and fellow artist Howard Arkley would also do a portrait of Nick Cave in 1999, using synthetic polymers on canvas.
6John Wray, ‘I Am the Real Nick Cave’, New York Times, 1 July 2014.
7Max Bell, ‘What If Elvis Had Never Been Born?’, The Independent, 4 July 2004, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/what-if-elvis-had-never-been-born-45975.html, accessed 20 September 2020.
8Bram van Splunteren, Nick Cave: Stranger in a Strange Land, VPRO Dutch Television, 1987. It may have surprised his own hardcore post-punk fan base, but Nick considered covering Springsteen’s 1978 classic ‘Racing in the Streets’ for his covers album, Kicking Against the Pricks (1986).
9Robert Brokenmouth, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as He Begins to Figure Things Out’, in Sam Kinchin-Smith, Read Write [Hand]: A Multidisciplinary Nick Cave Reader, Silkworms Ink, East Sussex, 2011.
10Bruce Milne, interview with the author, Melbourne, 26 February 2010.
11Phill Calvert, interview with the author, Sydney, 26 July 2012.
12Spurt! (fanzine), No.4, 1978, in Nick Cave: The Exhibition, The Arts Centre collection, Melbourne.
13Rowland S Howard had also witnessed Radio Birdman live on their first tour of Melbourne. He was so impressed he wrote a letter to join their fan club, enquiring as to why Deniz Tek had such an obsession with the TV-show Hawaii Five-O. During their tour of Sydney, The Saints’ Chris Bailey chose to mock Radio Birdman’s trademark insignia and crowd chants as proto-Nazi drivel. Naturally enough, Birdman took offence. Nick would toy with using the swastika in cover art for The Birthday Party, begging to offend people. Its origins as a Sanskrit symbol of wellbeing were the stronger, if equally sarcastic, reference.
14Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge, Penguin, London, 2008, p. 55. The Saints’ guitarist Ed Kuepper was not unaware of his band’s forceful use of volume from the start, serving up a backhander to the sneering clichés of every punk pretender cranking out noises at the time: ‘We [The Saints] don’t use volume as a substitute for excitement, though we probably play twice as loud as most other local bands. It all boils down to realism. We haven’t got the attitude of “Who gives a damn, man.”’ (Heylin, Babylon’s Burning, p. 51.)
15Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, p. 46.
16Michel Faber, ‘Conversations with Boys Next Door’, Farrago – The Rock Edition, 1979, p. 20.
17Clinton Walker, Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977–1991, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1996, pp. 42–43.
18Mick Harvey, interview with the author, Melbourne, 23 November 2010.
19Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 20.
20Michel Faber, ‘A Boy Next Door’, in Mat Snow, Nick Cave – Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, Plexus, London, 2011, p. 16. Mick Harvey, however, questions Nick’s description of the crowd at Ashburton Hall as ‘Homesglen skinheads’ and Michel Faber’s attempts to define them. He says their audience was invaded by local ‘sharpies’, akin to but quite different from skinheads, and a distinct Australian suburban phenomenon of the era, most of all in Melbourne where they thrived. Along with crewcut hair at the front and longer hair at the back (a kind of aggressive precursor to the mullet), sharpies favoured tight-fitting Lee jeans, ultra-tight cardigans and jumpers that accentuated muscle tone and malice, home-made T-shirts with gang names written on them, and chisel-toed boots with Cuban heels. They were instantly recognisable, and had a reputation for street fights that could include knife use. Females were called ‘brushes’ and often wore halter necks. Among the sharpies’ favourite bands were Lobby Loyde and The Coloured Balls and Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs, and early incarnations of AC/DC and Rose Tattoo. Sharpies had a special dance, an ape-like shuffle that was faintly comical and threatening. The criminal Chopper Read and the singer Bon Scott might be considered sharpie heroes. The gangs faded out as their membership was absorbed into other subcultures, from glam to skinheads to punks, of which they were a crude working-class amalgam and preview dating back to the 1960s. Greg Macainsh of Skyhooks’ four-minute documentary Sharpies captures them having fun at the Summer Jam concert in 1974.
21ibid., p. 18.
22Julie and Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 October 2010.
23Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave – The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 18.
24Bruce Milne, interview with the author, Melbourne, 26 February 2010.
25Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 27 July 2020.
26‘Interview with Rowland S. Howard 24/11/94’, Prehistoric Sounds: Aussie Indie Music 1977–1990, Vol. 1 Issue 2, 1995, p. 27.
27Glass appeared in the Australian production of Hair when it ran in Kings Cross, Sydney, in 1969–70. He played the leading role of Berger, a free-spirited and anarchistic figure likened, in one song, to a hippie Lucifer seeking to bring down capitalism through a change in consciousness. Glass also sang on the recorded version of the production. His understudy, Reg Livermore, would succeed him in the role when the show opened in Melbourne in mid-1971.
28Keith Glass, interview with the author, Sydney, 13 May 2010.
29Deborah Thomas, interview with the author, phone, 8 March 2012.
30Jenny Watson, interview with the author, Brisbane, 17 March 2010.
31Tobsha Learner, interview with the author, phone, 30 November 2011. Learner makes an intriguing reference to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884) as a seminal book affecting how people modelled themselves in St Kilda at the time. Against Nature’s central character, Jean des Esseintes, is a French aristocrat who rejects society and immerses himself in solitary luxury, art, literature and sensuality. Huysmans wrote a new preface in 1903. It reflected on the controversy this decadent, story-less and amoral book had stirred during the late 1800s: ‘There was undoubtedly, as I was writing Against Nature, a land-shift, the earth was being mined to lay foundations of which I was unaware. God was digging to set his fuses and he worked in the darkness of the soul, in the night. Nothing could be seen; it was only years later that the sparks began to run along the wires.’
32Legend has it that Ross Wilson liked a young Nick Cave’s song ‘Big Future’ so much, Nick sold it to him at the Tiger Lounge for a shake-hands deal and a stubby bottle of beer. Wilson never recorded the song.
33Karen Marks, interview with the author, 21 August 2020.
34Polly Borland, interview with the author, Melbourne, 6 April 2012.
35Polly Borland and John Hillcoat, interview with the author, Brighton and Hove, England, 15 June 2010.
36Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, 1996, p. 37.
37Dawn Cave, interview with the author, phone, 28 May 2015.
38Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, 1996, p. 47.
39Dawn and Julie Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 November 2010.
40Davina Davidson, email correspondence with the author, 6 January 2011.
41Dawn and Julie Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 November 2010.
42Pierre Voltaire, interview with the author, Melbourne, 25 March 2010.
43Deborah Thomas, interview with the author, phone, 8 March 2012.
Boy Hero
1Deborah Thomas, interview with the author, phone, 8 March 2012. Mick Harvey also remembers Blondie coming to see them. ‘[Clem] was one of those people we’d always bump into over the years. Great guy. Great drummer. Always really friendly. Mick Cocks from Rose Tattoo was like that too. He’d just turn up at all these places we’d be. Really nice guy, always encouraging. It’s funny the people you meet.’ (Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 28 July 2020.)
2Karen Marks, interview with the author, phone, 21 August 2020.
3Michael Gudinski, interview with the author, phone, 7 March 2012.
4Jon Savage, one of the most important music critics and cultural historians of the era, would describe The Saints’ ‘This Perfect Day’ as ‘the most ferocious single to ever grace the UK Top 40’. (‘The Saints’, The J Files, Triple J, 30 November 2000.)
5Michael Gudinski, interview with the author, phone, 7 March 2012.
6Keith Glass, interview with the author, Sydney, 13 May 2010.
7Karen Marks, interview with the author, phone, 21 August 2020.
8Greg Macainsh, interview with the author, phone, 9 May 2011.
9ibid.
10Aside from Michael Shipley’s world-class credentials as an engineer, Mick Harvey says that he was Nick Cave’s cousin. Harvey says Shipley would also do some work on the band’s debut album, Door, Door, with producer Les Karski. ‘So I wonder why Nick was struggling so much with his singing in the studio when I think back on it.’ Shipley would go on to be nominated for eight Grammy awards, working with The Damned, The Cars, Thomas Dolby, Blondie and a host of heavy metal bands. Def Leppard nicknamed him ‘bat ears’ due to his acute sonic abilities in the studio. Sadly, Shipley would commit suicide on 25 July 2013.
11‘The song is a joke, but Nick was obsessed with whether he was good-looking or not at the time. I don’t know why.’ (Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 20 July 2020.)
12Later versions of this story would raise the age to sixteen and change the instruction from ‘fucks’ to ‘dates’ in an effort to clean up, if not quite homogenise, the original advice. Rowland S Howard idolised Hazlewood’s songwriting skills and would cover the Nancy and Lee hit ‘Some Velvet Morning’ in a duet with Lydia Lunch in 1982, transforming the faintly psychedelic, woozy sexual overtones of the original into a tribute to co-dependency and addiction.
13See www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCbl5bfBw2I
14Karen Marks, interview with the author, phone, 21 August 2020.
15Anita Lane would do an extraordinary version of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ in collaboration with Barry Adamson and The Thought System of Love in 1991. Their film clip is pretty cool too. It seems to shoot an arrow right through the heart of something that had begun years earlier and stomp all over it. It was commissioned for the American crime film Delusion, as part of Barry Adamson’s score.
16Tony Clark, interview with the author, Melbourne, 10 February 2010.
17ibid.
18These days Nick Cave prefers not to see his lyrical juvenilia on display anywhere if he can prevent it. The lines Anita Lane was laughing at concerned people becoming so insane they go bald. It’s more than likely Nick was having a laugh and under the influence of his Ramones album when writing it, but on the page the joke perished.
19Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 23.
20Tony Clark, interview with the author, Melbourne, 10 February 2010.
21ibid.
22Jenny Watson, interview with the author, Brisbane, 17 March 2010.
23Tony Clark, interview with the author, Melbourne, 10 February 2010.
24Pierre Voltaire, interview with the author, Melbourne, 25 March 2010.
25Clinton Walker, interview with the author, Sydney, 8 April 2011.
26Tracy Pew probably did like the soundtrack to The Sting. But Pew was always attracted to deflating pretentious moments with something ridiculous or uncool. He would have also been acutely aware of a misinformed cultural snobbery that valued Satie and Eno but condescended to Scott Joplin’s early-twentieth-century ragtime music and a brilliant piano player, commercial film composer and conductor like Marvin Hamlisch.
27Released in 1972, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era was a double album of obscure 1960s garage rock and raw psychedelic band singles assembled by then record store clerk and music obsessive Lenny Kaye for Electra Records. It revived cult interest in groups like Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Kingsmen, The Electric Prunes, Count Five and others, providing a musical template for the punk explosion. Lenny would take his musical knowledge further with Patti Smith.
28‘List by Nick Cave’, c. 1978, in Nick Cave, Stranger Than Kindness, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2020, p. 36.
29Alan Yentob’s 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor: A Film About David Bowie depicted the singer in a drugged-out and identity-troubled state during his Diamond Dogs tour of the United States in 1974. Bowie was transitioning radically away from his previous image, and was in the process of recording Young Americans. The documentary was given a late-afternoon screening in Australia on ABC TV to fill a pop-music program slot, providing sensational, even unforgettable, viewing for curious adolescents.
30Mick Harvey, interview with the author, phone, 27 August 2020.
31Jillian Burt, ‘Boys Next Door’, Roadrunner, June, 1978, p. 6.
32Susanne Moore, ‘New Breed of Boys Next Door’, Daily Mirror (Sydney), 22 May 1978.
33Ash Wednesday would go on to play with Einsturzende Neubaten as a touring member from 1997 till 2013.
34It would be fair to attribute what became a trademark Melbourne sub-genre – a swaggering, urban swamp sound referred to sarcastically as ‘the Caulfield Grammar Schoolboy Blues’ because of its longterm associations with Nick Cave – to the defining bass sounds that Walsh and Pew originally mastered as Mount Waverley hoodlums. Walsh was always the kind of guy to work off negative energy, and his refusal to heed Barrie Earl’s instructions to stand with his legs wide apart like English bass players fed into a natural antipathy that drove his aggressive and dark playing style. Whenever Walsh got in Nick’s ear about the music industry, it was only to pour petrol on the fires of a siege mentality they would share for quite some time to come. Indeed, there was something about Walsh that arguably foreshadowed the character of The Birthday Party itself, a mythic and annihilating machismo that partially inspired the subject matter for Nick’s alcohol-charged song ‘Fears of Gun’. When Tracy Pew was gaoled briefly in 1982 for drunk driving and petty theft, Chris Walsh would be called up to fill in for him in The Birthday Party.
35Pierre Voltaire, interview with the author, Melbourne, 25 March 2010.
36Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures, Omnibus Press, London, 1996, p. 23.
37Jillian Burt, ‘Gigs: Boys Next Door’, JUKE, 20 May 1978, p. 16.
38John Stapleton, ‘The Boys Next Door’, Roadrunner, December 1979, n.p.
39Jillian Burt, ‘Boys Next Door’, Roadrunner, June, 1978, p. 6.
40Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard, directed by Lynne-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein, Ghost Pictures, 2011.
41‘Interview with Rowland S Howard 24/11/94’, Prehistoric Sounds, Aussie Indie Music 1976–1999, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1995, p. 28.
42Rowland S Howard and Ollie Olsen, Music Around Us, ABC TV, 1977, online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HfsSWTP7J8,
accessed 24 September 2020.
43Harry Howard, interview with the author, Melbourne, 19 November 2010.
44Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard, directed by Lynne-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein, Ghost Pictures, 2011.
45Clinton Walker, interview with the author, Sydney, 8 April 2011.
46Jeffery Wegener, interview with the author, Sydney, 10 March 2010.
47Mick Harvey, interview with the author, Melbourne, 23 November 2010.
48Hutchence and Olsen first came together while working on Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space.
49Tim Anstaett, ‘The Birthday Party’, The Offense, April 1983. Republished at Rowland S Howard – Outta the Black: https://rowland-s-howard.com/articles/1983-offense.php, accessed 5 August 2020.
50‘Ian’, ‘The Boys Next Door’, SPURT!, No. 4, 1978.
51Models would evolve out of their electronic-influenced art-pop beginnings to become one of the most successful Australian pop-rock bands of the 1980s. Legend has it that concerns about their barbed approach and arty eccentricities led to their new manager, Chris Murphy (who’d guided the career of INXS), calling them in and asking if they wanted to be like Michael Jackson or Talking Heads. Duffield was the only band member to excitedly say ‘Talking Heads’, thus marking himself as the man ready to be shown the ‘out’ door. Ironically, Duffield would make his fortune writing advertising jingles. His most famous work is probably the theme song to globally popular children’s fantasy show Round the Twist. One of the last songs Duffield worked on with Models was ‘Barbados’, a reggae-influenced singalong co-written with James Freud. Beneath its glistening eighties pop sound lies a tale of alcoholism and sunny surrender that some interpret as suicidal ideation, presaging Freud’s personal struggles and his death in 2010.
52Stephen Scott, ‘He Hears Motion’, Medium, 12 June 2017, https://medium.com/the-cultural-savage/andrew-duffield-he-hears-motion-by-stephen-scott-a56c0b95975, accessed 5 September 2020.
53Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, 1996, p. 55.
54Janet Austin, interview with the author, phone, 7 September 2011.
