Boy On Fire Read online

  After the death of Arthur, Nick felt he had been changed entirely. There was only before and after. ‘I’m a different person now,’ he said to me on a few occasions. In his opinion, this rendered what had been said in our conversations ‘entirely redundant’.

  Our communications dissipated and ceased. I occupied myself with my own struggles and life story, a messy and tangled narrative all its own as, by then, my grand Miltonian plans for a Nick Cave mega-biography had well and truly collapsed. I must say Nick was only ever kind and understanding over the period when I went off the rails, expressing concern for my wellbeing and encouraging me to rebuild myself, as well as offering good-humoured conversation and a few spikes of pragmatism. But the road we were on was parting, as I always knew it would. The ride was over.

  I lamented that I nonetheless did have a biographical volume almost done, a portrait of the artist as a young man and all that he promised ahead of him. A book that, with just a bit more work, was even more important in the wake of what had occurred. This book keyed itself in to Nick Cave’s childhood and youth, from Wangaratta to the Crystal Ballroom scene in Melbourne, through the early landscapes, novels, artists, loves and friendships that shaped him. Much of which Nick would continually refer to in his songs, books, poetry and films. I believe this Australian youth, this Australian being, to run deep inside him. I also believe it relates to something paradoxical about the nature of ‘Australianness’ itself: how we undervalue and disguise, and even dismiss what we are as we look outward from our culture for international affirmations, losing sight of our history in a sometimes brutal and ongoing act of forgetting. The older we get, however, the more we begin to reach back to our youth as essential to who we are and who we still can be.

  What emerges in this biography is a remembering of that world. Not just Nick Cave’s story of growing up, but the memories and stories of all those around him. The life and times of a boy on fire, with all that he absorbed in order to dream himself into becoming one of the darkest, and then one of the brightest, of our rock ’n’ roll stars. Light enough for the many to share.

  Nick Cave backstage at the Tiger Lounge, Royal Oak Hotel, Richmond, 1978 (Phill Calvert)

  PART I

  THE RIDER

  Such Is Life

  MELBOURNE & SYDNEY

  2007

  ‘Too little, too late,’ he says. Nicholas Edward Cave has just turned fifty, and old wheels are grinding inside him.1 His car pulls forward at the traffic lights and makes its way further down his former stomping ground, Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. The silvery light of an encroaching Melbourne dusk settles over the peak-hour traffic and he catches a glimpse of the waters of Port Phillip Bay at the street’s bottom end, as if he could drive into this same silvering and disappear.

  It is 28 October 2007 and Nick Cave is about to fly to Sydney to be inducted into the ARIA (Australian Record Industry Association) Hall of Fame. The singer describes it as ‘the seventh circle of hell’, then ‘a bad party you can never escape. Let’s face it, it’s really a form of punishment.’2 For a moment he considers stopping the vehicle so he can hop out on Fitzroy Street and run away. The ARIA Awards! He puts his head to the glass as if he has a headache. Thump. ‘God, I’d rather just go and get a kebab.’3

  The only people he’d care to associate with in this Oz Rock Valhalla to which he is being condemned are The Saints and AC/DC, he reckons. There’s Michael Hutchence too, of course, ‘a beautiful guy’, but Cave’s friendship with him was not about halls of fame or even music, not INXS anyway; that was quietly understood. There was something else between them. Something brotherly only people in their shoes could share. Those stoned afternoons they’d spent trying to pull their lives together as well as having fun. Mornings when the pair would take their respective son and daughter, Luke and Tiger Lily, to a local park. The Portobello Café, which they bought together in London in 1995; that place never made a profit. The phone messages Michael left him two years later, so wild and funny, and in retrospect so in need of contact. Michael’s voice on his answering machine saying, ‘I’m coming to see The Bad Seeds play in Sydney, Nick. I’ll be up the front throwing rotten fruit at you.’4 Nick still has the hotel number jotted down in an old diary somewhere, along with a note to call Michael back in Sydney.5 ‘Ask for Murray River’s room,’ Hutchence said with a laugh.6

  November 1997. Ten years earlier. What a bad month that was. Beginning with Kevin ‘Epic Soundtracks’ Godfrey – the former drummer for Swell Maps, Crime and the City Solution, and These Immortal Souls – turning out the lights in his West Hampstead flat and never waking up. Nick can only shrug when Epic’s name comes up. He didn’t know him that well. ‘And to tell you the truth, I was never a big fan of his music, but people I rated always rated him, so I had to respect that.’ Epic died in his sleep, cocaine and heroin in his system, autopsy results inconclusive. The information would reach Nick through mutual friends, including his Bad Seeds collaborator and bandmate Mick Harvey and the singer Dave Graney, both of whom were troubled by Epic’s death and what could have been a decision or plain bad luck.

  A few weeks later Michael Hutchence passed away at a five-star hotel in Double Bay, Sydney, under similarly cloudy circumstances. Ten years ago, almost to the day. Nick ended up writing out a set of lyrics when he got the news: ‘Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, I can no longer stay with you . . .’ The words were drawn from an eighteenth-century west-country English ballad called ‘There Is a Tavern in the Town’: the lament of a suicidal woman destroyed by her lover’s insensitivity. It is also known in some quarters as ‘The Drunkard’s Song’. In Nick’s diary version, various lines are reworked as the narrator’s voice slips uneasily between a method actor’s empathy for what is happening and a storyteller’s detached insights.7

  Looking from the outside, who’d have thought Nick would have been the good influence in this friendship, the one who learned to swim while Michael was going under? ‘I liked Michael a lot. He was very passionate. There was a truth to Michael that was very impressive. When I knew him he was going through a really bad period, being hounded night and day by the English press. He couldn’t move a muscle. I didn’t understand the extent of it till we went out to this club together. We got in fine. But when we left there were paparazzi everywhere. Someone pushed me. In a rage I pushed them back. Michael pulled me away. Then we left. He said to me, “You can’t do that, it’s a waste of time.” It was criminal what they did to Michael. They hunted that guy to his death.’

  These weren’t the first or last people Nick would witness leaving this world unexpectedly. Not by a long shot. Ever since his father, Colin Cave, was killed in a car crash, he had been learning what it meant to live with the dead. The road accident happened on the first Sunday of 1979, just a few months after Nick turned twenty-one. It took him a long time to accept how much it affected him, Nick says, ‘to engage with it or even understand it’. Between his mother’s pain and the thrill of leaving for London a year later, in February 1980, with his fine young band, The Boys Next Door, Nick had pushed his own feelings aside. He only saw later how the loss of his father intensified something that went back to his boyhood days in Wangaratta. Not even the town as it was, really, more the way he would remember it and then mythologise it. Things like the railroad tracks, the slaughterhouse, the river where he swam and its willow trees had become the stuff of songs such as ‘Red Right Hand’ and ‘Sad Waters’ for him, a real and yet imaginatively transformed land akin to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.8

  As if to confirm a rural Gothic streak straight out of a novel by the likes of Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, Nick had even found a body when he was a kid. Someone from the old people’s home had stumbled down in their pyjamas to the shade of the riverbank and lain down to sleep in the mud. For the twelve-year-old Nick and his friends it had been the thrill of their day, astride their bikes on a narrow strip of road staring down at the still figure. Amid their excited chatter, one of the boys sile
nced everyone. ‘“Show some respect for a dead man,” he said. I really remember that.’ Nick could not wait to get home and tell his mother about their discovery. ‘She wasn’t very happy with the way the police had spoken to us, actually. They told us all to piss off when they arrived.’

  Nick Cave’s old friend, photographer and journalist Bleddyn Butcher, is driving him to the airport in Melbourne today so Nick can get to the ARIAs on time. Bleddyn’s black suit and bolo tie accentuate a bright face and bob of unruly white hair that faintly suggest the appearance of a frontier-town Tennessee judge. An exceptionally long fingernail on the pinky of Bleddyn’s right hand serves him well for playing guitar at home; it has Oriental overtones too, symbolising a man of culture and breeding who is above manual labour. In Taxi Driver, a much-loved film of Nick’s teenage years, Harvey Keitel’s pimp character has a similarly long talon, painted red and used for the convenience of sniffing heroin on the go.

  A figure of almost enraged intelligence, Butcher is made of more affectionate materials than such associations might indicate. ‘I think I can call Nick a friend,’ he tells me later, touching his chest. ‘I think so. I feel it in my heart.’9 Having photographed Nick for the NME ever since the singer’s arrival in London with The Birthday Party in 1980, and run an official Nick Cave fanzine called The Witness in the late 1990s, the London-born, Perth-raised Butcher can lay claim to knowing Nick’s work as well as anyone. Unlike many in Nick’s orbit, he’s never shy of making his judgements, or his appreciations, known, something that moves Cave to drolly comment, ‘You don’t go to Bleddyn for a response when you have something at a sensitive stage of development.’

  Even so, here Bleddyn Butcher is, back in Melbourne and driving ‘The Dark Lord’ (as he likes to call Nick) around again. It amuses him that the singer did not apply for a learner’s permit till 2001 in the United Kingdom, which is where Cave continues to reside today, in the seaside community of Brighton and Hove. The driver’s licence might be interpreted as yet another marker of Nick’s drug-free lifestyle. Let’s face it, the 1980s was not a time when you wanted to see The Dark Lord behind the wheel of any vehicle coming your way. Bleddyn can only arch an eyebrow and observe, ‘Nick is still a little prone to lose focus behind the wheel if he’s talking to you.’10

  Bleddyn has picked Nick up from his mother’s place, where he sat around over tea and homemade cheese scones with Dawn Cave while her son packed his bags. The sparring intelligence between mother and son has the light touch of comedy: Nick’s lugubrious, ‘Yes, Mum’; Dawn’s wry comebacks; the jolts of affection that unite them and pull you closer to them when they are together. It is surprising to Bleddyn, but there is one word that is rather underused in critical appreciations of Nick’s work, yet is present throughout a host of his songs, and in the way he sings them: tenderness.

  Dawn Cave’s present happiness is a matter of long-term relief as much as anything else. After all the years of turbulence, her son ‘has settled down so well’ with his wife, Susie, an English former model and Vivienne Westwood fashion muse. ‘And he’s such a good father to the twins, Arthur and Earl. If Nick’s father, Colin, were alive today he’d be so proud,’ she says later in an interview. ‘And Nick’s free of the drugs, too.’ Dawn holds her hands together in an unconscious prayer motion as she contemplates it. Being with Susie made all the difference in the end: ‘They saved each other, I think. I could have run down the street and jumped up and kicked my heels together, I was that relieved and happy when Nick first told me he was going into rehab. Little did I know how hard it would be, how long it would take, but I will always remember that first time [in 1988]. At last, I thought, at last.’ 11 Ten years on, and four more rehab centres later, Susie Bick finally came onto the scene. At last, at last.

  Dawn waved goodbye to Nick and Bleddyn from the door of her home and closed the security grille. Nick had told her the night before that a few old friends were ribbing him about an exhibition of his life and work coming up in Melbourne, entitled, appropriately enough – ‘and with all due humility!’ he says – Nick Cave: The Exhibition.12 Pennants showing his face are already fluttering from flagpoles around The Arts Centre in the heart of the city to promote the show, which opens in another week. Together with the 2007 ARIA Hall of Fame induction this evening, it contributes to a rather uncool impression that this one-time punk rocker and wild man of Australian rock ’n’ roll is being institutionalised and tamed.

  The putdowns are endless, a few quite barbed. Nick’s exgirlfriend and first great muse, Anita Lane, will be there with the others on opening night, going through room after room, heckling him and comparing Nick Cave: The Exhibition to a game of Where’s Wally?

  Anita Lane. She always had a way of shaking Nick out of himself. Old friends sometimes refer to her as ‘his first wife’. You can barely see the scar she left on Nick Cave’s face two decades ago. He touches it, almost without thinking, as he sits in traffic and Bleddyn edges their vehicle forward. Fitzroy Street in St Kilda makes him think of her, especially with the night coming on. It’s where their adventures began in the late 1970s, with art and music, with heroin too, and a whole way of being that carried on across the world, to London, then West Berlin and a few other cities as well. On the cover of Tender Prey (1988), the scar looks as fresh as a rapier slash from a duel. It was a vegetable knife, prosaically enough, a middle-of-the-day domestic in West Berlin during which Anita took a chunk out of his cheek and went at him for another piece. Nick had unwisely decided to end their relationship once and for all by telling her that he had a new girlfriend. The relationship would recover, sputtering on for another year.

  Amphetamines could do that to you back then. The drugs flowing from the East were very high-grade. Speed addictions would send half the city mad, leaving people damaged and broken just as the Wall was falling and Germany was being reunited. Nick would hear the crowds shouting in the streets while he and The Bad Seeds were working at Hansa Studios on the night of 9 November 1989. He would not allow the band to leave the studio to take a look, relenting only to let them watch the television news. In truth, the band were not that interested. Like many West Berliners they anticipated people from the East bringing down the tone of their neighbourhood, breaking through the Wall and singing about freedom – yeah, sure – but mostly screaming out for stonewash denim, Coca Cola and ‘buying bananas’, Nick says. For him it was time to finish the album – and get out of town permanently. Owing money to various dealers only added to his motivation to leave while everything was falling down.

  Ever since Nick had left Australia, he had lived in a wilful state of exile, and more than a little like a man on the run. Having used up Melbourne, London and West Berlin, he’d made the city of São Paulo, in Brazil, his next port of call after coming out of a legally enforced stint of rehab for the first time in England. On a tour of Brazil at the end of 1988 he’d met a new lover, Viviane Carneiro, and found fresh inspiration in the culture he encountered there. Brazil had quickly become his new home and marked a new direction in his music. The Good Son had been recorded there, and he’d only skulked back into West Berlin in late 1989 to finish the sound mixes at Hansa, his drug debts and the temptation to relapse with friends making it a necessarily brief return.

  Fleeing back to Brazil was what old hands in NA and AA referred to as ‘doing a geographic’ – running elsewhere, only to discover you took your problems with you. He wrote ‘The Ship Song’ not long after coming out of rehab, farewelling Anita and longing for what Viviane and a new world promised. After enjoying a celebrity welcome to Brazil, Nick thought he liked the day-to-day of being ‘nothing but a gringo’ in São Paulo. But even outsiders can get tired of things. He was never that great with foreign languages. Viviane felt that Nick’s dependency on her to speak for him drained him of his enthusiasm for her country.13 That and the fact he was drinking like a fish, the classic ex-junkie way to self-medicate. Nick tried New York as an alternative base, but it was too crazy there to set up a fami
ly. São Paulo, West Berlin, São Paulo, New York, London, São Paulo, London again, then back to São Paulo . . . it was getting hard to keep track of where Nick lived. He made firmer plans to relocate to England, and Viviane, now his wife, and their young son, Luke, followed him to try to make another home together.

  Back more or less living in London by 1993, and much the worse for wear from drinking and drugging again, Nick found himself being interviewed by MTV Europe in a bar. Sitting beside him was The Pogues’ sacked singer, Shane MacGowan, perhaps the most famous booze-hound in rock ’n’ roll since the early days of Tom Waits. Nick and Shane had put together a Christmas song the previous year, a sincere version of Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ that swam out of their shipwrecked reputations. Many critics found it hard to distinguish its pained idealism from drunken karaoke. MacGowan’s profoundly Irish music had made Nick aware of a great loss in his own life – and the lost horizon he felt was lurking below their interpretation of ‘What a Wonderful World’. ‘The older I get,’ Nick told MTV, ‘the more inclined I am to think that you need some kind of roots and you need to think that you belong somewhere . . . I’ve kind of destroyed that part of me as a person. I really don’t feel I do belong anywhere anymore.’14 It was a sad confession to make on camera. But Nick was bullshitting himself. He was always going to have to answer to home sooner or later. Or if not quite home exactly, the gravitational pull of a past he’d yearn for in his songs and buck against in his life as if there were something way back in time to be ashamed of.