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‘Trouble seemed to be part of my DNA’: Nick Cave on his teenage years

By Mark Mordue

The fields of Caulfield Grammar School stretched out in the early summer morning like a burning lake, the sun igniting the dew. Nick walked the green edges on his way to class, still thunderstruck to be there. Founded in 1881 as "a thoroughly Christian" school, the Anglican college took as its motto the Latin phrase Labora Ut Requiescas: "Work hard that you may rest content."

Despite this familiar Protestant ethic, and the school’s reputation for progressive teaching in the arts, Nick felt no contentment on the horizon. Instead, he sensed the geometry of a prison, the brute hierarchies of a boys’ boarding school closing in around him from the very first day. Skinny and awkward, like some goofy fallen bird, he must have looked an easy mark for bullying. Closer examination would have revealed broad shoulders, a country boy’s sinewy strength and dauntingly large hands that were as good as clubs when he formed them into fists. Cave had something else, too, in his favour when it came to defending himself: what might be called a killer instinct, a way of never giving up no matter what odds were stacked against him.

A photoshoot for the cover of Brave Exhibitions in June, 1978. From left: Phill Calvert, Mick Harvey, Nick Cave, Tracy Pew.

A photoshoot for the cover of Brave Exhibitions in June, 1978. From left: Phill Calvert, Mick Harvey, Nick Cave, Tracy Pew.

His future bandmates in The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, Mick Harvey and Phill Calvert, had also started at Caulfield Grammar. The three would slowly become friends, forming what would be their own little clique inside the school’s Art House. Mick and Phill managed to avoid the periodic fights and bullying that broke out; Nick drew this bad energy to him like a magnet. "Trouble seemed to be part of my DNA," Nick says. "I don’t know why." He arrived to repeat second form in 1971, his reputation from Wangaratta High School trailing after him. Both Mick and Phill recall early sightings of Nick on the sports fields enmeshed in fights, often against older or bigger boys who had targeted him or found his smartarse comments insufferable. The pecking order could be ruthless, exacerbated by conflicts between the boarders and "day boys" like Mick and Phill who lived in surrounding suburbs. An encounter with one of Caulfield Grammar’s more intimidating figures, the almost comic-book-sounding "Beaver" Mills, was typical of what happened in a brawl.

"Nick’s incredible under adverse conditions," says Phill Calvert. "He has incredible strength when he is under duress. It’s this absolute driven, animal-type strength. I just could not believe it when the teacher broke it up: Nick was winning, he was on top and he was gonna kill Beaver."

Budding performer Nick Cave in 1976. From Boy on Fire by Mark Mordue.

Budding performer Nick Cave in 1976. From Boy on Fire by Mark Mordue.Credit: Ashley Mackevicius.

Nick may have "looked like an Art House wimp", to use Calvert’s words, but to see him in a fight was, Mick Harvey agreed, "quite scary". When Nick returned home to Wangaratta for the holidays, his old friend Bryan Wellington sensed the changes. Nick told him about it, how he had to fight. "How unhappy it made him. There was no violence in our growing-up time in Wang; Nick was not a toughie or an aggressive personality," Wellington insists. "With Nick I saw how that came into his life later when he was forced to leave and go down to Melbourne. I often think it wasn’t Wang so much that influenced him, it was leaving Wang."

Tracy Pew and Nick Cave at a Boys Next Door gig in 1977.

Tracy Pew and Nick Cave at a Boys Next Door gig in 1977.

The gaps between each visit home by Nick were growing longer. When Nick did come back to town, Wellington says, "we used to spend a lot of time writing out the lyrics to songs. I remember that being an important activity for us. Leonard Cohen, Dylan, John Lennon … just listening and writing down all the words."

On one of these visits, Nick stayed with Bryan for a weekend. He brought with him from Melbourne a copy of Fillmore East – June 1971, a live album by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. Nick and Bryan blasted out the track Bwana Dik on the record player again and again, partly to aggravate Wellington’s father. Both boys thought the song’s double entendres to be the height of wit. The absurdist jazz mania of the music, and the vocals – alternately cartoonish, operatic, orated or yelled – impressed them greatly: a compound of avant-garde style and crude humour cast in the mock form of a seduction taking place between a rock star and a groupie. "Each time we played it Nick turned it up a little louder. I took great delight [in that]," says Bryan.

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The weekend over, Nick caught the train back to Melbourne. Bryan says he and Eddie [Baumgarten] had in the meantime "became better friends after Nick left town, as it was then that the wagging, drinking, smoking and porn began at another friend’s garage". The duo would later fall out, arguing over a local girl. When she died unexpectedly of cancer the rift became something deeper. Bryan Wellington was only 16 when he fled from his "anti- intellectual" father to live with his uncle and aunt in Wangaratta so that he could finish high school. Eddie Baumgarten signed on to join the navy at age 15. Bryan says that "Eddie was sent away", but Anne [Eddie’s older sister] remembers her brother being an adventurer and "a pretty charismatic kid who drew people to him.

"That was how he and Nick connected. When Ed came back from the navy he had all these amazing stories about his trips around Asia. Bryan was a bit of an outsider. A nice kid, but not particularly cool and not in any group." Bryan followed Nick’s career from afar as he dealt with his own profound feelings of exile, then similar problems of addiction. After a long patch away from the town, he would end up back at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Wangaratta, finding accommodation there as a groundsman and listening to rehearsals by the various boys’ choirs as he went about his work over the years.

The school band at Caulfield Grammar, 1973. From left, Mick Harvey, John Cocivera, Chris Coyne, Phill Calvert, Nick Cave and Brett Purcell. Photographer unknown.

The school band at Caulfield Grammar, 1973. From left, Mick Harvey, John Cocivera, Chris Coyne, Phill Calvert, Nick Cave and Brett Purcell. Photographer unknown.Credit: Courtesy of Phill Calvert

Asked what he most identifies with in Nick’s lyrics, Bryan Wellington can only respond with jet-black humour: "Maybe the drug-induced, not-caring attitude." A little more genuinely, he adds, "All this stuff is really hard to talk about." The songs he can relate to most are like a dream of what it was like to be young: a dream of never being able to go back, or never really leaving. "Music," says Wellington, "was always our escape from Wangaratta."

Nick Cave singing I'm Eighteen at The Boys Next Door's first gig, Swinburne College, 1977.

Nick Cave singing I'm Eighteen at The Boys Next Door's first gig, Swinburne College, 1977. Credit: Peter Milne

He would obsess over Nick’s The Hammer Song as a key to something that happened to Nick in particular and to all of them in some broader way. But when Bryan discusses why the song is so important he is elusive and imprecise, suggesting its meaning without wanting to fully state what he feels privy to behind the lyrics. "That is very autobiographical if you know the story," he says. "Nick talks about the hammer coming down and how it squashed all dreams. But it made no sound! It means a secret. To me the song is about Nick being sent off to boarding school. He’s had a dream life and his tortured life began. It’s Nick’s idea of a bit of a joke too. He likes to say things are true that no one can say are true. There’s a mystery to it. Failure is what it’s about. A major failure in his eyes. The hammer coming down could be a God reference, but I don’t think Nick means it that way."

It was during his first year as a boarder at Caulfield Grammar that Nick was summoned to his father’s study after provoking Colin’s ire yet again on a weekend visit home. Cave would write about this experience in his 1996 BBC radio essay "The Flesh Made Word"; Nick details his father confronting him as a 12-year-old and asking him what he had done to make the world a better place or improve the lot of his fellow man? Fairly obviously, Nick felt strange about this, and rather confused. He was just a kid. Unable to answer, he threw the question back at his father a little defiantly. Colin cited a few short stories he had written and pulled out the journals they appeared in. There was a moment of reconciliation between father and son as they shared in what they meant. But Nick could see the publications were at least a decade old and any promise in them of something greater had long ago faded.

Nick later described these stories as "light and comic, the kind of thing you get in Reader’s Digest. One was this humorous, quirky tale about a lady in a hat shop. It was clever and funny and quite lightweight. The other was a rewrite of Snow White. An adult rewrite," he adds with a curious emphasis.

"My father and I became quite competitive as I got older," Nick says. "It was in some ways just me needing to assert myself against this giant personality my father had. So I actively sought out areas of knowledge he didn’t have. And began reading things like Alfred Jarry. My father would usually have a withering reply about that kind of thing. I was also getting into painters, and that was not his area. I still remember telling him, ‘I’ve just been looking at Mondrain.’ He looked up and said, ‘It’s Mon-dri-an.’ Then I backed out of the room."

'With Lolita, my father actually sat me down and read the first chapter to me out loud.'

Nick Cave

Despite this competition, there is no doubt that father and son shared a profound love of literature. "With Lolita, my father actually sat me down and read the first chapter to me out loud – I think he knew it by heart, actually. He unlocked the words for me, explained why it was such a forceful first chapter, taught me what alliteration was, [and how] the opening chapter drew you in. He saw it as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. He also recommended I read the murder of the pawnbroker scene in Crime and Punishment, which I later studied in final year English Lit, and that had a huge impact on me. He got me to read The Old Man and The Sea – Hemingway – that was cool – short and sweet! Also Lord of the Flies …

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"I can still remember the things he would say where he placed an emphasis on the importance of style. Style over content. I’m the same now. I’ve always been a style-over-content man, really. It’s not so much the content that interests me as the way it is said. Anyway, when Dad first read me Lolita he was excited by the sheer use of language, not what it was about. In some respects, it’s very inappropriate to turn a 12-year-old boy on to Lolita. It’s an adult book. But my father would say there is more benefit than harm in it."

This is an edited extract from Boy on Fire, by Mark Mordue, (4th Estate 2020), reproduced with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Australia. The book is due in bookshops on November 19.

The performance film Idiot Prayer – Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace, the extended cut, is in cinemas next month. The album will be released on November 20.

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Original URL: https://www.watoday.com.au/culture/books/trouble-seemed-to-be-part-of-my-dna-nick-cave-on-his-teenage-years-20201105-p56bt3.html