Read Write [Hand]
A multi-disciplinary Nick Cave reader
Edited by Sam Kinchin-Smith
Silkworms Ink Anthologies
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Silkworms Ink
Read Write [Hand]
Read Write [Hand]: A multi-disciplinary Nick Cave reader is a provocative new e-collection of illustrated essays, accompanied by illustrative online mixtapes, which interrogates Nick Cave’s literary undertones and emphases, false-starts and fixations, achievements and overall credentials. Taking as its starting-point the notion that Cave’s work – as both songwriter and Writer – represents an extraordinarily rich nub of musical-literary intersection, this unique volume considers, amongst other things:
– Cave’s formative years;
– Cave’s bible;
– the cinematic Cave;
– Cave in Berlin;
– Cave and the ballad tradition;
– the hard-boiled Cave;
– Cave and poetic scrutiny;
– Cave’s video narratives;
– Cave as Englishman.
Taking in academia and journalism, polemic and poetry, not to mention photography, stop-motion animation, graphic art and collage, Read Write [Hand] represents an attempt to explore Nick Cave’s interdisciplinarity via its own multidisciplinarity. Utilising eBook functionality, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Silkworm Ink’s stunning new website, it features essays by Robert Brokenmouth and Prof. Nick Groom, poetry by Roddy Lumsden and John Clegg, cover artwork by Steve Wacksman and a new version of Cave’s ‘Bring It On’ by Cypress Grove & the Signifiers.
Sam Kinchin-Smith is Silkworms Ink’s music and non-fiction editor.
Cover: Read Write [Hand]
Steve Wacksman
Ballpoint pen and Zip-A-Tone on paper, digital colour
Original dimensions: 8.5x11”
First published 2011
by Silkworms Ink
Highlands, Whatlington, Battle, East Sussex, TN33 0NL, United Kingdom
Selection and Editorial Matter © 2011 Sam Kinchin-Smith
Individual chapters and illustrations © 2011 the contributors
Typeset in Garamond by
James Harringman
Highlands, Whatlington, Battle, East Sussex, TN33 0NL, United Kingdom
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN13: 978-1-908-64401-5 (eBook)
The new self-publishing
Sam Kinchin-Smith
Illustrated by Corey Mesler
PART 1: 13 ESSAYS
I. Portrait of the Artist as he begins to Figure Things Out:
Part one of a possible series
Robert Brokenmouth
Illustrated by Mike Retter
II. “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks”:
Cave and the word of the lord
Kevin E.G. Perry
Illustrated by Bo Mathorne
III. Cave and the Seventh Art:
The cinematic imagination
Cypress Grove
Illustrated by Becky Scarborough
IV. Angels, Desire and the Vagabond:
Cave’s journey to a place of ease
Peter Webb
Illustrated by Irene Condorelli
V. Clutching at the Hands of Gurus:
Cave on authorship, mything the artist, and knowing exactly who to blame
Tom Steward
Illustrated by John Clegg
A Bad Seeds bestiary (a video essay)
Edward Cottrell
Illustrated by Reena Makwana
VII. “That road it twists/ That road is crossed”:
Echoes of traditional ballads in the work of Cave
Nick Groom
Illustrated by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
VIII. This World is Full of Danger:
The hard-boiled Cave
Nicolas Pillai
Illustrated by Marisa Redburn
IX. The Author Appropriates Artfully:
The use of other writers’ writing in Cave’s lyrics
Ashlee Elfman
Illustrated by Steve Wacksman
Cave’s lyrical accomplishments and poetic scrutiny
Phil Brown
Illustrated by Marisa Redburn
XI. We Call Upon the Author to Explain:
A letter to the narrator
Spring Offensive
Illustrated by Ben Jensen
XII. “There’s a devil crawling along your floor”:
Love + Lust = Madness in Cave’s videos
Morgan Wolfe
Illustrated by Marisa Redburn
XIII. “Our True Intent is all for Your Delight”:
Cave, Englishman, polymath, National Treasure (in that order)
Sam Kinchin-Smith
Illustrated by Roddy Lumsden
PART 2: [FEWER THAN] 13 MIXTAPES
Monsieur Cave, the transfigured lupus choirboy (a sound essay)
Merle Leonce Bone
Illustrated by Merle
Robert Brokenmouth
Kevin E.G. Perry
Cypress Grove
Peter Webb
Tom Steward
Nick Groom
Nicolas Pillai
Spring Offensive
Morgan Wolfe
Sam Kinchin-Smith
First of all, thank you James, for publishing and design assistance. Gigantic thanks to all the contributors to this work who, throughout a speculative, intense and often rather ridiculous process, responded to my inadequate suggestions with extraordinary intelligence and generosity – but particularly to Cypress, and then Ashlee and Robert, whose assistance recruiting brilliant people over the summer was invaluable. Thanks to John for his excellent proofing, Nick for the research, Saphi and Laurent for their work on Merle’s essay, Cypress’ band, Bruce for the stories and photographs (which I do intend to use, somehow, somewhere), Mark for putting me in touch with Steve, Belen for putting me in touch with Irene, and Phil and Nic for getting me out of a tight spot. Thanks to at least three other people I’ve forgotten.
The new self-publishing
Sam Kinchin-Smith
My great uncle, the splendidly named Gladwyn Turbutt, is a historian. The pre-eminent authority on Derbyshire history in the UK (and presumably also the world, then) or so I’m told. Must confess I haven’t got round to reading any one of the four volumes of his History of Derbyshire, which takes in its stride over a thousand years of county history, but I daresay I’ll find a couple of minutes to spend skimming through a few centuries of fighting and farming soon. For the time being, though, I want to focus on the books he writes in between monumental local histories – for instance, he’s just had a work about religion published, which takes in both the personal and the objectively historical.
Haven’t read that either, yet. Neglectful great nephew that I am.
Had published: the point here is that, though Uncle Bobby (no, I don’t understand how Gladwyn shortens to Bobby either) publishes his histories through local academic houses, he self-publishes the hobby works, usually with the assistance of one of those quasi-presses one pays to produce a couple hundred flimsy, badly designed paperback copies of a manuscript. Which isn’t exactly surprising; as a multi-volume History of Derbyshire would suggest, Bobby’s interests are rather specific, and his word-counts considerable. Two characteristics commercial publishers run a mile from. In other words, the set-up is practical because it is inevitable.
But for some reason, it attracts a certain amount of derision – not in the least malicious, but derision nonetheless – from other members of my family. Whilst it would be an overstatement to say that the self-published work is tacitly regarded with the same disdain as, say, the mythical “unfinished novel” (most families have an aunt or cousin writing one at any given time, in my experience) it sometimes feels like self-publication counts against a completed manuscript in a way that non-publication doesn’t. I’d suggest that there are three main reasons for this bizarre state of affairs, and that none of them stand up to very much scrutiny.
First up, rejection: the perception that self-publication is a last resort after rejection by the “proper” platforms. Putting aside for one moment the fact that assuming this about a self-published text is extremely presumptuous, this attitude also hinges on the notion that those platforms’ criteria for publishing a work are qualitative. A hilariously naïve assessment of the agendas at work in commercial publishing houses defined by their owners’ and editors’ targets, predilections, whims, conservatism. Second, the lack of an incisive editorial eye: the idea that self-published works aren’t elegantly tempered by the interventions of an objectively rigorous editor. Heavens, if these people could see the flailing laissez faire of the editor at an academic publishing house confronted by a monograph about, I don’t know, the semiotics of temporality in Yiddish prose poetry…
Third: vanity. Fair enough, if you can tell me precisely which elements of the traditional publishing process aren’t pretty much entirely vanity-driven?
In other words, sneering at self-publishing – and self-publishers – misses the point on a variety of levels. And them’s just the negatives. Turn to the positives and the case against the critics appears even more potent. Because it seems to me that self-publishing a work can potentially be regarded as a decidedly noble thing to do. It involves taking on a fair amount of commercial risk in order to distribute a project with few, if any, commercial expectations. A project that is often an extremely personal attempt, drawing on a considerable investment of experience and energy, to address a very specific problem with the ultimate aim of making a few people feel or think a bit differently about something. Is that really less admirable than trying to construct a “publishable” novel? Is it not rather generous, regardless of the vanity involved?
One might argue, of course, that this is a conversation that has been made irrelevant by the internet and, increasingly, eBooks. Frame self-publication in terms of blogging and folk will fall over themselves to say how wonderful it is that people are willing to spend their time spraying around their knowledge about stuff for no tangible reward. And so much has been written (inevitably, on blogs) about the rise and rise of publisher-sidestepping Kindle Store bestsellers – Amanda Hocking, say, and J.A. Konrath – that one could be forgiven for assuming that publishing models have already changed for good. That a centuries-old literary establishment has already been torn down by self-made writer millionaires (for predictably, it is Hocking’s earnings that the commentators commentate on) and we are already living in the age of the self-publisher – whether my extended family realise it or not.
Thinking that way is only possible, though, if one ignores the walls of snobbery that still line the traditional avenues of “quality” publishing – literary fiction, contemplative non-fiction, biography, criticism, edited essay collections, poetry – in a manner that they frankly never did with Hocking’s and Konrath’s genre pulp. There is a literary caste system that those working within these forms accept, without question, and the self-publisher remains at the foot of it. And I don’t believe that either of the aforementioned digital models are capable of breaking down those walls any time soon. Why? Because bricked up within them (and indeed within the very concept of snobbery: accepting that some art is objectively better than other art) are a number of undeniably good things that serious readers are unwilling to discard. As they are with blogs and e-thrillers because of the force of the former’s polemic and the latter’s thrillingness. Imaginative commissioning, say, or clear-sighted editorial intelligence; strong design, high production values, selectivity. Rigour.
But the dignified, thoughtful writer that I introduced via my opening image of the self-publisher – not to mention more controversial, experimental, political, wilfully obscure authors – remain left behind by the establishment. Serious publishing refuses to open itself up, democratise itself, in positive ways, for fear of the public genres’ slack editing, sinking standards, grotesque cover designs. But does one automatically result in the other? Is there not another way?
This book represents my first attempt to find one – by reasserting the possibilities of self-publishing by focussing, with equal attention and equal energy, on both writing/editing and publishing. And I use the latter word in (in many ways) its most traditional sense: the art of presentation, framing, distribution and so forth. Read Write [Hand] is an attempt to be carefully and intelligently innovative with both the writing and publication of a book, with an equal emphasis on each. Neatly dodging the self-evident shortcomings of imaginatively published bad writing (to which the traditional, serious publisher counters, why should we change what we do when New Methods result in a decline in quality?) or badly published imaginative writing (to which the retort goes, our way might not be perfect, but it’s better than this).
An attempt to assault traditional, serious publishing on two fronts, then, in order to show that the good can be preserved and the bad bettered.
Ridiculously ambitious, no doubt. But neither can there be much doubt that my (and Silkworms Ink’s) willingness to focus on both things, and work extremely hard doing so, is notable. I work in publishing and, while the cliché that the industry depends on an army of would-be novelists, closet poets and failed journalists is undoubtedly true, I’m continually bewildered by everybody’s unwillingness to combine the creativity of their day-job with the artistry of their extracurricular pursuits. Are you not fascinated, I have to stop myself from asking, by the notion of combining your eye for copy-editing with your interest in writing and referencing reviews? Think of the cohesively bespoke collection of work you could assemble and realise! And you, I point, in my head, at a colleague, aren’t you even a little bit interested in what might happen if you took a couple of your more interesting contacts, and your ability to successfully cold-call commission, and put them to work on a project you were, like, totally into?
And everyone, surely, surely you’d still want to design your own covers, even if you did find an interested external publisher?
Notable, but hardly unique. This is only a fledgling version of the practice perfected by a chain of literary auteurs (like the cinematic auteur, controlling every aspect of a work with the force of a cohesive creative vision) that stretches from Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, presenting their cultural manifesto via BLAST’s stunningly inventive typography, to Dave Eggers. For Eggers is as crucial a reference-point in conversations about magazine publication, editorial vision, independent publishing and the minutiae of fonts (he likes Garamond best of all) as he is in terms of semi-autobiographical fiction.
I would suggest, though, that the baton hasn’t been picked up for a while – that the current moment of literary production we’re all trying to understand, with its unprecedented challenges, doesn’t yet have any kind of defining writer-publisher. That the baton, indeed, is still really in the hands of Eggers et al which, considering McSweeney’s still largely classical, non-electronic model, says it all really.
And neither has it been picked up within two other fields: serious music writing, the revolutionary leaders of which are still reckoned to be conventional (and yes, brilliant) websites like Pitchfork and The Quietus. And essay publication, the more accessible side of which is still defined by venerable journals (The LRB, New Yorker, Paris Review – I don’t need to list these) and start-up copycats like The White Review, so desperate to emulate these big city papers (possibly that should read paper cities) they end up looking like they’re parodying them. And as for the scholarly end of the spectrum, while George Monbiot’s recent essay in The Guardian stating that “academic publishers make Murdoch look like a Socialist” was characteristically over-egged, an industry that continues to depend on selling prohibitively expensive journal subscriptions and monographs to the few, rather than opening up critical discourse to the many, is self-evidently problematically outdated. And just generally problematic.
As much as it is a book about Nick Cave, then, Read Write [Hand] is also a product of (and hopefully, alternative to) what these trends and energies collectively represent. This probably sounds like a rather pretentious way of describing an approach that, as I’ve already acknowledged, is by no means unprecedented. But it’s also the most accurate way of representing how the book’s intent and significance has evolved as it has come together. For its response to much of what I’ve mentioned in the preceding paragraphs has emerged spontaneously and organically, rather than as a result of some kind of manifesto that myself and the other Silkworms editors came up with before I started commissioning. It is worth briefly discussing this evolutionary process, because it makes sense of what the book now is – and isn’t.
My original idea was to commission some strangers whose work on Cave I’ve admired, along with various Cave-literate friends and acquaintances I’ve picked up in the course of my journalistic writing and so forth, to write ten short and conventional essays accompanied by illustrative online mixtapes exploring a niche I’d been blogging about for 18 months: the intersections between (mostly, popular) music and literature. Focussing specifically on a musician of letters who had, rather inevitably, become my most recurring reference-point. In order to indicate and interrogate Nick Cave’s literary credentials via the key angles – by looking at bible, ballad, the American Gothic and so forth. And turn around, in three months, a short eBook with an accompanying microsite hosting the tapes, pitched halfway between Karen Wellberry and Tanya Dalziell’s Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (but costing a tiny fraction of what that work costs) and the sort of Spotify-powered interactive musical commentary that Drowned in Sound does so well.
During the initial discussions I had with potential contributors, though, two things quickly became apparent: that writing creatively and analytically about Nick Cave is an inherently literary act, requiring an engagement with the writerly energies at the heart of his work, regardless of whether the specific focus of a study is trained on actual literature, an author, a genre and so on. And that asking people to come at Cave from a cross-disciplinary, multimedia perspective, while only allowing them to write a thousand words of standardised analysis, was pretty perverse.
The immediacy of these realisations meant I was able to assemble fourteen original and wildly divergent pieces of writing (ranging from biography to phenomenological analysis, from an open letter to a very long list) and as many original illustrations (including poems) within two and a half months. And then as I turned to the pressing problem of how to publish such a scatter of new work within a couple of weeks, in order to keep to my original time-limit, another revelation. Namely, that doing the presentational stuff really really quickly would inevitably involve rushing and/or ignoring the all-important fundamentals that the work’s credibility depended on my getting right – intelligent guidance of revisions, professional copy-editing and proofing, responsible fact-checking, adherence to a style-guide etc. Not to mention running out of time for finding spaces for the silly little personal flourishes that are the publisher’s prerogative. Like only ever using the word “Cave”, and never “Nick”, in titles and captions; like writing the odd postscript here and there; like drawing attention to the fact that there are fewer mixtapes than essays, rather than hiding it; like calling the mixtapes “Nicktapes” (sorry); like including an early draft of the cover image as an internal image; like writing a self-indulgent introduction.
(For this book, because of the range of genres and forms, I thought it less important to dedicate huge amounts of time to making footnoting and referencing consistent. Another publisher’s prerogative: arbitrary prioritisation.)
There are, however, other aspects of this book that are very much a product of an original vision, on the part of both Silkworms Ink and myself. A desire to skim the line between academia and journalism, for example, and in doing so bring together people from as many fields of discourse as possible (so bloggers and animators and poets, then, as well as musicians and critics). To use new technologies to supplement certain traditional principles of publishing, rather than throwing a manuscript at a MacBook Pro and seeing what happens. And most importantly of all, to build the book out of an economic model that is fair, cooperative, sustainable and in this case probably unprecedented. Hopefully you’ll have already noticed that $2.99 isn’t a lot for over 50,000 words, original illustrations, even some specially recorded audio content. What you won’t be aware of, though, is that roughly 60% of the net profits made on each sale will go to the book’s writers and illustrators, with only 40% going to Silkworms Ink. We are, in short, handing each writer involved in the work a royalty that is the equivalent of what a commercial publisher would offer the editor, only. And each illustrator a respectable chunk also. We couldn’t afford to pay anyone anything upfront, and so we decided to make sure it was in the interests of everybody involved to get people looking at, and talking about, the book.
(We also feel very strongly about being open about this side of things. That’s another cornerstone of our basic approach.)
I believe that this combination of imaginative commissioning, editorial openness and fluidity, encouragement of cross-disciplinary and electronic experimentation, equal emphasis on writing/editing and publishing, and makeshift writerly socialism, makes Read Write [Hand] a legitimate response to the failings of a literary and cultural status quo that I’ve only scratched the surface of here. If nothing else. Which reminds me, I recently attended a thoroughly underwhelming symposium at Modern Art Oxford, and napped through half of it. But then I bought the event book, because I was captivated by its beauty, its documentary intelligence, the way it brought together image and commentary, its bizarrely reasonable price (£12 for a full-colour cloth-bound hardback). The book itself was far more arresting than its subject matter. I hope that regardless of your interest in Nick Cave, this book feels like an interesting book.
How to read it, then
While it would be churlish to suddenly become all dictatorial about how one should go about reading the book, there are some relationships between the different types of content that I think it’s important to introduce, or at least account for, in an introduction. That said, hopefully the preceding paragraphs have already introduced the basic practical concept behind the work to a reasonable extent. To summarise: here are essays about different facets of Nick Cave’s literary practice which come with illustrations to look at and mixtapes to listen to (whilst reading, perhaps) to energise and bring into more multi-dimensional focus the analysis being asserted in the various arguments and narratives. Of course, each artist and mixtape-maker has approached this notion very differently (with some writers preferring not to compile a tape at all, due to rather admirable reservations about whether they could do anything with the interaction interesting enough to justify a whole other contribution) but the founding idea of interplay between thesis, imagery and soundtrack remains the same.
Except, of course, in the case of Edward’s written “essay”, which should be cross-referenced with his wonderful video essay (that can be viewed on the homepage of the microsite, at http://www.silkwormsink.com/nick/home.html). Edward’s work, and also Merle’s, is featured in the book because it is interesting, obviously, but it is also here to help establish an essential and meaningful relationship between book and website. For whereas the “normal” essays and mixtapes can be explored, albeit not fully enjoyed, via the book alone, Edward’s and Merle’s respective pieces make little sense without their online counterpoints.
A note, also, on publishing Merle’s writing in French, rather than an English translation (which he also provided me with, and which can be accessed on the microsite). Well first of all, it’s Merle’s essay, written especially for the book, and his first language is French – and I was therefore uncomfortable with the idea of publishing it in anything other than its original form. Second, though, I think it thrills because of its sonic qualities, not just in terms of Saphi’s audio version on the site (http://www.silkwormsink.com/nick/bridge.html) but also through the structures of sound embedded in the writing itself – I should add, at this point, that the “sound essay” tag is an editorial addition that I included for this precise reason. To put it another way, translating it into English would result in more of its essence getting lost in translation, than the alternative: keeping it in a language that a majority of the readership probably lack fluency in. Read it aloud, whether you understand the words or not. Or better still, have Merle read it to you.
A few other things… I’ve positioned Merle’s essay “between” the two halves of the book because it struck me that, being a fragment that functions almost like music and that furthermore has been turned into an actual recording by Saphi, it represents a bridge to ease the transition from the read to the heard. Hence, “Bridgetape”. Also, the ordering of the essays, now mostly mixed up due to other considerations, still vaguely reflects my original plan to organise the book into three sections: first, essays tackling biographical moments; then, essays attempting straightforward readings; and third, work attempting more experimental readings. I dropped the idea because the essays quickly grew out of their originally stated focus, and the section headings became meaningless assertions.
And finally, largely because of the haste with which I had to thrust together essayist and illustrator thanks to my initial Three Month Plan, most of the illustrations specifically respond to the title of the essay they accompany only, rather than its content. In the case of Ben Jensen’s illustration for the Spring Offensive essay, even this light connection is lacking, insofar as the artwork is very clearly a response to an early draft title involving the word “web” (included as the title of Ben’s piece) – rather than the open letter’s final title. To my mind, this strained relationship has resulted in some compelling tensions and conversations between image and written word, which justify the book’s multi-disciplinary (for the sake of multi-dimensionality) presentation far more than a set of linear, entirely illustrative associations would.
Silkworms Ink
I’ve mentioned Silkworms Ink a couple of times in this introduction, and referred to it via the word “we” two or three times also. I feel I should briefly explain the relationship between “the new self-publishing” and the specific example of this book, and the press that’s publishing it (of which I am an editor, if you hadn’t already gathered that). Originally intended to be one of several works we would use to re-launch Silkworms in 2012, and announce the principles behind our publishing, this has become a much more personal project, reflecting my ideas every bit as much as our ideas.
Read Write [Hand] is an application of Silkworms’ basic publishing concept – writers distributing work we want to read in interesting ways, because we are fascinated by both writing/editing and publishing – but it is also an extension of it, insofar as I have demonstrated my own fascination by controlling every single stage of its publication, and writing a few thousand words as well. The crucial thing to assert is that our chapbooks and more major works aren’t all like this, by any means. We don’t expect to control every facet of everything we publish, so please, if you’re thinking about submitting something to us (whether poetry, fiction, non-fiction, educational writing, or even an idea for a live event) send over proposals and manuscripts as under- or over-developed as you’ve had the time to make them – I can’t emphasise enough that our belief in a new self-publishing doesn’t mean we’re only interested in publishing ourselves. Truth is, we just care an awful lot about everything that makes a book a book. And hopefully, Read Write [Hand] is proof of that.
***submissions@silkwormsink.com
Only to Myself at First
Corey Mesler
My wife was a few rooms away.
Her chocolate hair had just been
trimmed and I wanted to tell
her that she is as beautiful as
river gold. Instead I was sunk in
a poem, trying to wrestle some
sense out of both the English
language and the webby pap
behind my eyes. There were not
words for the muddle my fingers
found hovering over their keys.
Something stuck in my eye, one
of the world’s small irascibilities.
I turned to put some music on:
it was No More Shall We Part:
it rose to my hand. And I said,
only to myself at first, Wife, I am
on my way to you, walking this
uneven road that I helped make, this
wobbly orbit I follow nonetheless,
through the dim din of eons, through
the sparkling beaches where
we sometimes wreck and sometimes
bathe, through wrack and rune,
through the flowers and the rime,
through pizazzed rooms we cohabit.
PART ONE: 13 ESSAYS
I. Portrait of the Artist as he begins to Figure Things Out
Part one of a possible series
Robert Brokenmouth
After over twenty five years with his hand on the tiller, and twenty-odd years of fame, awards and being a significant part of the underground-cum-pop zeitgeist, it is easy for the casual observer to believe that for Nick Cave, things were always this way.
Anyone coming to Nick’s work over the last fifteen years will have encountered a disjointed back-story. Cave’s Complete Lyrics is incomplete; people such as Rowland S. Howard seem to be a tragic sideshow; other significant contributors to Nick’s early career (such as Keith Glass, Tracy Pew and Phill Calvert) are simply nowhere. It’s as if The Boys Next Door never happened, with “Nick’s band” The Birthday Party appearing, fully-formed, out of the void.
The truth is more involved, as truths often are. Bear with me and I’ll try to take you into the beginning, just as far as their first vinyl appearance.
Although the wider world may fall into line to dismiss Nick’s early work, it was The Boys Next Door which made Cave a star to a young audience – and Nick would not have had this start without displaying some significant talent, in turn attracting people who would actively assist the band, and Nick, in getting to the next leg of their career. If Nick had not clearly demonstrated a charisma, a talent, and a determination to succeed, hip Australia would surely have dismissed him in the same way that ... bugger, that’s the next essay.
Because the getting there is far more complex than “he was always gonna be a rock star,” it is worth re-examining how Nick got here from there. Discussing an early draft of this essay, Sam Kinchin-Smith remarked that “much of Nick’s early life and work is best made sense of via a kind of literary dot-joining.” In one sense, that’s not too far off the mark: Nick’s early influences tend to appear and reappear in his lyrics, music and writing. For those of us, though, who followed the band Nick was part of, and then his own bands, Sam seems to be looking backwards, not forwards, the way it was back in the day when we had all our own teeth. Increasingly I wonder about all those people who hear a cracking Nick song and begin to investigate, to realise there are so many complicated, interlocking parts to a puzzle which I suspect Nick would himself find puzzling, if he could be bothered to think about it.
The genesis of Nick as a songwriter (if not artist) of the stature he enjoys today is due more to the influence of the people around him than literature, art, the blues and the bible. These are very, very important, as most of us realise, but also ... Nick is very much a people-person, and it was through sharing books, records, ideas, folk-lore and so on which Nick was then able to mull over… Nick’s own work has his own rather unique tang, but it’s people who have showed him doors, alleyways, tubes and pipelines which he may not have discovered on his own.
Charismatic, competitive and somewhat narcissistic (as many future stars are), Nick attracted fiercely loyal friends who delighted in his somewhat outrageous, wildly entertaining aura, from Wangaratta to Melbourne. This didn’t mean he was widely popular; then (as now) resentment was felt by those who had little charisma and cannot comprehend those who do. Jealousy merged with an outraged, “who does this prick think he is?” As Ian Johnston makes clear in Bad Seed (1995), Nick was not unused to fighting and was considered a “disruptive influence” as far back as 1970. Certainly the fighting was partly due to the usual intolerant schoolboy xenophobia towards anyone who does not conform; the other part was Nick’s extraordinary determination not to be put down, not to be made to feel shame.
A personal sense of security is essential to a growing child; as one of several children, and the youngest boy, Nick would have felt he had to fight for attention. Perversely, he also attracted the wrong sort of attention whether he liked it or not. Like his older brother Tim he grew surprisingly tall, and with his librarian mother and teacher father Colin (who later became headmaster) the Caves were intellectuals in a country town. Nick has often recalled that his father would push literature on his son – James Joyce’s Ulysses and Nabokov’s Lolita, for example. Ian Johnston makes the excellent point that “there seemed to be no respite from school, not even at home.”
Children and adolescents deal with situations that make them horribly self-conscious in different ways; while not every son of a priest turns up in a successful rock‘n’roll band, look at Alice Cooper and Mick Harvey. Consequently, Nick absorbed the rock‘n’roll records his older brothers Pete and Tim, as well as his friends, brought back from Melbourne, with considerable gusto. As with many adolescents who feel unutterably trapped, partial freedom came on vinyl. However, it was more than just music that informed Nick; the tangible, physical knowledge that there was a real world beyond “Wang”, far more interesting and worthy of exploration. Combine a trouble-making youth with the glamour and romantic possibilities of modern rock‘n’roll and ... well, let’s just say Nick’s divergent talents came out early.
A boarder at arts-focused boys’ school Caulfield Grammar in 1974, once away from home Nick’s world began to open up. Apart from being in the art class, possibly because he’d briefly been in the choir he became the singer in a band composed of Caulfield Grammar boys. They’d jam in one of the CG halls and sometimes play support at a dance at CG or one of the local girls’ schools.
In Melbourne Nick joined his friends, including the older art students, in discovering the record stores, bookshops and the clothing shops, the opportunity shops where you could get incredibly cheap clothes and accessories. Nick read copiously; the excellent teachers at CG taught widely, broadening way past the text books. Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu may not have been on the curriculum but, thanks to CG, Nick read it. Who can ignore a play whose very first word caused a riot, a play which was belligerently, joyously punk a lifetime before punk?
The band’s lead guitarist, John Cochivera, had a sister who was going out with a guy called Barry who either owned or ran an import record store. So everyone was listening to a lot of music which would never feature in the principal Australian music rags, RAM and Juke, never mind the rest of the somewhat xenophobic Australian media. The band had discovered an underground cavern filled with twinkling, silica stars. All of a sudden Nick, like many others before and after him, could see the reality of the rock‘n’roll dream. Record stores like Archie and the Juggheads (later Missing Link) used to be places to hang out. Apart from the music there’d be pretty girls, who Nick was soon hanging out with.
By now they had what might be described as “an art-fashion edge,” so God alone knows what they thought they were, buying all these glossy imported magazines with lots of Bowie, Roxy Music and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band and so on, filling their heads with pretty girls and impossible dreams and doing their best to emulate ... not just the bands but the lifestyle they promised. Take a look at the gatefold sleeve of the first Roxy Music album. Extraordinary or what? And they felt themselves aligned, polarised, and they were so far apart from the establishment ... teenagers, eh?
As Colin moved up the education establishment ladder, the rest of the Cave family moved to Melbourne and joined Nick. A competitive man, Colin’s shadow provided part of the impetus for Nick’s initial competitive nature and need to stand out.
In the now-famous 1975 Caulfield Grammar art class photograph of Nick with his trews just below his knees, you can see a hint of what those who were close to Nick already knew – that Nick Cave was effectively famous before he was famous.
What is also clear here is that Nick has a very off-beat sense of humour. He’s not the class clown; that’s too easy a judgement to make. Think about it: how does a sixteen year old go from, “oh yeah, classmate taking photo,” to “Aha!” and hauling down his strides for the shot? There are no teachers about, the two girls in the picture are student teachers, yet ... it’s not malicious behaviour; neither overtly sexual nor the “look at me” aspect of the class prat. This is a bloody funny moment where Nick’s caught clearly enjoying himself – and so are the class, they’re kacking themselves (look at Phill!).
The photo clearly shows what we seem to miss these days: that Nick is a lot of fun to be around (unlike the class clown, who isn’t). While there’s usually someone like this in every class, Nick’s character and behaviour were rather bigger and more extraordinary than most.
This is significant: Nick likes to have people around him so he can have fun. Simple as that. His idea of fun is very proactive, he shares it around. In the earliest known live footage of the Boys Next Door we see the band amused, even laughing, as their singer self-consciously performs, leaving us wondering if he will undermine his own performance. He never does; this is another element which the early crowds found compelling.
In late 1975 Brett Purcell left and the articulate and well-read Tracy Pew joined. Tracy brought a new, non-CG friend into the fold: Chris Walsh, who’d taught him to play. Chris’ “record collection would prove to be very influential for the group. His taste was expansive, stretching from The Stooges and The MC5, through The New York Dolls to the outlaw figures of country and western music, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash” (Johnston). To say their tastes were developing would be an understatement; they started to consider themselves as a unique art scene, not part of the music scene as such, because the music scene was horrible, dull and boring.
Even so, the band initially faltered at the beginning of 1976 as “freedom” and the “real world” beckoned. Even with the determined Mick Harvey rejoining after working on his guitar (developing a style which allowed him to play both rhythm and lead) the band was still more of a fun, art thing than anything else. The music was wedded to art, fashion and socialising, these were the key ingredients. Their friendships were firm; Tracy and Phill, both with day jobs, lived together in a flat, for example. Towards the end of 1976, their Roxy phase gave way to the discovery of The Velvet Underground. Nick acquired the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP, and Pere Ubu’s ‘30 Seconds over Tokyo’. Imagine discovering a band using the name of a play you loved!
So from the outset The Boys Next Door were not punk-rock, partly because the definition of “punk” didn’t exist. That musical movements (only later becoming known as new wave and punk) had been building in the US during the early seventies was well-known to a “certain type” of Australian teenager with a thirst for excitement; magazines like Rock Scene and Creem fuelled that thirst, made it more urgent.
From the UK arrived the New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds. While a similar movement was getting up a head of steam in the UK, powerful, visceral rock‘n’roll outfits such as Sydney’s Radio Birdman and Queensland’s The Saints had been developing in tandem with the US movement (see The Saints’ record, The Most Primitive Band in the World). Thrashing themselves into sweaty heaps in the front row, The Boys Next Door and their friends were all punks before punk, just like The New York Dolls, Chrome, Suicide, The Cramps, Pere Ubu and Armand Schaubroeck Steals were. When “punk” was announced by the UK press in December 1976, none of these bands were considered punk (if they were considered at all); instead, scruffy pop band The Ramones were seized upon as clone punk godfathers.
So the bands who were clearly punk before punk ignored the simplistic definition – they were too busy defining themselves to be bothered with pretending to have an attitude they’d already had for years anyway. Like The Saints and Radio Birdman, they found the punk tag limiting. Australia was in a lost world between the past and the present; by the time the music papers and import records arrived in Australia with the latest trend they were three months out of date – we all knew it was history. This galvanised many bands (particularly in Melbourne and Adelaide) to out-do what was happening overseas, because they knew they were always going to be three months behind. Positioned in the past they strove mightily to be current. Musical history was something to be investigated in the present, a pattern which remains with many Australian “old punks” to this day. This is another key to understanding The Boys Next Door and, ultimately, Nick.
As is the art world. Nick started the Fine Art course at the Caulfield Institute of Technology at the beginning of 1976 intending, like most students, to complete the course and become an artist. While many successful academic parents would have “steered” their son into a more standard career, one assumes Colin and Dawn Cave thought Nick might as well follow something he had a genuine interest in and talent for, rather than something he had little or no interest in (with potentially problematic results).
Art and the wayward path of the artist have always had a very strong influence on Nick. Talented and very clever Australian artist Brett Whiteley was one of Nick’s early influences. Whiteley won the Archibald and Sulman Prizes in 1976, the Wynne Prize in 1977, and then all three in 1978, an unheard-of feat. Other significant influences were Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman. During this period Nick stopped using his favoured narrow-nibbed rapidograph pen and took up a blotchy “dip into ink” fountain pen. Nick wasn’t intending tidy copperplate or polite calligraphy; quite the opposite. For Nick, using the fountain pen in this manner echoed the hands of Whiteley, Scarfe and Steadman, and represented independence and validity, if not success. One wonders if he discovered Steadman through his art scene friends or from the cover of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Nick’s use of the fountain pen in this manner first appeared publicly on the cover of giveaway single ‘Happy Birthday’/ ‘Riddle House’ in February 1980. Nick favoured this type of pen for many years.
To Nick, the band was not as important as art school and the wider art scene. Although the usual young man reasons probably applied for keeping the band going: it was fun, allowing them an opportunity for mayhem. And though Rowland S. Howard’s recollection of the band’s (now widely bootlegged) second gig on 19th August 1977 still rings true – “Nick told me this was the best night of his life. He’d played a gig, got drunk and got laid” – it would be mendacious to presume that these were Nick’s primary motivations. As Alice Cooper explains: “I’m eighteen/ And I don’t know what I want.” An 18 year old man wants more than anything, perhaps, not to be what he has been since birth: a child of his parents.
The prime motivator of young men is to make their own life and define themselves as distinct from their parents, so it is not surprising to discover that by now The Boys Next Door were asking record store owners like Keith Glass and David Pepperel to manage them, nor that ‘I’m Eighteen’ was one of The Boys Next Door’s covers on the 19th August.
Their self-consciously shambolic rendition of The Who’s ‘My Generation’ seems to mock the original – Nick isn’t taking this song seriously. Phill Calvert once related a story that, as he, Tracy and Nick were driving to a gig in Geelong in Phill’s old Holden in early 1979, Tracy put a copy of that second gig in the tape deck. As soon as Nick heard it, he ejected it and hurled it out of the window. In keeping with most artists with an in-built quality control, Nick dislikes his earlier material because it’s never as good as he wanted it to be, and can’t possibly measure up to what he’s producing now.
However, it is important to note that the covers are also songs which had a striking early impact. In 1977, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’ was well and truly obscure – unless you’d been listening to Creedence as they had. That Nick also ad-libs with brutal comic effect is startling, particularly when we recall the Bad Seeds’ version almost ten years later, and their 1985 tour with Screamin’ Jay himself.
Covering ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ was almost laying down the gauntlet. Anyone who’d heard Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s material knew that, in invoking a generally disregarded singer who did pop songs with violent intent, or expressed violent intent masked with pop songs, at the very least The Boys Next Door had sophisticated taste and an intelligence which lay outside the mainstream.
Whether The Boys Next Door could rise to the challenge they were apparently setting themselves was another matter. At this early stage, there were five original songs in the set; pretty good when you consider they probably didn’t take themselves that seriously. I mean, why go to the trouble to write an original when you can do another cover? Birdman and the Saints had a similar mix of covers. As they were all seeing these bands, they were learning where the songs were coming from – Detroit, garage sixties America. On the other hand, it had been nearly two years since school broke up, and they only had five originals.
Take the titles of three of these songs. A barbed, intelligent sense of humour is at work: ‘Big Future’, ‘Funny Isn’t It?’ and Mick Harvey’s ‘Who Needs You? (That Means You)’. Although the latter two were discarded shortly afterwards, probably for not being strong enough, ‘Masturbation Generation’, ‘I’m 18’ and ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ were retained for some months, improving with constant performance.
Many people (still) have a contemptuous reaction to ‘Masturbation Generation’ and it wouldn’t surprise me if Nick was rather embarrassed about it. He shouldn’t be; it takes a long time for a writer to become consistently good. There’s some excellent, quite amusing material in what is probably Nick’s second most misunderstood song (after ‘Hard On for Love’).
Garry Gray of The Reals, another short-lived punk band, swapped song titles one night at a party. Gary came up with ‘Masturbation Generation’ and Nick came up with ‘Hard On for Love’. Nick simply used Gary’s title and wrote the lyrics. By taking the piss out of the serious business of songwriting, Nick created his own odd world. Like a literary jackdaw, he can snaffle the glittering guts of something and create something else, often more powerful, but always his own. Apart from anything else, the basic writing technique used for ‘Masturbation Generation’ reveals an ability to construct one of many creative templates.
‘World Panic’ is a rather more juvenile effort which again didn’t last too long in the set, but it does provide a few interesting precursors to what would come later, in particular Nick’s delight in finding meaning and significance, as if by accident, in what Rowland S. Howard described as “outrageously stupid” lyrics. Although this tendency developed more clearly later on, we can see it just beginning here:
Well, I’m trying to survive the future shock...
This opening line would indicate that Nick had at least seen Alvin Toffler’s 1970 Future Shock, in which the shock of the future was that it seemed to be advancing so quickly into the present, that we have difficulty adapting to it.
Nick appears to be taking a concept or idea which he’s read about and then ... not just putting it to use in a song, as most other writers would, but trying to come at the concept from his own experience, making an idea part of his dialectic. Nick was also deliberately dumbing down his intelligence for the “punk attitude”, trying not to sound too smart-arse and “private school” – he was already way ahead of the punks in writing and lyrical ability anyway. Did I just say “dialectic”? Christ. Let’s go to the chorus...
World panic! World panic! Alright now!
Amusing (if not ludicrous) in its self-consciously rock‘n’roll manner, isn’t it? On recordings of ‘World Panic’, one can only presume Nick’s voice wasn’t doing what he really wanted it to do with the song. The next verse, if I’ve transcribed the lyrics correctly, speaks for itself:
Well, I’m just another twentieth century misfit
Always getting trimmed
I’m always getting my ass kicked
Well, I think, I got to give in
But I don’t give a shit
It’s easy to imagine a young Nick working on this, perhaps taking Toffler as his starting point but then adding the American slang to create a sort of mock-60’s street hustler character. No, it’s not brilliant, of course it’s not, but it’s not too shabby either. Don’t forget Nick was a massive Springsteen fan as well, so he would have been familiar with the device of taking on the persona of “a guy on the streets of Jersey.”
Nick continues, the future-cum-present weighing on his very identity:
Won’t somebody out there change me?
You know, most nights I don’t care
Living under the shadow of nuclear warfare
And everyone there trying to rearrange me
It’s almost as if Nick hasn’t quite connected with the future shock idea, and instead of pursuing that, ends up trying to follow his initial concept which doesn’t quite work – but the whole inverted idea of someone begging for something they probably don’t want comes through, as does, at the same time and somewhat under the radar, that what the singer actually wants is for the world to alter to accommodate him. Apart from that, the very conceit of the thing is absurd, ridiculous, and that absurdity is the kicker – this is the thing which so many listeners seem to miss, even today. If you miss Nick’s humour, you may as well go home.
Of course I’m reading into it a bit (you know I am), but come on. Even if the analysis isn’t completely accurate, or the lyric is unfinished or not fully-formed, the song’s still pretty funny:
World panic! World panic! Alright now!
You’re shocking me, you’re shocking me
World panic! [etc.]
It’s the rather lengthy final chorus which I enjoy the most in this song. Regardless of its apparent content (and the obvious Toffler reference), just the act of singing to an audience “you’re shocking me” is fairly extraordinary – not to mention bloody funny. And if you can’t hear echoes of how Nick would later use the audience’s own preconceptions against it, and then to seduce them, then you never got the Grinderman joke, “Touch me! Touch me!”
It can be easily determined from this cursory look at Nick’s early lyrics that he has nothing to be ashamed of. Just as we can see the kind of areas he will remain curious about, and his struggling to get the words right, we can also wonder. Not yet 20, it is remarkable that Nick articulates so many things as well as he does in a band which had been pretty throwaway for nearly two years.
Sometime before this gig Nick met Anita Lane and they started going out. Like Genevieve McGuckin, who Nick had been going out with before, Anita was a talented artist, lyricist and vocalist who later became a significant influence not just on Nick but on the entire band. Rowland later recalled: “Nick told me how Anita had stayed at his house, and, coming back to his room after a shower, she was reading his words to ‘Joyride’: ‘People down in the city square/ They’re losing their minds and they’re losing their hair/ Yeah yeah yeah,’ and he was mortified that she was laughing at them, saying, ‘This is stupid.’ He then went out of his way to write to impress Anita; the band was becoming more than a joke and a hobby, and it hadn’t been necessary for him to apply himself seriously before. Suddenly Nick was meeting people who expected more of him.” People who thought his ventures into absurdism were stupid, not clever.
Rowland and his soon-to-be girlfriend Genevieve McGuckin were huge fans who rapidly became friends with The Boys Next Door: to quote Rowland’s brother Harry, “Rowland read like a fiend… Rowland drew like a fiend.” With so many talented, critical people around him paying attention to him, Nick became determined to improve, sending his humour in a different, less bloody-mindedly obvious direction.
The band (and their close friends) enjoyed being together, gravitating toward Nick not so much as the leader, the dictator or the ready-made genius, but as a sort of… inspirational glue. The flipside of the coin is that they all became increasingly cliquey: if you weren’t in on the art-scene in-joke then… you’re not one of us. This attitude (a certain arrogance, a certain air of aloofness) showed up very early on, and was doubtless inflamed by the band finding themselves in a recording studio before they’d really begun to develop. Their attitude was catching, and as other bands sprung up around the scene, they adopted this lordly air as well. The Boys Next Door weren’t alone in this (Ollie Olsen had it in spades) but their impact would be the greatest.
Articulate rock fan and entrepreneur Keith Glass, who ran record store Missing Link with his wife Helena, was instantly impressed by the energy and personality of this band who’d hassled him at his shop to give them a gig. Keith got Laurie Richards, who ran The Tiger Room, to give them a support slot to see what the band could pull. Their third gig was immediately followed by a Tuesday night residency.
While Colin Cave was a fierce intellectual with a love of literature and classical music who appreciated the undercurrents of culture better than most, Keith, with his wide knowledge and love of rock‘n’roll, must have seemed like Colin’s flipside. Colin might have “got” a lot of current culture, but it is unlikely he would have got punk. His literary impact on Nick is thin to non-existent at this early stage – but what young man wants to be like his dad?
Taking them under his wing, Keith introduced The Boys Next Door to the dirtier side of rock‘n’roll, the Fugs, Captain Beefheart and so on; hence their later cover of Gene Vincent’s ‘Cat Man’ and, some would say, certain aspects of the later Prayers on Fire and Junkyard-period Birthday Party. It was also significant that the band continued to discover that older music was not a dead-and-buried mausoleum, but a veritable diamond seam waiting to be mined.
Old-school rock‘n’roller Barrie Earl discovered the fledgling scene (“gobbing punks,” in Keith’s sardonic phrase) at The Tiger Room and, by October 1977, had sourced a handful of bands for a compilation LP and bundled them into studios. Lethal Weapons was to be on the Suicide Records label, handled by major label RCA via Mushroom Records. The Boys Next Door’s initial five song recording (including new songs ‘Sex Crimes’ and ‘Secret Life’, and now probably lost if not taped over) was not deemed “hit material,” so the driving force behind Australia’s glam-shock Skyhooks, Greg Macainsh, was asked to produce. This is a clear indicator of how Barrie Earl saw The Boys Next Door – potential hit-makers.
Barrie saw potential in The Boys Next Door and The Teenage Radio Stars and intended them to have three songs each on the album (the recent Lethal Weapons CD features one additional track – by the Teenage Radio Stars). In retrospect it’s a pity the bands didn’t lay down a few more tracks so that a stronger selection could have been made; we’d certainly have a better idea of just how good these bands really were. On the other hand, who could have known that only one band would survive the following year?
I suspect The Boys Next Door’s cover of Ollie Olsen’s ‘Enemy of the State’ dates from this period. It certainly has that flipping air of the serious/ridiculous: “I am an enemy of the state/ Forever!/ And ever!/ And ever!” It’s really hard not to laugh when you hear it; their songs were written primarily for the stage, and it would have been a hoot had they actually performed it.
Like so many rock guru-types, Barrie tried to guide them into a more “audience-friendly” outfit. The Boys Next Door picked up the impetus, Nick developing a more physical, animated and style-conscious onstage manner. Gradually the band became more of an imperative, much bigger than an ex-schoolboy band playing to their mates.
However, while the Suicide compilation was significant in itself, quite a few bands had taken one look at Barrie’s gold chains and flares and told him to fuck off (in Sydney, Pete Tillman, The Filth’s singer, threw a chair at him). So the compilation was always going to be unrepresentative of the best and most interesting bands in the Melburnian (and Australian) scene at the time.