There’s a cute anecdote in a new book on Nick Cave’s younger years in which the lanky young intellectual, only 16, takes his even younger girlfriend Davina, 15, around the Melbourne art galleries on Sundays. He was already in a school band, already fixated on Bowie and The Bible. It’s 1973. He could play Perfect Day by Lou Reed on the piano and sing it as well.
The pair had innocent dates on the amphitheatre lawns around the Myer Music Bowl. They would sit in Cave’s room at his family’s home in Caulfield North listening to records – Queen, Bowie, Roxy Music and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, who Cave loved, and still does. Soon he would become Nicky Danger (briefly) in another offshoot of another band. He was reading Lolita, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. Sunday was art day.
In the book, Boy On Fire, Sydney author Mark Mordue recounts his chats with Davina about her teenage boyfriend and his love of art. Cave was obsessed with Brett Whiteley; the pair would go looking for his work on their gallery jaunts. He also loved Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Degas and Jackson Pollock; Blue Poles had just been bought for more than a million bucks by the Australian government.
But he adored Whiteley the most and perhaps identified with his outsider stance. The wayward painter was deep in his Alchemy period, that gloriously demented 18-panel surrealist masterpiece depicting birth, death, heaven, hell, the evil and profane, the sacred and grotesque; these being all the optimised themes in your average Nick Cave Song metadata search from then, more or less, until now. Cave’s extraordinary Bad Seeds’ record of last year, Ghosteen, for example, and the song Sun Forest, written at age 61: “…I lay in the forest amongst the butterflies and the fireflies, and the burning horses and the flaming trees, as a spiral of children climb up to the sun…”
The art of his youth has stayed with him. More than that, it continues to inform him.
Cave wanted to be a painter, alone in a room recreating his imagination, making images from nothing. He cut El Greco’s View Of Toledo out of a school library book and stuck it on his wall. It was painted in 1600 and is a foreboding landscape of greens and blacks and blues. Mordue thinks now that the painting is maybe the most important in Cave’s radicalisation and became the basis for his early Bad Seeds’ masterpiece, Tupelo; more so, he says, than the John Lee Hooker song of the same name and Leadbelly’s Looky Looky Yonder, which he stole from the song’s opening phrase.
The painting is a kind of premonition,” Mordue says.. “I reckon that image in his bedroom of the painting stayed in his mind. A city and everyday life threatened by a storm coming.”
Cave liked Goya equally, and Sidney Nolan. He grew up in Wangaratta in country Victoria, Ned Kelly country, and his father Colin Cave was an English teacher and Kelly scholar. He also liked the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, and Munch. In Boy On Fire Cave tells Mordue about Munch’s The Dance (of Life): “…the moon and its reflection as a phallus, our dark selves and better selves in a dance or grapple to the death.”
“All that expressionist torment and strange sexual distortion of the body,” Mordue says. “It’s the beginnings of (Cave’s infamous ‘78-‘82 band) The Birthday Party in a way. (Plus) the sadomasochism of Francis Bacon and theatricality of Bacon’s painting and Nick’s nascent sense of performing and the beginnings of his contempt for the audience, or if not quite that a desire to push and confront and ‘perform’ intensity in ways that make people a bit uneasy.”
In 1976, Cave started at art school, the former Caulfield Institute of Technology, where teachers included noted contemporary artists Gareth Sansom and Jenny Watson. He also got to know Tony Clark, an artist and teacher at the nearby Prahran Art College. Watson tells Mordue that Cave impressed her with a second-year painting of a figure wrapped in barbed wire, an image he took from a Flannery O’Connor book.
All around the young writer, singer and artist punk rock was breaking out, of course. He was in the middle of an agitated, nihilistic and very artistic firestorm. He’d already seen Australian punk bands The Saints and Radio Birdman play live and was about to form The Boys Next Door (which begat The Birthday Party, which begat The Bad Seeds), meet guitarist Rowland Howard, and sing the iconic, devasting Shivers, a song Howard wrote for a previous band when he was only 16. This, essentially, was where it would all start for Cave as a singer with both chops and serious cultural weight.
As he moved all that, Cave and his crew began hanging out with Tony Clark in St Kilda, even though Clark was a few years older. He became a mentor, and friend. Cave was getting into German painter Matthias Grunewald, especially his Isenheim Altarpiece sculpture and painting from the 1500’s. He was eschewing contemporary art and mining Clark’s mind. Clark introduced him to Louis Wain, a schizophrenic London painter of the early 1900’s, who specialised in creepy, psychedelic cats. Cave has since become a Wain collector and has numerous originals in his home.
This cycle of art – the pictures, from very early on, of a brilliant mind in flames - has continued unabated. Cave himself has exhibited his notebooks, sketchbooks and artful ephemera numerous times and to me the most revealing photographs of him have him bunkered in a ‘creative’ space with rude and religious imagery tacked on the walls, his original inspirations and his inspirations still.
Howard Arkley, another from the St Kilda punk scene in the late 70’s, has painted Cave in bright neon. The cover of a Bad Seeds ‘best-of’ compilation in the 90’s, which includes Tupelo, featured sections of Tony Clark’s 30-year project Myriorama project on the cover: a dark landscape of unholy scarlet trees and a sky which spells impending doom. It’s like Nick Cave had painted it – and all of the above – himself.
Chris Johnston is a Melbourne writer and author specialising in culture and cults. Twitter @mrcjohnston.
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