We all remember how student life could sometimes get too confusing, right?
Mick Harvey (5th from left), Nick Cave (center) and Phillip Calvert (3rd from right): “…a crew of degenerates in training who had more or less taken over the school’s art department…”, aka the nucleus of what would start as The Boys Next Door and later on evolve into The Birthday Party, photographed with fellow students during their days at Caulfield, Melbourne, back in 1975 (photo taken from “Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures”, a book by Robert Brokenmouth).
“He was a pre-teen choirboy at Wangaratta Cathedral, where he found Anglicanism not entirely to his taste. Thereafter, for all his father’s infusions of literature, Cave kicked against the pricks, to use one of his album titles. He was obsessed with Ned Kelly, and grew up near the scene of his capture. He and his friends would get sick drinking cheap sherry; at 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School for trying to pull down the knickers of a 16-year-old girl. (Her parents wanted to press charges of attempted rape.)
He was the town wild child, making a name for stripping off at parties - a good apprenticeship for his subsequent stage persona. In an attempt to keep him on the rails, he was sent to board at Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne, where he joined a covers band called Concrete Vulture.
He had a brief stint studying painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology, in 1976, but dropped out after a year to pursue music. And then, in 1978, his father died in a car crash. When the news came, Dawn was bailing out their son from St Kilda police station yet again, this time on a charge of burglary. He has said he has no memories of the funeral, but remembers well that “he died at a point in my life when I was most confused”. He later wrote that “the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose”.
