40 years after arriving in the UK, Nick Cave stands alone. An unimpeachable artist who refuses to repeat himself, presiding over an imperial back catalogue. From The Birthday Party to The Bad Seeds, and numerous collaborators, Daniel Dylan Wray speaks to those who helped the prince of darkness build his kingdom
When Nick Cave arrived in England from Australia in 1980, he did so with a colossal thump, landing head first into a pool of bitterness and squalor. His band, The Birthday Party, a feral and ferocious post-punk outfit, used to read the NME cover-to-cover back home in Melbourne (even if it was six weeks late by the time it arrived via boat). They learned about a groundswell of exciting new bands in the UK and decided it was the place to be, but arrived to find the bands largely mediocre, a hostile reception, and were soon living in squats that would result in their guitarist Rowland S Howard suffering from malnutrition. “We went from being big fish in a small pond to frog spawn in an ocean,” Howard said later.
Problems were further exacerbated for Cave and Howard by a little issue they had carried with them from back home: heroin. “They arrived with drug problems,” says their old band member Mick Harvey. “So they had to service those problems and both of them were completely unemployable. They were out on a limb.”
However, the band managed to take their anger, resentment and disappointment and spew it back at the people of London when on stage. While they arrived to indifference, their live shows soon began to enthral and terrify audiences. “It was on the edge all the time, there was a real nervous energy at the shows,” says Harvey. “There was the potential for anything to happen. Sometimes it felt like it was on the edge of some kind of violent explosion. When it all came together, the stars aligned and all the chemicals were at the right balance, the shows were unbelievable.”
Prior to becoming The Birthday Party, the group – made up of Cave, Howard, Harvey, Tracy Pew and Phill Calvert – had been in the more new wave outfit, The Boys Next Door. As The Birthday Party, they made two albums, Prayers On Fire and Junkyard, and by 1983 they were already close to implosion point as they released their finest material on a couple of EPs as a parting goodbye: The Bad Seed and Mutiny. Drugs, inner-band tensions, a breakdown in the songwriting relationship between Cave and Howard, and their audiences all were contributing factors.
The band seemed to contain so much manic, wired, fraught a
