Nick Cave

The Zoo: No Rum, No Double-Shots, No Dickheads

Music / / 9 minutes of reading

Shane Chidgzey is talking a mile a minute, sounding half street hustler, half tech bro. “I didn’t come from the music industry initially,” says the Sydney-based entrepreneur and owner of Brisbane’s The Zoo, one of Australia’s longest-running music venues. “I was looking for a way to disrupt, because I like to disrupt as a basis for most of my businesses.”

The Zoo has endured plenty of disruption in the last few years. Established in 1992 by two young women, Joc Curran and C Smith, it’s still emerging from a difficult period after Curran sold the venue in 2016. “I’d given it 24 years of my life, and I needed to have a life outside of that,” she says.

Since then it’s gone through a couple of sets of hands. Pixie Weyand bought The Zoo from Curran and, with the latter’s help, staged a 25th anniversary celebration in late 2017. But the Covid pandemic wrought devastation, despite Brisbane initially escaping almost unscathed: in 2020 the city played host to a packed AFL grand final, normally held in Melbourne.

The largesse afforded to major sporting events wasn’t extended to music. Under Weyand, the 500-capacity venue became one of the first to trial socially distanced shows: 100 people, positioned 1.5 metres apart.…

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Mutiny in Heaven: the Birthday Party from hell

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

In 1981, at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Melbourne, a band is making a video. The idea is to recreate a vision of hell. A cartoon death’s head with six limbs flashes on the screen. We see a young and scrawny Nick Cave – “a fat little insect” – pole-dancing in the middle of a circus tent. The song is an ode to self-loathing called Nick The Stripper.

Behind him, the Birthday Party swings and stumbles. After a year in London, the band once dubbed the Boys Next Door have returned to their home town a very different and much more menacing beast, ready to cut their first full album, Prayers On Fire. The tune, if you can call it that, hangs on a ghostly three-note refrain by the guitarist Rowland S Howard.

The action moves outside the tent. Along with friends, the band has bussed in residents of a mental health facility; one of them stands atop a gallows. Cave is wearing a loincloth. There’s a disturbing scene involving a goat.

A new documentary on the band, Mutiny In Heaven, lingers over this grotesque carnival of souls for the clip’s full four minutes. The film’s director, Ian White, says it would have been a shame not to use it in its entirety.…

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Don Walker: a real cat

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Every week, Don Walker buys a lottery ticket. It’s a matter of ritual. The piano-playing hurricane force behind one of the most successful Australian bands of all time, Cold Chisel – the man who gave us Khe Sanh and Flame Trees and too many more to mention – says he’s buying his continuing right to dream.

On his new solo album, Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky, there’s a song called When I Win The Lottery. What would he do? “Most of the song is about taking your winnings and running amok, basically coursing across the landscape with your hair on fire, fighting off supermodels,” he says drily, over Zoom, the familiar sweep of grey hair sitting high over his forehead.

“That’s not what I would do, because for a long time now I could probably do that anyway – the supermodels excepted. I live with a lot of freedom.”

Walker, 71, is well past retirement age. He has no need to work, and probably no need to be buying lottery tickets, either. He continues to do both out of habit. Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky is his fourth solo album, and first in a decade. Walker is also one-third of popular trio Tex, Don and Charlie (with singer Tex Perkins and guitarist Charlie Owen).…

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Nina Simone’s Gum: Warren Ellis (in conversation)

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

In 1999, Nina Simone gave her final performance in London. It was at the Meltdown Festival, which that year was curated by Nick Cave.

In an introduction to a new book by his bandmate and collaborator Warren Ellis, Nina Simone’s Gum, Cave recalls being summoned backstage by the legendary singer, who demanded he introduce her as follows:

“I am DOCTOR Nina Simone!” she roared.

“OK,” Cave replied.

In front of an awestruck audience, Simone sat down at the Steinway. She took a piece of chewing gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano. “She raised her arms above her head and, into the stunned silence, began what was to be the greatest show of my life – of our lives – savage and transcendent,” Cave writes.

At the end of the show, Ellis lurched towards the stage as though possessed. Reaching the Steinway, he peeled off Simone’s gum and tenderly wrapped it in a stage towel. This he kept with him for the next two decades, until it went on display at Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at Copenhagen, Denmark in 2019.

And now the gum is the subject of a short, wryly funny book. It poses a number of questions: what meaning do we place on seemingly insignificant objects?…

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Iggy Pop: World’s forgotten boy just wants to be loved

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

“Hey! Turn the lights on, I want to see everybody,” shouts Iggy Pop. And he grins that huge, irrepressible grin. Here he is, on the lip of the Concert Hall stage of a sold-out Sydney Opera House, with thousands of ecstatic fans cheering back at him. And he can’t get enough: he extends his hands, accepting everyone’s love and joy, touching that famously bare, Florida-tanned and now ever so slightly pot-bellied torso, as if to smear it upon himself.

“You’ve made me very happy,” he says, in all sincerity. But he’s no happier than anyone else in the room, after 21 of the greatest songs of all time that were never hits. Well, Lust For Life almost was, after its immortal tom-tom rhythm jump-started the film of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. But that was in 1996, 19 years after its original release. Nothing else, other than Candy (not played this evening) ever came close.

I’ve started this review at the end of the show for the sake of some context. How could Lust For Life not have been a major hit in 1977, the year punk broke? The answer is that the death of Elvis Presley meant that Iggy’s label at the time, RCA, poured its resources into reissuing the King’s catalogue at the expense of promoting what should have been the biggest success of the World’s Forgotten Boy’s career, just when he thought his Chinese rug was at hand.…

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Robert Forster: Inferno

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

Here in Brisbane, the heat has finally broken. For 46 days in a row, the mercury exceeded 30C. The previous record was 27 days, in 2017. While the north has been awash, the wet season here has failed. I’m listening to the title track of the new Robert Forster album. It’s called Inferno (Brisbane In Summer). You might think it looks like paradise, he sings, but everyone here is screaming: “Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me out!”

Forster has written about the weather in Brisbane before. On his 2008 album The Evangelist, recorded during a similarly excruciating period of mind-melting heat, the first song was called If It Rains. At the time, we thought it might never rain here again. Not that Inferno is any kind of manifesto. This is not a climate change concept album. It’s a Robert Forster record, which means buckets of atmosphere, dry wit, subtle pleasures and unerring quality.

While Forster’s last album, Songs To Play, was recorded close to his home patch in the hills west of Brisbane, for Inferno he escaped to Berlin, where he recorded his first solo album, Danger In The Past, in 1990.…

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