THE LONELY GIRLS before we met Jethro Cave V NICK CAVE (cycle 7) - You shall not make for yourself an idol (Commandment 2)
VOLUME 3 OF 3 of these Cycles//CYCLE 7 OF 12//SUBTITLES AND IDOLS
I WISH I STILL KNEW NICK CAVE AS
THAT AUSTRALIAN MUSIC GUY
SOME COOL PEOPLE I KNEW LIKED..
By Verity for THE VERITY AI PODCAST 31/08/2024
I hate that this is the way in which I now know Nick Cave. I was pretty ok with him being that Australian Music guy that some cool people I knew probably liked, and that guy who sang that duet with Kylie about murder or love. (I wasn’t sure as a kid, I didn’t think about things that abstractly back then unless presented as such). I heard the Kylie song on my mother’s Triple J Hottest 100 CD, along with Blink 182 that year also (dammit?), and maybe that song that went, “I hate my sister, she’s such a bitch..” Remember that one? Juliana Hatfield! Why do I?! I I must have really liked it…
It’s also weird that I remember liking that Kylie and Cave song, as well. I don’t remember hating it, I must have only been 10 years old. Jethro would have been around 5 or 6.
Anyway, I also knew Nick Cave as that guy that put on the music festival where I saw the best live performance by a band I’ve ever seen, the band Spiritualised. My first band called Dead Set Love (I know I was always bad at band names lol), was HEAVILY inspired by Spaceman 3. (If you are unaware of this music, essentially, Spaceman 3 changed their name to Spiritualised. But, they are distinctively different sounding. But similar too because it’s pretty much the same band…).
In any case, Spiritualised were ON ANOTHER LEVEL that late afternoon in Brisbane. I walked out and left the small music festival, All Tomorrow’s Parties when they finished a few hours before the festival was to end. (And there were two big bands to play still, including Nick Cave’s band, who I did intend to watch. However, to this day, I have never seen his band play. I saw Grinderman, they were great live). I just knew no one could top Spiritualised awe-inspiring set, which I was not ready to experience as profoundly as I did. This probably made the performance even better, because I wasn’t expecting anything that great.
To this day, no one has topped that performance, except Drake comes in at a close second though. Again, not expecting anything great, in fact, I didn’t even buy a ticket, I saw how much they were and decided it wasn’t worth it. I then got given a free ticket by the promoters and unenthusiastically attended with a friend who was a stripper who was very enthusiastic. However, I was extremely impressed and I’d pay double to see him again next time. Drake is in my top 5 favourite live artists, easily. (And I’ve seen a lot of live music. Like…..Alot! I used to play in bands, work at the Tote and every weekend that’s all we did).
The night I saw Drake anyway, he was at the top of his game. Drake killed it, and he isn’t joined on stage by a posse or dancers or anything, he goes it alone mostly. I remember seeing one dancer, and he had the crowd under his spell that night, we hung on his every word. It was super fun. This is in comparison to other hip-hop I’ve seen live, which is a not much, but a bit. Vince Staples, A$AP Ferg, local hip hop producers. I used to help organise and promote this alt hip hop dance party that played all along the east coast of Australia called Milkshake. I would perform as DJ Foxy/Moron, but I would mostly just organise them and curate. In my experience of seeing live hip hop and also curating it, I have found live hip-hop to be mostly disappointing to see live.
There wasn’t much showmanship in hip-hop, until Kanye West came along, however, hip-hop beat that out of him eventually. I love hip hop, but I have my issues with it. For such a progressive genre of music, the views and opinions by those who lead the way in public opinion in the genre, couldn’t seem to understand Kanye West’s expression of hip-hop, ever. Most hip-hop content creators or radio show hosts, resorting to taking his “black passport” away from him, for asking Daft Punk to co-produce and play synth on a track on Yeezus, deeming it “not hip-hop.” The opening track to Yeezus, I believe called, On Sight, is an explosive start to what is 30 minutes of pure art. An important part, and element, to a masterpiece of an album. Mostly rejected by the hip-hop community, and liked mostly only by white people. White people got it right for a change!
Rowland S Howard, from the Birthday Party with Nick the Stripper (lol) aka Nick Cave. Is also in that top 5 and has been since I first saw him playing live on stage by himself. Since then Rowland has been my QUINTESSENTIAL favourite Australian musician. Rowland was so amazing both on record, but especially live (R.I.P). When I saw him live for the first time, I didn’t know who he was and had never heard of him before, but I was captivated by him. And he wasn’t doing anything special, just a dude singing with a guitar, but no, it WAS special.
That was the one and only time I got to see Rowland live. I lived in Brisbane then, so I didn’t get the privilege to see him as much as people would have here in Melbourne, when he was alive. It seemed to me, that people liked Nick Cave more here than Rowland. Which was weird to me because it was a general opinion in Brisbane that Cave never gave enough credit to Rowland, when it came down to who influenced his music and persona the most. My personal opinion, before I met Jethro and before all of that, always was that Rowland pretty much made Nick Cave who is today, by being so fucking inspiring. That’s how most people in Brisbane viewed it also, however Melbourne people would be all, “Teenage Snuff what?”
Teenage Snuff Film, was in higher rotation in Brisbane, than down here by far. I found that weird, because, Teenage Snuff Film is more dark and gothy than any of Nick Cave’s work, IMO. And Melbourne is a lot darker and gothy than Brisbane. I’d go ahead and say Brisbane ain’t dark and gothy, at all! When I lived there, It was dark in a mentally ill way, but not in a sweeping original Australian reverby haunting goodness music kind of way.
Oh! And Nick Cave was also that guy that kinda belonged to that Cat Power (solo female singer) scene, who I loved growing up.
And AND, Nick Cave was also the dude that was very hated by my ex-boyfriend who was in a band called The Primitive Calculators and probably slept with one of Nick Cave’s girlfriend’s at the time (1980’s. But, he slept with a lot of people’s girlfriend’s from what I know. Including Mario’s girlfriend, from the infamous long time standing cafe Mario’s, on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy. They had a fight on the road outside the cafe on Brunswick Street after Mario found out. Stuart I guess was walking by. Whoops).
My ex-boyfriend would have been an annoying motherfucker when he was younger. Only a white man can go from junkie scum for a good 20 years, to respected clean philosophy university academic/professor. Staying afloat, mostly because, he was a white male (still is), but also because he was very talented too. (He wrote the song Dogs In Space for the film of the same name, featuring Michael Hutchence’s hair flick). He lived in a house with Paul Kelly and some other notable musicians in Sydney, but was fucking most things up for himself and losing huge music label contracts that could have shot him to a place of rock royality but he never got there because Heroin kills dreams. He eventually had some kind of awakening, after having a near-death experience shooting up cocaine for six months, and he got clean at the age of 30 (the same age Jethro died). This is how the academic road took shape for him, while clean still playing in bands, still indulging in a problematic sex addiction and this probably continues to this day. He managed to complete a PhD in phenomenology, a sanction of philosophy and metaphysics, and several years of undergrad study before that. No one gets lecturer jobs you know? Well, it’s very hard. There’s a lot of waiters with arts degrees and PHD’s out there, let’s put it that way.
Nick Cave’s father was a professor or a teacher, as the story he tells goes. He also says his father introduced him to the book Lolita, by one of my favourite writers and humans, Vladimir Nabokov. I think to myself, why would someone introduce a young boy to that book, I wonder what a young boy could even get out of a book like Lolita. Nick Cave never really elaborates on this side of that passing-by story he told once. Lolita confronts the reader in the most extreme ways, what female seduction can do to a male, it can send them mad. If rule number 1 is to choose the right victim, then every male is a victim. It also explores the idea of to what age a child needs to take responsibility for their actions, at what age can a child know what’s right and wrong and if the child purposefully chose wrong, do we hold them accountable? How are we to prove this?
Lolita, was also Jethro Cave’s favourite book, Nick Cave’s first born and second son who died before him. Jethro Cave and I were in a very intense relationship for the six years prior to his death, which happened suddenly and approximately at 4amish, on May the 6th 2022. It haunts me to look at a calendar from 2022, because I look at the days before when he was still alive, and the days after, when I fell into a deep melancholia and eventual psychosis from the pain. This has happened to me twice before, but the first two times were an extremely blissful experience, bathed in beautiful light, universal truths and extreme clarity. The one after Jethro died, was like Jethro was trying to pull me down into another dimension with him, and I didn’t want to go.
When I was sending a text to Jethro that Friday Morning, May the 6th 2022. I was to meet him later that day, around 2pm, near my apartment in the city. I was going to meet him on Little LaTrobe street, where we always used to get bubble tea. I didn’t like bubble tea much yet, later to become obsessed with it, but Jethro loved it. We were to meet on the afternoon of May 6th 2022, by this time Jethro was dead.
And as Lana Del Rey sings, Tomorrow Never Came.
I waited for you
In the spot you said to wait
In the city, on the park bench
In the middle of the pourin' rain
'Cause I adored you
I just wanted things to be the same
You said to meet me up there tomorrow
But tomorrow never came
Tomorrow never came
Verity.
Luv Verity xo
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