NICK CAVE
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.”