Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave

Mark Mordue ALLEN & UNWIN. £25

Nick The Nipper: exhaustive account of the singer’s first steps into the black.

Given his original concept was a career-spanning biography of Nick Cave structured like Paradise Lost, it’s unsurprising Australian journalist Mark Mordue became “overwhelmed”. Boy On Fire, salvaged from that scheme, tightens the focus to Cave’s formative years, ending as The Birthday Party catch a fateful plane to London. The level of detail suggests Mordue wants readers to be overwhelmed, too, yet his access to Cave and associates also creates an unusually intimate account. Key events – not least the death of Cave’s father – are carefully examined, while Mordue vividly maps the heroin-riddled Melbourne scene where Cave’s Crime And Punishment fantasies slid right off the rails. The writer’s “working friendship” with Cave occasionally intrudes too much into the narrative, but also allows candid moments, such as Dawn Cave encouraging her son before his 2007 ARIA Hall Of Fame induction: “Hold your head up high,” she says. “And fuck them all!”