tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/nick-cave-34451/articlesNick Cave – The Conversation2023-06-18T23:48:19Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2057442023-06-18T23:48:19Z2023-06-18T23:48:19ZHow a ‘pot-smoking, acid-gobbling smart-arse’ became the producer behind some of Australia’s greatest music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530279/original/file-20230606-27-3kg5ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C0%2C9174%2C6870&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Self portrait</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony Cohen Collection </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Maybe he’s someone only musicians know about. Which is criminal. Or maybe this excellent memoir by engineer and producer Tony Cohen, who died in 2017, will fling him into the spotlight. Which is appropriate.</p>
<p>Cohen, who was mostly Melbourne-based, made an astonishing contribution to Australian recorded music in the 70s and 80s.</p>
<p>It seems glib to reduce a busy creative life to a list, but these highlights are the main roads on the map of our culture through those years: Lobby Loyde, The Ferrets, The Boys Next Door, Laughing Clowns, Models, The Reels, The Birthday Party, The Go-Betweens, Hunters and Collectors, Cold Chisel, The Beasts of Bourbon, The Saints, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Tex, Don and Charlie, The Cruel Sea, Tiddas … </p>
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<p><em>Review: Half Deaf, Completely Mad: The Chaotic Genius of Australia’s Most Legendary Producer - Tony Cohen, John Olson (Black Inc)</em></p>
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<p>Half Deaf, Completely Mad is co-written with John Olson. Olson, as Cohen did, works in studios as an engineer (they worked together on Augie March’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/27/augie-march-bootikins-review-an-exceptional-rumination-on-time-passing">Bootikins</a>), but also as an archivist and oral historian. </p>
<p>Olson’s role in this book is essential to its success. Cohen had started the beginnings of a book in 2012, tapping out tales on his laptop. And then Olson started interviewing Cohen and many of the people who had worked with him.</p>
<p>But Olson made the wise decision to just let Cohen’s voice tell the story in this book, and it is clear and conversational off the page; he is both funny and irreverent. Cohen’s are stories of glorious inventiveness and dire indulgence from someone with a (mostly) keen memory. The gist of the stories was pure, even if the dates might have needed a bit of research on Olson’s part. </p>
<p>Ken Gormley, Cruel Sea bass player, commented after Tony’s death: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He was so fucking funny and sweet, complex, troubled, super intelligent, irreverent, totally maddening and just brilliant.</p>
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<p>Cohen’s life unfolds through the book as a long, chronological series of vignettes, separated by his handwritten initials TC and punctuated with exhortations to listen to songs that illustrate the tales – making it clear that the context of this life is music, and you’d better go and listen closely to these songs! Hear all the stuff he’s talking about: the sound and the songs; the people and the times.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-gentleman-with-the-mad-soul-of-an-irish-convict-poet-remembering-chris-bailey-and-the-blazing-comet-that-was-the-saints-181059">'A gentleman with the mad soul of an Irish convict poet': remembering Chris Bailey, and the blazing comet that was The Saints</a>
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<h2>‘Turn it up a bit more!’</h2>
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<span class="caption">Young Tony mixing in the studio.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown/Black Inc</span></span>
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<p>Cohen grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Mentone in the 1960s, playing covers in garage bands, but the stories really start when, in 1973, he was introduced to Bill Armstrong, owner of Armstrong Studios, Melbourne’s centre of music recording.</p>
<p>Working as an assistant, cleaning toilets and getting coffees, he was 15 and he had a job! In the first week he was paid $17 – “I was so young I spent it on lollies. And hash.” These were learning years, as he slowly brought bands into the studio in the quiet hours, getting better at this obscure craft, and developing an ego:</p>
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<p>I was up myself: a pot-smoking, acid-gobbling smart-arse who thought he knew it all.</p>
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<p>This time at Armstrong’s was informative, not just in learning what to do, but what not to do. Olson has allowed this part of the story to breathe deeply.</p>
<p>“He was really keen to talk about Armstrong’s and early recording,” Olson told me in a recent interview, “because they had taught him so much. And he talks a bit about Molly [Meldrum], which people will probably be surprised to read.” </p>
<p>Cohen’s regard for <a href="https://theconversation.com/molly-meldrum-at-80-how-the-artfully-incoherent-presenter-changed-australian-music-and-australian-music-journalism-196793">Molly Meldrum</a> is clear. Molly was a ground-breaking music producer in those magic years from the late 60s into the 70s, as youth culture swung into revolutionary mode. As Cohen says in the book: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He taught me so much, though he wasn’t meaning to […] Molly’s secret? Exaggeration […] Turn things up louder than is considered tasteful. It might sound like you should pull it back, but resist that temptation. Turn it up a bit more!</p>
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<span class="caption">Tex Perkins, Tony Cohen and Molly Meldrum at the ARIA Awards.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by TV Week / Are Media.</span></span>
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<p>But the core of Cohen’s reputation is anchored in the work he did with The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds. He met Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and the boys in 1979, and engineered and mixed their first cluster of albums, peaking with <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-birthday-party-junkyard/">Junkyard</a> in 1981. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everything culminated in a trashy, nasty-sounding recording. Well, that’s what they wanted.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This idea – helping the musicians to get what they want – is at the heart of Cohen’s success as an engineer and producer. Studio engineers know the gear and the rooms they work in intimately, while keeping sessions running smoothly; producers are all about getting the band’s ideas to the right audience, often keeping record companies happy. Cohen didn’t have a “sound” like some producers do, he saw his job as capturing the sound of the band, as transforming ideas into reality.</p>
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<h2>A strange, scrambled method</h2>
<p>According to Olson,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mick Harvey said to me that they felt that there was no one else at that time. That [Tony] WAS the person to work with, because he would be hands off and let them explore things and not say no […] Tony was prepared to throw himself into the whole thing and see where it went.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I also spoke with Laughing Clowns drummer Jeffrey Wegener about recording with Cohen at Richmond Recorders in 1979 and he echoed this sentiment: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He was the only one. He was daring to do different things, and there was a bit of "Fuck you!” to what the normal music benchmarks were. He didn’t care that I wanted to tune my drums differently, it was all cool. Go!!</p>
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<p>The training and workplace practices of studio engineers up to this point created that “no” mentality, and their way of working was quite removed from Cohen’s methods. Blixa Bargeld called him “The Anti-Producer”. Cohen wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve got a strange, scrambled way of working. I know how to use most pieces of equipment, but I don’t necessarily know what they do or why they do it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He talks about rooms and equipment in the book, and how he records things – inevitably. Why Yamaha NS10 speakers work; the usefulness of Neumann U87, U89 or TLM170 microphones if you are recording Tex Perkins; the Lexicon 480L reverb unit. It feels natural. This is, after all, a book about a working life.</p>
<p>By the mid-70s, Cohen had become comfortable with drug-taking of all types and as the decades passed he developed addiction problems, and eventually chronic health issues. In 1984 he asked Roger Grierson, independent label head and band manager, to manage him. (“It didn’t last long and I tortured the poor man.”)</p>
<p>Grierson remembers, in his recently published memoir: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He was a brilliant human being and a lovely guy, funny and clever, and that meant everyone would forgive him his transgressions, which were many […] “I’m just going to clean my teeth” was a euphemism for “Going to score, back in a few days … maybe.” </p>
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<p>Cohen doesn’t shy away from this part of his story.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Drugs played a big part in music, especially punk. I became so accustomed to drugs in the studio that they formed part of the equipment and I wouldn’t contemplate a session without consuming copious amounts. Junkyard is not just an experiment of sound, but of physical ability to cope with drugs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 1987, after recording and mixing a swathe of Australian music including Models, The Go-Betweens, The Reels, Pel Mel, The Johnnys, and X, and some time in London, Cohen moved to West Berlin. Recordings with These Immortal Souls and Crime and the City Solution followed, as well as a re-invigoration of the working relationship with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. West Berlin was, he writes, a turning point. “It wasn’t a business, everything was done purely on an artistic level.”</p>
<p>Back in Australia in 1988, and on methadone, over the next few years Cohen produced albums for The Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon, Dave Graney, Mixed Relations, Tiddas and The Blackeyed Susans, and most importantly, met his partner till the end, Astrid Munday.</p>
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<p>Cohen won Producer of the Year at the 1993 ARIA awards, saying, “this is an award I think I richly deserve”. But by 1995, with two ARIA wins, he was too ill with complications from diabetes to get up on stage. </p>
<p>Nick Cave posted on Facebook after hearing of Tony’s death: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tony was pure chaos in the studio and like many geniuses a nightmare to work with. But you came back again and again because he was just so good, everything he did was so unique and bold and startling. He was a master at both what not to do in the studio and what to do in the studio. For example – don’t set fire to the studio, don’t sleep in the air-conditioning vents, don’t not show up to the sessions for days at a time, but conversely – do record music like your very life depended on it, do create sounds that no-one has ever heard before, do mix records with a courage that put every other producer in Australia to shame. He was also the funniest guy I have ever met […]</p>
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<span class="caption">Nick Cave: everything Cohen did was ‘so unique and bold and startling’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jose Coelho/AAP</span></span>
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<p>At the end of the book is a list of Cohen’s compadrés who have passed on, maybe 60 names, most of whom you will be familiar with. Tony was a sweet man, well-loved, and those relationships meant a lot to him.</p>
<p>“I get very upset when I lose another but I dream a lot,” he says. “It’s always a jumble of those who are with us and those who are gone, and I wake up happy because I feel like I’ve been in touch with them again.”</p>
<p>Hopefully he visits his loved ones in their dreams. And he will always be in touch with us through the music he helped create, and through the words in this wonderful, lively, funny book about a working life in music.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205744/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Willsteed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Engineer and producer Tony Cohen made an astonishing contribution to Australian recorded music in the 70s and 80s – working with acts like The Saints, Nick Cave’s various bands, and the Go-Betweens.John Willsteed, Senior Lecturer, School of Creative Practice, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1919502022-10-17T19:03:50Z2022-10-17T19:03:50Z‘Grief can have a chastening effect’: in Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave plumbs religion, creativity and human frailty<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489295/original/file-20221012-22-y3vdkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C62%2C1375%2C905&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pfarrhofer_Herbert/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Whether you adore or despise Nick Cave, this book offers you a great deal. Far more than the stereotypes of the gothic expatriate, or the drug-loving, post-punk, underground lord, or the strutting songster with the deep, melancholy voice. All these characters appear in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/59056535-faith-hope-and-carnage">Faith, Hope and Carnage</a>, but we meet full on an older, reflective, theologically-probing Cave. For many readers this might sound like challenging, even uncomfortable, territory.</p>
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<p><em>Faith, Hope and Carnage – Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan (Text Publishing)</em></p>
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<p>In a long series of discussions across the pandemic period, Cave and his friend Seán O’Hagan conducted a recorded conversation that flows deep, through many sharp bends. </p>
<p>O’Hagan is an appropriate interlocutor. He is different to Cave in so many ways, and genuinely surprised at where Cave goes. O’Hagan is a journalist not a celebrity or a “creative”. He’s not religious, he’s not Australian, but he’s receptive and open to Cave’s challenges and, sometimes, his contradictions.</p>
<p>In the context of the pandemic, and after the tragic accidental death in 2015 of the Caves’ twin son Arthur at 15, a sustained and confronting strand of the conversation is, unsurprisingly, about loss, suffering, grief and death. </p>
<p>That will be no shock to aficionados of Cave’s music over the last 30 years, with earlier songs and albums like The Mercy Seat (1988) and The Murder Ballads (1996), his novel The Death of Bunny Munro (2009), the score for films such as The Proposition (2005) and Dahmer Monster: the Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022), and more recent albums Ghosteen (2019) and Carnage (2022), all drenched in often violent death. </p>
<p>What is new about this book, though, is that Cave is weaving the threads of his life – the loss of his son, and of so many friends, his mother and father, his early musical collaborator and girlfriend Anita Lane, his heroin years and rehabs – into a different, more reflective shape. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-reclaiming-artist-musician-anita-lane-from-the-despised-label-of-muse-188815">Friday essay: reclaiming artist-musician Anita Lane from the 'despised' label of muse</a>
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<p>And it’s not that he’s prettying things up. Not at all. In grief, Cave writes, </p>
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<p>you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain … [and as in the pandemic] grief can have a chastening effect. It makes demands of us. It asks us to be empathetic.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the chastening effects of grief, for Cave, is registered in the experiences and expressions of religious faith. The conversation between Cave and O’Hagan leaves us in no doubt about Cave’s deepened religious beliefs. These have always been a part of him, through his post-punk, drug-fed years, but they are taking new turns.</p>
<p>To his strengthened Christian faith, Cave, often to O’Hagan’s bemusement, attaches a suite of moral human values he would now, through living with his grief and doubt and fear, like to nurture in himself: values of empathy, humility and vulnerability, mercy towards others, openness and tolerance, and acknowledgement of his need for atonement. </p>
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<span class="caption">Cave performing in Lisbon in September.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tiago Petinga/EPA</span></span>
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<h2>Forgiveness and mercy</h2>
<p>Cave’s journey into grief and contemplation of death is personal, of course, but he does cast out a net, or spell, towards his audiences, and even broader. When O’Hagan asks about the differences between sacred and secular worldviews, Cave’s answer will be taken by many as provocative. He finds in the world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves … a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence … to do with the increasingly secular nature of our society. There’s an attempt to find meaning in places where it is ultimately unsustainable – in politics, identity, and so on …[religion] deals with the necessity of forgiveness … and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Religion “has a lot to answer for”, but it nurtures “a humility towards one’s place within the world – an understanding of our flawed nature”. </p>
<p>Such reflections do not, to this reader, come across in the spirit of hostility, but in a tested, lived, often broken human consideration of where meaning – Cave’s, his audiences’, the contemporary world’s – might be sought. </p>
<p>Throughout the book, Cave discusses the how and why of his <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/">Red Hand Files</a>, an online blog fours year old and still going. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-transcendent-rage-nick-cave-and-the-red-hand-files-144735">Friday essay: transcendent rage — Nick Cave and the Red Hand Files</a>
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<p>In these Files, Cave seeks and practices openness, tolerance, empathy. Further, he consistently declares his gratefulness to his fans, and others who write in, for their care of him in his time of grief over Arthur’s death. Tragically, Cave lost a second son, Jethro Lazenby, earlier this year. (In May, Cave published a letter of condolence on the Files, <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/dear-nick-i-have-no-question/">thanking readers</a> for their kind words and acknowledging their letters had been a great source of comfort.)</p>
<h2>Radical listening</h2>
<p>In the Files and in his recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jun/16/conversations-with-nick-cave-review-wales-millennium-centre">Conversations</a> tour, where he talked openly with his audiences about any topic they threw out, Cave demonstrates an amazing vulnerability, describing his involvement as similar to prayer or meditation, to radical listening. </p>
<p>In contrast, he writes that he came off Twitter and “the world suddenly improved … as far as I can see social media makes you sick”. </p>
<p>Another major strand of the conversation in Faith, Hope and Carnage is around creativity. We are given multiple discussions about song writing, performance, collaboration, audiences, and the artist’s divine spark. For Cave, art “does not exist in its true form unless it moves through the hearts of others as a balm.”</p>
<p>Music has the capacity </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…to enlarge the spirit, provide solace, companionship, healing, and well, meaning. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cave is not only talking about his own involvement with music here, he embraces his audiences, and all lovers of music. He then puts to O’Hagan that his current work is about seeking forgiveness, “making what might be called living amends, by using whatever gifts you may have in order to help rehabilitate the world.” </p>
<p>For some this might sound like egotism or zealotry, and there are certainly tinges of these.</p>
<p>Still, this is a panoramic, coruscating book. We are enabled not only to glimpse the wellsprings of Cave’s religious faith and hope, but in a vibrant landscape we are introduced to many of his friends, his literary, artistic and musical influences, his collaborations and recording locales. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489945/original/file-20221017-21-hgpj3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>We can begin to map out the changes, and contradictions, of Cave’s lifetime in music, lived as a truly cosmopolitan artist who remains, in many wonderful ways, Australian (see his childhood memories in the book of Wangaratta and of art college in Melbourne). </p>
<p>It has been a rich life immersed in art, storytelling, poetic language, religious possibilities. It’s helpful to have Google and Spotify with you, just to check out the songs, historical contexts and personalities that jostle and claim attention in the pages.</p>
<p>There is, amongst all this, a person with regrets, self-professed sins, the felt need to make amends, and an overwhelming sense of human frailty. If this is an ego strutting its successes, it’s more so a broken, humbled, ageing, open-eyed man.</p>
<p>In the final pages Cave throws out one of his many <em>bon mots</em>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…hope is in every little thing, as far as I can see. Hope is optimism with a broken heart. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For this reader, the unstoppable energy, as well as the reflectiveness of Cave – the musician, the religious believer, the religious doubter, the family man, the collaborator and the friend – continues to be a wonderfully tender balm.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191950/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyn McCredden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In a series of discussions with journalist Sean O'Hagan, we meet an older, reflective theologically-probing musician, drawn to the Christian qualities of mercy, atonement and forgiveness.Lyn McCredden, Personal Chair, Literary Studies, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1888152022-09-22T20:15:34Z2022-09-22T20:15:34ZFriday essay: reclaiming artist-musician Anita Lane from the ‘despised’ label of muse<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485084/original/file-20220916-17-dl68vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C8%2C1794%2C1188&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anita Lane</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">MuteEnhanced</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I heard Anita Lane had died aged 61 in April 2021, a memory flashed up: I’m sitting beside her at the foot of a bed in the mid-1980s, and she turns to me to say how much my hair has grown. </p>
<p>I don’t recall why we were sitting on that bed in a darkened bedroom of the unpretentious Paddington flat in Sydney she shared with her boyfriend, Andrew. I don’t know why I remember this moment, out of so many insignificant moments evaporated by time and lost in the wash of youthful substance use. But it vibrates with aching, incomprehensible poignancy. Perhaps, I sense a glimmer of the fleeting subconsciousness connecting us in our vulnerability. </p>
<p>We were young women then, in our 20s (Anita some years my senior), trying to free ourselves from the hold of charismatic exes, who both happened to be living legend “punk” musicians. She and <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-transcendent-rage-nick-cave-and-the-red-hand-files-144735">Nick Cave</a> had called it quits several years earlier (they would soon reunite), and I was raw and messy after a parting of ways with Rob Younger, singer of the influential band <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jun/10/radio-birdman-brutally-honest-doco-cements-legacy-of-volatile-sydney-punk-band?">Radio Birdman</a> and singer-songwriter in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Christs">The New Christs</a>. </p>
<p>We weren’t friends, as such; we just had encounters around the traps over a period of many months – though she was an indie “it girl”, so I’d heard of her well before we met, and we had mutual friends over the years.</p>
<p>I remembered, too, that Anita once saved my life in that flat – but that story would only distract us.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Anita Lane’s ‘The World’s a Girl’, from her final album, Sex O'Clock.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>More than a muse</h2>
<p>Anita Lane was a singer, songwriter and recording artist, who released <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/479734-Anita-Lane-Dirty-Sings">a solo EP</a> and <a href="https://www.discogs.com/master/67147-Anita-Lane-Dirty-Pearl">two</a> <a href="https://www.discogs.com/master/67145-Anita-Lane-Sex-OClock">albums</a> between the late 1980s and early 2000s. A central player in the 1970s Melbourne art scene – peopled by the likes of Nick Cave, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_S._Howard">Rowland S. Howard</a>, comedian <a href="https://theconversation.com/noice-different-unusual-watching-kath-and-kim-as-a-locked-down-historian-166261">Gina Riley</a> and filmmaker <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-dogs-in-space-30-years-on-a-once-maligned-film-comes-of-age-56288">Richard Lowenstein</a> – she contributed lyrics to some of Cave’s most famous early songs.</p>
<p>Their first co-written recording, <a href="https://youtu.be/NQS8rwIo_Cc">A Dead Song</a>, from The Birthday Party’s <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/releases/prayers-on-fire/">Prayers on Fire</a>, caught John Peel’s attention for high rotation. She co-penned <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyric/from-her-to-eternity-2/">From Her to Eternity</a>, the classic song on the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ first studio album of the same name. She is often cited <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/anita-lane-nick-cave-dead-1162241/">in the music press</a> as a founding or brief member of The Bad Seeds. </p>
<p>She worked closely with Mick Harvey, who produced or co-produced all her major recordings, and she was also an impressive visual artist. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">From Her to Eternity, co-written by Anita Lane and Nick Cave, was performed in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the announcement of Anita’s death, obituaries popped up in online music magazines celebrating her as Cave’s muse. It is understandable journalists and biographers underscored crucial Cave/Lane collaborations – she directly aided his ascent – but these nods provoked indignant criticism among fans and friends. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/anita-lane-dead.html">New York Times article</a> was a prime example of how the media outs itself as sexist. The headline, tagging Anita simplistically as a “rocker”, was followed by an intro that read, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ms. Lane was Nick Cave’s collaborator and girlfriend during his formative period and helped define his sound. She also made records of her own.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It could have been ironic comedy gold in other hands, but instead stands as an illustration of how women’s creative accomplishments are devalued. </p>
<p>Anita seems to have been sprinkled with an extra dash of <em>je ne sais quoi</em> fairy dust. So, she was idealised and rhapsodised over as a “muse” – a tag that followed her into the mediatised afterlife. </p>
<p>As Cave wrote on his blog, <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/tell-us-about-anita/">The Red Hand Files</a>, Anita “despised the concept of the muse but was everybody’s”. She profoundly affected people and their art-making, and the media can’t be expected to disregard that. But the coverage throughout her career failed to convey that, as Cave candidly proclaimed, Anita was “the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/conversing-with-the-divine-why-we-still-need-our-muses-37051">Conversing with the divine – why we still need our muses</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>‘A living artwork’</h2>
<p>Melbourne-raised, Brooklyn-based composer, producer and performer <a href="http://www.foetus.org/content/">J.G. Thirlwell</a> (known as Foetus, Manorexia etc., and for his work on Archer) knew Anita from around Melbourne. They became firm friends after she moved to London to be with Nick and Co. “She resonated wherever she went because she had an incredible magnetic presence which was very alluring […] this incandescent presence,” says Thirlwell. </p>
<p>He is not alone in describing Anita as “a living artwork”. It wasn’t just a matter of putting out a few records, and she didn’t inspire people just by being captivating. She had a huge impact, Thirlwell says, because she was a great artist, but </p>
<blockquote>
<p>not the sort of person whose art you could catalogue and quantify; her art was the way she thought and moved through life. Everything was artful about her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/376579.The_Andy_Warhol_Diaries">The Andy Warhol Diaries</a>, Warhol says he coined the term “superstar” for people who are very talented, but whose talent can’t be sold. Anita was a superstar, and that’s why the reductive coverage galled many. They had it the wrong way around, casting her a muse-artist – when her innate creativity meant she was always an artist first: an artist-muse. </p>
<p>Commenting on a public Facebook thread, after her death Mick Harvey took the press to task for straining to make tasteless and banal connections between Lane and Cave. He conceded that Anita’s mystery and her rebuff of showbiz glitz disadvantaged her. He added that he took solace, by contrast, from the outpouring and accolades from fans and acquaintances, which, he felt, got closer to the truth. </p>
<p>Anita was a contradiction. She had friends scattered far and wide, but was guarded and notoriously isolated, especially in her maturing years. She was a conspicuously absent interviewee in the 2011 documentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2015298/">Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard</a>. She did not cooperate with Mark Mordue’s recent Cave biography, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460713211/boy-on-fire/">Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave</a>. And she would almost certainly have declined an interview request from me. (Harvey and Cave did not respond to interview requests.)</p>
<p>If you search the internet, you’ll find many images and references to her, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Lane">Wikipedia page</a>, and album reviews. You’ll find a few thoughtful homages, such as Eleanor Philpot’s <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/29144-anita-lane">Unearthing A Pearl: Praising the Sexual Mysticism of Anita Lane</a> in The Quietus, which argues that her musical body of work was a pioneering study of “female sexuality”. And you might come across the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/anitalaneforfans/">Anita Lane Facebook page</a>, run by a French fan.</p>
<p>The only remnant of interview footage I unearthed was a degraded and grainy 21-second clip from the 1992 Dutch documentary <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/nick-cave-documentary-stranger-in-a-strange-land/">Stranger in a Strange Land</a>, where Anita, otherworldly, responds to an unheard question, presumably posed by filmmaker Bram Van Splunteren. “Well, he really does have a muse,” she says of Cave, in her distinctive doll voice, “and it’s not me. It’s a real one.”</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard – Anita did not participate.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anita was precocious from an early age, with an organically <a href="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fluxus-movement-art-museums-galleries">Fluxus</a> experimental bent, and she was known for being a fount of inventive ideas that mostly vaporised once aired. As a visual artist, she had an assured hand that could magic an image in a streak of fast lines. Her eagle eye for weakness informed her merciless caricatures, and she often turned that laser vision against herself.</p>
<p>Bronwyn Adams/Bonney, a violinist with <a href="http://crimeandthecitysolution.org/">Crime & the City Solution</a>, says Anita was always busy “doing little drawings and making artworks” in a homely, creative practice mode. Cave confirms this, declaring that she would sit at his kitchen table sketching with a “clear, light line full of humour, throwing each drawing away and starting another”.</p>
<p>Anita was a disarmingly singular person. Yet, she is also the epitome of a certain kind of restless, unorthodox, creative young woman who came of age in the vapour trail of postwar nuclear-family modernism, transmuted by the 1960s and 70s counterculture. </p>
<p>Unconventional women coming up in the 70s and 80s were influenced by various art and fashion movements of the 20th century and second-wave feminism, but mainstream culture was still trapped in a patriarchal time warp. Anita grew up in the crosshairs of that cultural tension, oblivious to the looming, corporatised arts sector of the future. During that period, artistically inclined young people concentrated in inner cities, mostly surviving on the dole, dressing in op-shop fare, and often self-medicating on the regular. </p>
<p>In Sydney and Melbourne, hard drugs were everywhere, and were relatively plentiful and cheap. Some say heroin flowed so freely due to America turning a blind eye to poppy production and distribution during the dubious alliance between the US and the Taliban. Heroin was funnelled through Southeast Asia and ferried into Australia on private boats. </p>
<p>In the indie music milieu, we ran in packs, taking hours getting ready to records played loud, heading out to navigate dark clubs and suburban pubs when most were settling down to sleep. There were state-based rivalries, die-hard cliques, and miscellaneous sub-genres – sometimes allied, sometimes warring – and allegiances were forged and broken with the furore of ancient battlefields. Computers were in the realm of <a href="https://theconversation.com/50-years-old-2001-a-space-odyssey-still-offers-insight-about-the-future-102303">2001: A Space Odyssey</a> science-fiction; some of us didn’t even have a landline. People <em>visited each other</em>, dropping in with new vinyl or some stash. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/five-reasons-andy-warhol-is-so-popular-right-now-179865">Five reasons Andy Warhol is so popular right now</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The art school scene</h2>
<p>According to Bronwyn, a “near-mystical synchronicity” led to the core posse of the Melbourne art-music underworld finding each other in the pre-Ballroom St Kilda days circa 1978. </p>
<p>Bronwyn attended alternative Swinburne Community School, which brought her into contact with <a href="https://www.perimeterbooks.com/products/peter-milne-juvenilia">Peter Milne</a>, soon-to-be scene photographer and visual artist, and others who would become key players. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Anita had moved to Era, a “progressive” co-ed secondary school. </p>
<p>From there, she enrolled to study at Prahran art school (later amalgamated with the Victorian College of the Arts) where she befriended fellow student Rowland S. Howard. Rowland had declared himself the future of rock and roll aged 15; he went on to become a guitarist in <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/78466-The-Boys-Next-Door">The Boys Next Door</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birthday_Party_(band)">The Birthday Party</a> – and later, a solo artist. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Anita Lane, solo artist, performing ‘Jesus Almost Got Me’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By all accounts, though Anita was outstanding as a visual artist, she lacked ambition and focus. As Cave <a href="https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/nick-cave-anita-lane-tribute-25754/">detailed</a> on his blog, perhaps stretching the point, having secured a place at the “most prestigious art college in Australia”, Anita purchased an easel and some materials and “never went back in”. As Bronwyn says, “Her art was like drawing a perfect circle in the sand, and then the sea coming in and washing it away, and that was what she liked.” </p>
<p>Bronwyn recalls visiting Peter’s house, where Rowland was working on a logo for a xeroxed fanzine, Pulp, with his art-school friend in tow. “I’d heard about Anita and her best friend, Lisa Creswell, and how great they were,” says Bronwyn. “She hadn’t dyed her hair red yet. I think it was dark blonde. She had big eyes. A perfect, small nose and very full lips. She had these slender, Florentine hands. She had pale skin, very light, but with a gold tinge. Long legs, coltish.” </p>
<p>Anita wasn’t driven by trends, but she had a look: miniskirts, boots, and baby doll dresses. “She’d wear hot pants with a bib and sew a big heart on the front. She had her own aesthetic and philosophy,” but at a certain point, “she lost interest in being a clothes horse.” </p>
<p>Anita’s avant-garde edge and flair for creative expressions were evident. “She was an amazing fashion designer, but she didn’t do anything with it; she just did drawings of dresses. She wrote poetry, but she was more focused on visual art. She could have sculpted. She could have done anything.”</p>
<p>Anita was the kind of person who obsessed people. Many, including an adolescent and delicate Rowland S. Howard, were unrequitedly in love with her before Nick Cave entranced her into her first serious (albeit rocky and fitful) relationship and a lasting artistic camaraderie. They reportedly got together at a party in 1977, a few months after that nucleus formed. Cave took her to the Hilton for breakfast the following day, which was about as posh and passionate as a suburban boy could get.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A red-haired young woman and dark-haired man in suit and tie. Anita Lane and Nick Cave" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486021/original/file-20220922-26-pcat36.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anita Lane and Nick Cave. Polaroid.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jessamy Calkin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anita was 17, Nick was 19, and overnight, despite their youth, they became a power couple, emitting an instantly unified force-field of cool – though Anita was never self-consciously cool, as so many underground luminaries were. The Boys Next Door gigged around Melbourne furiously, and by 1979 the original cluster of 25 or so had boomed exponentially and congregated at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Ballroom_(Melbourne)">Crystal Ballroom</a>. </p>
<p>From there, Nick and Anita were launched onto their shared (if disparate) paths of prominence. He courted and fashioned global reputation with a product-centric, indefatigable work ethic. She made her mark with collaborative and sporadic solo musical offerings. </p>
<p>Bronwyn states that “she was more advanced than him, in terms of her personal vision”. Though encouragement flowed mutually, Anita influenced Nick critically from the start, sometimes styling him and making his clothes. Bronwyn gestures toward the piano key shirt featured in early promo shots of The Boys Next Door, which Cave sports with spiky hair and black eyeliner. </p>
<p>Anita was also an unacknowledged giver to Cave’s taker; he’s implied as much on the public record, bringing to mind John Lennon’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/oct/06/how-yoko-ono-helped-create-john-lennon-imagine">admirable admission</a> that ego prevented him from attributing Yoko Ono’s influence on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgkThdzX-8">Imagine</a> when it was released.</p>
<p>Couplings of creatives are often confounded by complications: creative conflicts, competitiveness, jostling for attention, pique at slights, failed reassurances. Not to mention tempestuous weather patterns involving feelings and sex. Loving a fêted frontman can lead to lashings of pain. While the menfolk of Indietown were generally more restrained than your Led Zeppelins or Mötley Crües, the titillation, temptations and touring inflamed wounds. </p>
<p>Biographical accounts of Cave’s early career during the years they were an intermittent couple make clear that he had affairs. While that worked both ways – and Anita was reportedly friendly towards his other women – there were signs she suffered more than she might have let on. </p>
<p>Other interpersonal intricacies could also play havoc. For instance, a man might find himself dealing (or rather not dealing) with a mentally ill girlfriend. Anita spoke about the depression that dogged her during an interview for <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/ian-johnston/bad-seed-the-biography-of-nick-cave">Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave</a> in the 1990s. She seemed more outward-looking and available at that time – a period that correlates with the “recovery” revolution in the alternative music community. (Thirlwell asserts Anita led the “clean and sober” charge of the Melbourne crew.) </p>
<p>She told Ian Johnston she was “grieving all the time and pining for something” and carried a burden of sadness “like it was raining in my chest”. But that insight came later, after Cave had achieved fame beyond Australia. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-singular-vision-new-film-tells-the-touching-story-of-musician-and-triffids-founder-david-mccomb-166758">'A singular vision': new film tells the touching story of musician and Triffids founder David McComb</a>
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</em>
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<hr>
<h2>Rising stars and ‘epic psychodrama’</h2>
<p>During the 70s, first-generation Australian TV kids found a welcome window to the alluring lives of expats who managed to escape the shores of the sleepy Antipodes. There were two standard routes out: Australia to India, for those of a hippyish persuasion, and Australia to London, the heart of the colonial motherland – the major artery for those with more worldly ambitions. </p>
<p>In 1980, having achieved eminence in Australia, The Boys Next Door undertook the Australian bands’ rite of passage. They had renamed the band The Birthday Party by the time the plane touched down at Heathrow, and Anita traded her comfortable family home for dingy squat living in Thatcher’s blighted Britain. </p>
<p>As Cave’s star rose, Anita’s status as a muse snowballed. Though she was creatively active musically, working closely with Cave et al, Anita was, at that point, still viewed by music fans more as the Queen of King Nick’s burgeoning fringe court than an artist in her own name. While he had the confidence of a hundred suns and grew infamously intolerant of the media from a position of cocky resistance, Anita vacillated between being pleased with the jewels in her crown (she once told a friend she considered herself one of the most natural singers she’d ever heard) and nervy uncertainty. </p>
<p>That instability fed a distrust of the gaze of others that saw her recoil from the attention she so effortlessly attracted. “She was leery of putting herself out there because she’d get performance anxiety,” Bronwyn explains. And she had cause to be concerned. “Because people loved her, there was a lot of bitchy gossip. Jealousy. Worship. A poison and treacle mixture.”</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave (with Warren Ellis) performs a tribute to Anita Lane, who he calls ‘one of the original Bad Seeds’, six months after her death.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trying to keep up with Anita and the on-again, off-again nature of her relationship with Cave is a dizzying exercise; Anita was transnational, traversing borders and men as fluidly as art forms. </p>
<p>By all accounts, Anita and Nick also had trouble keeping track of each other. “Nick would disappear, and then Nick wouldn’t know where Anita was for days on end,” says Thirlwell of the mad London days. At some point, she left Cave for a turbulent stretch in New York with Australian journalist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Rothwell">Nicolas Rothwell</a>, who Bronwyn describes as “Oxbridgey”.</p>
<p>It gets harder to follow her movements after that. But though there were comings and goings across continents, and she and Nick had other lovers of varying significance, their standing in each other’s lives seems to have been unshakeable. </p>
<p>During one of their extended breaks in the mid-80s, Anita moved to Sydney and the Paddington flat, where I met her. After I went to rehab I never saw Anita again. At some point during the mayhem of my “early recovery”, I heard she’d gone to Berlin, where Cave was based. He was struggling to hold it together, and Anita was summoned attend to him. But when she arrived, they spun into a complicated spiral of reciprocal turmoil. </p>
<p>Bronwyn was brought in as an editor on Cave’s novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/and-the-ass-saw-the-angel-popular-penguins-9780141045610">And the Ass Saw the Angel</a>, which he was then working on. She tells of their decamping to Hamburg to escape the sycophants that bothered him like flies on a hot day. The three took up residence near the river in a “spooky, warehouse apartment full of dying tropical fish”; the mood was one of “epic psychodrama”. It wasn’t long before they separated again, but Anita stayed on in the northern hemisphere. </p>
<p>Nick moved on to São Paulo and Viviane Carneiro. Anita married German Johannes Beck and her first child, Rafael (known as Raffie) was born. When she left Beck, she moved to Morocco, where she met Andrea Libonati, a Sicilian man who fathered her younger sons, Luciano and Carlito. She purchased an old frescoed apartment in Palermo, where the family lived. </p>
<p>Anita fell back into addiction and after seven years, she and Libonati migrated to Australia, settling in beachy Byron Bay in Northern New South Wales. It’s hard to think of a less likely place for the nocturnal Anita Lane I recall, but those who knew her better than I did say she loved the wilds. In her later years, she took trips to Harvey Bay in Queensland where her parents owned a holiday house. </p>
<p>While it’s tempting to assume Byron promised a child-friendly location, with weather more suited to a Mediterranean partner than Melbourne, someone close to Anita suggests it was a “geographical” – a term for re-locations staged in an attempt to escape addiction. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-punks-legacy-40-years-on-60633">Friday essay: punk's legacy, 40 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Dirty Sings and swan songs</h2>
<p>Like many outside the inner sanctum, I had no idea how gifted Anita was in her own right until her 1988 solo debut, <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/479734-Anita-Lane-Dirty-Sings">Dirty Sings</a>, announced her.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485263/original/file-20220919-2934-sn1iup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Milne, courtesy of M. 33, Melbourne</span></span>
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<p>The Anita of that period is captured in my favourite photo of her, taken by Peter Milne and featured in his <a href="https://www.perimeterbooks.com/products/peter-milne-juvenilia">Juvenilia</a> project, an archival retrospective of his work as a young photographer, when he snapped friends who went on to become cultural heavyweights. </p>
<p>It is an image that speaks volumes. Translucent skin. Flaming red hair echoing a velvet orange chair. The trademark Melbourne red lip. The deep periwinkle blue of the dress and the white Peter Pan collar. The rose gold hue of the anonymous space and the superimposed shadow in the form of a disjointed cross, hands resting in her lap and at her throat as if in supplication. And above all, the eyes like the two sides of a quarter moon: one gleaming in a shaft of light, the other waning into darkness like a perfect visual metaphor. </p>
<p>Anita told Johnson the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/479734-Anita-Lane-Dirty-Sings">Dirty Sings</a> EP was a suicide note and an assertion of the validity of the disparaged and feminised experiences of self-doubt and vulnerability. But it was her 1993 album, <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/154022-Anita-Lane-Dirty-Pearl">Dirty Pearl</a>, that resounded in the ears of reviewers. These were productive years – or rather, they were the years when her creativity was most captured and manufactured as product. </p>
<p>Boy Next Door/Bad Seed Mick Harvey, acclaimed for keeping Cave’s bands on the road during their most unmanageable stints, was Anita’s most continuous musical partner. She made guest appearances on Harvey’s <a href="https://mute.com/mute/releasing-double-cd-of-his-two-serge-gainsbourg-albums-intoxicated-man-pink-elephants">albums of Serge Gainsbourg covers</a> released in the mid-90s, singing the parts originally performed by the women hailed as Gainsbourg’s muses: Jane Birkin, Brigitte Bardot and Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge and Jane). Anita even played some live shows with Harvey, promoting the albums.</p>
<p>Anita also branched out from her longstanding co-writing and guest vocal performances with Cave, Harvey and Co., to work with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Adamson">Barry Adamson</a> (ex-Magazine and Bad Seeds), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blixa_Bargeld">Blixa Bargeld</a>, a founding Bad Seed and lead singer of <a href="https://neubauten-org.translate.goog/de/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc">Einstürzende Neubauten</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Haut">Die Haut</a> and musician and DJ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudrun_Gut">Gudrun Gut</a>, churning out a wealth of original songs and covers. </p>
<p>Cave has nominated “Stranger Than Kindness” released on the 1986 Bad Seeds album <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/releases/your-funeral-my-trial/">Your Funeral … My Trial</a> (Cave later co-opted the song title for his 2020 book) as his favourite among the songs he’s performed. He notes Anita’s lyrics as a deciding factor, and he’s right to honour her striking poetics. </p>
<p>Cave might view “Stranger Than Kindness” as her signature song, but Anita had another in mind: “The Petrol Wife”, the penultimate song on her last album, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nZtaatj7cJuzZiF33LcFyH5grBPP11F0s">Sex O'Clock</a> (released in 2001). Anita had every reason to be proud. Of all her songs, “The Petrol Wife” seems the one she most shaped. </p>
<p>It stands out on an album that is more smooth dance-electro than balladeer. A few bars into tender acoustic strumming, her voice kicks in, double-tracked in out-of-time harmonies conveying the subjective fracturing at the heart of a damaging sexual relationship. The lyrics in the fervid verses and chorus hint at danger – and, alludes a close friend, intimate partner violence. It was, in effect, along with the final track <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4QAIN7eruPb0xngWPNDisD">“Bella Ciao”</a>, a cover of an Italian folk-protest anthem, her swan song. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Petrol Wife was Anita Lane’s ‘swan song’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anita left behind a stellar recording oeuvre. Though her reluctance to publicise narrowed its reach, the music press did her no favours in perpetuating the “muse” label after she surfaced as a solo artist. Even if, as Thirlwell states, “she would cringe at the thought of ‘career’”, she was serious about her art. “Anita never wanted to be a public figure, and at the same time, she’d be upset that her stuff didn’t get recognition,” says Bronwyn, noting her internal conflict.</p>
<h2>The muse – maligned and revered</h2>
<p>There have always been artist-muses. But before the modern technologies that enabled the twinned rise of youth and popular culture in the 1950s, they either dwelled in total obscurity or were actively maligned by society at large (even if they later came to be revered). </p>
<p>Women like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Faithfull">Marianne Faithful</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joni_Mitchell">Joni Mitchell</a> were also renowned muses. Faithfull’s prodigious output, staying power, and willingness to play live eventually pushed her to the fore of public consciousness as a singer-songwriter and outstripped her association with Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones. </p>
<p>Mitchell was famously partnered with Graham Nash, <a href="https://theconversation.com/listening-to-songs-of-leonard-cohen-singing-sadness-to-sadness-in-these-anxious-times-142661">Leonard Cohen</a>, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Sam Shepard and others during the 60s and 70s – but her genius as a songwriter and singer and crossover from folkie to the big time soon overwhelmed her muse status.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Marianne Faithfull’s first hit, As Tears Go By, was by Mick Jagger and Keith Jones.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anita was, like them, slim, fair, finely featured, with a Monroesque appeal that combined innocence with sexiness. Beauty, it seems, is in the “muse” job description. </p>
<p>The gendered slant hails from <a href="https://theconversation.com/conversing-with-the-divine-why-we-still-need-our-muses-37051">ancient Greek mythology</a>: the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and Zeus, the king of the gods, served as guides for art or science. Chaucer popularised the term in the late 1300s, and the “muse” was linked to lyrical poetry in Europe. </p>
<p>The timing was no accident. It followed the advent of chivalry and romantic and courtly love during the Middle Ages, when knights took platonic succour from married noblewomen in return for undying loyalty. The “muse” as a noun grew more democratised over time (if still somewhat class-based), coming to signify the capacity of a human goddess to move a man to make art. </p>
<p>Critiquing the idea of the muse doesn’t mean rejecting the potential for creative inspiration across genders. It merely interrogates the notion of the fetishised flesh-and-blood muse who treads a one-way, gender-binaried, heteronormative street in the service of men. </p>
<p>There were outlier queer women artists who were considered galvanising for well-known men, such as <a href="https://guitar.com/features/interviews/the-revolution-wendy-melvoin-lisa-coleman-recording-performing-with-prince/">Wendy and Lisa</a> of Prince and the Revolution (who maintained a long-term lesbian relationship). But they weren’t fussed over as muses, the way straight women have been. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Wendy and Lisa, who performed with Prince, ‘weren’t fussed over as muses’ – and broke away as a duo.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The dynamics in the indie music environment both mirrored and defied established gender politics. The guys, generally benign and progressive compared to most men of the day, were nevertheless heavily conditioned by the patriarchy that came before them. And, of course, some were more enlightened than others. </p>
<p>The men Anita worked with understood she was their equal and more. Anita was less accessible and public-facing than those men – and the women who made the top-40 charts. But the bottom line is: men can fly under the radar and be seen to matter to the ordinary eye, and women who break through to the mainstream gain visibility. But women like Anita, steadfastly subcultural artist-muses in the shadow of men who pull focus, slip down the cracks. </p>
<p>Anita garnered a devoted cult following and is not to be pitied. But injustice is done to women hampered by “muse” shackles when their under-appreciated creative pulses pump so ardently. In short, her associations and collaborations with more famous men robbed her of due recognition for being inspired as well as inspiring. </p>
<p>Masculinity remains the naturalised centre of talent and success in the industry, which labours the gender of women musicians. Donita Sparks, guitarist and vocalist of American grunge-metal band L7, disclosed the tiresome burden of being a “girl band” in a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6288290/">recent documentary</a>. L7, mates of Cave’s from the 1994 Lollapalooza tour, have also been outspoken about the disproportional levels of abuse women experience.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://musicindustryreview.com.au/">music industry review </a>into “sexual harm, sexual harassment and systemic discrimination in the contemporary Australian music industry and recommendations for reform” was recently published. Most women I know in the industry could readily contribute. Sexual violence was then, as it is now, a perpetual threat. </p>
<p>As Bronwyn confirms, “We were focused on not getting raped and dealing with constantly being catcalled and followed and groped.” We were also, the odd exception aside, inflicted with learned self-loathing and irking insecurities. “We suffered from Girlitis,” says Bronwyn. “You catch it from society.” </p>
<p>That structural setup alone can cause psychic schisms that undermine women artists. And most families are a theatre of harm by degrees. No rattling skeletons jump out when digging into Anita’s history – but there are intimations of discord in the suburban pastoral family portrait.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/with-the-strokes-of-a-guitar-solo-joni-mitchell-showed-us-how-our-female-music-elders-are-super-punks-188075">With the strokes of a guitar solo, Joni Mitchell showed us how our female music elders are super punks</a>
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</em>
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<h2>Suburban beginnings</h2>
<p>Anita was raised by middle-aged parents in Glen Iris, in southeast Melbourne. Divided by Gardiners Creek, it was quiet and hilly with a distant view of the Dandenong mountains – a dull place for a girl child of the 1960s and 70s. Anita reminisced affectionately about the leafy concrete streets populated with freestanding art-deco houses and red-brick postwar homes. Her own house was, says Bronwyn, “ramshackle”. Glen Iris had no pub and only the questionably named brutalist Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre on High Street for a landmark. Like many Australian burbs at that time, it had a Chinese restaurant for a spot of cuisine diversity. </p>
<p>Anita’s family weren’t bohemian or oddball, and there doesn’t seem to be obvious context for Anita’s eccentricity. She adored her father, who had been in the air force and had likely seen war (a touching image can be found on the internet of a young Anita with her aged dad). She had a fraught relationship with her mother, whom she thought a conformist and experienced as intrusive. And she had a considerably older brother.</p>
<p>Anita grew up a girly girl, loving pretty things: Bambi, swans, and other stereotypical embodiments of purity and goodness. This appreciation for cuteness stayed with her throughout her adulthood. By the time the Ballroom scene had sprung to life, and Anita was an arty teen writing poems and sketching, her folks were senior citizens.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485255/original/file-20220919-27-bnbvqe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anita Lane grew up a ‘girly girl’, loving pretty things.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jessamy Calkin/Mute</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After her relationship with Libonati ended, Anita returned with her growing boys to the Glen Iris family home to care for her mother, who had developed Alzheimer’s – having outlived her husband. Juggling rowdy youngsters and an aged parent with a progressive neurological disorder must have been a tough, tiring stint. </p>
<p>“Anita was running on lots of different platforms,” explains <a href="https://www.emilyhumphries.website/">Emily Humphries</a>, a fellow visual artist and Anita’s most stalwart, hands-on friend and staunchest art champion during the last ten years of her life. “Her door was open, and her house was filled with teenagers to 20-somethings she was taking care of. That was a big thing for her, the housing of humanity.”</p>
<p>Following the 2001 release of Sex O’Clock (re-released in 2021 on its 20th anniversary), Anita drifted away from songwriting. She made no statement about renouncing solo recording. Most likely, it wasn’t even a conscious decision. She refocused, <a href="https://jonimitchell.com/paintings/">like Joni Mitchell</a>, on visual art.</p>
<p>The “Mary Rug”, which showed in a 2017 exhibition in St Kilda curated by Humphries, was the last major artwork Anita produced and made public. She painted her “infinite prayer”, as Emily calls it, on a massive cut of carpet in her garden in a zoned frenzy. Emily describes how Anita stained the rug to sully it, transforming it to create a portrait of a trio of women: shimmering, bloodied, and metaphorically walked upon. Sorrow meets the archetypal. Anita was an “ephemeral” artist, says Emily. “She danced her work through the kitsch and familiar scraps of objects.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485265/original/file-20220919-22-mcc5ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Elena Popa/provided by Emily Humphries</span></span>
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<p>Anita was “a people person”, according to Thirlwell. Close friends say she gradually withdrew and became less socially active due to a combination of health issues (including diabetes) and her lifelong introversion. Emily describes the latter as a hypersensitivity which, coupled with Anita’s super-intelligence, made being out among it tremendously taxing.</p>
<p>When her mother died, having spent a couple of years in residential aged care, Anita sold the Glen Iris house. She missed Europe but struggled to get her health up to speed for travel, so she relocated to a house in hipster Collingwood. Her sons were living independently, returning for spells, and she passed her days pottering and making art.</p>
<p>Emily insists that despite her struggles, Anita “maintained an air of punk” and her artist’s eye was still sharp. She was “busy decorating the universe”. There she sits, insect-like, six pairs of glasses poised on her head. Next, she’s setting up tripods with light fittings fixed on them, dressing them up in tutus to create the illusion of tentacled jellyfish, and pondering opening a rehab for women. </p>
<p>She was also, according to Emily, an avid Googler. “If she loved you, she would research stuff for you.” If she was on your team, she was always on the case. And she retained her sense of humour: “She was probably the funniest person I’ve ever met.” That’s a remarkable statement, given that Emily is the daughter of comedian <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-barry-humphries-humour-is-now-history-thats-the-fate-of-topical-satirical-comedy-117499">Barry Humphries</a> and his second wife, dancer Rosalind Tong.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/male-artists-dominate-galleries-our-research-explored-if-its-because-women-dont-paint-very-well-or-just-discrimination-189221">Male artists dominate galleries. Our research explored if it’s because ‘women don’t paint very well’ – or just discrimination</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Seasoned women artists</h2>
<p>The women artists of Anita’s generation are maturing in an environment hostile to ageing, and to artists of all persuasions who aren’t big names – in a culture that equates promise and productivity with youth. Many still working navigate economic hardship, thanks to decades of prioritising art over financial planning. </p>
<p>“Anita’s divine energy was for her art, but her pulse externally was low because she was drained by ill health and trying to support boys with barely any money,” says Emily, expressing anger at “the lack of understanding and economic support available to genuinely creative women”.</p>
<p>Some of us survived long and well enough to shake off Girlitis, awakening from its fevered dream to a formidable lucid power. No longer dependent on the affirmation of our worth, we know it – finally, fiercely (on a good day). </p>
<p>But that doesn’t fund our art. Neoliberal governments in countries like Australia and the UK have systematically cut arts funding to scraps. While Anita eventually had the benefit of an inheritance, many don’t.</p>
<p>For most of her last decade, Anita had a partner – a reserved IT type keeping nine-to-five hours, who assumed the role of stepfather to her children. The demise of that relationship, about a year before she died, left Anita unmoored, suggests Emily.</p>
<h2>Farewelling Anita</h2>
<p>There’s a tendency to speak of compulsive self-harm in clichés: the Dimmed Bright Young Thing, the Rock n’ Roll Suicide, the Plath Melancholic. But moral platitudes elide the heartbreak in and for each afflicted life. Those forced to watch the narrative unfold find themselves in a dreadful dilemma. As Thirlwell puts it, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>worrying about Anita was like worrying about the weather. There’s not much you could do about it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anita was aware her friends and family were concerned. She told Emily that Cave had described witnessing her periodic returns to destructive patterns as beholding “a crime against God”. “She spoke a lot about Nick,” Emily confirms. “He was terribly important to her. It was a constant friendship.” Her mighty life-force pushed back again and again, but hope and confidence faded. She fell prey to the belief she could not be helped. </p>
<p>Yet Anita is not a wretched figure; Emily speaks for many when she says, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want her brilliance known beyond a sense of tragedy. I want her properly placed in Australia’s creative heritage and the world sphere.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No cause of death was announced. Fans expressed disbelief, friends mourned, and her people closed ranks, tight-lipped ever since, apart from the occasional oblique lapse, like Cave’s blog reference to the “rampant, unstable, fatal energy” that made it “both easy and terrifying to love her”. </p>
<p>Anita, mysterious to the end, defied obvious conclusions in death as she had in life; it seems her last months and weeks involved a complex scenario, and there were multiple contributing factors to her untimely passing. As Thirlwell says emphatically, “Anita would have liked to have stayed around for her kids. She loved them very much.”</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s just as well she stepped away from the industry when she did, since the contemporary music landscape is relentlessly characterised by the kind of self-promotion and marketing she loathed. As Bronwyn lamented in an anguished public Facebook post paying tribute to Anita, “high functioning brand-driven professionalism is the go”. </p>
<p>I binge-watched YouTube videos the day I heard the news. In the clip for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrniVTXH5-o">“The World’s a Girl”</a>, co-written with Harvey, black-and-white and sepia shadows flicker beguilingly out of focus, and Anita dances around Morocco, hair wind-swept, like a dervish outlier Bardot. She frolics with sly, sultry humour amid religious iconography, Hollywood Golden Age glamour, and subversive symbolism in the monochrome video for the country-twanging <a href="https://youtu.be/lp41tokijrc">“Jesus Almost Got Me”</a>. And she bounces through the clip for her cover (with Barry Adamson) of “These Boots Are Made For Walking” holding her unfazed baby. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">In ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’</span></figcaption>
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<p>Anita rarely sang in public, afflicted with stage fright, so it was a treat to discover footage of a 1992 live performance of <a href="https://sonichits.com/video/Anita_Lane_%26_Blixa_Bargeld/Subterranean_World_(How_Long...)">“Subterranean World (How Long Have We Known Each Other Now?)”</a>. Anita, in duet with Blixa Bargeld, is playfully tender, and appears relaxed. She beams at the end of the ode to friendship, when Bargeld kisses her cheek as the last notes sound. </p>
<p>How, I wondered, did she feel about herself as an artist in those final years? Emily tells a illuminating secondhand story. </p>
<p>She describes meeting a younger woman at an event, who mentioned Anita. They chatted, and the woman said, “You know I saw her in a 7/11 late one night in St Kilda.” She recounted how she told Anita, awestruck, they had met years before. She didn’t expect Anita to remember a transitory moment with a “nonentity” and was stunned when Anita recalled the exact time and place. The younger woman gushed, and Anita looked to the ground and said, “I’m surprised you even know who I am.”</p>
<p>Anita’s wake was rescheduled several times during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Melbourne spent 262 days under restrictive public health orders – enduring lockdown after lockdown. It went ahead in March 2022 at Abbotsford Convent on the Yarra River, a grand medieval compound that was once a Catholic nunnery and is now a thriving multi-arts precinct. </p>
<p>The prevailing Ballroomers came out in force, gathering in a high-ceilinged room fragrant with flowers. One attendee declared the ambience “celestial”, while another suggests the vibe was less spiritually embracing for those outside the cloistered in-crowd. </p>
<p>The many guises of Anita were projected, and there was a shrine of her art and personal mementos. There was no live music, though there had previously been plans along those lines. Her son’s eulogies brought tears to eyes, and the youngest read a letter written by the Brussels-based artist Marcus Bergner. Bronwyn spoke, erudite and heartfelt. International friends like Thirlwell and Kid Congo Zoomed in, Nick streaming silently among them. There was a bar, and people sat around talking about Anita, who was long gone and more ethereal than ever.</p>
<p>In the early 2000s, she recorded vocals for the English version of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr0XTtshpnU">“Blume”</a>, an atmospheric track by Einstürzende Neubauten, which she co-wrote and performed in duet with Bargeld. Anita does not appear in the official video (though interestingly, PJ Harvey can be clocked miming into a bullhorn in a split-second cameo). </p>
<p>In a voice that contains multitudes, described as “haunting babygirl” by Joel Gausten, she sings of being a supernova before ascending to a gloriously eerie chorus and trailing off into a guttural spoken-word German whisper that seems to emanate from an arcane mist.</p>
<p>And I can’t think of a more fitting elegy. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Clarification: After publication, Mick Harvey contacted the author to inform us that he had never received her interview requests. He says he would have been willing to have been interviewed for this essay.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188815/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Meera Atkinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>After Anita Lane died, former collaborator Nick Cave said she “despised the concept of the muse but was everybody’s”. Meera Atkinson highlights her achievements – with help from those who knew her.Meera Atkinson, Adjunct Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1447352020-08-27T20:11:35Z2020-08-27T20:11:35ZFriday essay: transcendent rage — Nick Cave and the Red Hand Files<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354762/original/file-20200826-24-786h2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=68%2C53%2C4626%2C3336&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Fernando Araujo/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Nick Cave is a tough knot of wonders to his fans, and seemingly so to himself. At the close of a recent <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com">The Red Hand Files</a> letter, Cave describes the angelic, feisty, Nina Simone singing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2m6IsVvj5c">My Sweet Lord/Today is a Killer</a>. </p>
<p>Simone’s performance is a glorious melding of George Harrison’s song and David Nelson’s poem, producing for Cave, “the voice of protest we need right now — intelligent, questing, transcendent, raging and thrillingly complex”. </p>
<p>Simone, he writes, is “this exhilarating collision of opposing forces — love and scorn”. You can’t help but ask how much is <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/protest-song-that-you-greatly-admire/">Cave’s own projecting</a> here — Cave as Nina as Cave, “transcendent rage […] conflicted and defiant[…] pull [ing]the heavens crashing down around our ears”.</p>
<p>Whether you’re a full-blooded fan or an intrigued observer, you will most likely be acquainted with Cave’s online series The Red Hand Files, “love letters” written to his fans, “no moderator […] between you and me”. He began these after a period of intense mourning for his son Arthur who died tragically at the age of 15 in 2015. </p>
<p>Cave has written about the loss of motivation and drive in his work, <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dream-feeling/">in his time of unspeakable loss</a>; and how he came to recognise his need for connection, for reaching out to his fans and the wider world. And what connections he forges — personal, passionate, whimsical, self-deprecating and self-making! </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-gothic-from-hanging-rock-to-nick-cave-and-kylie-this-genre-explores-our-dark-side-111742">Australian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>On mercy</h2>
<p>We meet in these letters: Cave the friend, the muso, the father and family man, the messenger of transcendence and of grief, the poet and the confessor. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354771/original/file-20200826-20-x4bo4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nick Cave performing with Kylie Minogue at Glastonbury last year.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel C Ryan/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The pitch and focus of The Red Hand Files take us on a wild ride, as the tall, thin man of Gothic beginnings draws us into frank conversations (or at least an ongoing representation of frankness) about values, beliefs, doubts and hopes. In a recent epistle he writes about mercy — a value which is as much metaphysical as it is political:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/what-is-mercy-for-you/">Mercy is a value</a> that should be at the heart of any functioning and tolerant society. Mercy ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe —to feel protected within a society, through our mutual fallibility. Without mercy a society loses its soul, and devours itself.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is discourse steeped in experience and authority. Not everyone will agree with his beliefs, (Cave’s views on cancel culture as “mercy’s antithesis” <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/nick-cave-cancel-culture-red-hand-files-political-correctness-a9667446.html">made international headlines</a>) or value his attempts at frankness, but few would want to tangle with the passion of the believer.</p>
<p>How marked is the difference between Cave’s stance and that of, say, the merciless trumpeters of venality and intolerance supposedly leading the world right now?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-popular-musics-search-for-the-sacred-in-a-secular-world-101117">Friday essay: popular music's search for the sacred in a secular world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The thought behind the declaration about mercy is complex and rigorous: if you act with mercy, you will garner mercy. It will not be offered to you through any direct consequence of your actions, necessarily; but will be manifest in the way it opens your eyes to your own imperfect and fallible self. </p>
<p>This realisation is the spring from which mercy arises: mercy as a sacred value rooted in many religious and humanist practices. It is personal, and it defines a society. </p>
<p>However, it is intriguing to consider the verbal echo between The Red Hand Files and Cave’s dark 1994 song Right Red Hand, which suggests the vengeful right hand of punishment from God.</p>
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<p>So mercy, according to Cave, is both personal and political. But interestingly, one correspondent, JMF of Auckland, does not see Cave’s work as predominantly political.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I love your music and its ability to relate common suffering […] Do you ever look back at your anthology and wish you had been more overtly politically outspoken — referring to activism rather than politics per se — in your art?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cave’s response is elegant and thoughtful, not rushing to defend himself, or disagree. Rather, it draws together so many of the threads of Cave’s ethos _ his music, spirituality, and beliefs — articulating a measured overview of his own work: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>My songs seem to be resistant to fixed, inflexible points of view. They have […] a concern for common, non-hierarchical suffering. They are not in the business of saving the world; rather they are in the business of saving the soul of the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, the need for mercy, and an understanding of humanity’s common suffering, is core. This also gives content to the way in which Cave’s music breaks with the rigid, fixed and judgmental; splices genres; dances between sacred and secular, the red right hand as potentially vengeful, or just.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pope-francis-and-the-joy-of-love-in-a-merciful-church-57554">Pope Francis and The Joy of Love in a merciful church</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Meaning-making</h2>
<p>In another letter to Rose of Melbourne, Cave writes of this commonality of loss and suffering:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In loss, things — both animate and inanimate — take on an added intensity and meaning […] this feeling you describe, of alertness to the inner-spirit of things – this humming – comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things […] our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates our lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We are given here a window onto the nature of Cave’s ontology: his generosity with his correspondents, and his way of being, and believing, in the world. One of the impressive aspects of Cave’s meditation on loss is the way it brings together deep emotions forged by experience, with discipline.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354763/original/file-20200826-16-1j1d3gd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1038&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cave pictured last year with his wife Susie Bick and son Earl.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christian Monterrosa/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cave’s notion of discipline can be seen here in his stress on meaning-making, understanding, and lessons to be learned, though never certitudes. His passion is punctuated by deeply philosophical, lived beliefs. It can be described as mystical — “alertness to the inner spirit of things” — but equally, it is pragmatic, aware of the passing of spirit, the littleness of the human, as he acknowledges the “impermanence of things”.</p>
<p>We are not being offered a set of pieties in The Red Hand Files, but an acknowledgement of what is due from us as response; that to “lose our resolve […] drop our guard, or just grow tired and descend into that other, darker, less lovely world” are understandable, but not the only course.</p>
<p>There isn’t any judgement, of self or others, if and when we do drop into a darker world; but there is a palpably joyful, disciplined exuberance in Cave’s actively seeking animation and illumination, available to all, and often through the experience of loss. </p>
<h2>Being ‘prayerful’</h2>
<p>This illumination does not arise out of, or produce, a set of certitudes. That would be anathema to the ambivalence and complexity Cave so values. In an earlier issue he is asked by Patrick of Melbourne about prayer, and Cave offers a typical, wonderfully secular/sacred response:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The act of prayer is by no means exclusive to religious practise [sic] because prayer is not dependent on the existence of a subject. You need not pray to anyone […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I personally couldn’t agree less with this perception of prayer. At the same time, I am drawn to Cave’s following statement: “It is just as valuable to pray into your disbelief, as it is to pray into your belief”. But the revealing clause comes last: “for prayer is not an encounter with an external agent, rather it is an encounter with oneself.” </p>
<p>Yes, there are fluctuating levels of belief and disbelief many of us wrestle with; but surely it is pure, feisty Cave here, arguing that what is perhaps the most dialogic of religious practices is monologic, culminating in “an encounter with oneself”.</p>
<p>This is the iconic Cave: angst-ridden, melancholy individual, “intelligent, questing, transcendent, raging and thrillingly complex.” This is Nina Simone, as well as so many characters in Cave’s songs; and it is Cave himself; from the lonely lover haltingly seeking comfort from God in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_esUexstdbg">Brompton Oratory</a>, the condemned man awaiting execution in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahr4KFl79WI">The Mercy Seat</a>, to the murderous lover in Where the Wild Roses Grow. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cv7NEbacamQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>So many of Cave’s fans love the angst, the tortured soul strung out between heaven and earth, resolution and complexity. This is Cave’s brand. However, in reading The Red Hand Files, something gets dislodged in that brand. The self opens up to all those fans who write seeking his advice; and he responds without rancour, and with wisdom. </p>
<p>You could argue that it’s still one long, mutual admiration society. Cave and his millions of little mirrors. But in that same response to Patrick of Melbourne, Cave writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The coronavirus has brought us to our knees, yet it has also presented us with the opportunity to be prayerful, whether we believe in God or not. By forcing us into isolation, it has dismantled our constructed selves, by challenging our presumed needs, our desires, and our ambitions and rendered us raw, essential and reflective.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This rawness — loss of “our constructed selves”, undermining of humanity as privileged centre of knowing — is something many of us in Melbourne, and indeed globally, might recognise right now.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354764/original/file-20200826-20-11xyiwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Capitol building in Washington DC: coronavirus has undermined our privileged centre of knowing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sipa USA Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s possibly an awareness that citizens in many precarious places — the US, Lebanon, South Africa, Ghana or Egypt — could acknowledge even more readily: we are not in control. We are not the centre of any universe. We need to be on our knees.</p>
<h2>‘The connective tissue of suffering’</h2>
<p>Cave began the work of writing to his fans (Issue #1, September 2018), after a series of concerts where he had spoken directly to his audiences in question and answer sessions. </p>
<p>Bitten down by grief, and unable to produce new work, he asks himself and his fans a question echoing from childhood: “how do we return to our lives — to the awe of existence - and reclaim a sense of wonder?”</p>
<p>Such a question resonates with many of us at this time of pandemic.</p>
<p>Cave was also asked in this first issue, by Jakub from Łódź, Poland, about the processes of writing. He replies by reflecting on his coming back to writing, and to life, after the trauma he and his family had experienced. His existential realisation is both practical and deeply wise:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I also realised that I was not alone in my grief and that many of you were, in one way or another, suffering your own sorrows, your own griefs. I felt this in our live performances. I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together […] as we floated lost in narcissism and self-absorption. </p>
<p>It also became very clear to both of us [he and his wife Susie] that we were not alone! We could see there were many others out there, floating around in the dark, outside of their lives. It seemed to be everywhere we looked— people in search of meaning and wonder. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Nick Cave is not simply mired in individualism or angst, for the brand’s sake. This is an individual — narcissistic and self-absorbed as we have to be in grief, momentarily — but also a man bonded with others by the connective tissue of suffering. </p>
<p>This realisation is both what Cave constructed for himself, imaginatively and intellectually, as a way beyond grief; but it also results from a trauma he did not choose.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354765/original/file-20200826-18-5w5xme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Melbourne under lockdown: in COVID-19 our suffering is shared.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">James Ross/AAP</span></span>
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<p>None of us choose trauma, but we also recognise in COVID-19, in the terrible racial and climate traumas of the globe, and in the individual loss of loved people in our lives, that such suffering is common, shared; and that it can enable us — to weep with those who weep, to offer mercy in our state of mutual impermanence. </p>
<p>In that same letter to Jakub, Cave writes: “It became clear that as human beings we have enormous capabilities that allow us to rise above our suffering — that we are hardwired for transcendence”. </p>
<p>Yet we also realise, as Cave fans, critics or distant followers, that the journey to such transcendence is inevitably entangled in bloody, torturous, common experience.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144735/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyn McCredden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Nick Cave’s ongoing letters to fans, begun after a period of intense mourning over the death of his son, have much to say about suffering, mercy and meaning-making.Lyn McCredden, Personal Chair, Literary Studies, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1377212020-05-04T11:49:31Z2020-05-04T11:49:31ZMusical plagiarism: why it can be admirable to steal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/331971/original/file-20200501-42935-1tnixhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=117%2C200%2C4750%2C3362&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at Primavera Sound Festival on June 1 2018.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/barcelona-jun-1-nick-cave-bad-1104306056">Shutterstock/ChristianBertrand</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367089/">The Squid and the Whale</a>, the young protagonist Walt performs a song at a school talent show that he claims to have written himself. He wins first prize, his girlfriend loves it, and at dinner his overbearing dad says that it reminds him of his second novel.</p>
<p>But of course Walt gets found out. He didn’t write it, Roger Waters did. It’s the song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFjmvfRvjTc">Hey You</a> from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. Confronted by the school therapist, Walt concedes: “I felt I could have written it … so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality.”</p>
<p>It’s something most of us have felt before. Plagiarism as an assertion of identity, a misguided sense that we own the things we love. The composer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Igor-Stravinsky">Igor Stravinsky</a> once referred to this affliction as “a rare form of kleptomania” – plundering of the musical past as raw material for the present. </p>
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<p>Stravinsky was doing something quite different to Walt. He refashioned his stolen sources into something new: Russian folk melodies were incorporated into <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZmlYgYzG4">The Rite of Spring</a> and material from the classical era gave rise to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sppjYdxeKFY">Pulcinella</a>. And yet Stravinsky tells us that Pulcinella was not only the first of his “many love affairs” with the past, but also “a look in the mirror”. Just like Walt, then, Stravinsky’s plagiarism was a form of deferred and narcissistic self-recognition.</p>
<p>We can look at such acts in one of two ways: either as an unethical infringement of somebody else’s <a href="https://www.gov.uk/intellectual-property-an-overview">intellectual property</a> or as the symptom of an attitude that underpins creative endeavour across the arts. In one of his <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/originality-hard-to-obtain/">Red Hand Files bulletins</a>, the singer-songwriter Nick Cave urges us to embrace the second of these:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation – everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, <em>all the time</em>. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music – the great artistic experiment of our era.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Plagiarism”, he writes, “is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary – even admirable – tendency, and that is to steal”. We could tell the history of rock as a twisted genealogy of theft, beginning with Elvis’s debut single – a cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxHQUvCkV20">That’s All Right (Mama)</a> in 1954.</p>
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<p>Cave likewise treads in Elvis’s footsteps with his 1985 album <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/releases/the-firstborn-is-dead/">The Firstborn Is Dead</a>. It features tracks such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSl4KX7zBTQ">Tupelo</a>, a paraphrase of John Lee Hooker’s spine-chilling Tupelo Blues; and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iEGIVV9aRg">Blind Lemon Jefferson</a>, a homage to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8">blues singer</a> of the same name. These singers had, in turn, written their songs by drawing on a shared tradition of stock or “floating” verses native to the deep south.</p>
<p>The further back you look, the more such hybridity and assimilation comes to the fore. The blues itself, as Africanists such as Gerhard Kubik <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tvgcn">have noted</a>, emerges from a complex and centuries-old process of creative interplay between the Arab-Islamic world of north Africa and musical cultures of the Sudanic belt, displaced through Altantic slavery.</p>
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<p>Of course, Walt’s performance of Hey You would not fit within Cave’s vision of stealing as “the engine of progress”. For Cave, acts of theft are absolved or justified only if the stolen thing is advanced in some way and made yet more covetable. Elvis, in this reading, is effectively pardoned for his appropriation of That’s All Right to the extent that his white-skinned version of the blues (white-washed as rock and roll) was an act of “mutating and transforming” the genre that sparked a new mass cultural form still very much alive today.</p>
<p>Another reading, however, is possible: that this new mode of expression was yet another instance of a dominant culture taking “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176649/everything-but-the-burden-by-edited-by-greg-tate/">everything but the burden</a>” from African Americans – a longstanding relationship characterised, as the historian of blackface minstrelsy Eric Lott memorably put it, by “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/love-and-theft-9780195320558?cc=gb&lang=en&">love and theft</a>”.</p>
<p>But what Cave is really referring to is a trope central to the literary critic Harold Bloom’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Anxiety-of-Influence">theory</a> of the “anxiety of influence”. No doubt we’ve all come across the following quote, variously attributed to Picasso, Stravinsky, William Faulkner, and Steve Jobs: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. It seems to have emerged during the late 19th century, but was most famously expressed by TS Eliot in 1920 as “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/57795/57795-h/57795-h.htm">immature poets imitate; mature poets steal</a>”.</p>
<p>Borrowing, Eliot notes, is perfectly normal – what distinguishes bad thieves from good ones is that the former “deface what they take”, whereas the latter “make it into something better, or at least something different”. In the right hands, Eliot is saying, plagiarism can lead to the creation of “unique” works rather than mere hackneyed replication. This modernist dictum chimes with Cave’s claim that artistic crooks must “further the idea, or be damned”.</p>
<p>So is it ever possible to be original? The lazy answer is no. A better answer is that originality is always a scandalous collaboration with the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ross Cole has received funding from the AHRC.</span></em></p>To quote Nick Cave, “Plagiarism is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary … tendency … and that is to steal”.Ross Cole, Research Fellow, Music and Politics, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1079092019-04-10T14:03:39Z2019-04-10T14:03:39ZMaking sense of the world: a walk down Jubilee Street with Nick Cave<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268112/original/file-20190408-2935-1svw4ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Australian rock musician Nick Cave.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Laurent Gillieron/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The world’s a mess. How do thoughtful people make sense of it all? In this series we’ve asked a number of our authors to suggest a book, philosopher, work of art – or anything else, for that matter – that will help to make sense of it all.</em> </p>
<p>There was a time when I thought I had pretty good concentration. That time is gone. Sucked into a vortex of addictive news checking, Twitter feeding, I keep on updating, streaming, screaming, plugged into yet more “news from nowhere”. Angry old white men, angry young white men, forests up in flames, towns dragged down in mud, turtles wrapped up in plastic. I need an “out”. </p>
<p>Flying around Europe for work (EU funded, so yes, Brexit kills me) I find myself playing the same song over and over again. It’s my way not of “making sense” of what seems mostly to be nonsense, but of finding an outlet – one that creates its own different, poetic world.</p>
<p>Every time the plane takes off I play “Jubilee Street”, a song by Australian rock musician <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/">Nick Cave</a> – over and over again.</p>
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<p>And it’s not only my takeoff soundtrack. I play it when I need to be somewhere else, where not making sense has its own beauty and internally coherent narrative. I need to hear a Nick Cave story and out of all of them, from all his time in music, “Jubilee Street” is the “magic one”.</p>
<p>I have been listening, on and off, to Cave ever since he screamed “Hands up Who wants to Die” on “Sonny’s Burning” with his band <a href="http://www.thebirthdayparty.com.au/">The Birthday Party</a> in 1983. I 5fell out of love with him for some time but there he was, always making music. There were side projects with singers <a href="https://www.kylie.com/">Kylie Minogue</a> and <a href="http://pjharvey.net/">PJ Harvey</a>, there was the band <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/grinderman">Grinderman</a>, his porn alter ego, and there were film scores.</p>
<p>All the time, along with Warren Ellis, his close musical collaborator, multi-instrumentalist, friend and fiendish violinist, he has been concocting stories about love, death, violence and sex. No one sounds like him. No bands plough his furrow. His world is indebted to the Western, the Gothic, to the <a href="http://www.grandguignol.com/history.htm">Grand Guignol</a> (The Theatre of the Great Puppet).</p>
<p>His music is the sonic equivalent of <a href="https://www.davidlynch.com/">David Lynch’s</a> films Wild at Heart or Blue Velvet, like German film director Werner Herzog’s <a href="https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/01/10/werner-herzogs-nosferatu-the-vampire-forty-years-later">Nosferatu the Vampyre</a>. It sounds odd to say that it functions as an escape, but Cave’s world has always been the same, existing in a parallel space to the “real” world.</p>
<h2>Love and loss</h2>
<p><a href="https://genius.com/Nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-jubilee-street-lyrics">“Jubilee Street”</a> is, like a lot of Cave’s work, a tale of love and loss. It recalls a woman called “Bee” who lives on the titular street making “ends meet”. She has a “little black book” wherein the protagonist finds his name written, “on every page”. </p>
<p>Bee is a working girl. Beyond that, the narrative becomes surreal and Cave starts to spin his web. Images that are not possible in this world become imaginable within his; if you suspend disbelief, you travel with him as he sings this song. </p>
<p>He carries strange things on chains and leashes, pushes impossible objects up hills, for some reason “the Russians” move into Bee’s place when it closes down, and all the while the song builds and builds to its climax where Cave sings about transforming, about flying. He marvels:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Look at me now! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>What he might have turned into, who knows? He laments how he is “out of place and time”, and “over the hill” and out of his mind. This confession of insanity and ageing, the feeling that he doesn’t belong, that he is out of kilter with the world. It’s one that makes no sense to him since Bee left – it is one that is confusing but tantalising, kaleidoscopic in its imagery. It’s the tale of a lost man who somehow finds beauty in his predicament. And this is why I guess it makes sense now.</p>
<p>The track comes from the 2013 album <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17618-push-the-sky-away/">Push The Sky Away</a> and was recorded in the South of France, where a children’s choir sang the backing vocals. Its hook, 18 notes that emerge early on in the song, is played on violin and echoes later in the children’s voices. </p>
<p>It is showcased at the end of the trailer for the film <a href="http://www.iainandjane.com/work/film-tv/20000-days-on-earth/">“20 000 days on this Earth”</a> by Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard, which depicts Cave in a gold lamé
shirt performing at Sydney Opera House in 2014, arms out, crucifixial, shamanic. And so he acts out, in song and on stage, this ability to transform, to change, to become the butterfly, to soar into beauty. </p>
<h2>Compelling cinematic images</h2>
<p>Cave has experienced <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/the-love-and-terror-of-nick-cave">family tragedy</a>, losing one of his twin sons at 15. He has courted political and peer disapproval by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/11/nick-cave-cultural-boycott-israel-brian-eno">performing in Israel</a>. But his life and political decisions are not what draws me to him – far from it. It’s his work, his conjured up worlds, that create compelling cinematic images I want to visit again and again. </p>
<p>Try <a href="https://www.songfacts.com/facts/nick-cave-the-bad-seeds/stagger-lee">“Stagger Lee”</a> and you will be transported to a mid-century, mid-Western town where the outlaws rule. Listen to <a href="https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858521629/">“Nature Boy”</a> and you will marvel at a relationship where the guy dresses up in a deep-sea diving suit for erotic charge. Listen to <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyrics/nick-cave-bad-seeds/boatmans-call/arms/">“Into my Arms”</a> for a love song, <a href="https://variety.com/2018/music/news/nick-cave-song-peaky-blinders-red-right-hand-1202692550/">“Red Right Hand”</a> for a murderer’s confession, or <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyrics/nick-cave-bad-seeds/let-love/loverman/">“Loverman”</a> for some deranged sex. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/nick-cave-dreams-of-miley-cyrus-in-higgs-boson-blues-75557/">“Higgs Bosun Blues”</a> sees Cave “driving down to Geneva”, boasts a cast of pop star Miley Cyrus and bluesman Robert Johnson, and includes an edict to bury him with his yellow, patent leather shoes should he die. But first, try “Jubilee Street” because of its creeping, haunting beauty. Cave finds poetry in the darkness. That’s why I keep listening to him.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107909/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Abigail Gardner receives funding from Erasmus+ </span></em></p>Rock artist Nick Cave finds poetry in the darkness - his song “Jubilee Street” is an example.Abigail Gardner, Reader in Music and Media, University of GloucestershireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1011172018-10-04T20:05:34Z2018-10-04T20:05:34ZFriday essay: popular music’s search for the sacred in a secular world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236797/original/file-20180918-158237-1yyh2cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave performing with The Bad Seeds in Budapest in June. His song lyrics, with those often melancholy, churchy organ chords, are dripping in references to what might be called sacredness. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Zoltan Balogh/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the most rancorous, persistent and <a href="http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2010/03/26/child-sex-abuse-and-the-church/">polarising dualisms today</a> is, arguably, that between the secular and the sacred. Sacred and secular are capacious categories, but in the field of lived and popular culture, such terms are being transformed kaleidoscopically, with the songs of Nick Cave, Hozier, and many others exploring the sacred embedded in very human, secular contexts. </p>
<p>So what happens if we unpack our individual relationship to that dualism? Do the safe walls we have, possibly, built around ourselves, either against religion (or more broadly, the sacred), or against atheism, stand unbudgeable, untouchable? There’s always that middle ground, agnosticism. But do we feel the need to open the gates, prepared to hear our own clichés fly: “Australia is such a modern secular nation”; religion, isn’t that an opiate?; “priests are all pedophiles”; “nothing’s sacred anymore”; “thanks to my Catholic childhood, but no thanks …” </p>
<p>Well, guess what? The enquiry into sacredness is not over, it’s just beginning for the 21st century, and in wildly, playfully, wonderfully disparate modes and places. Enter Nick Cave, that dark prince of early punk music, now striding restlessly back and forth between punk and popular. His song lyrics, with those often melancholy, churchy organ chords, are dripping in references to what might be called sacredness in a secular world. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-australian-teens-have-complex-views-on-religion-and-spirituality-103233">New research shows Australian teens have complex views on religion and spirituality</a>
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<p>Take, for example, the wry, self-deprecating lyrics of his popular song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnHoqHscTKE">Into my Arms</a>: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do / But if I did, I would kneel down and ask Him …” </p>
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<p>Or the lyrics of a lesser-known song, <a href="https://genius.com/Nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-brompton-oratory-lyrics#note-7268620">Brompton Oratory</a>, which takes as its scene the beautiful old church in central London, where a dispirited lover sings to himself, to his absent love, and to a God who is transposed across the absent lover:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Up those stone steps I climb<br>
Hail this joyful day’s return<br>
Into its great shadowed vault I go<br>
Hail the Pentecostal morn. <br>
The reading is from Luke 24<br>
Where Christ returns to his loved ones<br>
I look at the stone apostles<br>
Think that it’s alright for some<br></p>
<p>And I wish that I was made of stone<br>
So that I would not have to see<br>
A beauty impossible to define<br>
A beauty impossible to believe<br>
A beauty impossible to endure<br>
The blood imparted in little sips<br>
The smell of you still on my hands<br>
As I bring the cup up to my lips<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The music of Brompton Oratory juxtaposes a restless, walking, syncopated rhythm and the moody tones of the church organ. In Cave’s by now famous metaphorical merging of flesh and spirit – “the smell of you still on my hands/As I bring the cup up to my lips” – the singer presses imaginatively, movingly, against the border between death and life, worldly and spiritual love. </p>
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<p>Hope and belief merge too, because the sacred here does not equate with dogma, religion, or institution (though the Oratory’s steps are hard, and the apostles are made of stone), but rather with the raw, recognisable longing of one who desires rather than knows, who yearns both spiritually and in the flesh.</p>
<p>Cave’s 10th album, The Boatman’s Call (1997), where these two songs appear, is immersed in sacred and secular intertwined, two lovers knotted together, wrapped in each other’s arms in mutual need, suspicion and recognition. Have a look at the lyrics to <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyrics/nick-cave-bad-seeds/boatmans-call/kingdom/">There is a kingdom</a> or <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyrics/nick-cave-bad-seeds/boatmans-call/idiot-prayer/">Idiot Prayer </a>. The idiot in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWi9pOw3Fak">latter poem</a> has faith, but also doubt. He hopes for heaven and yet sees hell all too viscerally:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This prayer is for you, my love<br>
Sent on the wings of a dove<br>
An idiot prayer of empty words.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imagination is one route towards the sacred, but it so often crumbles into “empty words” in Cave’s ecstasies. This blend of lyric rapture and melancholy is familiar if you are a Leonard Cohen fan too. In Cohen’s 1984 song <a href="https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-hallelujah-lyrics">Hallelujah</a>, so exquisitely rendered by Jeff Buckley, as well as by John Cale and many others, sacred possibilities are embedded in a lyric of high desire and doubt:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord<br>
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,<br>
But you don’t really care for music, do you?<br>
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth,<br>
The minor fall, the major lift,<br>
The baffled king composing hallelujah…<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cohen’s complicated sexual and spiritual meditation does not shy away from the entanglement of the sacred and the secular (material, sexual, bodily) urges of human life: “There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)/That’s how the light gets in” (Leonard Cohen, <a>Anthem</a>). His hallelujah is “not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”</p>
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<p>“That’s muzak now, isn’t it?” my partner groaned, as I played Buckley singing his version. And it is. But read Alan Light’s 2012 book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13547619-the-holy-or-the-broken">The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’</a> for a gripping account of the journey of the song into popular culture.</p>
<p>Irish singer Hozier’s <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/hozier/takemetochurch.html">Take me to Church</a>, covered by Ed Sheeran and others, sings of a he and a she enthralled with each other, making sense of what is human, clean, innocent, generous, in terms that collapse the sacred and the secular.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No masters or kings when the ritual begins<br>
There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin<br>
In the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene<br>
Only then I am human<br>
Only then I am clean<br>
Amen, Amen, Amen<br></p>
<p>Take me to church<br>
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies<br>
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife<br>
Offer me that deathless death<br>
Good God, let me give you my life</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Hozier’s video for the song (one of two videos, the other a balletic production) is of a he and a he, a gay relationship, which presents another twist to our understanding about why the dualisms of right and wrong, embedded in heteronormativity, must be questioned. The video presents a confronting narrative of persecution and violence against gay sexuality. At the same time, it is a lover’s paean.</p>
<figure>
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<p>The chorus’ “Amen, Amen, Amen” is sung against the visual images of brute hatred and destruction, producing a complex response to the injustice of “the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene”. </p>
<p>Yes, the dualisms of sacred and secular, right and wrong, which fuel homophobia still motivate many cultures, with their need to hierarchise, dominate, or exterminate the other.</p>
<p>But Hozier’s song holds on, through images of total violence, to the beauty and rapture of lovers finding the ground for a love which “dares not speak its name”, still, in many places.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-quran-the-bible-and-homosexuality-in-islam-61012">Friday essay: The Qur’an, the Bible and homosexuality in Islam</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Relating to difference</h2>
<p>How far have we come from the rigid linguistic and lived dichotomies that shape people’s identities, that police who they can love, that dictate what we should find sacred? Perhaps it’s not a question of “how far have we come”, but of the fecundity of our processes that seek to understand and learn from difference. </p>
<p>Cultures seek sameness, likeness, but more and more, globally, we need to relate to difference, to keep trying to comprehend how different skins, different histories, different sexualities, different beliefs might find openness in living together. That quest for enlightened attitudes to difference speaks into what is at the root of both sacred and secular approaches to living on the earth.</p>
<p>It is a continuing conundrum that in this so-called secular nation of Australia we cannot find fuller and richer ways – politically, religiously - of acknowledging past violence and failure, of moving forward into places where differences are proudly enunciated, rather than nourishing the roots of hatred and dismissal of the other. This conundrum is highlighted when we consider relations between white and Aboriginal Australia. </p>
<p>How often have I heard (white) academics making welcome to country pronouncements, acknowledging Aboriginal sacred relations to place and country, but then in more ways than one eschewing, for themselves, the category of the sacred?</p>
<p>What is it that makes one people declare its sacred relation to ancestors and country, and another people so committed to a modern, secular existence – the material, or hyper-capitalist, or individualistic – while cohabiting the same country? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Queensland’s Innovation Minister Kate Jones (centre right) and entrepreneurs watch an Indigenous welcome to country performance on arrival at the 2018 Myriad Festival in Brisbane in May.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dan Peled/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was good, therefore, to hear recently of Australian academic David Newheiser’s current research project, Atheism and Christianity: Moving Beyond Polemic, emerging from a team at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. </p>
<p>Yes, the Catholic institutional context of ACU might raise some immediate questions about the nature of real debate in this evaluation of atheism. But listening to the reach and openness of this project is fascinating and uplifting (for more, go to ABC Radio National’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/spiritofthings/should-christians-and-atheists-get-along/10040020">The Spirit of Things</a> podcast). Old, cold dualisms are tumbling in this piece of research into the interrelatedness of belief in both atheism and Christianity.</p>
<p>And in relation to our joint life in Australia, racially and spiritually, Aboriginal people today are addressing the present Prime Minister, asking that he hear their claims to sovereignty and deep, historical, sacred relations to culture, country and language. The words of that enormously popular 1991 Yothu Yindi song <a href="https://genius.com/Yothu-yindi-treaty-lyrics">Treaty</a> still ring out.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now two rivers run their course<br>
Separated for so long<br>
I’m dreaming of a brighter day<br>
When the waters will be one<br></p>
<p>Treaty Yeh Treaty Now Treaty Yeh Treaty Now<br>
Treaty Yeh Treaty Now Treaty Yeh Treaty Now<br></p>
<p>Nhima djatpangarri nhima walangwalang<br>
Nhe djatpayatpa nhima gaya’ nhe marrtjini yakarray<br>
Nhe djatpa nhe walang gumurrt jararrk gutjuk</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>With its wonderful, 1980s guitar riffs, the song still holds up, still provokes dreams of “a brighter day/When the waters will be one.”</p>
<p>Of course “one” here doesn’t suggest homogenization, a cloaking of all difference, a refusal to acknowledge racial distinctions, languages and cultures. There are two rivers, different languages, the need for a treaty between different worldviews; but there is, equally, a dream of harmony and respect, a hearing of the others’ voices, a reflective displacing of the dichotomy “us and them”.</p>
<p>In political reality there is, of course, still a great divide, a hierarchy of black and white, of them and us, pre-modern and modern, colonised and coloniser. But there is also lyrical, even utopian, hope. A moving beyond dualisms listened to by many in the music of Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, and the transcendent Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.</p>
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</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-dr-g-yunupinu-took-yolnu-culture-to-the-world-81676">How Dr G.Yunupiŋu took Yolŋu culture to the world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In his monumental and widely influential 2007 work <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/824412.A_Secular_Age?from_search=true">A Secular Age</a>, theologian Charles Taylor wrote of the West’s history of belief and secularism, up to the current moment where, in what he describes as the secular wasteland: “… young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries”, eschewing the disembodying of spiritual, celebrating “the integrity of different ways of life”. </p>
<p>Today, flesh and spirit are in new forms of exploration, popular music soaring in the updraught.</p>
<p><em>For an extended discussion of Cave’s lyrics see <a href="http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30101010">Lyn McCreddin’s essays</a> in Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave, and the Bad Seeds (1984-2014) or in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6304923-cultural-seeds">Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave,</a> (2009). eds. Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101117/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyn McCredden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The enquiry into sacredness is not over, it’s just beginning for the 21st century, and in wildly disparate modes and places. In music, Nick Cave, Hozier and Dr G. Yunupingu have led the way.Lyn McCredden, Personal Chair, Literary Studies, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/954712018-04-26T10:13:38Z2018-04-26T10:13:38ZNick Cave sets out for a Distant Sky hand-in-hand with his audience<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216465/original/file-20180426-175061-1tsxm5v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Screenshot from Distant Sky (2018).</span> </figcaption></figure><p>It’s October 2017 and a crowd has filled the Royal Arena in Copenhagen for a performance by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Fans crowded at the edge of the stage applaud feverishly when Cave appears. The singer has the microphone in his right hand and gestures with the left. Standing almost directly above the audience, his hands hover over spectators’ heads, inviting them to reach out to him – his body almost touches them. And when he sings “Can you feel my heart beat?”, Cave grasps spectators’ hands and brings them to his chest. After a brief moment of puzzlement, the audience responds, offering him their hands. </p>
<p>This is not just another rock concert. This is the band’s first concert tour after the loss of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur, who <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/nick-cave-talks-death-of-son-arthur-2066069">died in July 2015</a>. The audience is well aware of the traumatic effect on Cave – he shared this in the 2016 film One More Time With Feeling. </p>
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<blockquote>
<p>You change from a known person to an unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognise the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On stage, Cave’s hands run the show – the hands that hold the microphone and give it to spectators to hold while he rhythmically claps. The hands that play the piano, that touch, grab, grasp, hold spectators’ hands. The hands that grab towels to wipe his sweat, the hands that hug a young spectator. The hands that the audience hold so tight, as if they are helping to keep him on his feet, to keep going.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Movie poster for Cave’s Distant Sky concert film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sylvia Solakidi</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But how about the others that Cave cannot physically touch? The Royal Arena has a capacity of 12,500 people. How can someone – like myself – seated among 20,000 spectators near the back row of the O2 Arena in London a few days before the Copenhagen concert, get touched by this? But I did. And I felt that touch again just recently, while sitting in a movie theatre watching a recording of the Copenhagen concert in the <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/news/new-nick-cave-bad-seeds-live-concert-film-distant-sky/">film Distant Sky</a>.</p>
<p>I could hear Cave’s voice. I could see his body and the handclasps. I could see others hearing and seeing him. And I held and was held by the performer’s and spectators’ hands. Magic?</p>
<h2>Communication and empathy</h2>
<p>Touch is remarkable in the way it connects. According to the French philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/">Maurice Merleau-Ponty</a> (1908-1961), when my two hands clasp each other, or one of my hands clasps yours, both hands are touching and are touched and they establish a connection between them, between us. But who is touching who – and who is holding who? Me or you, Cave or his spectators? This is mutual communication without words. I reach out to you and I take the risk that you may withdraw your hand, refuse touch, refuse connection.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w1IaKmg-LaE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>When Cave sings “With my voice I am calling you’, he invites spectators to touch his hand, when he demands "Look at me now!” he grasps their hands. While the body of the singer sings of his need for connection, spectators touch by seeing and hearing. According to Merleau-Ponty, touch is a model sense and different senses interrelate like “hands” – they “touch” each other and through their interweaving, they allow people to connect. </p>
<p>Influenced by Merleau-Ponty, in the 1990s, the Italian neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered <a href="http://www.gocognitive.net/interviews/giacomo-rizzolatti-mirror-neurons">mirror neurons</a>, which are activated both when we see and when we act. He conducted experiments showing that empathy is possible because when we see a gesture being performed, it is as if we are doing it ourselves. In this way, touch can “touch” other people. </p>
<h2>Intense emotion</h2>
<p>The effect of Cave’s handclasp with one person is amplified through seeing and hearing – and the intensity of their connection explodes in the huge concert venues making them “smoking, boiling, melting, burning” – to quote the words stencilled on his concert piano. We experienced the same intensity sitting in our seats in the movie theatre. When the camera switches from close-ups or medium shots of the first rows to long shots of the Royal Arena, the audience exploded just as if they were in the venue itself.</p>
<p>When Cave sings “I need you” and his body and voice crack, the audience sees the trauma of his son’s death. He transforms the music into “a weeping song” – but it isn’t for his son alone. We respond because we all have a precious person, that – in Cave’s words from his song Girl in Amber – we wish that “no part of her go unremembered”. Together we are a strong body of hearing, seeing and touching that makes an event of togetherness happen. In the end, when we “push the sky away” with our raised arms, we also push grief away, we are filled with delight and gratitude. </p>
<p>In his live performance documented in the film Distant Sky, Cave has revealed the power of the familiar – more often than not underrated – format of the rock concert, through the unexpected element of touch that “gets you right down to your soul”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95471/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sylvia Solakidi receives funding from TECHNE-AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. She is a second year PhD student at the University of Surrey</span></em></p>The film of Cave’s first tour since the death of his son is powerful and evocative.Sylvia Solakidi, PhD Researcher in Performance Philosophy, University of SurreyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/947242018-04-15T20:15:32Z2018-04-15T20:15:32ZWhy our declining biblical literacy matters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214422/original/file-20180412-592-sy3x6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Songwriters such as Nick Cave (pictured) and the late Yolngu star Gurrumul have often drawn on the scriptures in their work.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Bergen/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Biblical literacy is likely lower in Australia today than at any point since the convict era. General levels of familiarity with the Christian scriptures are difficult to plot precisely, but studies of Bible reading habits, and data on various forms of Christian socialisation, indicate a significant decline in Australians’ exposure to the Bible over the last half century.</p>
<p>A 1960 study found that nine in ten Australians had a Bible at home. It was rivalled only by a cookery book and a dictionary, and far outstripped works by Shakespeare. Sixty one per cent of Bible-owning Australians picked it up at least once a year. Thirty eight per cent had read it within the previous two weeks. (Mind you, it seems that apart from the most regular churchgoers, most people read the Bible in a cursory manner if at all.)</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jesus-wasnt-white-he-was-a-brown-skinned-middle-eastern-jew-heres-why-that-matters-91230">Jesus wasn't white: he was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew. Here's why that matters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>A 2002 survey found that 29% of Australian adults still read the Bible at least once a year, with 8% reading it frequently. In 2010, <a>around 10% of Australian secondary students read the Bible weekly or more,</a> and a further 15 to 20% browsed it occasionally.</p>
<p>Overall, though, since 1960 the proportion of annual Bible readers has dropped by half, and regular readers by three-quarters. In less than two generations, the proportion of Australians who never pick up a Bible for themselves has leapt to seven out of ten. The rising use of online Bibles and Bible apps may modify this picture, but <a href="McCrindle%20Research,%20%E2%80%98Bible%20reading%20not%20dead%20in%20Australia%E2%80%99,%202014,%20<www.mccrindle.com.au/resources/Bible-Reading-in-Australia_McCrindle-Research_Blog.pdf>">2013 data</a> indicates that Australians read less of the Bible online than their counterparts in the UK or the US.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214410/original/file-20180412-560-vzr2j8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A working knowledge of the Bible, and a critical skill in interpreting it, remain extremely useful in a secular society.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In parallel with declining Bible reading, fewer Australians identify as Christian at the census. Similarly, the proportion of people attending church at least once a month has fallen from 36% in 1972 to <a href="McCrindle%20Research,%20%E2%80%98A%20Demographic%20Snapshot%20of%20Christianity%20and%20Church%20Attendance%20in%20Australia%E2%80%99,%202014,%20<mccrindle.com.au/the-mccrindle-blog/a-demographic-snapshot-of-christianity-and-church-attenders-in-australia>">15% in 2014</a>. So fewer Australians have been exposed to the public reading and preaching of the Bible, and to <a href="McCrindle%20Research,%20%E2%80%98A%20Demographic%20Snapshot%20of%20Christianity%20and%20Church%20Attendance%20in%20Australia%E2%80%99,%202014,%20<mccrindle.com.au/the-mccrindle-blog/a-demographic-snapshot-of-christianity-and-church-attenders-in-australia>">its inculcation though liturgy and hymnody</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-who-was-mary-magdalene-debunking-the-myth-of-the-penitent-prostitute-92658">Friday essay: who was Mary Magdalene? Debunking the myth of the penitent prostitute</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Does it matter if Australians are becoming less familiar with the Christian scriptures? I would argue that, even aside from matters of faith, a working knowledge of the Bible, and a critical skill in interpreting it, remain extremely useful. </p>
<p>Firstly, the world is still an overwhelmingly religious place.</p>
<p>While Christianity has declined in its former European strongholds, and in related societies like New Zealand and Australia, it has spread widely in the global south. In 2018, it remains the <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/05/christians-remain-worlds-largest-religious-group-but-they-are-declining-in-europe/">most practised faith in the world</a>. Effective global citizenship can only benefit from a working knowledge of its key text.</p>
<h2>Shaping our culture</h2>
<p>Secondly, biblical literacy is worthwhile because of the Bible’s dynamic role in creative culture.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214411/original/file-20180412-584-1tlgz5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shakespeare’s plays contain many biblical references.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">First Folio of Shakespeare's works (and used for three subsequent issues). Published in 1623. Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The foundational role of the Bible in shaping English language and literature is well attested. Common phrases such as “the powers that be”, “from strength to strength”, “in the twinkling of an eye” and “escaped by the skin of my teeth” all come from English translations of the Bible. </p>
<p>Classic texts from Shakespeare’s plays to T. S. Eliot’s poems to the speeches of Martin Luther King assume some knowledge of biblical stories, images and ideas. </p>
<p>Among Australian creatives, too, literary lights such as Patrick White, Elizabeth Jolley, Tim Winton, Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas all make powerful use of biblical narratives and imagery. Songwriters from Nick Cave to the late Yolngu star Gurrumul have drawn on the scriptures in their lyrics. </p>
<p>Biblical stories and symbols have also inspired visual artists such as Grace Cossington Smith, Arthur Boyd and Margaret Preston. Reg Mombassa’s popular creation, “Australian Jesus”, offers a subversive take on the gospels. </p>
<p>Each of these Australians has found the Bible an enlarging influence on the imagination. Audiences can easily miss key elements of their work without a degree of biblical literacy. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/214218/original/file-20180411-566-ed58aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Reg Mombassa’s popular creation, ‘Australian Jesus’, offers a subversive take on the gospels.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Miller/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A colonial legacy</h2>
<p>Thirdly, the Bible is a substantial - and unresolved - part of Australia’s European cultural baggage.</p>
<p>It loomed especially large in the process of colonising Aboriginal land and forging settler societies. The legal fiction of terra nullius, for example, drew on a particular interpretation of Genesis 1:28 - “replenish the earth, and subdue it”.</p>
<p>Most British colonists assumed that European agriculture was the proper means of fulfilling this divine command. Failing to recognise Indigenous forms of land use, they deemed the land “waste”, belonging to no one, and ripe for the taking.</p>
<p>At the same time, a minority of colonists drew on verses like Acts 17:26 - “[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” – to affirm the common humanity of Aboriginal people, and to denounce settler greed and violence. </p>
<p>Crucially, as Indigenous Australians interpreted the Bible for themselves, they used it to demand just treatment and to assert their unique relationship to country. As the Mabo case made its way through the courts, for instance, plaintiff Dave Passi liked to quote from the Old Testament: “Do not move an everlasting boundary stone, set up by your ancestors” (Proverbs 22:28).</p>
<p>In all these ways, the Bible has been bound up with the Australian experience of colonialism. As such, a robust biblical literacy can aid understanding of the past and contribute to present day reconciliation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94724/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Meredith Lake has previously undertaken paid work as an historian for Bible Society Australia. </span></em></p>In less than two generations, the proportion of Australians who never pick up a Bible has leapt to seven out of ten. But a robust biblical literacy can help us decode creative works and understand the past.Meredith Lake, Honorary Associate, Department of History, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/893612017-12-21T00:34:39Z2017-12-21T00:34:39ZThe Australian Music Vault moves the canon beyond pub rock<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199855/original/file-20171219-27541-dg7cg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave's notebook, now on display in the Australian Music Vault.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dan Magree</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.australianmusicvault.com.au/">Australian Music Vault</a> launched this week in Melbourne, with music industry stalwarts and Vault patrons Molly Meldrum, Archie Roach, Kylie Minogue, Michael Gudinski and new addition Tina Arena on hand for the festivities. The Vault is a dedicated space at the Performing Arts Centre that will house a “free permanent exhibition, digital and interactive experiences and an extensive learning program”, according to a press release.</p>
<p>This first iteration of the Vault contains an impressive array of artefacts that cover a range of genres and eras from Australia’s popular music history. These include Chrissy Amphlett’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnOXYcO4zjg">schoolgirl tunic</a>, Dami Im’s gown from her Eurovision performance (a personal highlight), notebooks and lyric sheets from artists such as Nick Cave and Wendy Saddington, and footage from the Sunbury festival. Interactive elements in the exhibition space allow visitors to access archival footage and, of course, hear the music that is being celebrated.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199857/original/file-20171219-27562-1dvoxph.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gown worn by Dami Im for her Eurovision performance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jim Lee</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But what does it mean that such an institution is being launched in Australia now?</p>
<p>Museums and other bodies that catalogue and tell the story of the past perform important identity-forming functions. They tell us who we are, where we have come from and what is deemed to be historically important.</p>
<p>For a long time, popular music – and popular culture more generally – was left out of such stories. It was regarded as overly commercialised, disposable, and not worthy of the same type of preservation and celebration that other forms of art were accorded.</p>
<p>Over time, however, as musical forms such as rock proved more durable and long-lasting than initially anticipated, and as their young audiences grew up, the incorporation of popular music into once “high brow” cultural institutions started to become more common. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1341&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1341&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199856/original/file-20171219-27541-ygynvv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1341&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chrissy Amphlett’s tunic on display in the vault.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australian Performing Arts Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This trend has increased as cities such as Liverpool have demonstrated the economic worth of promoting popular music history as a tourist attraction, and as travelling exhibitions such as <a href="https://www.spin.com/2017/10/david-bowie-is-exhibit-brooklyn-museum/">Bowie Is</a> have become blockbusters. There are now many dedicated institutions that celebrate popular music’s history, including the <a href="https://www.rockhall.com/">Rock and Roll Hall of Fame </a>in Cleveland and the Museum of Pop in Seattle.</p>
<p>In Australia, the path towards the Vault has taken longer than in some other places. This is partly to do with the way debate about popular music’s worth has also been tied up with tricky questions of national identity, with the local industry long struggling to find a unique way to translate music with its roots so strongly in North America and the UK. Popular music has been, at various points, a way of connecting to the “motherland” through bands like the Beatles, or as a flashpoint for debates about the Americanisation of Australian culture.</p>
<p>For a long time, the touchstone of success for Australian musicians was to make it overseas, and to be accepted on the terms that these markets and audiences set. Such success did indeed eventuate for acts like the Seekers, The Easybeats, Olivia Newton John, AC/DC, INXS and Kylie Minogue.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/POWsFzSFLCE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Kylie Minogue’s first hit The Locomotion: for a long time, the touchstone of success for Australian artists was making it overseas.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But well into the 1990s the question remained: what is it that defines Australian popular music? Is there even such a thing as an Australian sound? Or do we just produce imitations of what we hear from other places?</p>
<p>This is a question that the Australian Music Vault tackles head on throughout its exhibitions. Visitors are explicitly asked to listen for what it is that might give Australian music a distinctive quality. It is a question that also becomes easier to answer when looking at the local scenes and national touring circuits that have developed over time.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199864/original/file-20171219-27538-1beq1jx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of the Australian Music Vault with a schoolboy uniform worn by Angus Young in the centre of the display.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jim Lee</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a maturing industry and growing population made it more feasible to have a career making music in this country without feeling compelled to make the move overseas, more and more music emerged that spoke to local identities and concerns. Australian accents have become more discernible and songs more likely to reference Australian places and issues. Artists such as Midnight Oil and Courtney Barnett have shown that putting “Australianness” on display is not necessarily a liability on the international stage.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1NVOawOXxSA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Courtney Barnett’s Depreston has taken the local vernacular internationally.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Speakers at the launch of the Vault noted that it seems overdue for us to have a space that celebrates the achievements of Australian musicians. The Vault exists partly because popular music has undeniably helped shape how we think about ourselves as a nation, and how we represent ourselves to the world. </p>
<p>This will always be an imperfect project; it is extraordinary, for instance, that in the search for an “Australian sound” the voices and musics of the original inhabitants of this continent have been so infrequently included.</p>
<p>The curators of the Vault have clearly considered these issues of inclusion. This first round of exhibits includes a number of Indigenous performers including Yothu Yindi and No Fixed Address, as well as Roach, and there is a strong representation of women artists such as Amphlett, Little Patti, Judith Durham and Ngaiire.</p>
<p>In doing this, they show that the institution has the potential to reframe as well as celebrate our relationship to this music, and to move us past the pub rock canon often put forward as the defining sound of Australia.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89361/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Strong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new, permanent exhibition, which pays tribute to Australian popular music, represents a coming of age for our industry.Catherine Strong, Senior Lecturer, Music Industry, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/706172016-12-20T15:02:42Z2016-12-20T15:02:42ZThe future of TV – where documentary meets fiction meets mocumentary<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150787/original/image-20161219-24271-1vxivct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A scene from the TV mini-series, 'Mars'.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Geographic</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.natgeotv.com/za">National Geographic Channel</a> is known for its nature documentaries, not for fictional television programming. But the recently launched TV mini-series <a href="http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/mars/">“Mars”</a> seems to mark a distinct move away from their regular programming. This series combines “real” documentary with fiction and mocumentary in a formula that is not only different from NatGeo’s regular offering, but also from other series currently available on conventional broadcast and streaming platforms.</p>
<p>The six-episode series stands at the centre of a multi-platform, multimedia Mars-focussed project. National Geographic magazine’s November issue featured a Mars <a href="http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/10/national-geographic-magazine-november-2016/">cover story</a>. NatGeo has made an eight-lesson Mars school <a href="http://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/file/MARS_CURRICULUM_GUIDE_FORMSVERSION_ALL_FINAL.pdf">curriculum guide</a> available for free online. </p>
<p>They have published <a href="https://shop.nationalgeographic.com/product/books/books/space/mars">two books</a> about Mars, one aimed at adults and one at children. Their website offers a slew of online resources including interviews with the cast and crew, exclusive <a href="http://www.spacex.com/">SpaceX</a> <a href="http://www.makemarshome.com/">rocket test footage</a> and an interactive Mars surface map.</p>
<h2>From bird hide to premium TV?</h2>
<p>In recent years the number of television series available on conventional broadcast and streaming platforms has <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9301867/peak-tv">grown exponentially</a>. The downside for TV channels of the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/21/there-s-too-much-damn-tv.html">over-abundance of choice</a> has been that audience attention and viewing loyalty has become diluted. It has become increasingly challenging to capture and retain viewers.</p>
<p>Mainstream Hollywood movies have grown progressively <a href="http://europe.newsweek.com/movies-suck-now-and-theyre-only-going-get-worse-334582?rm=eu">more formulaic</a>. Big studios and distributors hedge their bets on sequels, remakes, tested formats and building so-called “universes” like that of the <a href="http://marvel.com/movies/all">Marvel</a> superheroes. These formulas are supposed to draw audiences that want to repeat past positive experiences rather than be challenged by new perspectives in independent films.</p>
<p>Enter premium television. The big-budget, high production-value, star-studded television series that exemplify this phenomenon completely changed previously held perceptions that A-list actors, writers and directors simply don’t work in TV. <a href="http://www.kevinspacey.com/">Kevin Spacey</a>, though he has had a stellar feature film career, has now become almost synonymous with <a href="https://www.netflix.com/za/">Netflix</a>’s <a href="https://www.netflix.com/za/title/70178217">“House of Cards”</a>.</p>
<p>Award winning <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/stevensoderbergh">Stephen Soderbergh</a> produced and directed <a href="http://www.cinemax.com/the-knick/">“The Knick”</a> for Cinemax. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/stranger-things">“Stranger Things”</a> (also Netflix) captured the imaginations of young and nostalgic viewers. Most recently <a href="http://www.hbo.com/westworld">“Westworld”</a> blazed a trail to the top of HBO’s production slate and became an overnight phenomenon with fans around the world.</p>
<h2>Capturing primetime audiences</h2>
<p>So, is the ambitious, expensive and multi-layered fiction-nonfiction hybrid production “Mars” an attempt by NatGeo to capture some of this premium TV audience? What differentiates the series is the combination of three narrative layers to tell the story of manned missions to Mars. The first layer – real documentary – is set in 2016 and makes use of the <a href="https://epowdocumentary.wordpress.com/documentary-modes/expository-mode/">expository mode</a> to combine sit-down interviews with archive and contemporary B-roll (cutaways or visual evidence).</p>
<p>The second layer is fictional – a projection of what a future manned mission to the red planet may look like. Set in the 2030s, it starts in 2033 with the launch of the first mission.</p>
<p>The third layer can be characterised as mocumentary, since it uses the conventions of expository documentary (interviews and B-roll). But the interviewees are fictional characters and the B-roll is scripted and fictionalised. The amount of screen time devoted to this layer diminishes as the series progresses, so that there is only one mocumentary interview clip by the final of the six episodes. Arguably this layer forms part of the second, fictional layer, but I believe it’s worth highlighting because it occupies a position between layer one and two – though the content is fictional like that of layer three, the form is borrowed from documentary, mirroring that of layer one.</p>
<h2>Layer 1: Documentary</h2>
<p>For the 2016 segments the views and experiences of scientists, researchers, thinkers, entrepreneurs and others involved in space travel are woven together. It paints a picture of the history of space travel, where we find ourselves right now, and the manned space travel that is planned for the not too distant future.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150796/original/image-20161219-24276-9mf8lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlines his plan to design spacecraft to aid in the human colonisation of Mars within 40 to 100 years. He was speaking at the International Astronautics Congress in Mexico, 27 September 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ulises Ruiz Basurto/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s clear from quite early in the 2016 segment that it’s in fact a real documentary when entrepreneur, inventor and space explorer <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/">Elon Musk</a>, a man with designs on <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/27/13067376/elon-musk-spacex-mars-event-watch-live-stream-schedule-iac-2016">colonising Mars</a>, is interviewed. </p>
<h2>Layer 2: Fiction</h2>
<p>The fictionalised manned space mission, set in the 2030s, is scripted, making use of actors, sets, visual effects and the other conventions of fictional film and television production. The scenarios are clearly based on thorough and extensive research, however. </p>
<p>In relation to the first layer, these scenarios fulfil the same function that dramatisations of past events, or reenactments, would in conventional documentary. But, since the events are projected rather than historical, it would be more appropriate to call them “pre-enactments” instead. </p>
<h2>Layer 3: Mocumentary</h2>
<p>The third narrative layer, which includes scripted “interviews” with the characters of the fiction layer, serves to inform one’s understanding of the personal experiences of the Mars mission crew. These “interviews” are used to provide an excuse for exposition and as a short cut to establishing the characters before the audience is launched into the drama of the Mars mission.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150795/original/image-20161219-24276-hd1yub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South Korean-born singer Jihae (L), Canadian actor Ben Cotton and French actress Clementine Poidatz pose during a photocall for the TV series ‘Mars’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here documentary devices are used in the service of fictional storytelling. This layer is, arguably, the least compelling and most dispensable of the three. </p>
<h2>Juxtaposition and the suspension of disbelief</h2>
<p>The effects of combining the narrative layers and their respective storytelling modes are multifold. The 2030s pre-enactments visualise the science and technology discussed by interviewees in the 2016 documentary segments, showing their applications and implications.</p>
<p>The 2016 documentary lends credence to the 2030s fictionalised projection. The latter becomes more believable because we know that the technology to achieve what we see in the fictional scenes is already in development in 2016. And in the inter-cutting of the two layers a conversation is created that highlights various themes and dynamics that are explored in both.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oxfVCafkdPk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The soundtrack for ‘Mars’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is a strange tension in the series between suspension of disbelief, as one would expect from fiction, and intellectual engagement, as one would expect from a scientific documentary. This stems from the constant interaction between the documentary and fiction segments.</p>
<p>When watching a fiction segment, scientific research comes to life in a way that encourages suspension of disbelief. Drama conventions like interpersonal conflict and internal struggles are combined with action devices. These include visual effects, dynamic camera movements, fast cutting and suspenseful build-ups to climaxes. </p>
<p>The score enhances the dramatic and thrilling moments in the film. The haunting <a href="http://www.stereogum.com/1907425/nick-cave-warren-ellis-mars-theme/mp3s/">theme song</a> by singer and composer <a href="http://www.nickcave.com/">Nick Cave</a> that accompanies the aesthetically pleasing title sequence sets this up from the beginning of each episode as high production value fictional television programming. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150797/original/image-20161219-24271-12tise8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Composer of the score for ‘Mars’, Nick Cave.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Toby Melville/Reuters</span></span>
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<h2>Blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction</h2>
<p>The idea of combining fiction and nonfiction is, of course, not new. Errol Morris pioneered the use of dramatic reenactments to illustrate interviewee testimony in his groundbreaking 1988 documentary <a href="http://www.errolmorris.com/film/tbl.html">“The Thin Blue Line”</a>. The feature film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/">“District 9”</a> (2009) uses mock interviews with fictional “experts” to set the scene for its science fiction action.</p>
<p>Recently documentary filmmakers have questioned the divide between fiction and nonfiction through their choices of subject matter and application of form. In the documentary <a href="http://elenafilm.com/">“Elena”</a> (2012), for example, Petra Costa shifts effortlessly between history and memory, fact and fantasy to tell the story of, and process her own feelings about, the disappearance of her sister. </p>
<p>What makes “Mars” worth taking note of is that it combines fiction and nonfiction elements in a way that places them in balance. They inform and enhance each other without the one being foregrounded over the other. And the end result is both entertaining and scientifically grounded. </p>
<p>I’ll hazard my own projection here: we’ll be seeing more high budget, thoughtfully scripted and well acted pre-enactments in conversation with actual documentary in television series and films in the not too distant future. Certainly before we walk on Mars.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70617/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liani Maasdorp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The recently broadcast TV mini-series, “Mars”, combines fiction and nonfiction in a way that places them in balance. This kind of combination is likely to feature in more television series and films.Liani Maasdorp, Lecturer in Screen Production and Film and Television Studies, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.