Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave

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They might also be the names of gods or goddesses of fire or the sun or have other fire-related associations, like Ember and Phoenix. This study started out as a full biography of Cave, but Mordue confesses to losing his way in its composition and so creates this narrative taking us up to Cave’s departure with the band to London.

I'm a different person now,' Cave said, seeming to draw a line under his long-standing co-operation. When you’re an adult, the people that you said that to when you were a teenager are still around, and you still have to interact with, and you have to figure out how to deal with that.

There is far too much information, referencing hundreds of interviews in 50 pages at the back, too much stuff about other people. I can’t get enough of that era, love reading about all the influences being shared and realizing it’s all a bunch of kids figuring stuff out that changed the world. Delving in to the Melbourne punk scene of the late 1970s with a forensic detail that would perhaps astonish even those who were part of that scene, who in fact already received a feature film about themselves in 1986 (Richard Lowenstein's Dogs in Space), this is a titanic look at Nick Cave's formative years that manages to make him feel both real and fictional at once.

However, for those who are new to the series, it may take several hours just to make it through one game. Unlike the UK, or for that matter Brisbane, Melbourne’s ‘punk’ scene was born in our leafy middle-class eastern suburbs, and fostered in a social climate of free tertiary education, cheap rent, cheap drugs and a social welfare system that provided a living income that enabled creative types to experiment, fail and improve. Players don’t simply need quick reactions and good timing to jump their way through every level, they also need teamwork and a creative mind. I’m desperate for a more detailed account of the rest of the Birthday Party’s story, the Bad Seeds, etc.

It’s unremarkable that I like him as his preferred performers pretty much echoed mine at the time (Bowie for instance). An ex-work colleague of mine once told me a tale about witnessing an outrageous Birthday Party show in Manchester.

I believe it was just sex, or at least that’s what I have tell myself now to avoid slipping into a memory induced k-hole. As well as a powerfully compelling biography of a singular, uncompromising artist, Boy on Fire is a fascinating social and cultural biography, a vivid and evocative rendering of the people, time and places that went into the making of Nick Cave - from the fast-running dark river and ghost gums of Wangaratta and the punk scene that hit staid 1970s Melbourne like an atom bomb, right through to the torn wallpaper, sticky carpet and manic energy of nights at St Kilda's Crystal Ballroom. Like the first volume there, The Road to Xanadu, this one has Cave becoming an artist and a feted live performer but not yet getting back the full critical and commercial approval for it. Fireboy and Watergirl will not hurt each other, but their interaction with the opposite element in the form of water lakes or lava will do. While Cave has had many career highlights since the demise of The Birthday Party, if you want to listen to NC at his anarchic best I recommend ‘Drunk on the Pope’s Blood’ (aptly subtitled ’16 minutes of Sheer Hell’) a live recording of four songs from this time.

The game worked very smoothly, it was carefully made and what is most important was designed only for the multiplayer mode, in which players control two characters and through cooperation, they solve puzzles and move on platform levels to complete the stage. If you want, you can also try to play alone, but this experience can be challenging especially if you're going to beat the time limit of each level.

It is, for the most part, a not very flattering portrait of Nick (or any of the band, for that matter), and I appreciate the sometimes brutal honesty of the thing. Names that mean fire are a diverse group, from a range of cultures ancient and modern, representing different feelings and styles. With twice as many characters to control, this means that twice as many people can play at once, so there is no more fighting over taking turns amongst two friends. And so, it was decided instead, to take the deepest of dives into his early life, from childhood, through his school years, detailing his mythical rise to stardom in the Australian punk scene with The Boys Next Door and ending as the band boards a flight to the UK in the eighties, where they would emerge as The Birthday Party and the next phase of Nick Cave’s metamorphosis into the artist we know today.If Mordue goes beyond that long-haul cliffhanger and does continue with his epic biography of Cave after all, there are four full decades of restless creativity left to cover, as Cave moves through multiple cities and scenes, collects and discards muses and collaborators, and emerges from addictions and complex private torments. Mordue has aimed for Boy On Fire to show Cave at the centre of 'a kaleidoscope of people and stories'. I realize I fell into that old gay adage of placing my feelings on a person who, for whatever reason, was never going to invest them back in me.