Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

The Firstborn Is Dead
Mute, 1985

On afternoons I would ignore my mother's instructions to walk home and catch the bus instead. Walking was boring – there was a racetrack that went on for too long and some houses I'd seen before. Anyway, most kids caught the bus. They would pour down to Nine Ways after the school bell in a stream of blue shirts and white blouses and condense outside the fish and chip shop. Sometimes I would wait with them there, loafing in the tiny car park around the corner next to the doctor's office, as the crowd gradually peeled off in twos and threes onto buses packed with other school kids headed up the hill towards the suburbs.

Eventually I would cross the road and wait for a normal bus to take me into the city. There would be a few down-on-their-luck types up the front and the back half would be empty. Sometimes a girl called Rowena would catch the same bus and get off at my stop to catch another one back across the bridge to Mayfield. I had a sort of unfocused crush on her that was dampened by some impossible truth – she was tall and thin and had perfect hair and a nice smile. One day she got on board with a girl from school who lived in the same suburb and was a year or two above us. Her name was Lauren. She had badges and pins on her clothes and wore her spiky red hair in pigtails.

We got off on the dead end of the main street, filled with boarded up shops and pubs with newspaper over the windows. The stop was in front of a giant building that looked as if it had been a department store at some point. I was never sure – it had been empty since I could remember. As we crossed the road Lauren spied on my bag the name of a Nick Cave record that my mother's boyfriend had given to me. It was the title of The Firstborn Is Dead, scrawled in black marker around the points of a pentagram. She was so excited that she gave me my first cigarette – a menthol – and her phone number. The following week she gave me a love letter written in blood. I drew her a picture of a hand puppet singing a Mr Bungle song.

Sodastream

Take Me With You When You Go
Trifekta, 2005

People become music journalists to tell stories like this. A few years ago I got to sit down with Karl Smith, one half of Sodastream, and talk with him at length about how he came to write one of my favourite songs. Sodastream was formed by Smith and double-bassist Pete Cohen in Perth in 1997. They relocated to Melbourne the following year and recorded ten or so records before breaking up in 2006. One of their last releases was called Take Me With You When You Go. On it was a gorgeous and gentle song with lyrics like something from Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, about a man in gaol writing a letter to his wife and recalling the events that led his to incarceration in detail so awful it still makes me wince. The story behind it was even bloodier.

The song, called 'Keith And Tina', was inspired by Smith's memories of growing up in a neighbourhood where tragedy was commonplace. The memories had come flooding back after he and Cohen were confronted by two drug users in a small town in Texas during a tour of North America. Sitting in an upstairs bar slowly making his way through a beer, Smith told me about looking into their eyes and having no idea what they were capable of or what they would do next. He remembered that he'd seen eyes like that before - in the woman who "slashed herself up" in the half-way house next door, and the man who called his mother for help one night after slitting his girlfriend's throat.

Smith kept talking, and the blood kept flowing. The final story he told me was of a murder at his high school. A boy had found and read his girlfriend's diary, and discovered that she had been having a romance with someone else. Soon after he went to school with a knife taped to his back and stabbed her during an English class in front of the other students. Smith hung on a particular memory – of consoling his shaken friend, who hadn't been able to retrieve his possessions from the school because they were covered in blood. I took another sip of beer and looked at the small, quiet and incredibly polite man sitting next to me and had no fucking idea what to say.

Jennifer Paige

Crush
Edel / Hollywood, 1998

In the film clip for Jennifer Paige's song 'Crush', which spent a fortnight at the top of the Australian charts about a decade ago, Paige drives around in a convertible on a sunny day with a group of men in open shirts who drag their arms across her and recline backwards over the ridge of the rear seat to show off their hairless and muscled chests. Perhaps deliberately, it cuts between that fantasy and a far more wholesome one without the subtle implications of group sex. In the other sequence Paige is pictured sitting on a swing in the forest being pushed by a comparatively mature man wearing a grey vest and a buttoned-up shirt who never gropes or flirts with her the same way as the others do. Kind of like he was her father or something.

If it sounds like I'm reading too much into the video clip, keep in mind that it is a particularly sexual song – even more so than the parade of thinly and not so thinly veiled odes to physical pleasures that march through the pop music charts and into the bedrooms of young girls and boys each week. The memories of my own that it recalls are just as lascivious, though nowhere near as showy – driving around town at night, sneaking alcohol into pool halls and having fumbling teenage sex with girls who lived in colourless and menacing industrial suburbs. For one reason or another they are always set at night. The closest thing to Paige's video clip fantasy the song ever approached in my own life was the tacky glow of neon.

Two years after 'Crush' was released it was covered by creative indie-rock band The Dismemberment Plan, who slowed it down to half the original speed and stripped away all of the instrumentation except for a guitar that chimed like clanging metal. It's an excellent cover. Without anything else to distract from it, the melody becomes hypnotic and the words take on a very different meaning. Singer Travis Morrisons sings the denials of the chorus ("It's just a little crush/ Not like I faint every time we touch") in a sort of piercing drawl that can be painful on first listen. It's the exact opposite of the original – not a celebration of lust and flirtation but the torture of tension without release.

Alice Cooper

From The Inside
Warner Bros, 1978

Alice Cooper had his first hit single in 1971 with the song 'I'm Eighteen'. By the middle of the decade he had released six albums, most of which broke the top ten, and become the first artist to make more money on a tour than The Rolling Stones. Only one of Cooper's personas is remembered now, but during his peak he ran through wardrobe changes as fast as recording studios. Muscle Of Love told the story of a naive boy from the country moving to New York and becoming a prostitute, Welcome To My Nightmare was a concept album that mixed imagery of suburban America with that of night terrors and murder, while Lace And Whiskey was inspired by pulp crime novels and Frank Sinatra.

As Cooper's fame skyrocketed, so did his drinking habit. By 1976 he had begun appearing intoxicated on stage and was, according to those on tour with him, regularly throwing up blood. At the end of his 1977 North American tour, Cooper voluntarily admitted himself to a sanatorium in New York to be treated for alcoholism. The experience formed the basis of his next record, a concept album called From The Inside. Each track tells the story of a different inmate, beginning with Cooper himself: "I got lost on the road somewhere/ Was it Texas or was it Canada?/ Drinking whiskey in the morning light... I never dreamed I would wind up on the losing end."

But, for once, Cooper isn't the focal point of this album. More interesting are the other asylum inmates whose stories range between bizarre and heart-breaking – a rich girl from Beverly Hills who "lost it", a priest who hates himself for lusting after a nurse ("to check my pulse she gotta hold my hand/ I blow the fuse on the encephalogram") and a down-on-his luck gambler. The very saddest story on the record is perhaps the least expected – not the man who wonders what his wife will think of him when he returns home, or the patient who wants to die locked in a padded room where he can't kill himself, but the inmate whose thoughts are, in contrast, rather normal. The song is called 'For Veronica's Sake', and it is about a man who knows that the pound is going to put his dog to sleep because he's been taken away.