“Insane”: the night Nick Cave and Henry Rollins gatecrashed the Australian consulate
“All sorts of shit was happening in LA,” Nick Cave said of the early 1980s. In the wake of The Birthday Party, the punk carnage of the musicians didn’t stop when they disbanded. Instead, as they barrelled into the world of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with just as much chaos and now more money, the story of the musician’s LA years is like the Aussie punk equivalent of a Hunter S. Thompson travelogue. In this instance, it would be Fear And Loathing At The Australian Consulate.
As he reflected on the many anecdotes with an older and sober mind, Cave prefaced it by saying, “I was taking enormous amounts of drugs, and I don’t remember a lot, to be perfectly frank. It was an insane period.” It was also a period in which the musician gained a new sidekick in the form of Henry Rollins, the Black Flag frontman who shared his taste for punk in its purest.
In many ways, Cave and Rollins were kindred spirits. The Birthday Party were once dubbed “the most violent band in the world” as their gigs almost always descended into a brutal scene that sent Cave to hospital more than a handful of times. He was out for thrills and fights, much like Rollins, who said he got into punk purely because he “wanted something that just kicked ass”. When the two met in 1983, that’s what they bonded over as they shared stories and showed each other their battle scars like they were medals. From then on, they found a partner in crime for their mutual recklessness.
But Cave’s memories of the time they spent together are hazy at best, burnt out in the flog of the drug addiction they were born in. However, Rollins kept a meticulous diary, remembering the various goings-on and the nights out. One of those nights involved the Australian consulate, a crowd of scandalised sophisticates, and the two rockers swiftly being kicked out.
It was in July of 1984. As part of a plan hatched out of their speed-riddled brains, Cave had convinced the Australian consulate in Los Angeles to invite the pair to an evening celebrating the filmmaking of his motherland. While an artsy film party might sound like exactly the kind of place Nick Cave should be, this was a decidedly more high-class affair, and the Aussie musician was a far cry from the dapper, well-to-do man he is now. These were the junkie days, where every night could have been a gonzo piece or a William S. Burroughs story, and as the friends wandered into a government-organised get-together, their peace-threatening presence was punk at its purist.
“The place was intense,” Rollins wrote in his diary, “Security all over the place. All these people dressed up, and then there was us. Nick had his bright green skintight Elvis outfit on. Looked like he hadn’t slept for a few days.” At first, the mission was simple: rinse the event for all that it was worth.
The friends were out to eat as much free food as their skinny frames could take and drink as much free booze as they could handle still standing. “We gave them so much bullshit,” Rollins wrote, “They were so stuck up and polite that they had to take it.” But when the people running the show didn’t give them the aggravation they were clearly after, Cave decided to step things up and turned his attention to the attendees.
“Nick went up to one woman and put his index fingers and thumbs together so they looked like a triangle,” Rollins remembered. “He looked through them at her and told her that he was looking to set up a shot and could she please stand still. He told her that the reason that he had his fingers like this was because he was the only director in the world to use triangular film. She asked him where he was from. He replied, ‘Nazi Germany’. She just stared and walked away to a group of people and pointed at us from afar.”
Still, it’s not shocking enough. “Nick is drinking and eating grapes by the handful,” Rollins continued, painting a picture. “I talk to some old man who knows me. A few minutes later, I look over, and Nick is on his hands and knees, crawling around on the grass. He crawls up to a large woman and bites her on the ankle. She bails.”
After that, they knew they were probably in trouble. “It looks like it’s time to go,” Rollins wrote. The security quickly booted them out after that, but not before Cave took his final bows by throwing some cheese at them. It’s a starkly different Nick Cave to the one that now attends state funerals and royal coronations. His biting days are behind him.
