BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs Eight things we learned from ...

2. His father taught him that art should “shake you up”

Nick describes how his father, a teacher, educated him in art and literature. “He would take books out of my hand that he thought were less than and replace them with something that had the same body count but was more interesting… I would be reading some crappy crime novel and he would put Titus Andronicus, let's say, by Shakespeare in my hand, because it's a massively bloody play.”

He continues: “I think my father enjoyed taking me to things that were slightly out of order, that I was a little too young to be seeing, that just shook up what I thought about things… When I was quite young, he used to take me to shows by Barry Humphries [who performed as Dame Edna Everage], and I was only 12. Now, what she is on TV is one thing, but a live show is absolutely outrageous and I remember just being absolutely entranced. But he also took me to film festivals where there were quite adult movies; and he read me the first chapter of Lolita [by Vladimir Nabokov] and said, ‘This is what literature is all about.’”

Nick thinks his father was introducing him to “the idea that art should shake you up, and should confront you and shock you and offend.”

3. His misbehaviour at school didn’t go unnoticed at home

Nick went to school in Wangaratta, Victoria, where his father taught Maths and English, and his mother was a school librarian. His parents would often find him sitting outside the headmaster’s office. “I was just a troublemaker,” he recalls. “Outspoken in class, talking back all the time, a kind of me-against-them feeling towards the school in general, that ended in me getting kicked out.”

He says, “I just never really liked to be told what to do, and how to behave, and what to sing, and what to play and all of this sort of stuff. And I think this very much carries on to this day. I find that fundamentally sticks in my craw.”

4. His move to London prompted some heartfelt letters back home

Nick moved to London in 1980, not long after the death of his father, with his band The Birthday Party. At that time he lived in a bedsit in Earl’s Court with his fellow band members and their girlfriends. He says he downplayed their living conditions in the letters he wrote to his mother.

“She died during COVID and when we were going through her things, I found this box that my mother had kept of my letters to her from Earl’s Court. There were a hundred of them and they were long. If I was getting these letters as a parent, I would freak. I was desperately trying to hide the situation that I was in, which was pretty dire, behind what a good time we're all having over here in London. And also asking them to please write to me. We couldn’t afford long distance phone calls and they were strangely, weirdly loving, desperate letters from across the sea.”

But when she later visited, he was able to give her a little reassurance. He says “I opened up the NME and there was this little ad for [his band] The Birthday Party that had a gig somewhere, and my mother saw that and [there was] just this look of relief on her face that [said], ‘Okay, this is actually not just something in my imagination.’ So that was a lovely moment.”