To be fair to Mordue, Cave is a tricky subject, at once visceral and highly literary; he has a habit of embracing genres only to mock them, gleefully sardonic even at his most sincere. He has so profoundly reinvented his own image and output that a focus on his younger self – the biography deals with his childhood and adolescence, and his years in the band that was the precursor to The Birthday Party, The Boys Next Door – seems perversely narrow and sometimes little more than purely academic. Mordue manages to mine some gold from the artist’s maturation, but we are left with an arrested picture of greatness, a non finito reaching into the void.

Cave was born in 1957 in the central Victorian town of Warracknabeal. Given that he spent only the first three years of his life there, it hardly seems worthy of its own chapter. But Mordue dedicates one to it because he has a narrative to tell, and it revolves squarely around Nick’s father. Colin Cave was a fairly dynamic character as far as small-town characters go, an enthusiastic and theatrical pedagogue, one who insisted on reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to his young son, who performed and directed plays in the family’s subsequent home of Wangaratta, and who died in a car crash in January 1979 when Nick was twenty-one. You might expect a biographer to scratch at the edges of this tragedy in the hope it might open up the subject, but Mordue’s centring of this event in Cave’s life – his tendency to refract every song lyric and emotional outburst through the prism of the father’s death, not to mention the ghoulish dramatic structure that obsessively circles the crash itself – smacks of one of two things: an outmoded and simplistic reliance on Freudian psychology, or a desperation to unify a narrative. Either way, the result is increasingly reductive.

Nick Cave in 1994 (INTERFOTO/Alamy)

The emotional claustrophobia of the biography’s early sections thankfully opens into a more satisfying Bildungsroman that takes place initially in the corridors and playing fields of Caulfield Grammar, where a young Cave boarded and from which he eventually graduated, and subsequently in the sticky-carpeted band rooms of inner-city Melbourne. It was here that Cave laid down the foundations of seminal friendships, most notably with fellow band members Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew, and (fractiously) Rowland S. Howard, who would pen the band’s first real hit, ‘Shivers’ (1979). This song, which Cave insisted on singing himself and would become ‘an albatross’ around Howard’s neck, marked the band’s shift from cheap covers to full creativity.

Cave’s reluctance to let Howard sing his own song can be read as a zealous narcissism or a prescient recognition of his own star power, or most likely a combination of both. At Howard’s funeral in January 2010, Cave would describe him as ‘Australia’s most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist’ rather than as the singer–songwriter he clearly was. Like most of Cave’s colleagues and companions, Howard would be forced into the shadows of that spotlight, a light too bright and too narrow for anyone but a solo artist with immortality on his mind. One of the themes of Boy on Fire is Cave’s tendency to overwhelm and obscure the talents of others, and not unreasonably. Howard’s friend Bronwyn Bonney describes it best when she says that ‘Nick has the ability to glamour [sic] people, to dazzle or hypnotise them … He can both give – and take away – many people in his orbit’s sense of their own self-worth.’

Most of which makes Cave sound monstrous, an effect only heightened by the acts of mindless rebellion and hooliganism he indulged in as an emerging star of the post-punk Melbourne scene. He and Pew would steal cars, smash windows, and trash rooms as the mood took them, acts entirely in keeping with the pubescent nihilism of the times, but that come across now as off-putting. No doubt Cave himself would look back on these days with some embarrassment, but Mordue makes no attempt to soften the rampant misogyny and homophobia underpinning the bulk of the band’s behaviour. It’s hard not to find yourself agreeing with Alannah Hill’s blunt assessment that ‘they were dickheads’.

It is here that we hit on Boy on Fire’s overarching flaw: Mordue wants us to see the artist in chrysalis as a synecdoche of the artist entire, but Cave’s professional arc resists this reading at every turn. In the early chapters of his career, he was the potent frontman of a largely forgotten post-punk, private-school band, high on Dadaist philosophy and self-conscious poses; later, he worked his songwriting craft into a kind of self-aware profundity, until even his great Southern Gothic pretensions fell away. Mordue mentions Cave’s most recent album, Ghosteen (2019), which he composed in the aftermath of his teenage son Arthur’s tragic death, but Mordue in no way demonstrates how the boy who jealously guarded the limelight evolved into the kind of artist who could turn a searchlight into the deepest crevices of his grief.

Mark Mordue may have abandoned his attempt to tell a whole life with Boy on Fire and decided that a focused depiction of a long-lost subsection of Nick Cave’s career was worthy of our time, and for some diehard fans and a few future music sociologists, it no doubt will be. For the rest of us, it can be frustratingly hagiographic, overdetermined, and sentimental, a car-crash example (to indulge Mordue’s own obsession with the death of Colin Cave) of the parasite–host dynamic inherent in music journalism and indeed in biography itself. It is a noble failure in an oddly moving way, a non finito still swaying to the rock-star shenanigans of a kid on the cusp of greatness, with all that would follow still waiting for us in the wings.