Caulfield Grammar School — where the Birthday Party formed

Caulfield Grammar School at 217 Glen Eira Road in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield is where Nick Cave met Mick Harvey in the mid-1970s, and where the group of musicians who would become the Boys Next Door — and then the Birthday Party — first came together. Cave and Harvey were classmates; they began making music together at school, recruiting other students, developing the obsessive creative partnership that would sustain them through the Birthday Party years and well into the Bad Seeds.

The school is a large, well-resourced independent Anglican school in Melbourne's southeastern suburbs — comfortable, conventional, the kind of institution that produces a very specific kind of Australian young man. Nick Cave was not, by his own account or anyone else's, the kind of student Caulfield Grammar was designed to produce. He was drawn to literature, to visual art, to the confrontational end of the cultural spectrum that the school's mainstream world did not accommodate. What the school gave him was Mick Harvey — a collaborator of extraordinary musical intelligence who would remain the closest thing Cave had to a musical conscience for more than thirty years — and the social context in which a group of similarly restless young men could find each other.

The Boys Next Door played their earliest shows in Melbourne from the mid-to-late 1970s, eventually becoming the Birthday Party after relocating to London in 1980. The sound they developed in Melbourne — confrontational, literary, post-punk in the most literal sense of having absorbed punk's energy and refused its limitations — had its origins in the conversations and collaborations that began in the corridors of a grammar school in Caulfield. The school continues to operate. Nick Cave is not listed prominently among its celebrated alumni.