Nick Cave — Lygon Street, Carlton, Melbourne (Early Home)

Lygon Street in Carlton was the axis of Nick Cave's Melbourne years before the Birthday Party left for London in 1980. Carlton was Melbourne's bohemian and academic suburb — home to the University of Melbourne, cheap terrace houses, Italian cafés, and the overlapping communities of students, artists, and musicians who defined Melbourne's alternative culture in the late 1970s. Cave and the circle around the Boys Next Door (as the Birthday Party were originally known) moved through the Carlton and Fitzroy neighbourhoods, rehearsing, performing, and developing the confrontational aesthetic that would make them one of the most significant bands in Australian history.

The Boys Next Door formed from Caulfield Grammar School but it was in Carlton and the inner-north suburbs that they became the Birthday Party. The parties, share houses, and cheap venues of this world were the social context for a band that was consciously trying to do something more extreme and more serious than the Australian pub rock mainstream. Cave's reading — Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, the American Gothic tradition — was forming alongside his music in these Lygon Street years.

Lygon Street remains Carlton's main restaurant and café strip and retains its slightly bohemian character despite significant gentrification. The Carlton and Fitzroy neighbourhoods are rewarding for anyone interested in Melbourne's musical and artistic heritage — the terrace houses, the bluestone lanes, and the proximity to the University give the area a character that is identifiably the one Cave inhabited.