Anita Lane has died at 61.Credit:Mute Records
So it was for Anita Lane,the enigmatic Australian singer-songwriter whose sad passing this week,aged 61,has brought Nick Cave’s hallowed name back into headlines.
They met at a party in Melbourne when she was 17 and he 19. “He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen,” biographer Ian Johnston asserts in his book,Bad Seed. “She seemed to have emerged from his dreams.”
It’s weirdly similar to how Dylan talks about Rotolo in hisChronicles Vol. 1:“I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen.” Rotolo would also introduce him to Baudelaire,Brecht,political thought in general,and other useful stuff.
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Anita Lane was a writer and a rebel.A Dead Song,Dead John andKiss Me Black,by Cave’s early band The Birthday Party,all bear her credit. So doesFrom Her to Eternity,the perennial encore stormer by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,a band of which she was an early member and had significant conceptual input.
Then she disappeared. “They realised it wasn’t a healthy relationship,” is how bandmate Rowland Howard remembered their split. “Anita felt she was being squashed … Anita’s a fairly fragile sort of person and it took a far greater toll on her than it did on Nick.”
As the old catch-all disclaimer goes,society is to blame. But I can’t help wondering how she might have fared in this one,where Lana Del Rey and Megan Thee Stallion and Taylor Swift and Anna Calvi and God knows how many others are nobody’s muse.
I only spoke to Anita Lane once,maybe 25 years ago. She’d made an album at last,a kind of compilation calledDirty Pearl,and she’d sung on Bad Seed Mick Harvey’s album of Serge Gainsbourg tunes,Intoxicated Man. She laughed a lot;she seemed mildly reluctant to talk about herself. Where had she been? Just living her life,apparently. Imagine.