Laura Harker and Paul Sullivan on Nick Cave and the 80s East Kreuzberg scene…

Cutting a discreet diagonal between Kottbusser Tor and Oranienplatz, Dresdener Straße is one of the streets that provides blissful respite from East Kreuzberg’s constant hustle and bustle. Here, the noise of the traffic recedes and the street’s charms surge subtly into focus: fashion boutiques and indie cafés tucked into the ground floors of 19th Century Altbauten, the elegantly run-down Kino Babylon Kreuzberg and the dark and seductive cocktail bar Würgeengel, the ‘exterminating angel’, a name borrowed from a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel.

It all looked very different in the 80s of course, when the Berlin Wall stood just under a kilometre away and the façades of these houses—now expensively renovated and worth a pretty penny—were still pockmarked by World War Two bulletholes. Mostly devoid of baths, the interiors heated by coal, their inhabitants (mostly Turkish immigrants) shivered and shuffled their way through the Berlin winter.

It was during this pre-Wende milieu that a tall, skinny and largely unknown Australian musician named Nicholas Edward Cave moved into No. 11. Aside from brief spells in apartments on Naumannstraße (Schöneberg), Yorckstraße, and nearby Oranienstraße, Cave spent the bulk of his seven on-and-off years in Berlin living in a tiny apartment alongside filmmaker and musician Christoph Dreher, founder of local outfit Die Haut.

It was in this house that Cave wrote the lyrics and music for several Birthday Party and Bad Seeds albums, penned his debut novel (And The Ass Saw The Angel) and wielded a sizeable influence over Kreuzberg’s burgeoning post-punk scene. And yet there’s no plaque outside, no mentions of the address in any guidebooks, nor—unlike a certain Thin White Duke’s former residence in Schöneberg—curious knots of tourists taking snaps of the doorway. Just an anonymous façade and a strange, bourgeois silence.

The Birthday Party

Cave arrived in Berlin in 1982 with his then band, The Birthday Party, which at that time consisted of himself, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew and Phill Calvert. Like David Bowie a few years before, Cave was looking for a place where he could kick the drug habit that was exerting an ever-increasing grip over his life and work. He was also seeking to escape what he described as the unwelcoming atmosphere and ‘shoegazing bullshit’ of London, where he had relocated from his native Melbourne in 1980. When Dreher, with whose band the Birthday Party had toured, invited the band to join him in Berlin, they all packed up immediately.

The problem, of course, was that Berlin at that time was far from a drug-free zone. In fact, West Berlin was allegedly pushing Europe’s purest form of heroin during those years, and the drug was rife amongst the creative scene. At the same time, Kreuzberg was in the middle of a politically-infused post-punk explosion that The Birthday Party— suitably exotic and anti-establishment—n…