Documentary #3: The Educator
DG: Clare and I met him in late 1988, Mick did an interview with me at PBS. I don't know what his role was then, seemed to be directing traffic around at PBS at the time. So we met him around, and then continued kind of enjoying his company. He was an odd person.

CM: He was a bit outside the rock scene so it was interesting to go, and we could talk about the trials and tribulations of the music business as we saw it and get his view on it, which was good. It was just sort of nice to talk with somebody who wasn't part of the whole scene at that time, our particular small rock scene I mean.

DG: We'd been away for five years so most of the people we knew were friends and that we'd known from before from the old St Kilda kind of post-punk crowd. But, nobody could remember where Mick came from, where he fitted into that scheme of things, and I think that's how Nick Cave seemed to enjoy his company later on as well, because they didn't have a shared history. Mick was an outsider, who'd seemingly been in Melbourne but had been in more of a jazz and art, literature kind of field of interests.

CM: We used to go round to his place and just hang around and listen to records and stuff, and we didn't actually have a manager at that point and I guess we thought it might be good to get somebody we knew who was into the idea, somehow the subject came up at one point.

DG: Yeah, after we met him we'd been back to the UK for about 6 months in 1990 and further things went strange with this British record company. Eventually we did a recording with the ABC here which became a live thing we put out called Lure Of The Tropics, and that was coming out and this album we'd done in the UK all coming out at the same time, two albums in 1992 all of a sudden, and I rang Mick up and asked would he be our manager kind of thing, and he was our manager until 1995. Our scene was very rich, our music was full of things Mick could relate to and pull things out of. He was kind of tuned into my kind of lyrics and mythology and that kind of thing. He knew we weren't kind of normal rock band. So he was great at distilling some of the madder things we did, but later on we worked with a large record company and Mick's relations with them were quite incredible, the way he would fuss over details and that, because he was very strong on representing to the last little nuance our ideas about promoting things and that. He loved fighting with record companies.

CM: That and writing very good promotional material for us! Yes he would have very long phone calls with the record company. The other good thing though was that Mick wasn't into the idea of being a career manager, like he wasn't looking around for other people to manage, he just wanted to concentrate on one thing at a time, so that was good.

DG: In the end I think we were asking Mick to do things that weren't his strengths. That's why we finished managing with him. We wanted someone to take a load off of our kind of things, y'know like a straight kind of manager, but Mick was more into the Andrew Loog Oldham style of being a manager, if you know what I mean, you know! Like he loved stories of the Rolling Stones going in to talk to a record company and all wearing dark glasses and all sitting there and not saying anything and just letting their manager talk. Mick would've liked us to have been more like that but we weren't like 19 year old spotty teabags.

CM: Ha ha !! He did enjoy the theme though.

DG: Oh yeah.

CM: Like the night that he was at the Continental and Michael Gudinski was buying him drinks all night because Michael Gudinski thought that Mick was Dave!! He of course didn't let on until at least the eighteenth drink!! (laughs)

DG: And often you'd see Mick, he'd like to hang around with people like the Bad Seeds, who liked his devil-may-care, kind of cigarette ash all over the place, kind of smoke-in-his-hair style. And often you would see other people who worked, like tour promoters and record company people, look at the way Mick moved between these worlds of the administrators and the world of the insiders, the artists, and you could see their kind of jealousy.

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DG: It was great to go 'round to his place, he had this brilliant flat with Lowanna in St Kilda, beautiful sunlit large penthouse apartment. He lived in a very aristocratic style that was very, cool. But he had tons of vinyl, beautiful, a life's collection of great vinyl, y'know you talk about anything and he would go and pull out some incredible album, in jazz, blues, and country. Mainly jazz, and very weird blues!

We were in a record shop and I started talking about this Captain Beefheart song called Grown So Ugly that I really liked and I wondered about the person, I'd heard the original version by this guy, Robert Pete Williams. And the next week Mick would give you a cassette of everything by this Robert Pete Williams guy, very strange esoteric country-blues singer.

But he had more of a role, people like Henry Rollins who was very close to Mick, not like a mentor, but he was a vast store of information and opinion about a wide variety of things - art, visual art, which I'm quite ignorant of; literature, film, and cricket, things like that.

CM: We only found that out like recently though, didn't we? We had no idea

DG: He would always be making tapes for people, he'd have two or three cassettes going quite distractedly while you were talking to him. And videoing things. He loved Paul Keating.

Documentary #4: The Private Man
CM: It was amazing the amount of stuff we learnt about him after he had died, all of the stuff about the cricket and the forming of the union in that place that he worked, just a whole lot of things that we had no idea about.
DG: His brother's eulogy was incredible, at the funeral.
Lisa Palermo: Yeah he seemed to have a lot of stuff going on, you know like a lot of levels, and not everybody knew about all of them. (CM: No.) I mean there is common stuff, but a lot of people seemed to have a different little piece of Mick.