![]() It wasn’t just a matter of putting out a few records, and she didn’t inspire people just by being captivating. He is not alone in describing Anita as “a living artwork”. “She resonated wherever she went because she had an incredible magnetic presence which was very alluring this incandescent presence,” says Thirlwell. They became firm friends after she moved to London to be with Nick and Co. Thirlwell (known as Foetus, Manorexia etc., and for his work on Archer) knew Anita from around Melbourne. Melbourne-raised, Brooklyn-based composer, producer and performer J.G. But the coverage throughout her career failed to convey that, as Cave candidly proclaimed, Anita was “the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far”.Ĭonversing with the divine – why we still need our muses She profoundly affected people and their art-making, and the media can’t be expected to disregard that. ![]() So, she was idealised and rhapsodised over as a “muse” – a tag that followed her into the mediatised afterlife.Īs Cave wrote on his blog, The Red Hand Files, Anita “despised the concept of the muse but was everybody’s”. It could have been ironic comedy gold in other hands, but instead stands as an illustration of how women’s creative accomplishments are devalued.Īnita seems to have been sprinkled with an extra dash of je ne sais quoi fairy dust. Lane was Nick Cave’s collaborator and girlfriend during his formative period and helped define his sound. The headline, tagging Anita simplistically as a “rocker”, was followed by an intro that read, It is understandable journalists and biographers underscored crucial Cave/Lane collaborations – she directly aided his ascent – but these nods provoked indignant criticism among fans and friends.Ī New York Times article was a prime example of how the media outs itself as sexist. I remembered, too, that Anita once saved my life in that flat – but that story would only distract us.įrom Her to Eternity, co-written by Anita Lane and Nick Cave, was performed in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.Īfter the announcement of Anita’s death, obituaries popped up in online music magazines celebrating her as Cave’s muse. We weren’t friends, as such we just had encounters around the traps over a period of many months – though she was an indie “it girl”, so I’d heard of her well before we met, and we had mutual friends over the years. She and Nick Cave had called it quits several years earlier (they would soon reunite), and I was raw and messy after a parting of ways with Rob Younger, singer of the influential band Radio Birdman and singer-songwriter in The New Christs. We were young women then, in our 20s (Anita some years my senior), trying to free ourselves from the hold of charismatic exes, who both happened to be living legend “punk” musicians. ![]() Perhaps, I sense a glimmer of the fleeting subconsciousness connecting us in our vulnerability. But it vibrates with aching, incomprehensible poignancy. I don’t know why I remember this moment, out of so many insignificant moments evaporated by time and lost in the wash of youthful substance use. I don’t recall why we were sitting on that bed in a darkened bedroom of the unpretentious Paddington flat in Sydney she shared with her boyfriend, Andrew. When I heard Anita Lane had died aged 61 in April 2021, a memory flashed up: I’m sitting beside her at the foot of a bed in the mid-1980s, and she turns to me to say how much my hair has grown.
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