Nick Cave biographer and Newcastle hometown boy Mark Mordue is coming back to the city to do a poetry reading at Wickham Park Hotel

"We hold all kinds of identities in our lives," he says.

"I'm a father of three kids, I'm a Nick Cave biographer, I'm a poet, I'm a journalist that's been writing all kinds of stories for 40 years. I'm an older white male figuring out his place in the world as the world changes radically through COVID and identity politics."

He's also, he says, a person understanding where he is in a highly material culture. Depending on the day, these identities compound and shift their balances.

Mordue has a few gigs coming up in his home town of Newcastle. He'll be reading at Poetry at the Pub at the Wickham Park Hotel on May 17 and he'll be on a panel at Maitland Indie Festival on May 29. He'll return to Newcastle on July 4 to read poetry at The Family Hotel.

As a boy growing up in Newcastle he recalls listening to music and imagining himself as a future music writer. He remembers listening to artists like T.Rex and Elton John.

"People and their lyrics that made me think about poetry and wanting to be a writer. You've got that connection from music, poetry," he says.

Journalism has always been a way for him to make a living and he's been published in publications like Rolling Stone, Vogue, GQ, The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald.

He's published several books, his most recent about Nick Cave and called Boy on Fire. He's spent a lot of time with Cave over the past 10 years, hanging out with him or talking on the phone. He describes the book as a portrait of the artist as a young man.

"A biography can be so strange; it kind of becomes something like a working friendship," Mordue says. (Cave did write Mordue a nice email about the book after it was published.)

In the epilogue, purely by coincidence, Mordue and Cave are driving up to Newcastle together.

Mordue grew up in a working class family around New Lambton, Broadmeadow and Hamilton.

"It was what used to be called the Gully Line," he says.

"The storm water drains were like my freeways on a pushbike. I went to uni there in Newcastle. I was the editor of the student paper, Opus, where I got my first taste of journalism. Of course I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had a fun time doing it."

He describes the late '70s in Newcastle as a "much freer kind of place". He left when he was 21, having finished his bachelor of arts and already starting to get published in rock'n'roll media. He jokes it was like the film Almost Famous, but not quite.

"I went to Sydney, had all these fantasies of becoming a big famous rock'n'roll writer; it wasn't quite like the movie, but I had a pretty fortunate and lucky life," he says.

Newcastle is important to him. He has so many special memories, even if it's just driving down the industrial highway at night.

"It's shaped me profoundly for sure in terms of, I guess, a sense of loyalty to working class values, a sense of home, which is really important in knowing where you sit in the world," he says.

"I know those streets, I know the Hunter River, the docks. They've changed obviously. I know that industrial area, I know the university as it was; we're talking about memory as much as present. I feel like that landscape stays with me. I guess it does influence my writing, it sort of grounds me."

At university he was friends with all the Castanets of the band the Castanet Club, and he fondly remembers the post-punk scene that happened in Newcastle. He rattled off festivals like This is Not Art, The National Young Writers Festival, the Newcastle Writers Festival and artists and influential names like Pel Mel, the writer Jack Marx, Mikey Robins, Sandman (alias Stephen Abbott), the journalist Tony Squires, and Marcus Westbury.

"It seems Newcastle has had this incredibly creative artistic history contrary to the image people have elsewhere that this is an industrial and dirty town," he says. "It's a brilliant creative place and beautiful place."