Nick Cave interview
Oct. 7th, 2004 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alonewiththemoonBelow the cut is a rather lengthy Nick Cave interview from the October issue of Dazed and Confused (not exactly high on my reading list--this was transcribed by a member of the goodson mailing list). It's a shame that as he becomes increasingly likable his music becomes increasingly less likable.
I was thinking about lyrics, though--some of the old lyrics are pretty poor when read on paper too. It was the style of delivery and the fire behind them that made them work.
Anyway...
The October issue (#18) of Dazed & Confused has an interview with Nick
and three full page photos taken by Philipp Ebeling. Hopefully you will
enjoy the interview (and sorry for any typos...)!
Heini
-----------------
Old Saint Nick
He may have worn black and done smack with a New York Doll in the 80s,
but these days the antipodean master of the macabre, Nick Cave, is
happiest in Brighton, living a life outside of rock clichés.
Text Barney Hoskyns
On Abattoir Blues, the cheerily titled first half of the new double
album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, there is a song called "There She
Goes, My Beautiful World".
In it, a number of august figures crop up: Marx and Gaugin, Larkin and
Dylan Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov and the dissolute Earl of Rochester,
Christian mystic St John of the Cross and punk junkie Johnny Thunders.
"St John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box," Cave
croons on the track, "and Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote
'Chinese Rocks'."
Talk about bathos: how in all seriousness can one compare the co-writer
of cold turkey classic "Rocks" with the 16th century author of The Dark
Night of the Soul?
"Well," Cave says with a slightly sheepish smile. "The song is just
asking, how did these people do it? How did Johnny Thunders write
'Chinese Rocks', which is one of the great drug songs. Obviously there
was a certain humour to including him in that list."
I ask Cave if he recalls an infamous afternoon many summers ago when he
and the former New York Doll actually met in a drug-infested flat in
Paddington, London. Against all odds he does.
"I don't remember much about it, except that his hands were in
unbelievably bad condition," he says. "But I wouldn't trade that moment
for anything."
You won't be altogether surprised when I tell you that it wasn't music
that brought these two rock icons together. Nor should you be too
astonished that the younger musician almost overdosed after reboiling
the cotton the elder one had used to strain his hit. Such was the scale
of Thunders' heroin habit at the time.
Ah, the long cold summer of 82: blood on the walls, Astral Weeks on the
turntable, Cave's band The Birthday Party in ever more desperate
straits. Life as a junk-yard: a bunch of diseased Ozzie goths playing
death-rattle jazz-punk horror-rock while all around them lay flouncy
haircuts and synthesizer whimsy.
Of all the singers from that era you'd have bet on enjoying a long
career of cult status and "respectable album sales", Cave would have
commanded very long odds indeed. Johnny Thunders eat your junk-blackened
heart out: you couldn't see Cave making 25, let alone 30.
But here he is, sitting in a modish hotel in his adopted hometown of
Brighton, 45 years racked up on Planet Earth. He's still rake-thin, but
the August sun has tanned his cheeks. On the mobile is wife Susie,
former model and mother of twin boys Earl and Arthur. (There are two
other, older sons. Both are from different relationships; both are
worshipped by Earl and Arthur.) "I'll be home soon," Nick tells Mrs
Cave. "I've just got one more of these to do."
Cave has never enjoyed the stale rituals of the interview treadmill.
Most journalists, he says, come to him with a fairly stock notion of
what "Nick Cave" means. "I can see sometimes with people who interview
me that they're really struggling," he says. "They're not equipped to
talk about the music, so you feel it drifting back to the past and they
want something about all of that. I guess it must be, like, 'Oh, Nick
Cave's put out a new record, who's gonna go and interview him?'"
The new record in question, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, is the
first Cave/Bad Seeds album to be recorded with former Gallon Drunk
frontman James Johnston, whose organ playing beautifully complements the
melodic piano work of Conway Savage. It is also the first Bad Seeds
record to be made without Blixa Bargeld, the eccentric and charismatic
Berliner who for years simultaneously led the group Einsturzende
Neubauten. Anyone who's seen the Seeds live over the last two decades
will know that the dynamic between Cave and Bargeld was as integral to
the band's chemistry as the Jagger/Richards ying-yang was to the Rolling
Stones in their pomp. "The Nick and Blixa relationship always seemed
very theatrical to me," says Jim Sclavunos, drummer and percussionist
with the Seeds. "It was like watching some sort of ritual or pantomime,
like a little dance or stately minuet."
Cave says he misses Bargeld, but adds that "on another level" the
departure has been good for the group. "Blixa had his way as a person
which was very different to all the rest of us. He was like, 'Where is
my fucking vodka and where is this and where is that?!' And I miss that
aspect of the band. But we've been forced to change our methods. We
still don't know what the effect actually is."
"Blixa's departure really changed an entrenched structure," adds
Sclavunos. "It was a good opportunity for us to take a lot of the old
songs and re-address them in a fresh way."
Sclavunos was one quarter of a scaled-down "Micro-Seeds" that decamped
to Paris earlier this year. "There's always some sort of effort to do
things slightly differently," he says. "In Paris we were trying to put
songs together out of thin air, and a lot of stuff came out of those few
days."
"I don't think I've ever done that," Cave adds. "You know, just gone in
and said, 'All right, I've got nothing, let's try and write some stuff
together.' And we said to ourselves, 'It doesn't matter what the music's
like, if we want to do 25 minute prog-rock explorations, we're able to
do that' – and we did." [BadriyaZ says: Ow. Please don't do that.]
In contrast to the fairly full-throttle Abattoir Blues – which includes
the hummable single "Nature Boy" – The Lyre of Opheus [sic!] is softer,
more unplugged. "Easy Money" is close to soulful and "Breathless" could
be a campfire singalong. "'Breathless' was the last thing that was
written," Cave says. "It was an attempt from my point to write a song
that didn't have a twist at the end. It was a celebration of nature and
divinity, and it had a buoyant melody."
If last year's Nocturama reached back to the feral fervour of early
Seeds, the new double album is a generous blend of calm beauty and
holy-roller intensity. (It even features a clutch of voices from the
London Community Gospel Choir.) At moments it does sound like a band
reborn. Is it important for Cave to feel that he still has his henchmen
around him? "There's definitely been a return to that sort of thing," he
replies. "We're a working band in the sense that it has nothing to do
with records coming out or anything."
Why have the Bad Seeds always come across like quasi-criminals? Why the
suits and ties?
"For me the Bad Seeds has always been about a group of men, primarily.
It's about a group of men with a man's work ethic about things. The
times that we've worked with women have always – apart from with Kylie –
been very difficult. And I think that's because in my life, outside the
Bad Seeds, I don't actually have these male relationships. In the Bad
Seeds everyone's personal lives are fucking left elsewhere and we just
go to work. And I think we cleave to that in some way. We dress like
we're going to work. We don't dress in Bermudas and flip-flops."
Do they ever do manly things together?
"No, we don't. We don't go skipping through the fields reciting poetry
and sniffing each other's armpits either."
In a recent South Bank Show about Cave, Blixa Bargeld talked of ways to
survive being a rock star. One way, he said matter-of-factly, was to
"notice that there is a life outside being a rock star". Has Nick
achieved that?
"To an extent, certainly. I had to separate my work methods from my
family, simply out of respect for them. I don't think it's fair on them
to witness the creative process. It's ugly, and there's something kind
of vulgar and demeaning about the whole thing."
On Abattoir Blues' "Hiding All Away", Cave makes the divide between his
work and his life clearer still. The song suggests a kind of conscious
withholding in a culture where artists now sell their lives in lieu of
their art. "What is important to me is trying to create songs where you
no longer have to listen to them and think, 'How is Nick Cave doing at
the moment?' Part of that is to create, at least within the media, the
blandest possible lifestyle I can work out. Because there came a point
where it became clear to me that the weight of people's ideas of what I
was would destroy me."
"Nick's always had to wrestle with his public image," says Jim
Sclavunos. "I guess he'll still have to do that because he'll always
have some kind of public image and there'll always be some disparity
between that and who he is. As very well there should be."
Does Cave still regret the self-exposure of 1997's The Boatman's Call,
born of the pain experienced in his split with PJ Harvey?
"I think it's a really good record," he says. "But I felt that some of
the songs came from a place I'd railed against all through my life –
that place of self-pity. I think that whatever happened around then
knocked me for fucking six. And I didn't see it coming. There was a
feeling, to me, of 'Welcome to my pain' that I found a little excruciating."
Since his marriage to Susie Bick, many of Cave's songs have implicitly
been about slowing down, taking stock of his place in the world. There's
a lot of pastoral imagery – a lot of flowers and trees – in these songs.
Does he feel more at peace with the world, and with himself? "I don't
particularly feel that, to be totally truthful. I feel that the
circumstances of my life are greatly improved than they were five years,
ten years ago, but whether I feel at peace... I really don't think that
I've ever felt at peace. Except probably when I used to take smack,
early on when it still worked."
Isn't work – specifically, Cave's very driven regimen – sometimes just a
substitute addiction?
"Well, one of the things that happened when I took smack was that all
these voices – all this chattering fucking nonsense that used to go on
in my head – just went away. And those voices go away when I work,
especially when I'm on a roll. They swap from 'you're fucking
second-rate, you'll never amount to anything' to 'you are the fucking
greatest person that ever walked the earth'. And I know that neither of
these voices is telling the truth."
Does he think that on any level he's still trying to prove himself to
his English-professor father, who died in a car crash when Nick was 19?
"Um, I think I've done that. I think I proved myself when I wrote my
novel (1989's And The Ass Saw The Angel). He probably wouldn't have
liked it, but… ah well, I don't know."
Has the absence of the father figure had anything to do with his search
for God – the ultimate Patriarch?
"I don't know about that. But I feel that it's important to mention God
in my songs, because I'm sickened by what is being done in the name of
God these days. The concept of God has been hijacked by bullies and
bigots and psychopaths. And part of this is because they don't have a
questioning view of God. It's narrow, it's locked-in and it's right – to
them. Christ talked of these people at his most vehement. He called them
hypocrites and blasphemers."
Is great music inherently religious?
"I think a lot of musicians are believers, and it seems that if you're
working in music it's quite a logical step to take. I feel that a lot of
people would quite like to believe but find that it's an impossible
notion to defend. And it is. But that lives quite comfortably in the
part of my mind that is about imagination and magic and absurdity and
everything that there is no argument for."
Over two decades since those crazed Birthday Party shows that usually
involved "Nick The Stripper" injuring himself, how does Cave now view
the business of live performance?
"It feels to me the same, only I feel I'm better at it. It's just a
place where I can go and I can be that person that I always wanted to
be. You feel God-like, and that's something I really value."
God-like? A guilty, almost boyish smile plays across Cave's face.
"It doesn’t last very long," he laughs. "Once you come off stage you
realise you're the schmuck you always knew you were."
I was thinking about lyrics, though--some of the old lyrics are pretty poor when read on paper too. It was the style of delivery and the fire behind them that made them work.
Anyway...
The October issue (#18) of Dazed & Confused has an interview with Nick
and three full page photos taken by Philipp Ebeling. Hopefully you will
enjoy the interview (and sorry for any typos...)!
Heini
-----------------
Old Saint Nick
He may have worn black and done smack with a New York Doll in the 80s,
but these days the antipodean master of the macabre, Nick Cave, is
happiest in Brighton, living a life outside of rock clichés.
Text Barney Hoskyns
On Abattoir Blues, the cheerily titled first half of the new double
album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, there is a song called "There She
Goes, My Beautiful World".
In it, a number of august figures crop up: Marx and Gaugin, Larkin and
Dylan Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov and the dissolute Earl of Rochester,
Christian mystic St John of the Cross and punk junkie Johnny Thunders.
"St John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box," Cave
croons on the track, "and Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote
'Chinese Rocks'."
Talk about bathos: how in all seriousness can one compare the co-writer
of cold turkey classic "Rocks" with the 16th century author of The Dark
Night of the Soul?
"Well," Cave says with a slightly sheepish smile. "The song is just
asking, how did these people do it? How did Johnny Thunders write
'Chinese Rocks', which is one of the great drug songs. Obviously there
was a certain humour to including him in that list."
I ask Cave if he recalls an infamous afternoon many summers ago when he
and the former New York Doll actually met in a drug-infested flat in
Paddington, London. Against all odds he does.
"I don't remember much about it, except that his hands were in
unbelievably bad condition," he says. "But I wouldn't trade that moment
for anything."
You won't be altogether surprised when I tell you that it wasn't music
that brought these two rock icons together. Nor should you be too
astonished that the younger musician almost overdosed after reboiling
the cotton the elder one had used to strain his hit. Such was the scale
of Thunders' heroin habit at the time.
Ah, the long cold summer of 82: blood on the walls, Astral Weeks on the
turntable, Cave's band The Birthday Party in ever more desperate
straits. Life as a junk-yard: a bunch of diseased Ozzie goths playing
death-rattle jazz-punk horror-rock while all around them lay flouncy
haircuts and synthesizer whimsy.
Of all the singers from that era you'd have bet on enjoying a long
career of cult status and "respectable album sales", Cave would have
commanded very long odds indeed. Johnny Thunders eat your junk-blackened
heart out: you couldn't see Cave making 25, let alone 30.
But here he is, sitting in a modish hotel in his adopted hometown of
Brighton, 45 years racked up on Planet Earth. He's still rake-thin, but
the August sun has tanned his cheeks. On the mobile is wife Susie,
former model and mother of twin boys Earl and Arthur. (There are two
other, older sons. Both are from different relationships; both are
worshipped by Earl and Arthur.) "I'll be home soon," Nick tells Mrs
Cave. "I've just got one more of these to do."
Cave has never enjoyed the stale rituals of the interview treadmill.
Most journalists, he says, come to him with a fairly stock notion of
what "Nick Cave" means. "I can see sometimes with people who interview
me that they're really struggling," he says. "They're not equipped to
talk about the music, so you feel it drifting back to the past and they
want something about all of that. I guess it must be, like, 'Oh, Nick
Cave's put out a new record, who's gonna go and interview him?'"
The new record in question, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, is the
first Cave/Bad Seeds album to be recorded with former Gallon Drunk
frontman James Johnston, whose organ playing beautifully complements the
melodic piano work of Conway Savage. It is also the first Bad Seeds
record to be made without Blixa Bargeld, the eccentric and charismatic
Berliner who for years simultaneously led the group Einsturzende
Neubauten. Anyone who's seen the Seeds live over the last two decades
will know that the dynamic between Cave and Bargeld was as integral to
the band's chemistry as the Jagger/Richards ying-yang was to the Rolling
Stones in their pomp. "The Nick and Blixa relationship always seemed
very theatrical to me," says Jim Sclavunos, drummer and percussionist
with the Seeds. "It was like watching some sort of ritual or pantomime,
like a little dance or stately minuet."
Cave says he misses Bargeld, but adds that "on another level" the
departure has been good for the group. "Blixa had his way as a person
which was very different to all the rest of us. He was like, 'Where is
my fucking vodka and where is this and where is that?!' And I miss that
aspect of the band. But we've been forced to change our methods. We
still don't know what the effect actually is."
"Blixa's departure really changed an entrenched structure," adds
Sclavunos. "It was a good opportunity for us to take a lot of the old
songs and re-address them in a fresh way."
Sclavunos was one quarter of a scaled-down "Micro-Seeds" that decamped
to Paris earlier this year. "There's always some sort of effort to do
things slightly differently," he says. "In Paris we were trying to put
songs together out of thin air, and a lot of stuff came out of those few
days."
"I don't think I've ever done that," Cave adds. "You know, just gone in
and said, 'All right, I've got nothing, let's try and write some stuff
together.' And we said to ourselves, 'It doesn't matter what the music's
like, if we want to do 25 minute prog-rock explorations, we're able to
do that' – and we did." [BadriyaZ says: Ow. Please don't do that.]
In contrast to the fairly full-throttle Abattoir Blues – which includes
the hummable single "Nature Boy" – The Lyre of Opheus [sic!] is softer,
more unplugged. "Easy Money" is close to soulful and "Breathless" could
be a campfire singalong. "'Breathless' was the last thing that was
written," Cave says. "It was an attempt from my point to write a song
that didn't have a twist at the end. It was a celebration of nature and
divinity, and it had a buoyant melody."
If last year's Nocturama reached back to the feral fervour of early
Seeds, the new double album is a generous blend of calm beauty and
holy-roller intensity. (It even features a clutch of voices from the
London Community Gospel Choir.) At moments it does sound like a band
reborn. Is it important for Cave to feel that he still has his henchmen
around him? "There's definitely been a return to that sort of thing," he
replies. "We're a working band in the sense that it has nothing to do
with records coming out or anything."
Why have the Bad Seeds always come across like quasi-criminals? Why the
suits and ties?
"For me the Bad Seeds has always been about a group of men, primarily.
It's about a group of men with a man's work ethic about things. The
times that we've worked with women have always – apart from with Kylie –
been very difficult. And I think that's because in my life, outside the
Bad Seeds, I don't actually have these male relationships. In the Bad
Seeds everyone's personal lives are fucking left elsewhere and we just
go to work. And I think we cleave to that in some way. We dress like
we're going to work. We don't dress in Bermudas and flip-flops."
Do they ever do manly things together?
"No, we don't. We don't go skipping through the fields reciting poetry
and sniffing each other's armpits either."
In a recent South Bank Show about Cave, Blixa Bargeld talked of ways to
survive being a rock star. One way, he said matter-of-factly, was to
"notice that there is a life outside being a rock star". Has Nick
achieved that?
"To an extent, certainly. I had to separate my work methods from my
family, simply out of respect for them. I don't think it's fair on them
to witness the creative process. It's ugly, and there's something kind
of vulgar and demeaning about the whole thing."
On Abattoir Blues' "Hiding All Away", Cave makes the divide between his
work and his life clearer still. The song suggests a kind of conscious
withholding in a culture where artists now sell their lives in lieu of
their art. "What is important to me is trying to create songs where you
no longer have to listen to them and think, 'How is Nick Cave doing at
the moment?' Part of that is to create, at least within the media, the
blandest possible lifestyle I can work out. Because there came a point
where it became clear to me that the weight of people's ideas of what I
was would destroy me."
"Nick's always had to wrestle with his public image," says Jim
Sclavunos. "I guess he'll still have to do that because he'll always
have some kind of public image and there'll always be some disparity
between that and who he is. As very well there should be."
Does Cave still regret the self-exposure of 1997's The Boatman's Call,
born of the pain experienced in his split with PJ Harvey?
"I think it's a really good record," he says. "But I felt that some of
the songs came from a place I'd railed against all through my life –
that place of self-pity. I think that whatever happened around then
knocked me for fucking six. And I didn't see it coming. There was a
feeling, to me, of 'Welcome to my pain' that I found a little excruciating."
Since his marriage to Susie Bick, many of Cave's songs have implicitly
been about slowing down, taking stock of his place in the world. There's
a lot of pastoral imagery – a lot of flowers and trees – in these songs.
Does he feel more at peace with the world, and with himself? "I don't
particularly feel that, to be totally truthful. I feel that the
circumstances of my life are greatly improved than they were five years,
ten years ago, but whether I feel at peace... I really don't think that
I've ever felt at peace. Except probably when I used to take smack,
early on when it still worked."
Isn't work – specifically, Cave's very driven regimen – sometimes just a
substitute addiction?
"Well, one of the things that happened when I took smack was that all
these voices – all this chattering fucking nonsense that used to go on
in my head – just went away. And those voices go away when I work,
especially when I'm on a roll. They swap from 'you're fucking
second-rate, you'll never amount to anything' to 'you are the fucking
greatest person that ever walked the earth'. And I know that neither of
these voices is telling the truth."
Does he think that on any level he's still trying to prove himself to
his English-professor father, who died in a car crash when Nick was 19?
"Um, I think I've done that. I think I proved myself when I wrote my
novel (1989's And The Ass Saw The Angel). He probably wouldn't have
liked it, but… ah well, I don't know."
Has the absence of the father figure had anything to do with his search
for God – the ultimate Patriarch?
"I don't know about that. But I feel that it's important to mention God
in my songs, because I'm sickened by what is being done in the name of
God these days. The concept of God has been hijacked by bullies and
bigots and psychopaths. And part of this is because they don't have a
questioning view of God. It's narrow, it's locked-in and it's right – to
them. Christ talked of these people at his most vehement. He called them
hypocrites and blasphemers."
Is great music inherently religious?
"I think a lot of musicians are believers, and it seems that if you're
working in music it's quite a logical step to take. I feel that a lot of
people would quite like to believe but find that it's an impossible
notion to defend. And it is. But that lives quite comfortably in the
part of my mind that is about imagination and magic and absurdity and
everything that there is no argument for."
Over two decades since those crazed Birthday Party shows that usually
involved "Nick The Stripper" injuring himself, how does Cave now view
the business of live performance?
"It feels to me the same, only I feel I'm better at it. It's just a
place where I can go and I can be that person that I always wanted to
be. You feel God-like, and that's something I really value."
God-like? A guilty, almost boyish smile plays across Cave's face.
"It doesn’t last very long," he laughs. "Once you come off stage you
realise you're the schmuck you always knew you were."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-10-07 07:32 am (UTC)no longer have to listen to them and think, 'How is Nick Cave doing at
the moment?'
blah