Resurrection man
At the ripe old age of 50, when most of his peers are floundering in the doldrums, Nick Cave has hit a purple patch with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his most commercially successful and critically acclaimed album to date.
Peter Murphy, 09 Apr 2008
It’s rare you’ll find Cave at home on a weekday. Usually he sticks to a fairly strict working regime, confining his creative impulses to the office he rents a short walk from his home. That productivity – and the often unbridled nature of his most recent music – is a repudiation of Byron’s nonsense about the baby carriage in the hall being the enemy of art. If anything, his modus operandi, as borne out by both the Grinderman and Lazarus records, suggests Flaubert’s oft quoted line: ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life like a bourgeois, so you can be violent and original in your works.’
“Yeah, well, it feels a little like that,” Cave concedes, a tad reluctantly. “But at the same time it feels like that undermines a certain part of my life that I actually find really interesting, which is outside of my office. There’s too many pat conclusions that are made about what goes on with regard to me for my own liking sometimes, without going too much into that. Certainly there’s another part of me that, when I get down into the office, there’s something that’s sort of screaming to get out. It feels necessary for that to emerge in order to lead the kind of life that I’ve chosen to live. But it’s also the other way around: in the more chaotic times, let’s say, 15, 20 years ago or whatever, I was able to write some of the most delicate and spiritual songs that I’ve ever written. There’s a kind of need that’s being met in the writing process that acts as a sort of ballast to your life.”
Does he have to block out the idea that the wife and kids might ever listen to some of his more hardcore stuff?
“No, you know, it’s actually not about that, it’s about what gets written about my life. I find that aspect of it difficult, because huge liberties are taken, and it’s not even the truth, y’know? It’s not even the truth. And this has an effect on the way other people see me and my kids. It has some tangible effect on their lives, and y’know… I fuckin’ hate that. But they do listen to my records, and they think they’re funny. And on one level there’s a sort of childish streak that runs through a lot of what we do that they respond to, that they don’t respond to listening to a Joy Division record.” (laughs).
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