Always look on the dark side of life

Dylan once said that, “To live outside the law you must be honest.” In a way, all great artists live outside the law. Nick Cave is one of them. He has managed to create a body of work which walks its own world – a world full of hard men and hard women, of the lost and the losers, of those who kick society and get kicked back, of those looking for love in all the wrong places, of wanderers whose minds play games with their souls and whose souls are full of dread.

It’s a world of the walking, talking, screaming, spluttering dead, of those waiting eagerly for the wrong card to be led, the wrong word to be said, of those rummaging through the rubbish in their minds for the right way to do the wrong deed. Of those who meet the point of life at the point of a knife.

Nick Cave is honest. He is true to himself, to his own visions and urges, to his own needs and desires. He doesn’t ever pretend to be what he is not. And that, for me, is one of the most important things I could say about anybody. But that’s the bonus.

Because for most of us who will know Nick Cave, it will be Nick Cave the Artist we will know. And that’s enough, more than enough. Because this Artist has given us his visions, beautiful visions, full of the passion and the intensity. Dark visions, sure. But it’s a dark world half of the time at least. And anyway, who said beauty belongs only in the light?

Could Live Seeds be seen as a way of wrapping up a period of history for you?

We were quite disappointed in the way that the Henry’s Dream record came out. The production on it was dreadful, and that was primarily due to the fact that we brought in this David Briggs, Neil Young’s producer, an outsider, to come in and try and work with the group. And that didn’t work at all. And his kind of concept of what was supposed to be aggressive music and our concept of what was supposed to be aggressive music was completely at odds. And consequently the record’s quite gutless, I think. The versions we were playing live on the stage were really forceful and powerful. So, one of the reasons we did the live record was to remedy that situation. To show, basically, how the songs should have sounded, not the way that they did on the record. And also the group was at its most powerful now as a live group, so it just seemed like the right thing to do. I mean, I hate live records. You know, I’m not a big live record fan.

The first song on Live Seeds, ‘The Mercy Seat’, is about someone condemned to wait on Death Row. Throughout the song, the one saving grace, so to speak, the person has is that they never lied. Yet the sting in the tail of the song is that they indeed have lied. What were you trying to get across there?

I guess trying to say that nobody’s really innocent, that there’s no sort of judgement that’s final. The song is supposed to be about different levels of judgement. About him being judged by society and him after years of contemplation in the cell, judging himself. A sort of insanity coming into where he’s judging inanimate objects as being good and evil. And I think it was to do with the sort of hypocrisy of judgement.

“I began to warm and chill/To objects and their fields/A ragged cup, a twisted mop/The face of Jesus in my soup/Those sinister dinner meals/The metal trolley’s wicked wheels/A hooked bone rising from my food/All things either good or ungood” (‘The Mercy Seat’)

Your attraction to the dark side of life always reminds me of lines by W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction/While the worst are filled with passionate intensity” (‘The Second Coming’). Is it that you find more variety and passion in the darker things, than in the straight and narrow?

I’m just attracted, both in my writing and in my personal life, to dysfunctive kind of characters. I get on well with characters like that, and enjoy being with them. I tend to like people and think that they are good people simply because they are interesting. And what makes them interesting to me is their faults usually.

It would be easy to draw the conclusion from your work that you had a pretty fucked-up childhood. Was it as bad as some of the plots in your songs?

I didn’t have a fucked-up childhood in the sense that my parents beat me or that they were unkind to me. But I felt at the time that I was denied a lot of attention. And when I think about it these days, I don’t actually think it was true, but that was the way that I felt. And I tended to respond to that in the way all kids do.

You went into yourself?

I did that quite a lot, yeah. And I was also quite rebellious against my parents and everything else. I was constantly vying for attention and I did that in negative ways.

I also get the impression that you had a fairly strong Catholic upbringing?

No, I didn’t. I had a strong religious, Church of England/Anglican upbringing. It was strong in the sense that I had to attend church about three times a week, up until the age of about eleven, because I was in the cathedral choir in my town. But my parents weren’t strongly religious really. But I was forced to sit there and listen to a lot of that sort of stuff.

Was a song such as ‘Mutiny In Heaven’ a type of anti-religious exorcism for you?

By that stage I had ceased to have any fear of religion, so I could really say what I liked.

Were lines like, “If this is heaven/I’m bailing out,” not an indication that religion still remained some sort of dominant feature within your subconscious?

That song was more about drug addiction, I always thought.

But say lines like, “From slum church to slum church/I spilled my heart to some cunt behind a screen…”

(Laughs) That line is a bit kinda nasty, yeah. Yeah, I thought you were talking about that line. (Pauses) Yeah, I can’t remember what that song was all about. But I know that it was to do with a kind of spiralling drug situation that I was getting into.

You mentioned in the interview you did with Shane MacGowan that you had an Irish grandfather. Did you have much contact with him?

Did I say that? (Laughs)

So you’ve no Irish roots at all?

Well, I come from Australia. There’s a lot of Irish people in Australia. I think I was bullied into saying that by Shane or someone else.

Biblical/religious imagery has always been a strong element in your work. Could it be said that your very fascination with religion is an indication that mysticism or religion offers you a type of meaning that perhaps is difficult to find in other areas of life?

Listening to the stories from the Bible, I always found them incredibly fascinating; I was never bored by listening to the preachers talk about things like that. But I think as I re-acquainted myself with the bible around the time of writing the book And The Ass Saw The Angel I found it had more of an effect on me than I actually realised. Particularly the New Testament, and particularly the life of Christ tended to have a quite a strong effect on me when I was reading that again. I mean, I had a lot of trouble with the Virgin Birth, and I always had a lot of trouble with the Resurrection, but the rest of the story of Christ I find really . . . (Pauses)

Inspirational?

Inspirational, I would say.

There is a certain opinion, particularly in relation to popular culture, that variety of styles is a good thing. Yet, you stay strictly to a particular theme and style. It seems to be your belief that specialisation and dedication to a particular style will hone it into a rare jewel, that the more you tend the garden the better the fruit will be . . .”

(Laughs.)

…that the other approach of shifting between styles has the ‘jack of all trades’ danger attached to it. Would that be a correct evaluation?

I would agree with that. And I would say that the last thing I want to do is to pander to audiences or critics by feeling that I have to present something new each time I do something. You know, I have definite obsessions and there’s things I just can’t shake. And there’s things the more I write about them and the more involved I get in them, the more interested I get in them, and the more important they become to me. And consequently I continue to write about them. I just feel no compulsion to react to the ‘people have heard all this before’ . . . You know, I don’t think that would be being true to myself.

In a way it’s a very modern pressure. I remember once meeting a classical guitarist and the only style of guitar he would play was classical guitar, because he felt that if he played another style it would diminish his ability to reach for perfection within his classical style. But in the modern consumerist society, it seems like we have become addicts of style rather than lovers of substance.

One writer that I always think about is Samuel Becket, who I read a lot when I was younger. He just did exactly the same thing. He made a life’s work out of one point, one idea.

Your covers album was called Kicking Against The Pricks, and he had a book called . . .

More Pricks Than Kicks.

Was there a connection there?

No, that was one of the reasons why I wasn’t going to call it Kicking Against The Pricks, but I thought, fuck it anyway. I mean, it’s a line from the bible: “Must I forever kick against the pricks,?” Or something like that.

Is it of a certain importance to you to be recognised in your native country?

Yeah, it is important that I get some recognition from Australia and from Melbourne the city I lived in. And I do. And there is quite a strong following, a stronger following than there’s ever been. But, for me it’s always been the hardest place to do a concert, and I always feel the most nervous when I play there.

Would you say that you brought something uniquely Australian into your music?

Well, I think in my writing there’s a lot of Australia in there, simply because I grew up in rural Australia, and the first twelve years of my life were spent in small towns there. I have a sort of love/hate relationship with small town mentalities.

Did you have much experience of the Aboriginal people as you were growing up? Would their culture have influenced your work in any way?

No. I came from Melbourne. There’s Aboriginal people there but they’re Aboriginals who have been completely robbed of any culture. They’re a kind of a lost race of people, particularly in Melbourne. So no.

You covered Elvis Presley’s ‘In The Ghetto’ and paid a certain homage to him on ‘Tupelo.’ Did his music mean a lot to you while you were growing up?

Yeah. And it’s always meant a lot to me. I just saw the This Is Elvis movie on the television the other night, and he’s just amazing. I mean, his life story and what he went through and his voice, yeah it’s always been important to me. He’s a great source of inspiration and one of the best rock singers that has lived, as far as I’m concerned.

You also covered Bob Dylan’s ‘Wanted Man.’ Was he a big influence?

Yeah, he was a big influence. He still is. He’s someone who seems to pay a lot of attention to what he’s writing about. He seems to be head-and-shoulders above everybody else.

It could be said that Dylan, a man who for so long defined everything that was great and innovative in music, has hit a very fallow patch in his career. Do you sometimes worry that one day, your well may also run dry for a period?

I’ve always worried about that. All my creative life I’ve felt that sort of creative impotence was just around the corner. And I’ve always sort of struggled against that. The reason why I still make records and the reason why I work so hard on my records is through fear of that, basically. And I can see a day when it just gets too difficult and you just have to lay down . . . and that dry patch will come. Or that inability to do anything worthwhile will come. So far, it seems to be going OK.

Have you found it difficult over the years to draw a line between Nick Cave the artist, and Nick Cave the person? Could it be true that the fear which drives you creatively has meant that you have very little time to develop Nick Cave, the person, the father?

Yeah. I find I have very little time to do that. You know, when I look at my life I always see it in terms of Nick Cave the artist. I’m trying to do something about that but I just don’t get too much time. And I think that certain sacrifices have to be made, and I’m sort of coming to terms with that as well. I mean, if I wasn’t a father I would do a lot more, I know that. My output would be more. But I just have to concentrate more on what I do, and say no to a lot more things that I would perhaps have normally gone ahead and done. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s just being a little more selective.

If you go totally into your art, it costs in your personal life. So are you constantly balancing, constantly asking, ‘what’s the price?’ When does it become too much? Has it become too much? Is that something that worries you?

Yeah, it does. You know, I think that if someone is really, really involved in their work, then their personal life is bound to suffer to a certain degree. And I think as human beings they’re going to become retarded to a certain degree; they’re not going to develop the same way. I know that when I’m working or even when I’m touring and stuff like that, which is just incredibly time-consuming, my other life is just completely on hold the whole time. So I get far less time than a normal person gets to develop myself as a person. And consequently, as a sort of social person I’m quite dysfunctional in that way. And I think that’s a price you have to pay. It’s a bit like being a drug addict or something like that, where while you’re actually taking drugs everything is put on hold and nothing really develops. But you’re kind of happy in this little world. It’s a bit like that.

You can’t be an ordinary person and a star?

Well, it’s not necessarily to be a star. You have to work. And you have to spend an incredible amount of time on your own and in your own head. And there’s not nearly enough time to become a social sort of person, and to relate to other people. But that’s just part and parcel of the job. I’m not complaining about that. What I’m doing while I’m in my sort of artistic world is something worthwhile as well, so I’m not complaining.

How do you go about writing a song?

I actually write a date – this is when I’m going to start writing my new record. And throughout the year I’m kind of collecting ideas in my head. And then I begin it and everything gets put on hold. I’m doing it at the moment, actually. And I just start writing all the songs together. You know, I have eight ideas for songs or something like that, and they all start to get written together. I write a few lines for this one, and come back to it. And basically build them up all together. That’s why very often my songs are kind of tied together thematically.

Do you still test your new songs on your mother’s tape recorder to see if they measure up?

Yeah, I still play them to my mother, yeah.

And what does she think of them?

She’s great. For example, when I played Henry’s Dream to her, there was a kind of awful silence after it finished. And then she said, ‘Well, that kind of lacks dynamics, doesn’t it?’ — This was before we remixed it, actually. ‘What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t seem to be as dynamic as your usual records are’. And I’m going, Oh, God! I knew it. I knew that. It isn’t. So, ten minutes later I’m on the telephone getting a new engineer in, and setting up time to go in and remix it, re-do it basically. She’s great. She’s very smart and very on-the-ball about things.

You may balk at being compared to Meatloaf, but I was watching an interview with him recently and he was saying that he sees himself as an actor and that each song is his plot. It reminded me of you, because so many of your songs are like miniature film scripts. Do you approach your songs as an actor would approach a script?

No. These characters are all very much myself.

But it could be said that we never see the ‘real’ Nick Cave in your songs, that you are always someone else?

Yeah, I mean I think a lot of the lyrics are a kind of smoke screens in a way. I do hide behind my lyrics quite a lot. But I know, I guess I’m just not a very giving sort of person in that respect. I am a bit like a closed fist about things. Eh, but I think it’s all basically there.

Was there a specific artistic need that made you write your novel And The Ass Saw The Angel,?

Writing the book actually gave me an opportunity to get a lot deeper into those things and take basically the same themes but kind of descend with them a lot deeper than I can actually in songs, or was able to in songs.

A friend of mine described you to me as a ‘song and dance man.’ She said she could imagine you as a travelling seanchaí or bard in old Ireland or wherever, travelling the roads, entertaining for your supper and a bed. How would you relate to such a description?

I think that’s possible. I don’t know, you know. The ‘entertainer’ concept, I’m not exactly that happy with. It seems to make light a little of what I do, as if what I’m doing is for the good of other people in a way. What I’m doing is definitely primarily done for myself. And basically to understand what I think about things. And then I guess take these songs on the road and present them in a fairly entertaining way, but primarily the songs are done for me and not for the audience.

The first thing I bought of you was the Mutiny ep. Coming from a strict, rural, Catholic upbringing I found it very liberating. Sometimes I play your music to friends/acquaintances. Some react badly, saying what the fuck! That guy is twisted, and the likes. And I can understand that reaction. Yet something in the music says something quite different to me. It’s almost like you laugh at the darkness and somehow tame it or make it less fearsome. Is that one of your motives in dealing with the topics you deal with?

I don’t know. I just find that I start off a song and take it to its logical conclusion. And where I end up with these songs is where I end up. Where these songs end up seems to be the obvious place to me. I don’t know. It just really excites me to sit down and write about these types of situations and these types of characters. To write about violence and stuff like that just really excites me. I enjoy it.

Does the song take you like a spell? Or are you thinking, how far can I go with this character?

I’m not thinking, how far I can go with it. I basically feel that I have a point to make and that needs to be made. And this character is the right character to do the job basically. So I tend to start off and invent a character that I think is appropriate for what I want to say. And then that character goes about writing the song for me. It just tends to take the story where it’s going to go. And there’s a definite sense of humour in the inevitable tragedy of all my songs. I mean, I see that in a humorous way. That my songs always end up in defeat, death and anguish and stuff like that. The part of the humour of what I write is that everybody ends up that way, and every time.

I suppose for me one of the important things that attracts me to your work is the inventiveness of your language. You seem to me to have a great love for the poetry of words.

I do. I have quite a strong understanding of how powerful words can actually be, that it’s not actually what you’re writing, it’s how you’re writing it that’s important. And that it’s actually going to impress people. And I’m sure that’s what people really like about my lyrics. It not really what the story is but how the story is told. And I just have a very powerful love for the language of violence really. And that’s always in there. It’s in my love songs and it’s in just the straight murder ballads. It’s a love for the language of violence and the violence of language.

There is a great synergy in the music you make with The Bad Seeds, a special type of chemistry.

Finally I have a band that all seem to have an equal irreverence for music and performing and stuff that I myself have. They all have a really good feeling towards the overall atmosphere of something, rather than how tight things are actually played. That’s quite difficult to find in musicians. Musicians are generally very kind of finicky characters in a lot of ways. And the better they get the more careful they are with their music. The musicians I have are all excellent musicians but they create a real sort of rollicking, drunken ramshackle sort of sound that we’ve managed to create that’s perfect for what I want to put across.

With regards to your time with The Birthday Party, what was it that you would say differentiates its music from that which you made with The Bad Seeds?

The Birthday Party to me was just a pure kind of unadulterated expression of aggression and violence. And in that were its limitations, really. I just wanted to do something else. You know, I wanted a band that had the capacity to play very sentimental music if necessary, aggressive, violent music, if necessary, and anything in-between. And I think that’s what I’ve finally succeeded in getting.

It can be said that the artist can probe too deep into darkness, and that their work can become a source of enjoyment/thrills/

encouragement for certain sinister people. Do you ever feel that you walk a very dangerous line in dealing with some of the topics you deal with?

You can’t really allow something like that to stop what you’re doing. People are going to do what they’re going to do anyway. I’m not just shrugging responsibility for something like that off but you know it would be a sorry state for art if people worried about whether their work is too vivid or too whatever.

You lived in Brazil for a while. What did you find there, that you didn’t find in the West?

Well, I found people who were living under a far worse political, social, economic nightmare than this country would ever have experienced. Yet they are completely resilient, and maintain a kind of amazingly open and a sort of happy attitude towards things. That was really refreshing. I mean, maybe it’s that attitude that is the reason why the country is in such a state, I don’t know. But it was certainly refreshing to be around people like that. I mean, Sao Paulo is an incredible city. I think it’s my favourite city in the world.

You seem to have a strong friendship with Shane MacGowan. Do you see him as a sort of soul brother? That you’re following similar tracks, ploughing similar . . .

Furrows. (Laughs) That’s all your Irish . . . Your rural . . . Whatever they’re called?

Agricultural metaphors.

(Laughs) Well, I do. Before I knew Shane I always thought he was the best lyric writer around, really. Then we met. We found that we had various things in common . . .

Like Irish roots?

(Laughs) Those Irish roots, yeah. And, eh, so we’re very good friends now. And we’re planning on working on various other things together. This CRADLE thing, for example, I’m going to do that. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve no idea. I mean, I’m just getting up with Shane and singing three songs or two songs.

Shane MacGowan, for me, is probably our greatest living poet. Yet, he seems to suffer from this thing that has faced so many Irish artists: alcoholism. So many of our greatest artists drank themselves to death. Did you ever feel that you were following that path, indulging a kinda ‘death wish’?

Yeah, I did. I was a junkie for about ten years. I don’t know. (Pauses) I don’t think you need to be Irish to drink a lot. I think the Irish encourage it more. They like it more in their heroes a bit more. There’s a lot more romance built around it in Ireland, I don’t know. Seems to be a lot more tolerated in Ireland, doesn’t it? Seems like it is a requirement for your heroes to be . . . (Pauses)

I think that attitude is changing. Certainly I look at Shane MacGowan and I think, ah, what are we going to lose if we lose Shane MacGowan? All the great songs that’s still in him. But what would have driven you to drugs?

I don’t know. It would take a long time to actually sit down and tell you about that, and I don’t really have the inclination to do that. But, eh, there’s a million reasons.

When you look at your son, do you sometimes worry, and hope that he doesn’t do some of the things that you did?

No, I don’t feel that way. I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly wrong. I don’t feel that in my life I’ve necessarily set a bad example. I mean, I’ve taken a lot of drugs but I don’t necessarily see that that’s a wrong thing. I don’t even necessarily see it as a bad thing. I don’t see that from a moral point of view at all.

When we become parents many of us tend to become more conservative. And that the things which were ok for us to do, we wouldn’t like to see our children doing.

I wouldn’t be that concerned if he started using drugs. (Pauses) ’Cause I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with them. I’d be concerned if he sort of mistreated them, disrespected them. I’d be concerned if he started taking them in an obviously self-destructive way. But I don’t see anything wrong with taking drugs. You know, I lived inside myself for a long time, and I didn’t spend much time looking out at the world. And I didn’t really pay much attention to the situation I was in. And you’re forced to do that to a degree if you have a child. Simply because you have to pass on some sort of knowledge to your child, and it’s just not on to be completely ignorant about everything. So, I’ve had to open my eyes up a bit. And there’s certain places I made a decision that I wouldn’t live in with my child. Like America, for example. But, you know, I have a reasonably sort of optimistic overview of the whole thing.

So you look on life now in a more hopeful way than you would have before?

I think I’ve still got exactly the same troubles as I’ve always had really. And they’re internal troubles. And they’re basically a way of dealing with life which I could never really get the hang of particularly well. External things have changed. Like, I make more money now, for example. Or I have a wife and a kid. But I still have basically the same response and feeling towards the world that I’ve always had.

Do you think your child has helped you? Has opened doors for you that perhaps only children can open?

I think that that’s fair enough to say that.

You finished Live Seeds with ‘New Morning,’ perhaps your most optimistic song. It’s a beautiful song, a song about the journey through darkness into light. While re-reading the lyric, it reminded me of Lou Reed’s ‘Magic and Loss’. “As you pass through the fire, as you pass through the fire/Try to remember its name/When you pass through the fire licking at your lips/You cannot remain the same/And if the building’s burning/Move towards that door/But don’t put the flames out/There’s a little bit of magic in everything/And then some loss to even things out.”

Oh, that’s kind of nice isn’t it. When did he write that. Recently?

Yeah . . . I’ve this crazy thing written. I wrote it at four in the morning, so be prepared: Would I be correct in saying that your career has been one of going up to and staring into the flames. That in conquering the urge to put the flames out, you have inhaled the smoke and the fire . . .

(Laughs)

. . . and like some Native American wise man, have seen some visions?

(Laughs again.) OK, that’s fair enough.

Your music to me has never brought me down. I wouldn’t ever feel depressed by it.

Well, I can’t see how you could.

But a lot of people would.

Well, it’s just people who misunderstand it might feel that way. I don’t find it that way. And I know most people who enjoy my music don’t find it that way.