Happy Birthday, Nick Cave!

Happy Birthday, Nick Cave! The Australian musician, writer, actor and more was born 60 years ago today. Back in 2003, Hot Press sat down with him to talk name-drops from Irvine Welsh, settling down, and his "mate' Bill Gates. Read the full interview below.

Good days at the office: Interview with Nick Cave
From dark age to middle age, Nick Cave is such a far cry from the blood-spilling junkie of rock legend that these days you’re likely to encounter him commuting to his 9 to 5. Except of course that his job is writing and making music, his new album is called Nocturama and there are, he admits, some sizeable blow-outs in the memory banks.

That was a strange one outside hers when she caught me looking up at the stars. I gave that quote from a Nick Cave song and I thought she called me a cunt. I didn’t realise that she was referring to Kant the philosopher. I even called Renton up about it. He reckons that Cave lifted that line verbatim from a Kant book. What the fuck is the world coming to when your favourite lyricists let you down with such shoddy plagiarism? – from Irvine Welsh’s Porno (2002)

Up until today Nick Cave hadn’t been aware that he’s prominently namechecked in Irvine Welsh’s hilarious Trainspotting sequel but, now that hotpress has just mischievously broken the news, the Australian singer and writer seems highly amused to hear that some of his lyrics feature in Simon ‘Sick Boy’ Williamson’s repertoire of killer seductive lines.

“Really?” he laughs delightedly, momentarily sitting up and furrowing his impressively high brow in surprise. Then, catching himself somewhat, he relaxes back down into the couch, re-ignites a half-smoked roll-up and regains his cool composure. He’s still smiling though.

“No, I wasn’t actually aware of that,” he chuckles through a cloud of smoke. “Probably nobody had the courage to tell me about it, but there you go. ‘Kant’ as ‘cunt’, eh? That’s really funny. I’ll have to get my hands on a copy.”

And how does Mr. Nicholas Edward Cave plead on the charge of “shoddy plagiarism.” After all, the line in question – “The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” – was originally penned by the German philosopher before being, em, Nicked for a track on 1997’s lovelorn masterpiece The Boatman’s Call.

He rolls his eyes and sighs in mock exasperation. “Look, what happens is I have notebooks and you write down this stuff all the time – ‘Oh, that’s nice, I’ll have that’. And this stuff feeds itself into songs and then after a while you’re thinking, ‘Oh fuck, was that me or was that someone else?’ And if it’s really good, it’s probably Kant (laughs).

“Actually, we were going to call one of our albums Kant, just because we thought they’d have such difficulty marketing it. You know, the new album from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Kant!”

Presumably it was this same perverse streak that led you to title your latest record Nocturama…

“No, I really like that title,” he insists. “There was a bit of a dispute over it. What happened was I had a song called ‘Nocturama’ which didn’t make it onto the record. It was a beautiful song but it just didn’t happen for some reason or other. And I liked the title. But when I told the record company that I wanted to call it Nocturama they were like, ‘Please don’t!’ (shakes head wearily and laughs). You know, ‘We’ve spent ten years trying to get rid of the dark thing and now you’re going to call it a place where you keep the bats! Please don’t do it!’”

Needless to say, Nick Cave did it anyway. Now aged 45, the country boy from Wangaratta (a small town outside Melbourne) has stuck resolutely to his artistic guns thus far in a chequered cultural career that’s encompassed music, film and literature. At this late stage, he’s highly unlikely to change an album title just because somebody in Mute’s marketing department doesn’t approve. For a musician who’s only ever breached the Top Ten once – with his murderous duet with fellow expat Kylie Minogue ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’ – Cave has an enviable amount of control over his artistic output. And if he wants to call his new album Nocturama, then that’s damn well what it’ll be called!

Despite what he says, though, you can’t help but suspect that the rebellious schoolboy in him is sniggering at the sheer obviousness of the title. According to my dictionary, a nocturama is an artificially controlled habitat in which the cycles of day and night are reversed to accommodate creatures that only come out at night. As Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ album titles go, then, it sounds about right – entirely in keeping with such previous dusk-till-dawn delights as Murder Ballads, Tender Prey and Your Funeral, My Trial.

Ironically, though, the Bad Seeds’ eleventh album proper contains what’s probably his lightest and most accessible collection of songs to date – with drunken preachers, sodomite serial killers, harelipped sluts and knife-wielding carneys all conspicuous by their absence. In fairness, there is a “drug addled wreck with a needle in his neck”, a “rapist on a roll” and a “demented young lady, who is roasting her baby”, but they all appear, amongst a cast of literally hundreds, in the same song – the 15-minute/40-verse album closer ‘Babe, I’m On Fire’. A wild, sprawling and totally nonsensical stream-of-consciousness epic, the song will undoubtedly be a bitch to play live, but isn’t particularly representative of the album as a whole.

In fact, it’s hard to tell which tracks are. ‘I’m On Fire’ and a couple of other thumping rock tracks aside (notably the hilariously black ‘Dead Man In My Bed’ and first single ‘Bring It On’), Nocturama is mostly composed of slow ballads and devotional love songs, so tender, loving and true that they’re virtually unrecognisable as the work of the strutting, snarling, Old-Testament spouting frontman of The Birthday Party and early Seeds.

Time has obviously been good to Nick Cave – and made him a nicer person to boot. No longer self-loathing, no longer drug-addicted, no longer heartbroken, no longer angry at the world, the leather-clad, gothic-punk iconoclast of the early ’80s and black-suited, dour, doomed, romantic of the ’90s is now telling us that “It’s a wonderful, wonderful life/If you can find it.”

Nick Cave has definitely chilled-out. He’s successfully made the transition from Dark Age to middle age, stopped kicking against the pricks so much and found himself a wonderful life (not to mention a wonderful wife, in the shapely form of former model Susie Bicks, whom he married a couple of years ago). For fuck’s sake, the man’s even wearing blue denim jeans in his press shots! Five years ago this would have been about as unthinkable as him mentioning Bill Gates in a song. But he’s only gone and done that as well! And yes, that’s Bill Gates, the nerdy-looking Microsoft founder, not Bill Gates, the one-legged, glass-eyed, seventh bastard son of a seventh bastard son.

It happens in the third verse of ‘Babe, I’m On Fire’: “My mate Bill Gates says it/The President of the United States says it/The slacker and the worker/The girl in her burqa says/Babe, I’m on fire.”

“Well, what happened was someone sent me a photograph of Bill Gates in his office and he had a big Nick Cave poster stuck on his wall,” Cave explains. “That’s why it’s ‘My mate Bill Gates’ in the song. But I was very happy to put Bill Gates in there. He gives a lot of his money to Africa.”

We’re sitting, sipping sweet tea from styrofoam cups, in a large and comfortable room behind the balcony of Bush Hall, a beautifully restored old ballroom halfway down the Uxbridge Road in west London, that will later play host to a stripped down Bad Seeds gig. Tonight will be the first public airing of the new songs and, in honour of the occasion, Cave has left his denim casuals at home and is rather more traditionally attired in black cords, a green velvet jacket, pink shirt and tie, and pointy cowboy boots.

He looks great – smiling, relaxed, healthy and, judging from the colour of his eyes, as drug-free as a Westlife aftershow. It’s a far cry from the self-obsessed junkie of old who, according to rock legend, used to scratch out his lyrics with a syringe full of his own blood. And a near cry from the maudlin, alcoholic wreck of the mid-’90s. Fingering his gold wedding band, he admits that he’s happier now than he’s ever been, but when I mention that he’s come a long way from his dark days in Berlin and London, he smiles wryly and comments, “Well, they didn’t seem so dark to me.”

Of course, there’s always been a lot of rock & roll mythology surrounding the shadier side of Nick Cave but, having encountered the man on various occasions over the last decade, I can testify that he’s never been this courteous and friendly. In fairness, I’ve always liked him. I just never got the impression that he particularly liked me. Famously contemptuous of the music press (he once wrote a song called ‘Scum’ about an NME reviewer and has physically attacked journalists in the past), today he appears to have changed his tune somewhat, and seems more than happy to talk.

2003 being the twentieth anniversary of the Bad Seeds formation, I open by asking him what’s been the highest point of the last twenty years.

“Personally? Well, I sang a song with Johnny Cash and that was one of those things that happened and they’re kind of rare in life though I guess they happen for everybody – where something has just happened and no matter what anyone fucking says or whatever, it’s happened – and no-one can ever take that away. Even though that was in the middle of a tour and I was just invited to come down the next day and sing a song. I asked what song he wanted me to sing and he said ‘just anything’. That was probably the high point.”

Did you like his cover version of ‘The Mercy Seat’?

“I loved it, yeah” he enthuses, running a hand through his jet-black hair. “Other people doing the songs is really exciting for me. I wrote a song for Jimmy Scott this year and he seems to really like it and wants to record it. You know, that’s some kind of benchmark for me – other people wanting to cover my songs and do their own interpretations. Especially when they’re people I really admire. Of course, the weird thing is that I’m completely divorced from it. I have nothing to do with it. It’s just something that happened, they’ve done it, they can’t undo it, and I really feel honoured.”

Nocturama was recorded over just seven days last March in Melbourne’s Sing Sing studios and produced by PiL/Talking Heads knob twiddler Nick Launey – who first worked with Cave on The Birthday Party’s 1981 single ‘Release The Bats’. Cave doesn’t see a week as being unduly fast, remarking that he can’t understand bands who spend months upon months in the studio (“What the fuck are they doing in there?”). Having played and recorded together for two decades, the band have undoubtedly learnt a few studio short-cuts by now anyway. It probably helps as well, that Nick ultimately calls the shots and there’s little or no arguing over mixes.

“Democracy is too slow,” he declares. “The way it seems to work with the Bad Seeds – and we’ve been together for a long time and the whole thing changes all the time – but it seems that people know very much what their role is, both in the studio and out. And sometimes their particular role is at the forefront and sometimes it retreats and the whole thing kind of goes like this (waves hand up and down). If there’s a managerial decision to be made, Mick Harvey seems to float to the top… or whatever. We all have our different roles to play.”

Who’s responsible for quality control ?

“I think that Conway [Savage] is very sharp on that. You know, he’ll sit up there with his glass of wine and make his comments. And they’re very astute. I’m more, ‘Is this alright? Is this alright?’ That’s what I’m constantly saying. Warren [Ellis] is very much about the truth of the music, and that’s the way the Dirty Three are as well. You know, ‘this is the one that we did and maybe this one’s technically better, but this is still the one we should use’. He’s kinda like that. Mick is obviously more pragmatic about things. But it really depends.”

Although their influences aren’t immediately obvious, Cave claims that he was listening to a lot of Bob Marley, Neil Young and Nina Simone during the writing of the new songs. He’s pleased, if a little dubious, when I mention that, at times, the album is also strangely reminiscent of the quieter moments of Dylan’s Desire.

“I dunno,” he says, pulling a doubtful face. “We certainly didn’t go into it with that in mind. I mean, there is the violin, of course, but that’s been there for a while now. But there aren’t many people that I like being compared to, and he’s one of them… so cheers! I’m quite happy to be compared to Bob Dylan. It’s certainly nice for me to hear because basically something that I have tried over the years to get rid of, that I can’t seem to shake, is that I have a very low self-critical idea of what I do.”

Is that not just part of every creative artist’s burden? That guilty feeling that you’re fooling everybody and not really as good as people think you are?

“Well maybe it is,” he shrugs. “I mean, I actually quite enjoy reading my lyrics. I can open up one of my books and read through the lyrics and think ‘well, that one’s good’ or ‘that one’s not so good’ or ‘that’s a great line’ and all that sort of stuff. And the novel as well [Cave’s 1987 novel And The Ass Saw The Angel] . As much as I can see the faults in it, I’m still proud of it and can open it without breaking into a sweat. It’s just hearing myself that I find… disappointing. Mainly because I don’t play my stuff and I always remember it from the studio as having been so good. I always have this feeling in the studio of, ‘This is the best thing ever – wait till they fucking hear this!’ and all that. Just an all powerful feeling that always goes when I hear the finished album.

“I mean, I haven’t listened to Nocturama since the day we agreed on the mixes. And I’m not usually that brutal about it but I just know that it takes me quite a long time to recover from that disappointment. This is not that I think the records are shit, or that I don’t think the records are any good, it’s just an intrinsic feeling when I hear my own stuff that it’s… (pauses). I can see the shortcomings of it – and that takes me a really long time to recover from, to get it up again and start doing another record. With this one I decided that I wouldn’t listen to it back and I’d just carry on writing.

“So at the moment I’m just in the studio. I’m writing another film script at the moment but basically I’m also writing the next record which we’re planning on recording this year. We’re gonna try and put out three records kinda fast on top of each other and see how that goes.”

Any idea of the feel of the next album yet?

“I don’t know what the next record is gonna be like, I’ve no idea. I’ve written two or three songs and they seem to be kind of up-tempo-ish, but I don’t even know if they’ll ever get there.”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. In stark contrast to the songs on the Bad Seeds’ last album, 2001’s No More Shall We Part – the bulk of which tended to be long, wordy and ever so slightly overcooked affairs – the songs on Nocturama are much sparser and looser. At times, the lyrics are so comic that they’re almost throwaway, like on the soulful ‘Right Out Of Your Hand’ when he sings, “Please forgive me/If I appear unkind/But any fool can tell you/It’s all in your mind.”

“I think that’s largely because they were written much quicker than I normally write,” he explains. “I usually write something fast and think ‘that’ll do, that’ll do’, and I’ll fix it up later. As long as I can get some kind of structure to sing and make the song up with, then I let it go and sort it out later on. Which I always intended to do with these, but once I’d gotten all the songs together and was playing them, I was thinking ‘these are fine’. There is something quite direct about them. If I had taken them back to the desk and worked on them a little more, I probably would’ve added something or made some of them a bit kinda cleverer or something.”

Not that he thinks the new songs aren’t clever. Although Nocturama isn’t by any means a radical departure in terms of songwriting, it could never be accused of being badly crafted. He’s certainly made better albums in his time but, then, even an average Nick Cave record is a cut above the rest of the competition. He’s aware of the importance of putting the work in and wary of relaxing his standards.

“I think in the music business you’re kind of encouraged to just slowly start writing under yourself, and you see that that does just as well, or it does even better, and you just keep dipping like this (lowers hand). Because it takes quite an effort to sit down and write a really meaningful song. And it’s not that hard to write one that sounds like it means something even, and you can get away with that. There’s actually a lot you can get away with.”

What keeps you writing to a high standard?

“I guess looking at my heroes – people like Neil Young, Dylan, Van Morrison, and watching the way that they’ve gone really. And knowing that it’s possible to just maintain a certain level. Then again, some of these people have dipped and dived. In fact, all of them have dipped and dived!”

Are you playing to any kind of career gameplan? Do you know where you’re going to be at in ten years time?

“Em… not really,” he avers. “I just wanna be in it for the long haul. Really wanna try and see if I can hang in there. In the way ‘O’Malley’s Bar’ hangs in there, you know.”

Do you think you have an Astral Weeks or Blood On The Tracks in you? A perfect record that’s a summation of all your experience?

“No, I don’t see myself doing a record like that – sadly. I don’t see myself as being that kind of artist. I just know from experience that it never really happens. These are records that can’t be surpassed and I don’t see myself ever doing that. I do see that there’s a possibility that I can just keep on making good records and that there can be some argument in maybe ten years time, as to whether this last one is as good as this one ten years later. There’s potential for that to happen but I don’t see that I have it in me to make an Astral Weeks. Sadly.”

You’ve always mined your private life for lyrical material and some of your songs are a little like diary entries. Albums like Let Love In and The Boatman’s Call charted the disintegration of your relationships with Viviane Carnerio and Polly Harvey respectively and, on Nocturama, you’re obviously singing to Susie on lines like, “The best thing I done/Was to make you the one/Who I’d walk with down to the altar.” Could that be why you don’t tend to listen to your own songs? They’re either too painful or too personal?

“Em… I don’t wanna get too bogged down with this, you know,” he says, shifting uncomfortably. “I do feel proud of what I’ve done in some general way. I was reading a Radiohead interview, and the singer’s girlfriend or someone like that told him, ‘Be proud of what you do and don’t look back’. Which was really the most intelligent thing that was in the interview. But it really struck home that, because that’s basically the way I feel. I am basically proud of it, but when I look at stuff in detail all I can see is the flaws and the shortcomings. That’s why I don’t tend to listen to them. But I think what we’re doing with the product and the outcome isn’t so important to me as the actual process. The process is much more important.”

The process for Nick Cave is one of steady routine these days, and has been for a couple of years now.

Currently living in East Sussex with his wife and twin baby boys, he keeps an office separate from his home in the seaside town of Hove. Every morning at 7am, he kisses his wife and kids goodbye, and drives the short distance to his workplace – a large, airy, white-panelled room with a view of the sea, containing a piano, a Hammond organ and a word processor. No matter how he’s feeling, he always works a full day – office hours – not returning home till after 5pm. He claims to do it in order to spare his family the trauma of watching him go through the frustrating ordeal of songwriting and literary creation.

“I also find the routine of going in every morning essential. I find that if for some reason I can’t get in in the morning and I go in the afternoon, nothing really comes, I just don’t know what’s going on. And it just peters out as the day goes on really, so by the night-time I don’t have a fucking thought left in my head.”

Any sign of another novel?

“Well, I would really like to write one,” he says. “It’s actually the same as writing an album in that you just go in an office and do it. But there’s always something else to do. And it’s a lot of time to put aside. It’s not something that you can do as a sideline. I mean, I’m on my second script and that can be done as an extracurricular activity.”

There’s certainly a lot less description involved…

“Yeah, you don’t have to worry about language so much. It’s just kind of telling a yarn through dialogue.”

Cave’s first completed film script, The Proposition, is currently being developed by Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead director John Hillcoat (who also made the videos for ‘Bring It On’ and ‘Babe, I’m On Fire’) and should hopefully be going into production in the next year.

“They’ve got the money and they’re just trying to get the right actors now. It’s set in the 1880s in Australia and it’s a fictional story about Australian bushrangers – who were the Australian/Irish outlaws. It’s very funny, very violent and very sad, in equal parts.”

Any plans to appear in the film yourself?

“No,” he says bluntly. “I’ve no interest in acting anymore.”

Whatever extracurricular projects Cave does involve himself in, he probably won’t be doing them for the money. He’s made a comfortable living over the last decade and could probably easily afford to retire by now. The last time I interviewed him, around the time of Murder Ballads in 1996, he had just turned down an offer of £200,000 from a Japanese cigarette company, feeling it would be an abuse of his muse to allow his music to be used in an advertisement. He hasn’t changed his stance since…

“I would never allow a song of mine to be used in an ad,” he declares. “There’s a certain song, which I don’t wanna point fingers at, but it’s on a car ad of some sort at the moment. And this is a song that I used to listen to back in Australia with my mates – we’d be pissed out of our minds, we’d be in a car and we’d have that cranked up and we’d be all singing it, and it’d be ‘fuck you’ to the world! You know, it was our great fuck-you anthem to everybody, to all that sorta shit! And now it’s on a fucking Toyota ad or something like that.

“It’s demeaning and I feel quite betrayed by that. Is nothing sacred? I mean, I know everyone has their reasons for doing things and I’m not standing on my high horse about it, but just from that level of people – people who don’t need the money. I would find it difficult to listen to that song again in the same way.”

At the same time, he understands that people have their reasons and isn’t too quick to judge them for it.

“People have gotta make a living and stuff as well. I understand those kind of things. I’m sure there are many reasons why people do these things, but at the same time… Anyway, so far I haven’t done that or needed to do that. There may be a million reasons why people need to do that. It’s not really for me to look at why other people do it but from my point of view, so far, it’s not something that I’d consider doing.”

Cave would appear to be keeping his options open, however…

“You can get someone who says we’re just gonna use three minutes – or one minute or thirty seconds – of your music and they give you two hundred grand. And they’re gonna use it in Japan. There might be a day when you think, ‘ah, fuck it – why not?’ (laughs).”

Although he won’t allow his music to be used in advertising (currently, at least), Cave has no such qualms about using himself. In the early ’90s he appeared, surrounded by naked lap dancers, in a fairly lewd ad for infamous porn magazine Hustler.

He chuckles when I mention it. “How’d you see that? I have done an ad for Hustler, yeah. That was quite funny. I did an interview for Hustler once actually, years ago. I got a phone call saying they wanted to interview me. This was in The Birthday Party days and I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah! I’m being interviewed by Hustler! I’ve finally made it!’ And I said something about certain journalists being perverts – you know, meaning it as perverts of the written word or something like that – and the Hustler guy was going, (adopts American accent) ‘Which of these journalists are perverts – and what do they do?’ I was going, ‘Em, I think you might have picked me up wrong!’”

The girl from Mute sticks her head around the door and informs Cave that some of his fellow Seeds have just arrived, and he’s now wanted downstairs for the soundcheck. “Gimme five more minutes,” he calls back to her, before profusely apologising for his imminent departure. “Sorry, I’m gonna have to go and do this. What else do you wanna know?”

Loads! So with the clock ticking…

Do you read the newspapers?

“I do read the newspapers, yeah. And sometimes it is difficult not to write about what you read. Especially these days. But at the end of the day, I don’t know why but I just don’t want to drag it all in there.”

Were you more affected by the Bali bombing than by 9/11?

“No more than anyone else really. I don’t really know what to say about that. For Australia, they basically would not have been prepared for that kind of thing. It would’ve been very difficult for them to understand how something like that could’ve happened to them. But from my point of view – I guess from being over here a bit – I can understand it, but I don’t really wanna get into it.”

There’s a song on Nocturama about wanting to return to Australia…

“Yeah. But there’s another thing about Australia on ‘Babe, I’m On Fire’ which goes, ‘The cattleman from Down Under says it/The patriot with his plunder says it/Watching a boat full of refugees/Sinking into the sea’. And Australia really does have some fucking vicious racial policies. It’s kind of understandable that there’s a lot of resentment and they’re not exempt from the hatred of these people.”

What’s your relationship with God in the light of all of this global turmoil?

“Haven’t we talked about this before, a few years ago? My relationship with God now is still the same.”

Even though you’ve now got children?

“I’ve got two 11-year-old boys – who aren’t twins! – and twin two-and-a-half-year-old boys, so I’ve had children for a while.”

Does your belief in God influence the way you raise your children?

“It influences everything. It influences everything because I’m not sure how I could cope with things if I did have a different belief system and, uh… that’s pretty much it.”

Have you read the Agnostics at all?

“I have, yeah. I’ve read a lot of stuff. Actually, I was moving offices and unpacking boxes which hadn’t been unpacked for four years or something like that. And I was just pulling out these books which I can barely remember reading, but they’ve all been read – they’ve all got notes written all over the fucking place. And they’re all basically books on the Christian texts really. Which I don’t read in that way anymore. I just did for some years – that’s all I read I think. I can’t really remember.

“The sad thing about that is I can’t actually remember reading much of that stuff. I mean, I had a few other things going on at the same time (laughs wryly), which affected my memory very much and which is, em, unfortunate really. I could’ve become some kind of scholar of that sort of stuff, but I’m not.”

Is your memory still that bad?

“Yeah, I have big gaps. There are huge areas I just can’t recall. This is a perfect example. Taking boxes and boxes and boxes of these bookses. Ha! Bookses! And putting them on the shelveses and just looking at them. There was hundreds of books there and they’d all been annotated and had cigarette holes burned in them. And the pen kind of trailing off…”

Do you find that your fame makes it difficult meeting people on a real level?

“I rarely meet people on a real level anyway.”

Do you find friendships difficult?

“Not the ones that I already have. I have a handful of friends and they’re very dear to me. But I don’t find myself constantly meeting and making new friends. I don’t feel the need for it really. I have a few that I’m in constant contact with – mostly by telephone I have to say – and my family and my work – and that seems to do me alright. And I have my children.”

Actually, no offence, but I find the idea of you doting over children quite hard to imagine. Do you often find yourself doing ‘daddy’ things?

“Yeah, well I’m a dad,” he laughs. “Of course I do ‘daddy’ things! But I draw the line at fucking kicking a football around and stuff like that. In fact, I draw the line at anything where I have to change into some other outfit.”