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In person, Nick Cave is remarkably tall and remarkably skinny. He looks healthy, but he has a vampiric sheen even at 10 a.m. Intimidating? Yes, particularly if you’ve heard tales of a junkie Birthday Party-era Cave giving interviewers a rough time. But meeting at Chicago’s Bin 13 (a trendy wine bar in the House of Blues Hotel) the day of a show, he pleasantly engages the interviewer over tea. Maybe that’s because we’re conducting business, and Cave has a strong work ethic—especially when it comes to his art. "I’m a worker. I get up in the morning and I’m at the office by 8 o’clock and I work," said Cave. But work on his next album has been sidetracked by a couple of film projects. One of them he said he’s not at liberty to discuss, but the other is a film called The Proposition that is set in Australia in the 1880s. "It’s taking up a huge amount of time, mostly sitting around, waiting for people to get back to you," he said. "I’m slowly learning that a screenwriter is pretty much the bottom part of the food chain in Hollywood. They’re not deal makers, they’re these people who sit in rooms and dream about things. They’re not taken that seriously, which is kind of extraordinary." He said he’s anxious to get back to writing music. "I’m really looking forward to having the freedom of going back and writing songs, which is what I was put on this world to do, not to fuck around trying to write a film script," he said. It’s one thing to write vividly about a guy sitting in an electric chair or an album’s worth of murder songs. It’s a whole different thing to write as vividly about common emotions like love. But that’s the direction Cave is traveling these days. "It’s deliberate. It’s to somehow make the ordinary dramatic and beautiful," Cave said. "They’re harder to write, but more interesting somehow." "I’m very much increasingly interested in the poets that are concerned with the ordinary like (Philip) Larkin and (W.H.) Auden. These poets have a huge influence. Especially Auden, who initially wrote about love as a transitory thing and that it was always exploding in his face and all of this high emotion, extremes of emotion. Then at some point he came to America and he started to write about spousal love. The poems became so extraordinarily effective because of that. He was writing about civic duty, duty to the community, these kinds of ordinary things. But the poems became so vivid because of it. "Auden talks about ordinary things, but these unexpected knee-jerk adjectives that he uses next to the noun that are so powerful and stuff like that. He’s the shit, man," Cave said.
"I’m certainly not trying to be the voice of the common man, you know what I mean? I guess I’m interested in making the ordinary extraordinary," Cave said. Cave’s most recent album, the gorgeous Nocturama, was recorded quickly on a tour break in Australia. The band recorded a batch of songs that Cave had written and then set aside, swiftly moving on to the next piece. That process gave the songs a raw, fresh feeling. Cave said that the material is still evolving on stage. "I guess should have learned this by now, but I think that very much our albums are the springboard for the live performances," Cave said. "The songs almost always become what they’re supposed to be in a live situation. And it’s difficult to understand that when you’re actually making the record, that what you’ve done there—which you’re usually very happy with—is going to pale in significance when you start to play it live. But they always turn into something else. "I think what happens with these songs is the drama of the song reveals itself in a live situation more than it does in the studio. In the live situation, you’ve lost the sense of what’s beautiful about the song and you’re no longer seduced by that. Then you start looking at the song properly. When you record a song in the studio, you go ‘Fuck, that’s really nice!’... Once you start playing it live, you forget that the song is beautiful. You start looking at the nuts and bolts of the song and how it can be more so, or more effective or more powerful." In fact, that metamorphosis might lead to a new approach for the next record. "I was talking with Warren (Ellis, the Bad Seeds’ violin player) yesterday about a different way of approaching the next record, which is to possibly to rent some 200-seater venue for a couple of weeks or something like that and have a residency there and keep playing the new songs to a very small crowd every night live to get them to that place where they should be before we actually record them," Cave said. "Having said that, there is something that I like about the recorded versions of the songs, because they are quite naked, they are quite vulnerable and unformed in a way, and that can create a different sort of beauty about them as well." Much of the beauty comes from Cave’s compositions, but much of it comes from his close interplay with his longtime band, the Bad Seeds. "I don’t dictate in the studio at all. I have a certain understanding of what I would like the song to sound like," Cave said. But the Bad Seeds have a tremendous amount of freedom to play. "We know each other and they understand how I want this song to be. I know that no one’s going to do an endless guitar solo, I know that I trust each member that they’re going to play something that’s kind of appropriate. But they pretty much do what they want to do, really. If it sounds too clattered, I’ll say it sounds too clattered. They’re free to do what they like," he said. That long-standing chemistry between Cave and the Bad Seeds was dealt a blow earlier this year when original member Blixa Bargeld left to pursue his work with Einstüerzende Neubauten. "It was very sad, the day that Blixa left," Cave said, his mood turning suddenly downhearted. "He’s a friend, he’s a great musician and he’s a great person to have in the studio. He has a certain way that he can cut through the bullshit with things and say ‘No, this is not right!’ or ‘This is good!’ and all of that sort of stuff. He’s very clear, and I’ll miss that element. But he felt that he was playing less and less and having less and less of an important part of the group over the last three records. Which, in a way, was true." Bargeld’s replacement in the Bad Seeds is James Johnson of Gallon Drunk fame, and in Chicago he fit in to the point that it was surprisingly easy to forget that Bargeld was missing (aside from the occasional overzealous audience member shouting "Blixaaaaaa!"). On stage, Nick Cave is part Elvis, part Jesus, part creepy preacher—perhaps the mad old buzzard the reverend of "Papa Won’t Leave You Henry." During the performance at the Chicago Theatre, Cave said to the audience: "I don’t know if you’re allowed, but you can come closer." And with those words, the packed house became a church. Fans processed to the front of the hall in an orderly fashion, like communicants on their way to receive a musical Eucharist. By the time he got to "God is in the House," he wasn’t telling the audience anything it didn’t already know. Not bad for a day’s work. |
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—Brian J. Bowe July 2003 |
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Photos by Polly Borland
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