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Did Nick Cave find mainstream success — or did it find him? Two decades after
the spook-haired, heroin-addicted sybarite of the Birthday Party formed the
Bad Seeds he was in a Brighton cinema watching Shrek 2 with his twin
sons Arthur and Earl when that very question occurred to him. He knew that
one of his songs had been cleared for use in the film, but he couldn’t
remember which one, or in which context.
When the moment came — on the song People Ain’t no Good —
Cave saw himself recast as a pirate playing a piano with his hook. “I tried
not to take that as a personal slight,” he says of his moment of comforting
a lovelorn ogre with a wind problem.
In truth, it’s probably a little of both. If you added up the body count on
every Bad Seeds album released since From Her to Eternity it would
rival the Plague. But somewhere along the way he also got better at the
piano and — in the likes of Straight to You and Into my Arms
— came up with a succession of truly superlative love songs.
The mainstream responded graciously, allowing him to score his first Top Ten
single, when he duetted with Kylie Minogue on
Where the Wild Roses Grow , a song about bashing her head in with a
brick. The offers of work, he says, are constant and rarely restricted to
music. Most are turned down.
He tried his hand as a novelist, with
And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). It was well received, but he didn’t
feel the need to follow it. Screenplays are a greater source of excitement.
He wrote the script for The Proposition
(2005) — John Hillcote’s western set in his native Australia, and this summer
shooting will begin on his second screenplay. Also directed by Hillcote and
starring Ray Winstone , it’s a seaside comic drama about a salesman who
sells hand cream door to door. “If that seems surprising,” he says
preemptively, “it shouldn’t. My songs have always had a sense of humour. If
you can home in on life’s absurdities, it helps.”
As it happens, life has thrown up no shortage of absurdities on the day we
meet. For the purpose of a video shoot we are sitting in the flat above a
disused East End pub where exotic birds fly free. There is no bedroom, just
a mattress set into the roof space. Found objects and bric-a-brac account
for a smell usually found in Welsh junk shops.
Cave stoops to avoid the rafters and goes in search of someone to meet his tea
requirements. “I’d like half a cup of hot tea,” he tells Pauline, the
“guerrilla artist”-cum-landlady of what now functions as the Mad George
Theatre. “If someone could actually manage that down there.” She asks why he
wouldn’t prefer a whole pot. As though it were the most natural thing in the
world, Cave replies that his preferred quantity would be just half a cup,
straight out of a kettle: “Not in a pot — just an English breakfast tea. A
half-cup, with a bit of milk.” Pauline says she’ll get someone to come up
with it.
Back in the days of the Birthday Party this was the sort of place Cave might
have called home. Anyone who has heard the dissolute garage blues of his new
project will know that it’s a fitting place for that too. Though
recognisable as Bad Seeds, Cave and his cohorts — drummer Jim Sclavunos,
violinist Warren Ellis and silent bassist Martyn Casey — are here as
Grinderman. The name change, says Cave, is emblematic of their new modus
operandi. Cave has taken leave of his piano and, for the first time in his
career, picked up a guitar.
The songs that resulted from this new way of working seemed to reawaken
something that many had thought lost in Cave. Take, for instance, No
Pussy Blues , a first-person account of the humiliation encountered by a
rock star who deploys every trick to get a fan to sleep with him. As his
group hammers out an explosive punk simulation of sexual longing, Cave
fumes: “I sent her every type of flower/ I played her guitar by the hour/ I
patted her revolting little chihuahua/ But still she just didn’t want to.”
These spurned advances — are they imagined or autobiographical? “I am a
happily married man,” comes Cave’s response, and he details a touching
episode of a couple of days previously in which he and his wife Susie danced
alone in the house to — who would have ever guessed this? — Ain’t
Nobody by Chaka Khan. Years ago, however, when one-night stands were
part of being a “working” band, Cave experienced “no problems in that area”.
It’s tempting to say that Grinderman represent an absolute return to the
macabre catharsis of his first serious band. In fact, they’re a more
intriguing prospect than that. If you imagine the Birthday Party as a feral
delinquent child, misunderstood by everyone in the village, Grinderman
represent the moment the miscreant’s estranged father rolls into town.
Each is fully explainable with reference to the other. Well, that’s the theory
I put to them at any rate. Staring into his cup of tea, Cave (whose own
father died when Cave was 21) ponders the notion a little more literally
than was perhaps intended. It helps, in this instance, that the raven-haired
preacherman of our postpunk yesterdays is a big fan of the BBC One
child-rearing “strand” Supernanny .
“Perhaps if there had been some sort of musical naughty step 25 years ago, the
Birthday Party might have been a different band,” deadpans the 49-year-old
singer. “I hasten to add, though, that my parents were very liberal and
encouraging. I’m much harder than they were.”
With Cave relinquishing what he refers to as “the old Nicktatorship” of the
Bad Seeds, the input of his fellow musicians assumed a commensurately
greater significance. It was Ellis who suggested that Cave pick up a guitar.
While Cave was passing through New York, where Sclavunos lives, the drummer
took him to his favourite guitar shop. Within weeks, says Ellis, “I was
getting phone calls going: ‘Listen to this!’.”
He musters a decent approximation of satanic power-chords crashing out of a
receiver. “It sounded great.”
Acquiring a level of virtuosity on the piano had, for Cave, become a mixed
blessing. “When I sit down at the piano, I’m naturally inclined to go from
one chord to the next one and, after a while, you get into these patterns.”
I point out that John Lennon’s Imagine is a famous example of a
song written by someone just beginning to find their way around an
instrument. Cave is anything but flattered by the (unintended) comparison.
“Well, he probably should have learnt it better and then he would have
written a better song.”
For one other member of Grinderman the chance to experiment with new working
techniques couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Both in the Bad Seeds and
his own band, the Dirty Three, Ellis is known for his sweeping, cinematic
violin playing. This time round he got to indulge his passion for medieval
music. Not that you would know it if he didn’t point it out to you. Although Get
it On is built around a lute theme from the 12th century, the finished
article is something more akin to Iggy Pop and the Stooges aping a chain
gang in fierce crosswinds.
Where does a musician go if he wants a meaty 12th-century lute riff to
bastardise? “It’s mostly Sting records at the moment,” says Ellis, a laconic
swipe at Sting’s recent excursions into 16th-century lute music. Not that
anyone in the room has heard them.
“If Sting made a good album in 2007,” I ask, “would any of us be man enough to
admit it?”
Like a bored Old Testament God trying to get comfortable on his cloud, Cave
momentarily attempts to work out what he thinks of Sting. “Look,” he finally
exclaims, “Sting has probably got an enormous amount to offer the world. It
feels to me like he’s on some kind of journey to discover exactly what that
is. And I guess he just hasn’t got there yet.”
“Message in a Bottle — you can’t deny that’s a great song,” I
say.
“That has a dramatic arc and a pleasing denouement,” concedes Cave.
We ponder the notion that songs are messages in bottles, thrown out into the
world where all sorts of unforeseen consequences ensue. Cave points out that
not all “bottles” necessarily end up where you would like them to. By way of
illustration, he recounts two episodes. Recently he was at home in Brighton
watching TV, only to be confronted by a snatch of Breathless — a
highlight of Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus , from 2004 — being
used on Jamie’s School Dinners . “You think: ‘Is that what I
think it is? Oh no.’ ” He shakes his head at the thought of such a
soul-bearing declaration of devotion being used in tandem with mothers
lovingly feeding their children Big Macs through the school railings.
The second one dates back to the 1999 fortnight at the South Bank when, as
that year’s Meltdown curator, he assembled a wishlist of his favourite
artists. “That was when I met Nina Simone. She summoned me to her room and
when I arrived she was sitting there looking enormous in this wheelchair,
with Cleopatra make-up and a look of utter hatred for me.
“I went ‘Hi’ and she said: ‘I want you to introduce me! But
I want you to get it right! I am Dr Nina Simone.
“Which annoyed the hell out of Germaine Greer, who was also on that night. She
sneered: ‘Well, it’s obviously an honorary doctorate.’ ”
At the far end of the candle-lit room, the video’s director — Cave’s
long-term collaborator and the director of The Proposition , John
Hillcoat — appears. It’s time to shoot another scene downstairs. This may or
may not turn out to be the bestiality scene the two had been discussing.
Just before Cave leaves, I suggest that some of his fans might be surprised at
the picture of his life that has emerged. The Chaka Khan moment; the family
outing to see Shrek ; Jamie’s School Dinners ; Supernanny
— it’s a lovely picture, but one at odds with Cave’s current project.
Suddenly, Cave adopts the chillingly friendly air of a man who could press a
button on his phone and have you cremated by teatime. “Let’s make a deal
between you and me, shall we? This Supernanny / Jamie Oliver stuff.
Let’s just keep it like a one-liner or something like that, eh? Rather than
trying to weave it through the story and conclude with: ‘There he is. Let’s
put him on the naughty step!’
“Please. Can you do that for me? It’s just that . . .” The
debauched Dionysian cock-rocker of Grinderman puts his empty teacup on the
floor, next to an even tinier budgerigar dropping “ . . . I can see where
this is heading.”
No Pussy Blues is released by Mute. The album Grinderman is
released on March 5
This is not an interview. It's merely an opportunity for the interviewer to indulge in his narcissistic conceit. Poor Nick Cave.
Clive O'Mahoney, Watford, Herts
I trust that as a Brighton resident Nick qualifies as the major British act that we are waiting to be announced as the headline band for the Isle of Wight Festival this summer!
If not, then perhaps Grinderman next year?
H, Isle of Wight, UK
Fantastic interview, Nick Cave is a true legend.
Just one pedantic point, isn't Supernanny a Channel 4 programme?
Mic, London, England