Nick Cave |
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Tue. April 15.2003 12:00 AM EDT |
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Nick Cave: What a Way to Make a LivingMurder, infernos, fundamentalists – just another day at the office for the Bad Seed. by C. Bottomley |
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Nick Cave (Publicity) |
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It’s seven in the morning in the British seaside resort of Brighton. The milkman leaves several bottles of full cream at somebody’s doorstep. Kids make sure their pencil cases are in their rucksacks before heading off to school. Mom watches a little
Inside are a piano and a Mac computer. These are the tools on which Cave writes the songs he performs with his group the Bad Seeds. On the piano he constructs the skeletal forms that the band transforms into roadhouse rockers or overcast ballads. On the computer he writes his lyrics. They might be stories of love tender as an English garden or explosions of murderous rage. He might have lunch. He might read his book. He goes home at 5:30. It’s a far cry from the Nick Cave of legend. In the '80s, as the ferociously unpredictable singer of Australian punks the Birthday Party - who sounded like a wrestling match between a hysterical kangaroo and Iggy Pop - and field commander of the Seeds, Cave was on a mission to torture himself as no tortured artist has before. A reporter once saw the smack-addled singer on a London subway, writing lyrics with a bloody syringe. From such chaos came a remarkably strong body of work. During the past 20 years, Cave has traveled from the sound and the fury of the Seeds' debut to the composed narrative command of his hero Johnny Cash, who has covered the Aussie's electric chair saga “The Mercy Seat.” Cave's “Red Right Hand” made it on the soundtracks to Scream and The X-Files. Critics helped tout his arty achievements, and therefore his prestige. He fell in and out of love with Polly Jean Harvey. Cave's latest album Nocturama finds him perched on the edge of domesticity. There are ambiguous ballads like “Wonderful Life,” nostalgic reveries like “There is a Town,” and resilient thrashes like the 16-minute “Babe I’m On Fire” - where Cave invokes everyone from Picasso to the fish in the sea to “the slacker and the worker, the girl in her burqa” as the Seeds kick the music to life. Cave spoke to VH1 from his office about how he’s hoping to pick up an already blistering songwriting pace, why there’s something sexy about conviction, how his wife appears in his music, and meeting Johnny Cash. VH1: You recorded Nocturama in a week. Does getting at the songs so quickly affect your relationship with them? Nick Cave: It does. In a sense you face them for the first time. They’re immeasurably different than the way I write them at the piano in my office. They suddenly come alive in a way that I hadn’t imagined. When you’re recording as fast as we did, I don’t really get an understanding of the songs even after the record is made. It’s only in a live situation that I get inside the songs and understand them myself. VH1: You’re touring this spring. Have you started that process? Cave: We did a small live show as a launch for the band - and “Wonderful Life” became a ferocious thing, which was pretty exciting. That’s the beauty of keeping a song open - not getting to know it too well. The songs reveal themselves when you’re actually playing them. They take on a life on their own. When you finish a song, you look at the rest of the band and go “Hmm, interesting.” VH1: You’ve focused on the ballads over the last three albums. What is the appeal of a slow song? Cave: For me, they can move into areas that haven’t yet been defined. With the up-tempo songs, there’s nowhere else for them to go. It’s difficult to take “Babe, I’m on Fire” anywhere else. But when we played a ballad like “Wonderful Life” live, the whole meaning of the song changed. It became more aggressive, paranoid and frightened. It sounded really good! VH1: You’ve said you want to make an album a year for the next three years - what’s with increasing the work rate? Cave: The short answer is I go into the office every day and work. I don’t write more than anybody else, I just work more hours so I get more done. The long answer: The band has become frustrated with the length of time it takes to get from one record to the next. You have to do interviews, tour, then pull your head in for a while and choose the right time to make the next record. You tend to shy away from taking risks because if you f*ck that record up, it’ll be six years between a good one and the next good one. We decided that if we put out records faster, we would be able to approach them in a more light-hearted, playful manner. It’s healthier. VH1: The album has a lot of songs about love under fire. Was that a way of dealing with the world events that have happened since the release of 2001’s No More Shall We Part? Cave: I’m not a hermit, but part of me leading a satisfactory life is having a place of solitude, like my office. There I need to enter the world of the imagination that is an alternative to the world outside. Part of that is not to seriously bring current events into my writing. It’s essential for me to lock myself away from the world artistically. Music, personally, is an escape. When I put on a record I know I can enter into another place. That’s an incredibly powerful thing about music. VH1: Your own work has its own share of religious fanatics, though. Have they gained a political relevance? Cave: They may have accidentally. I’m not fond of the religious fanatics that have come up in my earlier stuff. Obviously, there’s a religious element to all of the songs - hopefully, not a fanatical one. Although fanaticism is attractive sometimes. There’s something about conviction that I find somewhat sexy. VH1: Is that because you’re interested in a life that’s lived with rules imposed from without? Cave: I am. I tried to become involved with established religions, thinking my spiritualized ideas would be systemized in some way. But I never could. I tried and then felt like running away and screaming. I impose rigid rules on myself. My whole life is disciplined in a way. But the self-imposed rules exist for a purpose, and I live by them. I find it very difficult to do what other people tell me to do. It’s either my fatal flaw or saving grace - I can’t tell which. VH1: So do you keep your New Year’s resolutions? Cave: I never make them. VH1: Does your wife feature prominently in the Nocturama love songs? Cave: Yeah - she moves in and out of the songs. VH1: Do you play your music for her? Cave: Yeah. She loves what I do to a fault. If there’s any conflict, it’s when she can’t recognize herself in the songs - like, “Who the f*ck is that?” VH1: Your songwriting regime sounds pretty disciplined. Do the live appearances, with their unpredictability, counter that for you? Cave: The regime I work under in the office is completely unique to the rest of the ways in which things work. That’s essential. It’s mostly about the time I commit to what I do professionally. I come in at seven in the morning and leave at 5:30 in the afternoon. There’s nothing in here but a piano and what I write on, so there’s nothing else to do. On tour, we don’t really rehearse. If we do, it’s only for about two days to decide what songs we’re going to work on and attempt to play them as a group in different versions. We’ve been playing for a long time and it seems to lock in pretty quickly. VH1: In spite of the changes in your career, do the fans still expect the “Bloody Nick” persona from the early part of your career? Cave: Probably less and less - those ones have progressed on to Marilyn Manson or something like that. I don’t know where they’ve gone. We seem to get a lot of young people as well which is quite interesting and strange. It’s difficult to say, really - I don’t even really think about it. VH1: You sang “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” with Johnny Cash on his new album The Man Comes Around. Did you get to meet Cash when you recorded it? Cave: I went into the studio with him. I got a call from Rick Rubin saying Cash is in town, “Do you want to sing a song with him?” I said “What song do you want to sing?” He said “Any song you like.” We sat down and sang the Hank Williams song in two takes. It was the first time I’ve ever met him. VH1: What kind of impression did you get from him - did he become more human? Cave: Well, I always suspected he was human. He’s a hero of mine but he’s very much the way I thought he would be - brilliant and an extremely generous-natured character. I had a sleepless night thinking “God, I have to go in and sing with this voice. How am I going to do that? I’m an ant in his massive shadow.” But immediately, I was put at ease and it was a pleasure to do it. VH1: Does seeing him make you wonder what you might be like at 70 years old? Cave: I hope my relationship is the same his is with music. It has the capacity to revive you. Here is a man who is weakened with age, but as soon as he starts singing, you wouldn’t know it at all. I saw this with Nina Simone as well, a few years ago. She had difficulty getting to the piano but by the time the concert ended, she was pounding it. She was completely rejuvenated. It was an extraordinarily exciting thing to see. |
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