In an exclusive Irish interview, Cave speaks about how stability in his private life has served his art, film collaborations with John Hillcoat, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and a brief encounter with Bob Dylan.

Tennessee Williams once said that life is a fairly well-written play, except for the third act. Nick Cave might yet prove the exception. The last half-decade has seen the 50-year-old songwriter, screenwriter, film scorer, novelist and occasional actor shrug off any intimations of autumnal slump and revel in prolificacy.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Nick & the Bad Seeds’ 14th album, crowns a period of creativity that includes 2004’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus set; The Proposition – a bushranger western directed by John Hillcoat, written by Cave and co-scored with Dirty Three violinist and Bad Seed Warren Ellis; last year’s snaggletoothed but sad-eyed Grinderman project, plus the score for Andrew Dominik’s Oscar-nominated The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt and featuring a cameo by Cave.
That’s not counting scores for a handful of stage productions, the as yet unproduced screenplay for Hillcoat’s melancholic sex comedy Death Of A Ladies Man, and a stab at Gladiator II which came about after Russell Crowe read The Proposition script and recommended Cave to Ridley Scott. One is tempted to quote the runaway John Harper’s incredulous observation of preacher Harry Powell in Night Of The Hunter: “Don’t he ever sleep?”
It’s almost ten years to the day since this reporter first interviewed Cave in the Mute offices in London. Back then, undertaking press duties for the Bad Seeds Best Of, he was apt to answer questions like a man under oath, carefully selecting his words lest they indict him for some awful crime, or worse, be quoted back at him at a later date. When we catch up with the singer at home in Brighton on a bright and windy March morning in 2008, he’s positively jaunty. The stick-thin Shakespearian delicate of yore now sports ’70s medallion man chic and a ’tache to offset the dyed black receding hair. It’s a look only Cave could carry off without risking ridicule. When our conversation is interrupted by the return from school of his seven-year-old twin boys Arthur and Earl, he dispatches them with the robust good humour of a seasoned working dad.
It’s rare you’ll find Cave at home on a weekday. Usually he sticks to a fairly strict working regime, confining his creative impulses to the office he rents a short walk from his home. That productivity – and the often unbridled nature of his most recent music – is a repudiation of Byron’s nonsense about the baby carriage in the hall being the enemy of art. If anything, his modus operandi, as borne out by both the Grinderman and Lazarus records, suggests Flaubert’s oft quoted line: ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life like a bourgeois, so you can be violent and original in your works.’
“Yeah, well, it feels a little like that,” Cave concedes, a tad reluctantly. “But at the same time it feels like that undermines a certain part of my life that I actually find really interesting, which is outside of my office. There’s too many pat conclusions that are made about what goes on with regard to me for my own liking sometimes, without going too much into that. Certainly there’s another part of me that, when I get down into the office, there’s something that’s sort of screaming to get out. It feels necessary for that to emerge in order to lead the kind of life that I’ve chosen to live. But it’s also the other way around: in the more chaotic times, let’s say, 15, 20 years ago or whatever, I was able to write some of the most delicate and spiritual songs that I’ve ever written. There’s a kind of need that’s being met in the writing process that acts as a sort of ballast to your life.”
Does he have to block out the idea that the wife and kids might ever listen to some of his more hardcore stuff?
“No, you know, it’s actually not about that, it’s about what gets written about my life. I find that aspect of it difficult, because huge liberties are taken, and it’s not even the truth, y’know? It’s not even the truth. And this has an effect on the way other people see me and my kids. It has some tangible effect on their lives, and y’know… I fuckin’ hate that. But they do listen to my records, and they think they’re funny. And on one level there’s a sort of childish streak that runs through a lot of what we do that they respond to, that they don’t respond to listening to a Joy Division record.” (laughs).
So they’ve spotted what critics have had trouble getting their heads around for the last 20 years?
“Exactly.”
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is less a resurrection than a culmination. 1997’s masterpiece The Boatman’s Call was followed by a four-year recording hiatus, the longest of Cave’s career. In that time he managed to finally kick his various addictions, married model and actress Susie Bick, and enforced a church and state divide between his creative and home life.
The first fruits of this new regime, 2001’s No More Shall We Part, was a collection of ambitious, elaborately arranged songs that were exquisite in isolation but too rich to be consumed in one sitting. 2003’s Nocturama was a bottleneck record, as the band sought to reclaim the spontaneity of earlier albums with mixed results.
The departure of longtime Bad Seeds mainstay Blixa Bargeld that year was crucial. The Berliner, an avowed anti-rockist, had arguably become more of a roots music conscientious objector than musical contributor in the band. The breaking point came when they were recording a version of bluesman JB Lenoir’s upbeat shuffle ‘I Feel So Good’ for Wim Wenders’ Soul Of A Man.
“I didn’t get into rock ‘n’ roll to play this rock ‘n’ roll!” Bargeld protested, and soon left the fold.
It was just the kind of shake-up the band needed. Seeking a faster, looser working module, Cave decamped to Paris in spring 2004 for a songwriting binge with his sidebar touring ensemble, nicknamed the Little Seeds (Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos), later to become Grinderman. Those sessions freed Cave from the constrictions of writing piano ballads in his office and allowed him to bang out rambunctious gospel, blues and the occasional pure pop song, improvising lyrics and melodies without feeling self-conscious about the content. The result was Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. Featuring the London Community Gospel Choir, it was their best album to date, and set in motion a four year domino effect: Orpheus begat The Proposition which begat Grinderman which begat Jesse James which begat Lazarus.
“Abattoir Blues seemed like a really brave record for a band of that age to make at that point in time, because you can get stuck so much in the mythology,” Warren Ellis told me in November 2005. “There’s so much mythology around the band, particularly around Nick, and trying to move things is really a commendable thing to do, I think. That tour was really great ’cos it was big and wild and kind of unwieldy in many ways, and we played only songs off that album for the set, not just pull out the chestnuts.”
In Bargeld’s absence, Ellis had expanded his musical armoury to include bouzouki, mandolin, mandocaster, guitar and loops. It was also Ellis who encouraged Cave to play guitar in the Grinderman set-up, instigated the no-piano-or-songs-about-God rule (hence titles like ‘No Pussy Blues’), and has in recent years become the singer’s main co-conspirator and musical foil.
“I don’t really know how to explain that except, since Blixa left, Warren has been able to move in a different way than before,” Cave proffers. “Blixa was basically in charge of noise, and Warren was brought in initially to play the aching violin, and I think with Blixa gone he was able to take on that role. Warren got rid of that aspect of the violin as quickly as possible, because we’d used it a lot. I don’t think he played the violin at all on this new record.”
In fact, on Grinderman tunes like ‘Electric Alice’, and just about every song on Lazarus, it’s hard to tell what he’s playing.
“Yeah, what Warren gets up to is a mystery to all of us,” Cave chuckles. “We all record together, live, and there needs to be sight lines, we need to be able to see each other to construct the journey of the song because we don’t learn songs in a traditional way. But Warren, as you know, hunches over, and so you often just see his back, and there’s all this sort of pedal action going on down on the floor, so you can’t actually see what he’s doing, and he works very intuitively, he’s not one for being particularly interested in where the verse is and where the chorus is anyway, so you kind of end up with a song and you go, ‘What the fuck is that?’ or ‘Where did that come from?’ He’s really amazing. And when you’re collaborating like this, I guess you just egg each other on. There’s a certain amount of bluff about the whole thing, how much you can actually fit in, and no matter how exhausted you are, to say, ‘Well let’s do this now,’ type of thing. There’s a certain perversity about our relationship that seems to work quite well.”
And both men are very similar in character: magnetic, restless individuals who might be said to have replaced their addictions with workaholism.
“I’ve got two kids now,” Ellis told me, “and I’ve set up a little office around the corner that I can go and work in. It’s the only answer actually, sitting down and working. It was great for me to move away from the Dirty Three and start working with Nick more, doing music for an adaptation of (Georg Büchner’s play) Woyzeck, which was performed in Iceland. And doing the soundtrack for The Proposition was very creative because we were one step behind the editing process, time was running out. We’d get it and a few days later it’d be changed, so nothing could be solid: ‘Here’s five seconds, let’s do some, y’know, exciting music.’ If you come up with something that’s really good for the film and it doesn’t work, you have to be prepared to let go. That’s really healthy. What is it directors say? The first thing you do is cut your favourite scene. And the music was great like that, ’cos we were working at such speed. In six days we did something like eight CDs of music, just non-stop bashing shit down. It was fantastic.”
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! was the product of similarly feverish industry, recorded in a couple of weeks in London last summer. It’s an album that crackles with surrealist comedy, sex and violence, in which the unwillingly resurrected Lazarus acts as a spirit guide through the imaginal nightown of 70s New York. If the Cockney Rebel nod in ‘Nature Boy’, the blaxploitation-flavoured ‘Desperanto’ contribution to Marianne Faithfull’s 2004 album Before The Poison, and the Grinderman project telegraphed a new playfulness at work in Cave-land, then Lazarus tears up the rule book, incorporating dark funk grooves on the title-tune and ‘Moonland’, groovy Mysterians organs (‘Midnight Man’), No Wave white noise (‘Albert Goes West’), Stooges bump ‘n’ grind (‘Today’s Lesson’), The Modern Lovers (‘We Call Upon The Author To Explain’) and Cohen-esque love poetry (‘Jesus Of The Moon’).
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Bad Seeds records were like the reverse negative of Des Esseintes’ residence in A Rebours, hermetically sealed universes designed to shut out all things shiny and synthetic in order to preserve their own stark aesthetic. Now they’ve let the filthy modern tide in, and they sound invigorated by it.
“It’s that dreaded wah-wah pedal!” Cave deadpans. “Do you mean that there’s a lot of contemporary elements in it?”
Exactly. The lyrics are almost a kind of absurdist journalism.
“Something happened around the writing of ‘Today’s Lesson’, which was early on. It kind of pointed a direction lyrically for most of the record for me. It felt like the opportunity to create a different kind of world. I don’t think it’s necessarily a realistic world, in the same way David Lynch maybe deals with the modern world, but you wouldn’t call it a realistic world. Not that it’s Lynchian. It feels like a peculiar kind of world. Planet Cave!”
Lazarus’s jump-cut narratives, particularly the closing ‘More News From Nowhere’, also seem to acknowledge mid-60s period Dylan, the speedwritten surrealist manifestos of Highway 61 and Blonde On Blonde, which Cave had previously bypassed in favour of the simplicity and directness of John Wesley Harding or Slow Train Coming.
“I could never understand what he was going on about!” Cave laughs. “But y’know, I don’t think that those records are actually much of an influence. We’re certainly not referencing them when we’re talking about what we’re doing, saying, ‘Hey, that’s cool, that sounds like Procul Harum,’ or something. Funkadelic or Miles Davis, fair enough, but lyrically, we’re just not reaching there. Although I think with Dylan, he’s the prototype of a lot of this kind of lyric writing, he’s the original. And if you go into abstracted narratives and stuff like that, you can’t help but go there.”
Cave and Dylan had a largely non-verbal encounter at Glastonbury in 1998, in which they expressed a mutual admiration for each other’s work but not much else. Has he subsequently managed to have a proper conversation with his Bobness?
“No, we just had a kind of mutual boot-staring competition.”
Somebody told me there’s a very simple rule with Bob: if the hood’s up, don’t talk, if the hood’s down, you can talk.
“Is that right? Oh, how wonderful! Well, his hood was up. God I wish… if only… I’ve gotta think of something like that.”
Shades?
“Shades, yeah right. But that means you have to sometimes not wear shades though!”
‘More News From Nowhere’, like many of the Lazarus tunes, operates under a sort of bizarre dream logic, the juxtapositioning of slapstick and horror. Does Cave write stuff down when he wakes up?
“No, I do dream, I mean we all dream, and I do remember them when I wake up, but I don’t really trust people who write down their dreams. There’s nothing worse than someone telling you their dream, right? It may mean everything to the teller and nothing to the listener. In fact, what’s his name… aw fuck, the American writer who’s quite old now and still churns out books? John Updike. His one was, ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader.’ I can very much understand that. I would say there’s a dream logic in the sense that it feels like – and this was very intentional – as soon as I felt I knew where the song was going lyrically, I would change the direction of the song so that it created this kind of crazy trajectory.
“And the record should be viewed as a whole. An old fashioned concept, I understand that, but for me this particular record should be seen in its entirety as a kind of patchwork of images that play off one another. I think because of the way things are listened to now, it feels important for some people to hold out and not just let go of the fundamental ideas behind the actual making of a record, that it should be an identity unto itself. A good record always is.
“If you look at the first 10 Bowie records or whatever, they have an absolute identity, and that’s their strength. They were attempts at creating different worlds unique to that particular record, and they had a logic to the placement and arrangement of the songs. And this is something that’s being lost due to the way a lot of people listen to records now, through the internet and downloading and all that sort of stuff. I mean, you have to adapt, you’re always adapting. We adapted to the CD age, and that was a whole different way of valuing music, a general undermining of music in a way, and once again it’s happening, only in a much more radical, much more complete and total way.”
As a result, Cave is doggedly sticking to the notion of an album as a complete entity to be experienced like a novel or a film rather than a repository of songs to be plundered piecemeal. Mind you, recent experiences of composing to film cues have rendered him decidedly unsentimental in the editing process. He writes at length so that he can cut with impunity.
“It kind of feels like some actors who want to have as much information about their characters as they can before they perform those few simple lines they’ve got to perform,” he explains. “There’s an exhibition of my stuff in Australia, the written lyrics, and it was kind of a surprise to me because I forget I do this kind of stuff – there’s something about the song ‘Red Right Hand’, and they show all the peripheral stuff around this particular song, there’s kind of maps and fucking little essays about what the town looks like and there’s all sorts of shit that obviously doesn’t end up being in the song, but it somehow makes the song more real. So when I sing ‘Red Right Hand’ live, I have an extremely strong visual environment that this song operates in, in my head.”
Speaking of strong visuals, in the first lines of ‘Moonland’, Cave removes the song’s central event, thus adding to the mystery: “When I came up from out of the meat locker/The city was gone.” Something awful has happened, but we don’t know what it is.
“I don’t want to get too much into what the song’s about,” he deflects, “but an extremely effective way of creating a sort of mystery in a song is to edit almost at random. Especially in a song like that, where you’ve got a narrative, and I write them very long, there’s four times as much lyric-writing as you actually get, and I record the whole thing. We’re sitting in there, and we’ve played it, and the first question is not, ‘How good is it?’ but, ‘How long is it?’ They’ll say, ‘It’s ten minutes’, and we’re usually going for songs under four minutes if we can make it, so I just start hacking away at it very quickly, even though I’ve spent weeks and weeks over the writing of this particular song.
“And if I do it fast enough I’m not really sure what I’m doing in a way, so that when you sit back and listen to the song, especially some days later, when you can remove yourself, it’s like: ‘Fuck, what is this song about? It’s about something different now.’ And it’s kind of exciting. You feel almost a kind of spectator to your own stuff. But when I’m doing that editing thing, I’m not ploughing through my best lines, I’m not doing it with a blindfold on, it’s not pin the tail on the donkey or something like that, I know what I’m doing. Some of the songs I allow to get expansive in the writing process, because I know I’m going to end up hacking away at them anyway.”
That concealment of the trigger event in ‘Moonland’ is akin to Cormac McCarthy’s last novel The Road. Both are located in a nuclear winter resulting from an unspecified catastrophe, and the omission of information haunts the reader.
“Yeah, there’s a flash of light that’s mentioned, I think.”
The line is, “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” It gives me a chill every time.
“Yeah, it gives me a chill to hear that too. Is that what he says? ‘A series of low concussions.’ Oh, that’s beautiful!” (laughs)
Is it true John Hillcoat had to put Cave’s screenplay Death Of A Ladies Man on the backburner when he was offered a chance to direct The Road?
“He’s filming it as we speak. Death Of A Ladies’ Man was written because he wanted to go straight into making another film after The Proposition, and we went for a low budget English film for practical reasons, because he lives in England and he could do something fast. So I wrote him this, which is basically set outside his door where he lives in Brighton, and I live in Brighton too. It was a low budget movie. He wanted to do that while the Hollywood stuff he hoped would come in came in, which it certainly did.
“But in fact to fund this film, which was considerably less money than any of the other stuff, was an absolute fucking nightmare. So it didn’t get made and John got offered The Road. And he had a very difficult decision, because he really likes this film we wrote, and he invested a lot of his own energy into the script as well. But anyway, now he’s making The Road, and we’re doing the music. It’ll star Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.”
Is there any talk of his screenplay for Gladiator II ever being published?
“I don’t even know where it is!”
Good heavens – such blithe disregard for weeks of work!
“I’ve become increasingly less precious,” Cave concludes. “I mean, I never was precious, in the sense that I could be very brutal with editing because the work had been done. And that’s way I feel about the actual recording of a record. Once the record is done, once it’s mastered, I’m not interested in it in the same way as I was when I was actually making it, I no longer feel connected to it in the same way. Whereas for the week or so it took to record it, it felt like a life and death thing. And then suddenly it comes out and it’s just another record – you’re onto the next thing.”

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is out now on Mute/EMI. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Dublin Castle on May 3, as part of Heineken Green Energy.