Hot Press Meets Nick Cave

It’s early on a mild June Monday morning in Brighton. Sitting in a comfortably furnished room in his spacious period home near the seafront, Nick Cave is pondering some of the great changes that have occurred in his life over the last few decades.

30 years ago or thereabouts, the Australian expat punk rocker was living in a dingy Berlin squat, hopelessly addicted to heroin, and living his life gig by gig. From scabs to riches. Fast forward to 2013 and, at the age of 55, he’s looking far better than anyone who knew him back in his artistically tortured Berlin days could ever have reasonably expected.
It’s not just the impeccable tailoring. Still stick-insect thin, with a full head of long jet-black hair, and healthily suntanned face, he seems to have weathered his lost years (including extended sojourns in London and Sao Paulo) incredibly well. Undoubtedly, this is largely down to the fact that he’s been clean of hard drugs since the end of the last millennium. He’s also allegedly teetotal and, more recently, has reportedly quit cigarettes as well.
“Well… the smoking is a bit of a work in progress,” he admits, with a guilty smile. His other addiction issues are pretty much old news, and not worth wasting our breath on today. After all, there’s a summer of music ahead, including an appearance at the highly rated – and growing – Body & Soul festival in Ballinlough, Co. Westmeath. In his current Zen state of mind, it may well be the perfect place to
see him.

There was once a troubled time when Nick Cave routinely ate music journalists for breakfast (even penning a song called ‘Scum’ about an NME hack who’d displeased him), but he’s mellowed considerably in recent years. Of course, this is probably because “Britain’s greatest living Australian” – as the Independent recently dubbed him – has nothing left to prove. Always prolific, he’s the widely-acclaimed auteur of 19 albums (the bulk of them with longstanding collaborators The Bad Seeds), two novels and two films, and the recipient of numerous awards, critical plaudits and honorary degrees. Happily married to English model Susie Bick since 1999, he is the father of four boys – twins with Bick, the other two born to different mothers on different continents within a fortnight of each other (which presumably required some awkward explaining).
Given the decadent, peripatetic, occasionally violent and often impoverished rock ‘n’ roll life he’s lived, there must now be times when Mr. Nicholas Edward Cave looks around himself in mild disbelief and starts to hum a classic Talking Heads song…
“What? Like, ‘This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife”?’” he laughs. “You know, I was never given to speculation or looking into the future at all. I had no ambitions. I still don’t have ambitions, despite the way it looks. Most of what happens to me is accidental. I’m often asked that question – how would the younger Nick Cave feel about the older Nick Cave? – and, to be honest, the younger Nick Cave never thought about things in that way. So I really don’t know how to answer that.”
A couple of moments later, he seems to change
his mind.
“I think that I would be… impressed,” he reflects, “by the work. Just the amount of work that I do. And right back, when I was very young, that always interested me. I came out of art school and I wanted to be a painter. It was always that idea of locking yourself away in a room and working on something in a solitary way that I found very exciting. And I guess I’ve kind of applied that to my rock ‘n’ roll life. So even though I do live in a very nice house, and I have a beautiful wife, my working habits are largely the same as they ever were.”
Released a couple of months ago, his fifteenth studio album with the Bad Seeds – minus guitarist Mick Harvey, who departed the fold in 2009 – is the somewhat portentously titled Push The Sky Away. Was he conscious of the fact that it was the first record made without a single original Bad Seed left in the line-up?
He pauses before replying: “No, that didn’t really register with me. You know, some of the members have been in the Bad Seeds for so long anyway – Marty [bassist Martyn P. Casey] and Thomas [Wydler, drummer] and stuff – that it doesn’t feel different or anything So I didn’t really take that into account.”
The last Bad Seeds record was 2008’s scuzzy Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Between that and the making of this new album, he released the sophomore Grinderman record – not so imaginatively titled Grinderman 2 – in 2009. Formed as an artistic side-project with Warren Ellis, Casey and Jim Sclavunos, he has previously stated that he did it as “a way to escape the weight of the Bad Seeds.”
How important was Grinderman to the feel of this new album?
“Hugely important,” he acknowledges. “Grinderman were not a vanity project. It had a huge impact on where everything went, and it had a huge impact on the Bad Seeds. In fact, in my view, it saved the Bad Seeds. Or at least extended the life of the Bad Seeds. Some members may not agree with that, but I think that way.”
Of all the Bad Seeds, he has collaborated most closely with Warren Ellis in recent times. Although the Australian multi-instrumentalist – not to be confused with the gonzo graphic novelist – first came on board for Let Love In, Cave told an interviewer that he couldn’t actually remember his appearance in the line-up until 1996’s Murder Ballads. The singer was still doing smack at the time.
“Yeah, I’d feel bad about saying that,” he deadpans, “but I don’t think he remembers me singing on it either. None of us were in great condition.”
Push The Sky Away was recorded with producer Nick Launay at La Fabrique, a famous recording facility based in a beautiful 200-year-old chateau in Saint-Rémy de Provence, where the walls of the main studio are lined with a priceless collection of
classical vinyl.
“It was amazing,” he enthuses. “I like recording but I don’t really like studios. It’s a place where you’re supposed to be creative and there’s something very uncreative about some studios – very sterile, with bad lighting and all that sort of stuff. And this place was very, very beautiful and kind of old and soulful and, you know, it actually affected the sound of the record considerably. We were sad to leave.”
La Fabrique is a residential countryside facility, which allowed the band to remain in situ for the duration.
“It was a three weeks residential situation, and we just loved it. I mean I don’t think any of us had had a studio experience like that before.”
While three weeks is a relatively short amount of time to spend recording an entire album, Cave maintains that the bulk of it was done in just seven days.
“We recorded it all in the first week,” he insists. “The second week, we kind of listened to it back and started putting overdubs on it, and then the third week we took them off again.” He laughs heartily. “More or less, that’s what we did. We found the more that was put on to these songs, the more it would detract from something that was essential about
them. And so we kind of went back to the original recordings.”
While all of the lyrics had been written in advance, the songs were only properly formed during the recording process.
“Yeah, the lyrics were definitely written, although they weren’t edited,” he recalls. “So I go in knowing there’s a lot more that will come out. Some songs are very long and I edit them as I sit at the piano recording stuff. The pieces of music we had were… the basis of things were done but Warren and I have a policy about songs in that once there is the lyric and the vaguest of ideas, we put that song aside and we don’t look at it again until we are in the studio. We never consider it, we don’t look at it or add overdubs or think of alternate melodies or any of that other stuff outside the studio.”
In the studio, they recorded a number of songs in just one or two takes.
“It is literally done within the first take or the second take and the band don’t know the song,” he explains. “The band aren’t really that familiar with the song when they’re playing on it. Something like ‘Higgs Boson Blues’, for example, is more or less a loop no-one has heard before and I have never sung to. I laid down that vocal and the bass and that sort of stuff all in one take. And so we don’t know how that song goes or how it eventuates. You can lose something when everyone understands the workings of the song.”
It seems quite an unusual approach…
He shrugs. “It’s just the way that we tend to record these days, in a way that the recorded versions of the songs become springboards for the live versions. Maybe we should do it in a different way, but that is the way we tend to do it.”
All nine of the album’s songs took form in a special shellac covered notebook – a facsimile version of which comes with the deluxe edition.
“Yeah, this one had a symmetry about it because, a couple of days before I started writing the record, I received from a friend of mine in Sydney, Gillian Bird, a kind of bespoke notebook she had made for me, because she makes notebooks. I had complained to her about certain things in notebooks that tend to irritate me. One is that they don’t sit open on the piano and the pages flap and it’s quite difficult to play the piano and look in the notebook unless you use one of those awful spiral notebooks
which I hate.
“So she developed a particular kind of notebook that would do that with a spine and I was very excited about that. And it did have a special cover that was lacquered: there’s a whole lot of detail that someone who’s into that kind of thing gets very excited about. And so I had that book on day one, starting the writing process.
“It took about a year or whatever to write the record, but I was able to only use that notebook – and another one she sent me as well,” he continues. “So the very workings of the songs from the absolute beginnings through to the end are there in that book, and we reproduced that book in a box-set. It’s edited, but once the songs had kind of arrived somewhere where I thought, ‘There is the song!’, I typed the song out on blank pages of old books that I tore out and stuck them into the notebook. Once the song was typed out and stuck into the notebook, it wasn’t touched anymore. I felt it had arrived and should be kept that way. So the book ended up being very much an anatomy of how the song comes about.”

Dark, slow and moody, Push The Sky Away is up there with the very best Bad Seeds albums, with some of the songs bleeding directly into each another. For example, in an interesting riff on reprises, ‘Finishing Jubilee Street’ opens with the line, ‘I had just finished writing ‘Jubilee Street’…’
“I always sit down on a particular date and start writing the record,” he says. “The date’s in my diary, it’s not something that I start when I feel like it. I start on a particular day, whether I like it or not, and the songs tend to get written that way. So I’m always going back and forward to the different songs. I’ve always written like that, so similar themes and even characters and scenarios do tend to bleed into other songs and there’s echoes from one song in the next song or in another song. And it has always been like that, but this one is particularly so.
“The references in‘Finishing Jubilee Street’ happened for two reasons. One: I thought that ‘Jubilee Street’ was going to be a big song, it just felt like that to me, and I decided I would mythologise it before it came out by writing a song about that song.”
Cave’s lyrics are often apocalyptic, violent and biblical. However, ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ also references the discovery of the subatomic particle by the Large Hadron Collider (admittedly alongside images of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson meeting Satan, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and Disney starlet Miley Cyrus floating in a swimming pool). Is he as interested in science as he is in God?
“I have an interest in anything that can give me a song?” he smiles. “Yeah, I have an interest in everything.”
Somewhat surprisingly for such a literary songwriter, he’s used text speak to title the album’s first cut, the ominous ‘We No Who U R’. Does he use such bastardised language when sending messages himself? “Yeah, sometimes I do,” he admits. “I’ve always been rather excited by it. Not that I use it much, but I have always found something exciting about kids taking control of the language – and making it their language. I’ve always thought this is a positive thing.”
Did he take the song title ‘We Real Cool’ from the famous Gwendolyn Brooks poem?
“No, I didn’t actually. Although having said that, I read a lot of poetry and although I don’t remember that poem, I’m sure I’ve read it – in which case it has no doubt stuck in my head. And y’know that just happens sometimes.”
The album cover is a black-and-white image of Cave and his naked wife, shot in their upstairs bedroom (he laughs when I tell him that my four-year-old daughter refers to the album as “the nudie one”). How did that come about?
“The story behind it is that my wife was doing a French magazine photo-shoot with a photographer called Dominique Issermann,” he explains. “It was in our bedroom and it was in between takes and she was naked. I walked in and Dominique asked me to go over and open up that window. She had a photo in mind and I opened up the window and Susie kind of went into that pose that she went into. She took a couple of photographs and then we forgot about it and I went off and did whatever I had to do, and then later on we looked through the stuff and looked through these other photos and the photo was there and it was really beautiful and it just seemed to relate very strongly to this record.
“There was something wonderfully serendipitous about it,” he adds. “Dominique hadn’t heard the record, but the title and the photo and what the record is about and how those windows look out over the garden next-door, and the sea was very important to the record. Anyway, it ended up going on the cover.”

Talk turns to Hollywood. Although Cave appeared in a number of movies (including John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead and Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire), he has no further ambitions to grace the big screen.
“Acting doesn’t really hold much interest for me,” he shrugs. “I just don’t think I’m much good at it.”
Not quite true. In 1991, he starred quite brilliantly as a deranged rocker in Tom DiCillo’s directorial debut, Johnny Suede. His co-star was a fledgling young actor named Brad Pitt. Has he stayed in touch with Mr. Angelina Jolie?
“No, our lives took different courses,” he laughs, shaking his head. “I think they already had taken different courses, to be honest. He seemed like a sweet guy, but I don’t really know him.”
Cave has written two films – 2005’s award-winning The Proposition and 2012’s somewhat less rapturously received Lawless – and a number of unproduced scripts including a reportedly superb Gladiator sequel, written at the request of his good Aussie friend Russell Crowe. Despite the mixed critical reception, he was happy with the John Hillcoat directed Lawless. However, his frustration with the endless script rewrites demanded by the studio is no secret.
“Yeah, I think the film is good,” he muses. “It’s a different film than it started out as, and on some level it became a much more successful film – but I’m not sure if it became a better film.”
Given that he’s so precious about his words, does he find it hard to collaborate on scripts?
“I’m not precious about it at all really – unless you feel it’s being taken away from you and is becoming a lesser thing. The thing about Lawless was it was successful. It made a decent amount of money and was considered in Hollywood as a success, which is great for John Hillcoat in terms of getting to help him make another movie, so I’m really pleased about that.”
Does he enjoy writing scripts?
“I do. You know, for a film to work, you have to get in and out of a scene as quickly as possible, and beautiful things can be done with juxtaposition. And in film the fact that one thing happens after another can be much more extreme than in a novel. I love that. I love the editing process and what happens when you lay one scene up against another. Scriptwriting can be a very exciting process.”
There’s been much industry babble about a film version of his second novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro. It’s a sexually-charged story about a priapic English salesman and his heartbreaking relationship with his young son. His God-soaked 1989 debut, And The Ass Saw The Angel, reads like it was written by a completely different person.
“I’m rewriting it,” he says of Munro. “I’ve just started because there seems to be some real interest in it. I can’t speak much more about it than that.”
Cave thanked our mutual friend Sebastian Horsley – the English dandy, writer and controversialist who tragically died of a heroin overdose in 2010 – in the acknowledgements of that novel. Does he miss Horsley?
“Yeah, of course I do,” he says, speaking softly. “Sebastian came up with some of the dialogue and some of the jokes in that book. He told me this joke one night and I used it, so I did the right thing and credited him. Unlike all the jokes he stole off me for his autobiography!” [Dandy In The Underworld].
That sounds like Sebastian!
“I let him get away with that!” Cave laughs. “In fact, I pinched some lines from his book to get him back and threw them in songs. Just to wind him up! There was a plagiarists’ war going on!”
The last time this Hot Press correspondent spoke with Cave, he had just turned down a lucrative advertising offer on the grounds that permitting one of his songs to be used in a commercial would be “disrespectful to my muse.” However, he’s just allowed ‘Red Right Hand’ from 1994 Bad Seeds album Let Love In to soundtrack a new tourism campaign celebrating the food and wine of Australia’s Barossa Valley.
“It wasn’t a money thing,” he proffers. “To align that song with Australian tourism felt okay. The ad is actually very beautiful. It really wasn’t about money. It felt good to give something back to Australia in some way. ‘The Ship Song’ is used for a campaign for the Sydney Opera House. I got a lot of pleasure from that.”

As we head into summer, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds will be busy touring Europe and playing selected festival dates. They’ll be stopping off in Co. Westmeath for a Body & Soul headliner later this month. “The thing that I always enjoy about Ireland is that Shane MacGowan turns up,” he laughs. “Sometimes I don’t get to see him for long periods of time so it’s always a pleasure.”
Touring aside, what’s he planning next?
“I’m not sure exactly. There’s huge amounts of work that we could do these days – or not. Me and Warren and theatre work and that sort of stuff, but you know – and it’s probably premature to say this – there’s something about the new record that has really opened things up again for us musically. It suggests all manner of things that can be done.
“We feel quite inspired around that record to carry on and see where else it goes. Some records you take years to recover from. There’s a kind of heaviness to them and a kind of ‘end of things’ feel to them. Some are the opposite, and have a lightness, and feel like they’re the beginning of something. This record feels that way to me. What I’d like to do is get in at the start, writing another one.”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds play the Saturday at Body & Soul, which runs in Ballinlough Castle from June 21 – 23. Push The Sky Away is out now.