One day in 1967, strung out on drugs, Johnny Cash crawled deep into an underground cavern in Tennessee to die, but instead experienced an epiphany that put him on the straight and narrow for the next decade or more. In short, God told him that Johnny Cash didn’t decide when it was time to go; He did.
The name of that hole in the ground? Nickajack Cave.
Conducting press in a London hotel room on a September afternoon, another man in black allows himself an incredulous chuckle.
“Nickajack Cave? Well, that’s pretty extraordinary. Wow!”
Nick Cave had an epiphany of his own while watching the Johnny Cash Show on television as a youngster – the sight and sound of the original gangsta gave him the first indication that music could be, as he put it, evil. Many years later he covered Cash’s ‘The Singer’ on Kicking Against The Pricks, and Cash returned the compliment in 2000 with a chilling interpretation of ‘The Mercy Seat’. And when producer Rick Rubin extended an invitation for Cave to drop by the sessions for American IV: The Man Comes Around, the two men finally sang together on Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ and the traditional standard ‘Cindy’, the latter eventually surfacing on 2003’s Unearthed box set.
“It was just kinda magical for me,” Cave recalls. “Johnny Cash was very, very ill, it was just remarkable that he could do it at all. And the band and him were just so old school about the whole thing. He knew the songs off the top of his head, got two takes at it, one take of ‘Cindy’ and that was that. There was just a real beauty and immediacy to the whole thing.”
What was Cash like as a person?
“He was an incredibly warm, generous character. As was June. She was a fucking trip. She was just an unbelievable woman, y’know, really kind of encouraging and sensitive about the whole situation to me. They even got me to sing harmonies on it. I said, ‘I don’t do harmonies’ and she said, ‘Of course you do – get in there!’ I was kinda worried about singing with him, just because of how to sing with his voice. And we did one run-through of the Hank Williams song, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna have to do that again’ and I was thinking, ‘I’m fucking flat, I’m flat.’ And I went, ‘I’m flat, right?’ and Rick Rubin goes: ‘Nope. Johnny’s flat.’ So that was ah . . .”
Sweet relief?
“Yeah, sweet relief!”
Johnny Cash’s spirit is very much present on Cave and The Bad Seeds’ new double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. ‘Let The Bells Ring’ is on the face of it a requiem song for Cash, although as its author explains, the original draft was a grander affair.
“A piece of trivia, but that was a very, very long epic song,” Cave says, “and I gave a verse to all the great, great recent dead. Y’know, there was Nina Simone and Ray Charles, these voices that were suddenly dropping away, very much about the world losing these great voices. In fact, in the first recorded version of it we had loops of the voices coming over the end, Johnny Cash and Nina Simone and different people, which sounds absolutely vile, and it probably was, but in the end I cut it right down to just being about Johnny Cash. The only real reference to him is something about Arkansas – to me it’s about all of these people.”
The Bad Seeds have never exactly been slovenly in their work-rate, but the last couple of years have seen them hit a particularly prolific seam, releasing three full-length albums in the space of some 18 months. Cave himself has also completed a number of extracurricular projects, including co-writing three songs on the new Marianne Faithfull album Before The Poison (“She was fucking amazing”), as well as penning a 19th-century ‘kangaroo western’ entitled The Proposition for Australian director John Hillcoat (Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, To Have And To Hold), with Guy Pearce slated for the lead role.
“It’s got a great cast,” Cave says. “It’s got Ray Winstone in it playing a very much off-type character. The whole thing’s been kind of, ‘It’s gonna happen/It’s not gonna happen/It’s gonna happen.’ You get the money, it gets taken away, you get the money again – it’s been a fucking nightmare. I’ve never been privy to that sort of thing, but it’s just un-fucking-believable what you have to go through to make a fucking movie. But they’ve got the money and they’re spending the money, so that pretty much looks like it’s gonna get made.”
Any chance of a quick synopsis?
“It’s a totally fictional tale. It’s about three Irish brothers but it’s deliberately stayed away from the historical grudges and all that sort of stuff. But it is the English up against the Irish and the Aboriginals up against everybody else. It’s really good, I think, y’know, a really good story. (laughs) This hasn’t been done before, the only films about this period have been bio-pics or whatever they’re called, of the famous bush rangers, Ned Kelly most of all, so this is basically turning it into a genre movie in the same way a western is done in America. We’ve tried to play around with perceived wisdoms of what happened and look at it in a different way.”
Given such industry on all fronts, it’s ironic that one of Cave’s new songs ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’ addresses the subject of writer’s block, sort of like an Elvis-does-Dylan adaptation of Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, containing the following choice couplets:
“John Willmot penned his poetry riddled with the pox/ Nabakov wrote on index cards, at a lectern, in his socks/St. John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box/And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote Chinese Rocks”.
“Yeah, I was just rubbing it into all these poor bastards who can’t write these songs anymore,” Cave deadpans. “ It was just a sort of call to arms really. I like that song personally because I can recognise very much the way that that song’s written. I’ve left the first verse – which is almost irrelevant to the song in some ways – in deliberately. It starts off with a list of names of flowers which I get from a little book, the Pocket Book Of English Flowers that I have next to my desk. They always sound so nice, you can write down a few lines of flower names and it gets the ball rolling type of thing! Even though in many respects it’s a meaningless series of lines, they sound good to sing and inspire other things.”
If in recent years the Bad Seeds were required to muzzle their rowdier instincts in order to serve Cave’s vision of a melancholic chamber music, the new record sees them very much on the tear, marauding all over exultant gospel, evil funk and even flamenco (‘Supernaturally’ could be Nina Simone doing Van’s ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’ with cloven Cuban heels on), culminating in the sinister ‘O Children’, with its images of oblivious revellers on a train to the death-camps. It’s a confident, sprawling work, remarkably so given that it’s their first since the departure of founder member and Einsturzende Neubauten mainman Blixa Bargeld.
“We didn’t possibly realise it at the time but looking back on it I think that had a huge effect on us,” Cave admits. “It really forced us to have to re-examine what we were doing, and it provided the opportunity to change the band, so in many ways it was a good thing. I certainly miss Blixa very much and I miss his presence and he was personally a huge influence over me. Y’know, he’s a clever man, and he probably got out of The Bad Seeds at the right time, for all of our sakes. And I say that in the fondest possible way.”
Certainly the band’s last album Nocturama received their most mixed reviews since Tender Prey. Were things getting stale?
“It was . . . y’know, we were forcing ourselves to try and make the thing sound different, but with the same elements. To me Nocturama’s a really important record for us. It may not have been our best record, but we developed a new approach in the studio, which I guess we pushed even more with this record. And this time we went in and it was just a different sound. (Gallon Drunk leader) James Johnston was playing organ and Warren Ellis plays a lot of stuff on this record, and he plays with an incredible amount of energy. The thing about Warren is there’s no irony in the way he plays, he just loves it. And with Blixa I think there always was a certain amount of irony in his guitar playing, and that’s just not there on this record anymore.”
Another significant new element is the presence of the London Community Gospel Choir, providing a dramatic counterpoint to Cave’s baritone – not to mention a moment of comic relief in ‘Hiding All Away’, where one of the singers cracks up laughing at the line about the butcher “Who lifted up his cleaver/Stuck his fist up your dress”.
“Yeah, they weren’t given a lot of information, the gospel singers,” Cave laughs. “Just, ‘Here it comes, I want you to do this, this and this,’ and they had a couple of run-throughs. The last thing they did was actually consider what they were singing to, if you understand what I mean. They’re really good, these singers, and really fast, and kinda spot on.”
Indeed, these days Cave is becoming increasingly determined to avoid getting bogged down in the tedium of the recording process.
“Absolutely,” he says. “We pretty much go into the studio and it’s three songs a day: one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. It’s nearly done by the clock. If we’re still fuckin’ around with one song in the afternoon, things are getting really uneasy, particularly between me and the engineer or the producers or whomever. And the same with the mixing. He has to mix two songs a day, he knows he has to mix two songs a day, and it just seems to work really well that way. For me it mostly comes out of a huge impatience with the studio, that I just want stuff, like, y’know, ‘Let’s hear it.’ ‘Shall we put that on later?’ ‘No, do it now.’ I find that a real urgency within the studio creates really good stuff. Pressure creates diamonds, or whatever they say.”

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus is out now on Mute.