I am going to see the great Nick Cave twice this week, yes twice! First, at the American Cinematheque, I will attend ‘20,000 Days on Earth: An evening with Nick Cave’ , about the film he co-wrote with artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, then, the next day, I will go to a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show at the Shrine. In preparation (or just for fun) I was reading the Nick Cave interview published by the NY Times this past week… I will give you the best parts of it.
About Elvis Presley and his visit to Graceland:
‘Those last Elvis performances — the ones for television, when he was already sick — I must have watched those clips a hundred times. They’re like crucifixions. I couldn’t bring myself to go inside [Graceland]’.
When talking about his kids’ taste in music:
‘My kids are at that lovely age where they’re just figuring out what’s good in music. They’re just grabbing stuff, on Spotify and all that, and occasionally they’ll find something that’s really mind-blowing. But sometimes I hear what they’re playing, and I just want to cut my wrists.’
About his fascinating personality:
‘As far as work goes, I’m something of a megalomaniac. But a megalomaniac with extremely low self-esteem.’
About his childhood – since we know that every tortured author has had a difficult one, right?
‘Nothing happened in my childhood — no trauma or anything, I just had a genetic disposition toward things that were horrible.’
Still something happened during his childhood! I knew it!
‘My father read me the first chapter of ‘Lolita’ when I turned 12. Something happened to him when he read it aloud. He became a different man. He became elevated. I felt like I was being initiated into this secret world: the world of sex and adulthood and art. At the same time, though, I was only a kid, and I couldn’t always meet his expectations. He’d catch me reading some nasty little thriller, and he’d rip it out of my hands and tell me: ‘You want a bleeding body count? Read “Titus Andronicus”!’’
Very early on, he was already so Nick Cave:
‘I had huge artistic ambitions as a kid, I liked a lot of the tortured, gothic, religious stuff — Matthias Grünewald and Stefan Lochner and the Spaniards — and I wanted to make paintings with that kind of power. There was something about just being in a room by yourself and making art that excited me. It’s exciting to me still, this weird medium of applying paint to a canvas and the restrictions of a square, two-dimensional frame. It’s not unlike the restrictions of a song, in a way.’
These days, Nick Cave goes to ‘work’ and keeps regular office hours at his rented place in Brighton, England:
‘I used to go six days a week, till I couldn’t stand it anymore. Now I go Sundays as well.’
Literature runs in his blood, in his family, as he explains while describing his novel ‘And the Ass Saw the Angel’:
‘It definitely had something to do with my father, that book. He was an aspiring writer himself as a young man, and literature was a matter of life or death to him. My mother recently showed me a letter he wrote her, about this theater piece he was directing, and it’s written with such intensity — his frustrations with the actors and with the budget and so on. There’s this mania and enthusiasm for the work that’s very beautiful to me. Then, at the end, you find out he’s talking about a school play. So, yeah, the book may have felt on some level like unfinished business. But it took over my life in a way that wasn’t healthy, for me or the people around me. And as soon as I’d finished it, I left Berlin.’
About the making of ‘The Boatman’s Call’, which is about the end of his relationship with fashion stylist Viviane Carneiro and his passionate affair with P.J. Harvey:
‘People often compare ‘Boatman’s Call’ with ‘Blood on the Tracks. Too much for my liking, I have to say. I’ve got no idea what led Dylan to make that album, but in my case, there was a coming together of a particular bunch of unfortunate events — brokenhearted moments but epiphanies, as well — that hit me all at once and became what the record was about. Not a happy time, particularly. At least I got some songs out of it.’
About meeting his wife, model Susie Bick (who is on the cover of his last album ‘Push the Sky Away’:
‘The first time I saw Susie was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And when she came walking in, all the things that I have obsessed over for all the years, pictures of movie stars, Jenny Agutter in the billabong, Anita Ekberg in the fountain . . . Miss World competitions, Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Jones and Bo Derek . . . Bolshoi ballerinas and Russian gymnasts . . . the young girls at the Wangaratta pool lying on the hot concrete, all the stuff I had heard and seen and read . . . all the continuing never-ending drip-feed of erotic data . . . came together at that moment, in one great big crash bang, and I was lost to her. And that was that.’
Wow, it is as dramatic as I would have assumed, but Nick has a secret, a deep secret with women:
‘I have a female audience in my mind when I write’
And this explains a lot! But he adds:
‘That being said I’m often flabbergasted by what some women find sexy in my music.’
‘Not all women like it, I’ve been called all sorts of things. But even the material that’s the most. . . . The most forceful sexually, it’s always riddled with anxiety. If my songs came off as just a male thing, I wouldn’t have any interest in that whatsoever’.
About the way he composes music:
‘What we do is we record nonstop. We go in in the morning, and we just sit there for seven or eight hours with headphones on and just play anything, no matter how awful. The songs are completely abstract when we start; no one even knows what key we’re in — and there’s something going on between the musicians, about discovering something, that can be impossible to repeat. It couldn’t be more different from the way I wrote for some of my earlier albums, like ‘The Boatman’s Call’ or ‘No More Shall We Part.’ It’s more the way we did it back at the beginning, making the first Bad Seeds record with Blixa and Barry” — Adamson, bassist for the group — “and Mick.’
This Lolita reading at 12 must have been influential…:
‘We used to have something called inappropriate-film night, I’d sit my boys down and show them something no sane father would ever show his young sons — ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ something that scared the hell out of them — and it was a wonderful bonding moment. Now there’s no other kind of film night at all.’
Influential but also terribly career-inspiring:
‘I was 12 years old at the time, so I didn’t understand half of what I was hearing. ‘Fire of my loins’? What on earth did that mean? And some of it made me very uneasy. But more than anything else, the words he was reading excited me. I knew nothing would ever be the same.’
Read the full article here