I have his handwritten signature on the door of my fridge, at the bottom of the setlist of his epic show at the Fonda last year, and it is reminder of how close I got to Nick Cave once… And everything that gets me a bit closer to his inside world is valuable! According to Dangerous Minds, Nick Cave kept a journal when he was young, but it wasn’t your ordinary I-threw-my-thoughts-on-paper diary… Not at all, Nick made a sort of dictionary, arranging interesting words he wanted to remember, in a sort of alphabetical order… and use them in his songs, I guess!
The A section and a bit of the M section of the beaten down little book were made available a while ago, and it’s quite interesting to look at the assortment of words chosen by language-lover Nick: Anathema, Anchorite, Aneurism, Amuck, Anabolism (hey some biological process there), Anabranch, Anastomosis, Anabaptist… and for the Ms, you have Micturition, which interestingly he defines as the ‘Morbid desire to pass water’ when it just refers to the act of urination? But Nick sees it as morbid! Then you get Machination, Murk, Mesquite, Mort (x2), Mordant, Morass, Mooch, Moot, Mot, Motet, Mountebank, Mow…
And you get one of the secrets of Nick Cave’s very complicated, wordy and intricate songs, he was using a personal dictionary all along. I was sure he was very methodical man, but I wonder, does he still use this method? … Or how would he manage to assemble lines like these ones: ‘Hear a man preaching in a language that’s completely new, yea/Making the hot cocks in the flophouse bleed/While the cleaning ladies sob into their mops/And a bellhop hops and bops/A shot rings out to a spiritual groove/Everybody bleeding to that Higgs Boson Blues’
Now, if someone wants to write a thesis about Mr. Cave’s work, this is a gold mine! In his movie, ’20,000 Days on Earth’, he goes through his own archives and nostalgic treasures, and although it was half fictional, this dictionary had to be among these things. ‘It’s all shit, isn’t it? he adds in the film — the movie site has even a page called ‘the museum of important shit’ which catalogues ‘humble signifiers of huge significance’… and this handwritten dictionary belongs there.
