NICK CAVE

Rip It Up, Issue 180, 1 July 1992, Page 10

NICK CAVE

"IF THE VIOLENCE OF MY SONGS CAN EXCITE PEOPLE IN THE WAY SIMILAR STUFF IN LITERATURE AND FILMS HAS EXCITED ME I’D BE VERY HAPPY"

His new album, Henry's Dream, revolves around the same bowl of vomit (his words, not mine) that, by now, everyone in the English, German and Portuguese(!) speaking world must have learned to love or misunderstand. Violence, religion, prostitution and exaggerated cinematic sentiment abound, as do death rattle rhythms, swooning strings, gorgeous buried piano parts and absurdly memorable gutter-Sinatra couplets.

A new Bad Seeds line-up was gathered together from London, Melbourne and Berlin to record the album and they're now touring with the new material. Cave says he's been "up to his neck in music", but not so much so that he hasn't had time to plan a second novel. (For those of you who've just joined us, his literary debut, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was a Faulkneresque excercise in Bible-Bludgeoning small town uncanny, a long way from the usual sub-Morrison (is that possible?) rock-star-shows-us-his-bad-poems thing). I asked him whether the reaction to Ass Saw the Angel from "serious literary critics" mattered to him at the time.

"Well I consider myself to be something of a literary critic in the sense that I've got a pretty good idea of what's good literature and what's bad and I felt that my book was a competent piece of writing. At least at some point through the writing of the book I knew it was going to be good, so I wasn't that worried about it, but at the same time it was interesting to see what those people had to say. They were a lot more forthcoming with their compliments than the music critics were about it."

Have you taken much notice of recent critical ideas that see us as literally meat puppets, powerless organisms that desire and language speak through? Your work sometimes coincides with them in a certain problematic way; your characters are certainly dominated by their drives. (Pause) "I am aware of those theories." (Another pause; irritating prompting by interviewer). "I mean ... I don't know, actually ... I have some vague spiritual beliefs which I sometimes feel very strongly about and at other times I feel very far away from. It sometimes doesn't seem very logical that we're just pushed around by desires . . . [CLICK silence CRACKLE POP authentic Brazilian telephone line noises],.. some greater kind of mechanism at work ..." All through your work the male characters feel tormented by females and often end up feeling quite vengeful. Do you think that interaction between the sexes is necessarily combatative? "Well I haven't found much harmony in that respect myself. I only write about what I know about, what I feel like an authority on, and I feel like I have some kind of talent for writing about love — maybe everyone has — the extremities of love, it's what I've been continually harping on about through all my records and the book to a lesser extent. I find I write best when I'm troubled and quite often it's relationships that trouble me, so there's always a certain disgust, a tension in it." Has becoming a father, liv-

ing with a child, changed any of that? "No, not really," Cave halflaughs, implying 'what a ridiculous question'. "Things don't really change that fast." After the spectacular verbal acrobtics of the Birthday Party a lot of your Bad Seeds lyrics were concerned with "clarity", with linear narrative. Is the baroque image-overload on new songs like 'Papa Won't Leave You Henry' and 'I Had A Dream, Joe' a deliberate change of direction now you've proved you can tell a simple story well? "Well, I think the first part of what you're saying is quite righty with the Birthday. Party I. was absorbing a massive amount of different influences and I was interested in everything and where I stood on certain things wasn't really clear. I disguised the fact that I was unsure about things in a lot of verbiage and ambiguity, but with the Bad Seeds I haven't had the patience to play around with words so much, I just want to say what I have to say. The second part of what you said I don't necessarily agree with — I guess 'I Had A Dream, Joe' is obscure in a way, but in the end it's just about a dream I had about a person I knew. "'Papa Won't Leave You Henry' is a kind of trashcan song where all sorts of things? are being thrown in and not necessarily resolved and the

viewpoint gets swapped around from verse to verse, but ultimately it's about one thing, it's a song to a newborn child from a wayward, self-disgusted father." Even without the wordplay your writing shows an awareness of the force of phrasing, something that's missing from a lot of rock lyrics, especially "meaningful, content-based" ones. Do you revise painstakingly or does it just spill out perfectly formed? "No, I put a lot of time into those lyrics. I'm interested in style as much as content, in the way saying something in one particular way is so much more potent than saying it another way; the beauty of language really. And I quite agree with you, I don't like many contemporary lyric writers except for a very small handful." Do you feel any affinity with the Lynch/ Cruise practice of re-investing culturally over-de-termined images, small-r romantic cliches with some kind of emotional force? "I think that's something I've always done, dealt in cliches, for want of a better word. My writing's always been full of references to stuff you've heard before, and I just try and give it some new . . . meaning." It's also a source of considerable humour, which is something critics and audiences alike seem to miss.

“With monotonous regularity." \ Do you think there's a limit to human creativity, a point at .1 ement, becomes all that's left to do? "I think as long as there are individuals who - know their own minds and what they want to say they'll always find ways of saying things, at the same time I thinkthere are definitely limits to what one person can ; do: That's something I feel very strongly, and it's always hang- . ing over my- head; the thought of when going to dry up, when what I do .isn't going to be worth anything any more. It gets harder and harder, more and more of an effort all the time." , - Do : you have any belief in heroic artistic suffering, then? The album cover with the image of you on. the billboard -could-be-read- as -some-sort- of ironic comment on - the iconization of the genius-star. - "Well, about the first part of that I just. don't know, but the . album cover was an idea I came up with, I don't know whether it was a good one or not... this 'demonic' representation of me's obviously got nothing to do with me."' Do you derive any pleasure from being seen as some sort of demi-god (demonic or otherwise) by a particular breed of fan? "I get a lot of mail- from these very unhappy, frustrated people who write to me in the hope that I can solve some of their problems. I just don't answer it now, I've had trouble in .the past when I've . answered letters andTpeople have wanted more and more from me so now I read it and don't answer it. I've got enough problems of my own." Do you think people take, the representations of passions and violence in your work as substitutes for excitement in their own lives? "I'd be quite flattered by that, in a way. If the violence of my. songs can excite people in the way similar stuff in literature and films has excited me I'd be very happy. I don't mind if people use my lyrics to escape to." So have you got any desire to become hugely popular, to communicate with the masses on the same scale as those other Wenders favourites, U2? "I don't see that happening, because it would require a certain amount of ambition and energy and-to tell you the truth I'm not a very ambitious person, at least not in that direction. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to be the person record companies, or even other people in general want me to be." It's true — Nick Cave probably never will become a bestselling coffee table item, not for lack of a seductive and therefore marketable persona, but because, regardless of their objective validity, the modernist high art premises he works from — "self expression", "enduring. value" — make him too much trouble for the consumers as well as the distributors of the latest Pearl Jam sandwich. If you're in any doubt that that's their loss you were a lost cause years ago.

MATTHEW HYLAND