Nick Cave: The My Big, Black Cock Flashback Interview
Nick Cave, circa 1992 (Photo Credit: Anton Corbijn)
In the first of My Big, Black Cock’s Flashback Interviews, we turn back the clock to 1992, when Cari Luna and I interviewed musician/author Nick Cave. Nick had just released his album “Henry’s Dream” at the time, and his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel was still fresh in the minds of his fanbase. Cari, in turn, chose to tackle the literary aspects of his work, and as a result, she came away with an extraordinary interview that offered a great deal insight into Mr. Cave’s work (and psyche) that was missing from many of the articles I’d read up to that point. (By my own admission, I was there mostly for moral support, so my contribution to this piece is minimal.) Regrettably, the magazine who had asked us to do this piece seemed to miss this part at the time, and a different piece on Nick Cave was run in its place. Since then, this interview has been sitting in my file cabinet, unread for over a decade…until now.
Within the context of this web site’s new direction, I feel that the time is finally right for this interview to see the light of day. Hopefully, despite its ripe old age, it’s still a piece that can be enjoyed by everyone, and something that offers that insight I mentioned earlier into the mind of one of the world’s most gifted, evocative songwriters. Thanks go out to both Cari herself, and to the publisher who paid for this at the time, but ended up not using it. Both have given us their blessing to publish this. Without any further ado…
by Cari Luna
Over the course of his long career, beginning in the late Seventies with The Boys Next Door, Nick Cave has, perhaps unwittingly, achieved the status of the mythical tragic hero; a slim, tousled shadow bellowing and moaning through the sufferings of his characters, so that there is no way to know where the music stops and where the man begins. “Henry’s Dream”, Cave’s seventh album with his band The Bad Seeds, shows Cave’s considerable story-weaving abilities at their strongest. The stories and their characters possess a vitality, an immediacy that clearly set Nick Cave apart from his peers.
And so, the Eighth of June, 1992 found me sitting across a table from the man himself, wondering what I could possibly ask him. He was notoriously difficult with the press and, I must admit, he seemed quite aloof, looking out from behind his dark sunglasses. I wanted to get past the surface, to uncover something of the man himself. As a long-time fan, still harboring a bit of a crush dating back to my early teens, I wanted to get him to talk to me as a person with a real interest in him and his work, rather than just another member of the press. (Only Nick knows for sure if I’ve achieved any of this.) I took a deep breath, glanced at my friend Scott Crawford (who’d accompanied me to the interview), and began.
Nick: Okay–so what do you want to know?
Cari: On your new album, “Henry’s Dream”, there’s a very strong sense of storytelling and character. These elements have been a central part of all of your previous works but it seems to have really come together on this one, so I was wondering if the experience of writing a novel had influenced your approach to writing lyrics?
Nick: I just think I’m very good at writing narrative lyrics–I think it’s what I do best, and it’s what I enjoy doing the most, in a way. I mean, I’ve always written narrative lyrics–all the way back to the beginning, so the book was more of a logical extension of that. Now I just continue to write stories. It’s basically a situation of me inventing characters, and then letting those characters write the song for me, in a way. Once you have invented souls, characters that you can actually visualize and that are metaphorically correct, the stories tell themselves. So, in a way, I find easy, as well, to write narrative songs. I find that I have plenty of stories.
Cari: How much do you feel that your characters are extensions of yourself?
Nick: Well, they are. Yeah…I would say they all are.
Cari: A friend of mine talked to you after a show in Boston, and you told him that your 5th album, “The Good Son”, was a response to the complexity of your novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, trying to get back to a simpler format. Could you elaborate on this?
Nick: Yeah, that’s true. I’d become a bit disgusted with words and all. And The Ass Saw The Angel is so full of verbiage–it has so much to do with words, you know, and I was a bit tired of words, and so “The Good Son” is much more straightforward, a simple record. I would say that would be the general pattern; I mean, there’s a lot of words on “Henry’s Dream”, but it’s quite straightforward as well. I think I just understand what I’m saying better now than five or six years ago, and so I don’t have to hide what I’m trying to say within complex language. As you get older, you understand what you want to say more.
Cari: Do you have plans for a new novel?
Nick: Yeah, I haven’t gotten the opportunity yet to write it–I mean, I kind of took off last year, in a way. I mean, I wrote a record and did a film and had a baby and stuff–I should have started writing it then but I just didn’t get around to it. So then when I finish with this record–with the tour which we’re going to start–then I’ll put music away for a while and maybe start this new book.
Cari: Are we going to see any of the themes or characters of “Henry’s Dream” in the book?
Nick: Well, the book will be a journey of some sort. Basically the story is of an aggressive, inarticulate boy following his beloved sister and her abductor; it’s basically along the seaside–so there are certain themes in “Henry’s Dream” that relate to that, I guess, but none of the characters.
Cari: What were the specific ideas that you wanted to get across with this record?
Nick: I don’t know, really. When I write a record I just take time off. I look at it as a project of some sort, as opposed to just sitting down and writing songs any which day, you know. I don’t do that. I haven’t written any songs since “Henry’s Dream”, I probably won’t write any more songs for several months–or until I decide to make another record, basically, in which case I will take off the same amount of time and start to write the songs. So what happens is that all the songs form at the same time, and so the records end up having a sense that each song is interrelated, that there’s some purpose to the order of the songs, and that there is some greater story going on. But in fact, it’s basically a situation where you write everything together and there’s echoes of each song in every other song.
Scott: When you get together with the Bad Seeds to put out a record, how does the songwriting process evolve after you’ve written the lyrics? Do you finish them and then take them to the rest of the band, or do you usually write the lyrics along with the music?
Nick: Well…with “The Good Son” I didn’t really feel that the band, as a band had much room for expression. The songs were very much written before we went into the studio. I knew every single part that had to be put down and it was basically just a matter of going in and extracting these songs. With “Henry’s Dream” I wanted it to be far more of a group effort, and sound like a band playing together, and give them more freedom; a lot of the songs on “Henry’s Dream” were very unformed when I showed them to the group, and I handed them far more responsibility than saying “Well–you do this.” I mean, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” is basically just one chord on the piano. I just sat down and said “Right, this is the first song: (simulating banging on the piano) dun, dun, dun, dun”, and sang all this shit over the top of it and said “Alright–that’s the song. Now you do something with it”, which raised an eyebrow or two at the time, but it gave Blixa (Bargeld, Bad Seeds guitarist-Ed.) the chance to play guitar how he wants to play guitar, rather than trying to fit his style of guitar playing into an alien style of music.
Scott: Out of all of your works in print and music, do you have a personal favorite?
Nick: Well, the book, I guess. That’s my favorite thing so far.
Cari: How has your move to Brazil affected your work? Has it been a positive move for you?
Nick: Brazil is very frustrating in some ways. A lot of creative stuff happens there, but nothing that I’m really involved in, so I’m pretty much on my own over there. I mean, I’ve got a girlfriend and a child, but I’m still creatively isolated, and for me that becomes very frustrating. On one hand it’s refreshing because you’re alone in an environment where there’s so much stimulus–inspiration–and you have it all to yourself in a way; at least Robert Smith from The Cure doesn’t live there, or whatever. I mean, you feel like you’ve got this all at your own fingertips, but at the same time it ends up becoming frustrating because I don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of. I have to do it entirely on my own…and I’ve never been all that confident about what I do anyway–I’m always worried about it all the time–and it doesn’t help me really, basically not even having people to speak to. They don’t have that much sensitivity towards the English language because they don’t really speak it there. So it has its frustrations, but it’s a very inspiring place too.
Cari: One thing that I’ve always liked about your work is that you really do explore the psyche of the character, and you bring the audience into that character. Is that a specific goal of yours?
Nick: Yeah. Absolutely. What really interests me about my characters is what they’re not prepared to tell you about themselves, and the veneer that they created around themselves to protect themselves. What interests me is the lies underneath. I think that’s what interests me in all the books that I’ve really enjoyed–all my favorite books are written in this way–in the first-person, where they’re trying to tell you their side of the story, and trying to convince you that they’re moral, likable people, but ultimately, you realize that they’re not, that there is something very, very wrong with these characters. It’s the secrets and the lies and the things that they don’t tell you that interest me. So, perhaps you take a song like “Jack the Ripper, for example, which seems on the outside to be a very simple song about a guy complaining about his girlfriend–the fact that she’s a bitch and won’t have sex with him, and she’s dictatorial and all this sort of stuff, but hopefully, in the end, if you look at the song closely enough–perhaps the way it’s sung, the way the character sings the song–you realize that there is something wrong with this particular character, and that is perhaps why the woman treats him this way. Perhaps when he does try and make love with her, he approaches her in an aggressive, insane fashion. So that’s what interests me–it’s what’s not told. The lies and the deceit…
And what I was searching for as well, the man beneath myth–the one I think I’ve met, but can’t be sure. A few weeks later, on the stage of The Ritz in New York, the man I met erupted into a thousand-headed, magnificent shining monster holding an entire audience in the grip of what seemed that night to be the most powerful force in the world, a force that can re-invent itself as many times as there are songs to sing and stories to be told.