Singer, songwriter, teller of stories about death, murder, pain and insanity, Nick Cave is one of the seminal figures of modern rock music. He talks to Andrew Lynch.



Your latest album is called Nocturama – a word defined by the dictionary as ‘an artificially controlled habitat in which the cycles of day and night are reversed to accommodate creatures that only come out at night’. It sounds like the archetypal image people have of Nick Cave.


Hmm. Well, there’s a simple reason for that. I had a song called ‘Nocturama’ which didn’t make it onto the record, and I decided I’d keep the title for the album. The record company were horrified, they said ‘Please don’t! We’ve spent ten years trying to get rid of the dark thing and now you’re going to call it a place where you keep the bats!’
Well … I know people think I’m a miserable sod but It’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.


The album itself received mixed reviews. How do you feel about it now?


I don’t know ... I never know how I feel about any album, really … is it any good?


It’s all right. I wouldn’t necessarily put it on first thing in the morning.


Right … we recorded it in seven days or something like that, because we’re far less patient with the whole recording process than we used to be. We decided to take some of the preciousness about the making of a record away and do it more like they did in the old days, which was a faster turnaround. The process of making a record and promoting it and touring it is so incredibly slow, I find there’s just too much time on my hands, really.
The way I wrote this record was to basically get the musical idea down and a set of lyrics, then I threw it to the side of the piano and started a new one. I didn’t really reflect on the songs at all, or bring them up again or play them again. Once they were written, that was it… whereas the record before – ‘No More Shall We Part’ – I had arranged the whole thing before I went in, which inhibits the band. If something’s already complete and all they have to do is play the parts, it doesn’t give them much breathing space. So I gave them a lot more scope to play and I think it’s a better record for it.


What have you been up to since it came out?


Working, always working. I have a very strict routine these days. I get up in the morning, go to my office and sit there writing all day. I’m afraid to stop, really, because I’m afraid that if I do it’ll become even harder to start again. I don’ like reflecting on things, so I just plough on. When I start writing, I feel very disconnected from everything, lost in my own world. It’s almost like a chemical reaction.


Do you study the way other people write songs?


Yes… I listen to a lot of music and read a lot of poetry and I’m always very excited by a lyric if I think it’s good. I steel lines from people occasionally, more by accident, than design, but I don’t study other writers in order to write like them.
There are poets that I think have had a profound effect on the way I write, Auden and Hardy’s poetry, definitely. As regards songwriters.. early Van Morrison, probably, and Bob Dylan.


You seem to have recently abandoned your old, confessional style of songwriting?


One thing I like about the last two records is that you don’t have to know anything about the personal narrative that accompanies them. I find that confessional mode I slipped into back there incredibly difficult to listen to now. There is a school of thought that thinks the confessional is honest and courageous but I don’t agree with that. I think it’s actually the easiest way to write, provided you are locked into a kind of masturbatory frame of mind, which I was back there. I mean, all that happened to me was that I was rejected by a woman, and there I was making a big heroic melodrama about it.
Why do you dislike talking about your lyrics in detail?


Well, to talk about them in that way – it always feels like I’m demeaning them. It’s like gossip or something, you know. A lot of the time writing lyrics is spent thinking about how much information I want to give, so that it maintains some mystery, that it’s ambiguous and it doesn’t beat people over the head.


You don’t allow your music to be used in adverts either


A few years ago Gap jeans asked me to appear in one of their ads. I wrote back: ‘Dear Gap. I might put on a pair of your jeans if you were to pay me a $1 billion, but even then I would have serious reservations’
I get letters from people telling me they got married to The Ship Song, or that they buried their best friend to Into My Arms, and I don’t want them to look at the TV and see that they buried their friend to a Cornetto ad or something. I feel some sense of responsibility about that, even though they wave enormous sums of money at you. That’s where my muse puts her foot down. 



Is your music ever influenced by events in the outside world?


I have a profound distaste for the world and the way it’s going politically. It’s been really important for me to lock myself away from it, and create an alternate world for myself. The more intense the world becomes, the more intense my fight feels to remain separate from it.


Does being a rock star ever strike you as a ridiculous way to make a living?


Yeah, all the time. Particularly as you get older… It’s not something that ever makes you proud, I find. Vain, but not proud. It never feels very healthy. You spend so much of your time sitting around, waiting for something to come, and it never gets any easier.


How has marriage changed you?


It’s made me finally realise, in my 40s, that a relationship isn’t something that just blazes with fire for two months and then goes downhill until the whole thing lies exhausted in the gutter. I’ve discovered that things go up and down and you can actually work through things and love the person more at the end of it. It’s because I’ve finally found the right person, who likes me just the way I am.


How hard was it for you to kick your drugs habit?


I don’t regret that time as much as some people think… I think I’ve always had a pretty strong creative impulse and that’s saved me from abandoning myself completely. Eventually I realised that I didn’t have that much time to waste, that life is constantly slipping away and you have to use every minute of it.


You’ve moved about a lot over the years – where do you live now?


Brighton… I find that I can’t bear living in the same place for very long. But I have the same setup wherever I live, so it doesn’t really make that much difference. I have my home and my office. For me, those two areas have an authenticity that I don’t find out in the world, which I find has become irrevocably corrupt.


As the son of a literary man and a writer yourself, which medium do you think is the more powerful – music or the written word?


I love both but I probably find music most exciting. I mean, I love the written word, too but I find it less mysterious, easier to understand. I’m fascinated how you can take two notes, each meaningless on their own, put them together and create something that breaks your heart. There’s all sorts of things that can go on in a song that can’t happen in literature, because there’s music, singing, chords, melody, all saying different things at the same time. You get this emotional conflict in a song that you don’t get in a painting or a novel.


What’s your favourite novel?


Nabokov’s Lolita, for many reasons… primarily, I think because my father used to read passages of it to me as a child. When I read it, I hear his voice.


What are you working on now?
I’m about halfway through a new album. And I finished a film script that looks like it’s gonna get made next year. It’s called The Proposition. It’s set in the 1880s in Australia and it’s a fictional story about the bushrangers – who were these Australian/ Irish outlaws. And I’m always doing other stuff, you know… a lot of film music, recently.


You’ve played in Ireland regularly throughout your career – do you have good memories of your time here?


Yes… I think Ireland is very similar to Australia in a lot of ways. There is this desire to bring people down if they’re seen to get above themselves, which I find quite tedious… although I suppose it can be healthy in some circumstances, too.


Finally, how do you feel about the death of Johnny Cash?


Well, I used to watch the Johnny Cash Show on television in Australia when I was a small kid, about 9 or 10 years. At that stage I had really no idea about rock’n’roll. But when I watched him, I realised what a beautiful, evil thing music could be.
He did a version of my song The Mercy Seat and I loved it. I wrote and recorded it when I was fairly young, but he brought a wealth of experience to it that I couldn’t. He could sing a line and give that line both heaven and hell.
One of my proudest moments ever was singing a duet with him, the Hank Williams song ‘I feel So Lonesome I Could Cry’. When Johnny first came downstairs into the studio he looked frail and sick, but once he started singing he was brought back to life. It was an incredible thing to see.
I’m very sad that he’s died because it’s another great voice gone. And as these people go, I don’t see anyone coming up to replace them.

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