A gentleman gangsta if ever there was one, Nick Cave is in surprisingly good mood for a "tortured doom-merchant". Nick Cave's record company thought he'd got over his 'night-time' obsessions. His new album, Nocturama, proved them wrong. Brian Boyd meets rock's prince of darkness.
Very tall, very skinny and with unfeasibly jet-black hair, the rock star/poet/novelist, famed for his gloomy and dark musical arrangements and rich baritone of a voice, sets about exploding some myths. "When I told the record company the name of the new album - Nocturama - they told me I was supposed to be getting away from all that dark, night-time imagery," he drawls in an accent that has never strayed too far away from his native Australia.
Oh yes, the "dark, night-time" stuff. That would be the sheer art-noise terror he inflicted on audiences in his first band, The Birthday Party, before he went through a messy and debilitating heroin habit and a re-emergence with new musical partners, The Bad Seeds ("backing group" doesn't do them justice) as one of contemporary music's most enigmatic, and slightly eerie, figures. A moody purveyor of subterranean blues, Cave has been poetically cataloguing the planet's ills over a series of underrated albums, loosely throwing around literary allusions in his lyrics as he treats on the subjects of religion, death and love with a brooding intensity that is at a complete remove from any other lyric writer. All this and he once got to bash Kylie Minogue's skull in with a big rock - albeit in a video.
Never that enamoured of the music press - he once physically attacked a journalist who pressed him on his heroin years - he's lively enough today, even stopping the interview to ask what the word "hubris" means.
Although he doesn't spell it out, he makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't want to talk about his picaresque past - "been there, done that" - and doesn't even like talking about his back catalogue. "I never listen to any of the albums once they're finished. The second we're finished in the studio, that's the last time I ever hear them. Never play them, ever," he says,
"At the time of making the albums, I think they're great, but I can't really judge the songs afterwards. I've quite a brutal attitude to the old work. I feel if I go back to the old work, it will influence the present work. There's pitfalls there, I'm constantly aware, all these albums in [Nocturama is his 12th album with The Bad Seeds] of dipping standards, of writing under myself."
No worries there with the new album - a dizzying mix of gossamer piano ballads (his trademark sound) and bar room rockers - it is, however, unlikely that the album will see him scale the commerical heights of his bestselling Murder Ballads album (1996) sales of which were buoyed up by a number one single, the still remarkable duet with Kylie Mingoue, Where The Wild Roses Grow.
Not up for scrambling his band for an appearance on CD:UK, Cave has now evolved to the status of being a "Heritage Artist" - an act who may not bother the upper reaches of the charts but who still releases consistently interesting and artistically significant work.
"'Heritage' - is that what they call it?" he says, a smile beginning to crease to lips, "I'd be very happy to consider myself a 'Heritage' artist if it meant being included with my heroes - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrisson. In fact, I was listening to a lot of Neil Young while recording this album. So long as I keep connecting with my imagination, keep connecting with the world out there - I'm happy."
Now living a subdued sort of life, he works in a businesslike manner: "I have this office, down by the banks of the Thames river, and I do everything there. I work a normal working day, 10 to 6, using a baby Steinway grand piano. It's more productive than how I used to go about working."
In tandem with his musical career, he also has literary ambitions. He has published a collection of lyrics, prose and poetry, King Ink and a well-received novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, which was recently re-printed as part of the "Penguin Essentials" titles, right up there alongside Animal Farm and Clockwork Orange. He's currently working on various screenplays and novels, but seems to prefer "writing grim songs".
Not so grim though that advertising agencies aren't always offering him stupid amounts of money so they can use them to help sell their products. "Never, ever - I couldn't do that. There's a certain well-known song being used in an ad now, I don't want to say what it is - but I remember growing up, and driving around with my friends as a teenager and this is always the song that we would crank up on the radio, it was sort of our 'fuck off' to the world, and to hear it now in an ad is just such a betrayal of everything it stood for."
But then, this is the same man who once refused a nomination at the MTV awards saying "My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race." He wrote MTV a letter, explaining his decision, which finished with the lines: "My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!" Similarly, he wouldn't allow television cameras to film him performing his song Into My Arms at Michael Hutchence's funeral.
He does agree to his songs being covered by other artists and is quietly thrilled at the fact that Johnny Cash did a version of his The Mercy Seat. "And Jimmy Scott has done a cover as well," he says, "but what I would really love is if Nina Simone ever did one of my songs. I always, in a way, feel sorry for my songs, they always seem to be so loaded up with baggage. Hearing other people doing them . . . it seems like they're doing it without burden . . . the song sounds genuine."
The baggage he talks about is how his work closely mirrors his personal life. The majestic The Boatman's Call album (1997) - for many Cave's Blood On The Tracks - was a first-hand account of the end of his common-law marriage and a short-lived but intense affair with the singer Polly "P.J." Harvey. He's now married to the model/actress Susie Bick, who is also tall, skinny and dark. They met "in the Victoria and Albert Museum - near the Brachiosaurus" and friends say that at their wedding, it was difficult to tell them apart.
While his previous work has sometimes been slightly too self-reflexive, Nocturama, he gladly admits, is his least "precious" work.
"It was just trying to take that preciousness away and record the album really quickly, make it like they made albums in the old days, with a really quick turn around. I just put the musical idea down, got the lyrics and then put it to one side and started on a new song. Once they were written, that was it. On the last album, No More Shall We Part, the whole thing was arranged before I went in to record it, but this was a lot less inhibited.
"And the writing of it helped me to understand what I now feel about things, and think about things."
Shortly after the interview, he takes to the stage of a small, old bingo hall for a "secret" premiere of the new album. With a slimmed down Bad Seeds accompanying him, he plays five of the new album tracks for a rapt audience, together with Henry Lee from Murder Ballads and Hallelujah from No More Shall We Part. It's difficult to believe that the man behind the piano playing these beautifully elegiac and delicate songs was once upon a lifetime, a goth-punk icon.
Sounding, and in a certain light, looking like Bryan Ferry - if he had stayed any good - this distorted blues/gospel rock music is as good as any he's recorded - with Wonderful Life and Rock Of Gilbraltar moving things on to another level.
As he cryptically said of the new songs: "They are the kind of songs you write when you're not writing a song . . . "
Nocturama is on the Mute lable.