The Caveman Returns
A dark new album and a bright
European tour prove Nick Cave is still the master of melancholy
By
HUGH PORTER London
For many
people, australia conjures up images of barbecues, Crocodile
Dundee and Kylie Minogue. And then there's Nick Cave, whose
very name calls to mind the devil and darkness. A pale, chain-smoking,
pessimistic ex-junkie, Cave seems the very antithesis of the
affable Aussie. He has spent the past 20 years and 10 albums
in a tortured struggle with life, love, God and the extremes
of the human condition. The songs he writes and sings with
his band, the Bad Seeds, are typically fraught. Now, with
his just-released 11th album, No More Shall We Part, a chink
of light has touched his melancholy. European audiences are
discovering it as Cave, 43, and the Bad Seeds tour the continent.
(They'll wind up in Athens on July 2.)
Cave, who
grew up in the country town of Warracknabeal, north of Melbourne,
has had an ambivalent relationship with his homeland. At the
end of the '70s he escaped with a band called the Birthday
Party and headed for London. Falling into the post-punk void,
the Birthday Party offered a heroin-fueled sound with lyrics
that show there's nothing new about Eminem. One of their songs
opened: "I stuck a six-inch gold blade in the head of a girl."
Not a g'day kind of sound.
The Birthday
Party moved to Berlin, where it imploded, and Cave moved on
to form the Bad Seeds in 1983 with multi-instrumentalist Mick
Harvey and guitarist Blixa Bargeld, the only members to remain
throughout. Their earliest albums, From Her to Eternity and
The First Born is Dead, introduce themes based on Southern
mythology and the Bible, the Old Testament in particular,
that recur throughout Cave's work (culminating in his 1990
novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel). Cave's characters are blighted,
often violent outcasts whose fate is retribution. His song
The Mercy Seat, from the 1988 album Tender Prey-recorded last
year by one of his mentors, Johnny Cash-is written from the
electric chair: "And the mercy seat is waiting/ And I think
my head is burning/ And in a way I'm yearning/ To be done
with all this measuring of truth/ An eye for eye/ And a tooth
for a tooth."
Cave left
Berlin at the end of the '80s for São Paulo, where his writing
took a more personal, less metaphorical route. Before arriving
at No More Shall We Part, Cave beat heroin, moved back to
London and found modest commercial success. His 1996 album
Murder Ballads featured collaborations with P.J. Harvey and,
improbably, his pop princess compatriot Kylie Minogue.
In 1999,
on the day of the eclipse, Cave moved from his houseboat on
the Thames and married British ex-model Susie Bick, with whom
he shares a terrace house in London. He leaves it every morning
for an office where he writes from 9 to 5. The upshot of this
domesticated and disciplined mode is No More Shall We Part,
in which Cave almost shows a trust of love-without losing
any of the trademark pain and yearning. In a lecture he once
gave at the Vienna Poetry Festival-which is included in his
Complete Lyrics (Penguin), to be published in Australasia
in August-Cave argued: "The Love Song must be borne into the
realm of the irrational, the absurd, the distracted, the melancholic,
the obsessive and the insane, for the Love Song is the clamor
for love itself, and love is, of course, a form of madness."
From anyone
else, the title track of the new album could be taken as a
romantic reflection on marriage. From Cave, it is menacing:
"And no more shall we part/ The contracts are drawn up, the
ring is locked upon the finger." Fortunately for his large
legion of fans, Cave has managed in these moving ballads to
maintain his muse-his demons-and to prove that maturity doesn't
have to be mellow.
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May 14, 2001 | No. 19
COVER
STORIES
The
Nuns' Stories
Hundreds of Roman Catholic sisters have opened up their lives, their memories
and (when they die) even their brains to researcher David Snowdon so that
all of us can better understand what causes Alzheimer's disease and what
can be done to prevent it
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOCIETY
BEHAVIOR: The Talking Cure...
Australian schools try shaming troublemakers onto the right path
THE
ARTS
CINEMA: Goodbye, Mrs. Tom Cruise. Hello, Nicole
Kidman, star of a bold new movie... Moulin Rouge awakens the dormant
musical
Samantha Lang, a cinematic connoisseur
of sex
MUSIC: Nick Cave, the gloom rocker, blooms
BOOKS: A slim prayer with sales that are
divine
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