After all, they're big boys now."Ĭave, meanwhile, is slumped in his chair. Then when members of the band come up to me and say, 'Hey, have you seen this or got that?' I just say 'No'. It's a joke, that's why I set up the tours. "They want 10 or 15 per cent of your money and then drink all your booze. "Tour managers are parasites," he later explains. He's one of nature's organisers, with a Filofax in his head rather than his pocket, as well as a wicked wit. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Harvey is the musical arranger for both the Bad Seeds and Crime & the City Solution. Kid Congo, now with a moustache, diligently packs his guitars while Mick Harvey picks up the takings and the rest of the band flop out. Hey, but mention writers … because, as Nick is the first to admit, he's technically a lousy singer.īackstage tonight it's like a grave. As the Bad Seeds sow the cyclical rumble of City of Refuge, from the tentatively titled new album, Tender Prey, flagellated by the bullwhip guitars of Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld and Kid Congo (no Cramps solos here), I know Cave is a great. Along the way he has left a narrative trail of picaresque characters. From the Boys Next Door, through the Birthday Party, to the present day Bad Seeds, Cave has often striven for things that can't be resolved: salvation and unrequited love.
His talent is he can tell fantastic musical stories that encapsulate those emotions. Nick might feel sorry for himself beyond belief, but belief is often the problem, the search for or lack of it. Many of his recent songs have been a collapsing of both. Whether it be biblical morality or unrequited love.
Ironically, though the surface vibe may be different, the clothes cut from another loom, the uniform of personal as opposed to social alienation that Cave deals in is the oldest cliche in the book. The body they're feeding off is a mirror of their own emotional turmoil. Barely moving, they're like hyenas attracted to carrion. The Cave constituency tonight in Utrecht, and virtually every night elsewhere, couldn't change its underwear without help. In a Dutch club whose corridors remind me of the entrance to the gas ovens in Auschwitz – not a flippant comment, since I've been there – this lanky piece of literate shit, in his waistcoat and bow tie, holds the audience around the neck by the hangman's noose of his sheer showmanship of inadequacy.
Vulnerability, sentimentality, bitterness, abrasiveness, humour and morbidity – all peel from his stretched larynx like a snake shedding skins. The cramped parameters of his singing are his strength. A man trying to exorcise the ghosts inside his head through limited means. Nick Cave is the voice of desperation onstage. It's time to tear out the pages of his book and light a fire. It misses.Įventually the press officer comes between Cave's gale-force windmill limbs and my passive resistance. He'd have trouble pissing against a lamppost. While I kneel down in the street and gather up the gear Cave cocks his boot at my head. Do you think that Jack hasn't got a memory?" "What the hell do you think you're doing?" castigates Nick's press officer as Cave fumbles with my zips – the one's on the bag, you understand. All I want is to get out of this damned city and never have to look at Cave and his dishrag limbs again. "If it means that much to you, I'll give it to you," I offer. "Where's that fucking interview tape," he hisses, ripping the contents of the bag out into the street. Picks it up and runs like an ostrich with its head still buried. He couldn't drive in a tack with a mallet. "I'll fucking kill you, you bastard," he bellows, trying to tear out my left eye with filthy spatula nails. We're too far into this ugly scene for him to quit or back down now. The hate in Cave's eyes burns more fiercely than a funeral pyre. He'll never get a gardening job chopping down weeds, let alone collecting my skull. "You're nothing but a shite-eater," he shrieks, taking a scythe with his fist at my head. The foot misses its target, resulting only in a bruised thigh. Luckily he'll never play football for Australia, even the junior squad. "You scum-sucking shit!" he screams at me, aiming a scuffed cowboy boot at my groin. Right this second, outside the VIP Hotel in Hamburg's Holstenstrasse, his larynx has the timbre of The Reaper.
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