Ostriches, frogs, and Wild Gods. The luminescent parables of Nick Cave.
How a Bad Seed learned to love the interview process.
I interviewed Nick Cave in 2003. I still shiver, thinking about it. Is it possible to blush and have the blood drain from your face at the same time? It’s a visceral miracle.
Why? Cave didn’t want to talk. He was polite. He was controlled. He was quiet, but also visibly exasperated by the process. You can’t argue with that. Interviews are an absurd enterprise.
I asked Cave about the song There Is A Town, and its lyric: “And so it goes/And so it seems/That God lives in our dreams/In our dreams”. The singer shrugged, saying that the meaning was obvious. Biographical enquires were dispatched in similar fashion.
“Memories become myths in a way,” Cave said, “especially if you do interviews where you’re constantly regurgitating your youth, and it becomes something alien to what it was. And I have a certain yearning for that myth. When things were simple and the lines were clean. And you could roam freely through life.”
He almost sang the last line, restraining himself as he spoke. “I always know when I’m getting tired,” he said, “because I can see the words written in front of me… ‘Roam freely.’”
I still have the cassette of that interview. I can’t bear to listen to it. I’ve sent it to Otter.ai but I can’t make myself read the automated transcription. I have the yellowing newspaper cutting, which at least has the good grace to look like a fading bruise. Can’t read it, except for the paragraph that - in memory - signalled the moment where Cave seemed to veer, wearily, towards an accomodation with the process.
I had asked him about recording with Johnny Cash. The story was re-told on the Stephen Colbert Late Show recently, and has now been polished into an anecdotal parable. As Cave said: memories become myths.
The story is this.
Cash was working with producer Rick Rubin. Now, in parenthesis, the whole American Recordings series can be viewed as a way of re-acquainting Cash, and a new audience, with his myth. It was a kind of regurgitation. The process involved pairing Cash with contemporary material, such as Trent Reznor’s Hurt, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus. Then there were duets with complimentary artists such as Joe Strummer and Nick Cave.
When it came to Cave’s turn, Cash had lost his voice. He explained that he had prayed to God for its return.
“I got down on my knees,” he told Cave, “and I never asked God for nothin’ - and then I said : ‘Look, you gave me this voice, but it’s gone, and I’m gonna come into LA and I’m gonna sing, give it to me back!’ And I woke up this morning, and listen to me, I’m singin’ like a bird!”
And, Cave continued: “June Carter’s goin’ ‘Yeah!’ It was one of those moments. Just fantastic. And he was singing like a bird.”
Cave said he viewed Cash as one of the irreplaceable voices of popular music, to be filed alongside John Lee Hooker and Frank Sinatra. (Cash still had nine months to live at the time of our conversation). “He’s pretty shaky,” Cave said. “But he obviously loves sitting down and singing a song. He really comes alive when he does it. I saw that with Nina Simone when she played at the Royal Festival Hall. She came on. She was real frail. It took her five minutes to get up the stairs to get to the piano, and by the end she was just hammering at this thing, screaming her lungs out, and it was the most extraordinary transformation I’d ever seen. That’s the beautiful thing about music.”
Can we talk about parables? Here is Johnny Cash, in the introduction to his novel, The Man In White. It is not as well known as Cash’s earlier book, The Man In Black (“God’s superstar tells his own story in his own words”) but it was important to Cash, being a novelistic rendering of the life of St. Paul. I am not going to read the book. The evangelist Billy Graham did that for all of us, and found what he was looking for, which was the suggestion that the Man In White was not Paul, but the Lord Jesus Christ. Cash’s introduction - before he gets down to the solemn business of reframing the gospels (“some occurrences are products of my broad and at times strange imagination”) - has a power of its own, particularly when he recounts the story of the time he was attacked by an ostrich.
Do we need context? Cash kept ostriches. I fancy I saw one of them when I went on a bus tour of music stars’ homes around Nashville in 1989, and the busload of country’n’western tourists - some of us wearing Minnie Pearl straw hats, some with foam beer coolers from Bobby’s Bare Trap - paused by the Cash driveway and took pictures of his mailbox.
“An ostrich tried to kill me,” Cash wrote. “I was trying to look across the abyss between heaven and earth and put some of it in words at my cabin in the woods, which is in a fifty-acre fenced-in area near my home stocked with wild game. I got up to take a walk and relax when I met this eight-foot tall ostrich in the path. He had lost his mate in the winter freeze and had become hostile. I was thinking of Paul being struck down on the Damascus road by a blinding light when I was suddenly struck down by the two big feet of an ostrich.”
At first, Cash survives the attack unhurt. But as he walks back towards his cabin, the bird reappears. “He spread his wings and hissed at me. ‘I think I’d better show you who owns this land,’ I said picking up a long stick. Then he attacked. I swung the stick at his long neck, which is just what he wanted me to do. He jumped straight up out of my reach and came back down on me feet first. He broke three ribs when he hit me, and only my belt kept his big, dirty claws from ripping me open.”
Cut to now, to Nick Cave talking on Stephen Colbert. The story about Johnny Cash losing his voice, then finding it, spools out, perfectly-formed. You can often see the joins on TV talk-shows, where the host isn’t asking questions as much as serving up cues. Actors are skilled enough to make the transition seem natural. Cave isn’t that kind of actor. But he is in the game in this moment, playing along.
Without going into detail, you can see how it happened. The trajectory of Cave’s life took him to a place where constant regurgitation wouldn’t just be boring, it would be injurious. This may be why he invented The Red Hand Files, a forum of intimate exchanges in which he is both player and referee. It’s not playing God exactly - God’s responses to fan-mail are generally more oblique - but the Red Hand Files does offer a peculiarly intense form of Q&A. It’s tempting to see it as a kind of narrative control, except that Cave gets something from the process too. Often, the questions and answers will centre on a note of reassurance that pain isn’t eternal. It’s an odd kind of autograph, but not a trivial thing.
After the Red Hand Files came Faith, Hope and Carnage, a further reframing of the interview process. It is a skilfully edited book, a coherent text made from discursive lockdown conversations. In the editing, O’Hagan becomes something of a curious ghost, but his role shouldn’t be underestimated. The book is that modern thing; a journey, in which Cave moves hesitantly towards a recognition of something spiritual. “Thank God, quite literally, for music,” Cave tells O’Hagan, “because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder.”
And so I spoke to Cave again, on Zoom this time, not in person. The conversation was for Uncut, to discuss the new album, Wild God. It’s a brilliant record, in all definitions of the word. Shall I make a list? It is bright, shining, blazing, dazzling, light, vivid, intense, ablaze, beaming, gleaming, glaring, luminous, lustrous, luminescent, radiant, incandescent, phosphorescent, scintillating, resplendent, irradiant, lucent, effulgent, refulgent, fulgent (all the fulgents), lucid, glistering, coruscating, lambent, fulgurant, fulgurating, fulgurous. All that. And joyous.
And yet, the track that Cave had chosen to introduce the record, Frogs, is the most obtuse thing on it. It prompted a Red Hand Files reader called Barry from Leatherhead to write the following note.
“Listening to Frogs on the ol’ Spotify so spend that 0.001 pence wisely, but got thinking: I have no fucking idea what this song is about. I love it, but its lyrics are meaningless to me. So, my question is this: what makes you decide whether a lyric is great or should be dumped cos it’s utter shit, cos, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, you walk a very fine tightrope between the two, my man. Anyway, best go, nice catching up, love to you and yours and all that.”
Does Barry actually exist? He certainly seems to inhabit the same universe as the comic phone-in caller, Colin from Portsmouth, but his point is well made. Cave’s lengthy explanation of the song (“a laudatory and epigrammatic paean to the cosmos as we sometimes find it, a cosmos tilting towards love and revelling in its own insistent beauty”) is similarly unbalanced.
So, a little tentatively, I suggested to Cave that the lyrics of Frogs were a bit obscure.
“I wouldn’t have understood the song without your explanation,” I said.
“A lot of people say that,” Cave replied.
“The meaning is quite hidden. Is that why you explained it?”
“No,” Cave said. “I explained it because I objected to the person who wrote in the letter. Wrote in the letter saying, ‘Just heard Frogs, great music, but the lyrics are a pile of shit, they don't mean anything.’ Well, hang on a second here, they may be pile of shit. That’s not for me to judge, but you can’t say they don’t mean anything. And I explained what they mean to me, and what they should mean to an alert listener, you would hope. At the same time, I was exaggerating it, and having a bit of fun with the whole thing too, to some degree. But these songs aren’t just bunches of words. They have their meanings.”
Back then, when I asked about There Is A Town, Cave wasn’t interested in explaining his lyrics. (Most songwriters aren’t). He also suggested that he had reservations about The Boatman’s Call, the album which marked a change in his narrative position to something more obviously autobiographical. Back then - from unreliable memory - he talked about the words being un-processed. This rawness, of course, was the thing that gave the songs their power, especially when you add the singer’s faith in the transformative power of music and multiply it by his broad and at times strange imagination. So where is he now on the lyrical tightrope?
“I think I’ve sort of stayed doing that kind of thing up to the present day. What I feel like I’m doing is taking very small ordinary ideas, and magnifying them into something much greater. So there’s something like Frogs, which is a truly epic song. It’s essentially about my wife and me walking through the rain with some nature happening, some frogs jumping around, but it’s blown into something massive, a highly, sort of religious or spiritual moment.
“I’m a songwriter, so that’s what I do.”