interview by steve cross.
edited by steve phillips.
article written in august 1997
published in "sadness is in the sky magazine" issue 4

One of the most discussed and admired artists ever to come from these shores, Nick Cave is a man of intensity and great talent. His most recent album with his band of merry men, The Bad Seeds, has seen praise and much esteem heaped on in limitless scoops. The album, 'The Boatman's Call' is a recording of beauty and an exploration of emotion, both joyous and reflective in it's tone In interview with Steve Cross, Nick Cave reveals his thoughts on 'The Boatman's Call', insight into some past & upcoming projects and some of his impressions on the very successful 'Murder Ballads' record of 1996. SC:I was kinda thinking the other day that a few years ago I was doing my radio show and you guys (Nick and The Bad Seeds) had played in town and I did an hour special playing original versions of some of the songs you've covered over the years, and I got this phone call which at the time I was a bit suspicious about cause I thought i was being wound up, by a character claiming to be Nick Cave wanting me to tape the Tim Rose album for him. NC: I think that might have been me, actually. SC: Yeah well I thought it was but at the time I wasn't sure!

NC: Yeah I have a feeling that was me cause I wanted to get that.

SC: Because I know you played with Tim Rose just recently...

HC: Well I'm going into studio with him when i get back to London. He was doing nothing whatsoever in America, in New York, he hasn't done anything for years & years and Years and there was this Dutch film company wanting to make a film about him, like 'what ever happened to Tim Rose?' And they sort of found him and and they got him to come back to London, and they did a little interview with me as part of the film 'thing' about why I like Tim Rose. And then I did and interview, a talk on camera, with Tim Rose and he said to come down and sing this song with him in Putney, and it was the first he'd been on stage in 20 years. Which I did, I went and sang "Hey Joe" with him. But he was fantastic anyway. It was just him with his accoustic guitar and it was brilliant. So ummm, we've kind of got him a record deal and we've kinda put together a band and we're gonna go into the studio with him and do cover versions, and he's gonna sing and Warren Ellis and Jim White (Dirty 3) are gonna do it, and Barry Adamson I hope and Alex Hacker from Einsturzende Neubauten. So we've got this kind of weird little group together and get him to sing along... it should be great.

SC: Well that's totally amazing, to resurrect a career like that!

NC: Well I mean he was just brilliant in anyone's terms when he played on his own you know so. I don't know if it's gonna resurrect his career, but I think we'll make a pretty interesting little record.

SC: Interesting that it's always the Dutch film companies making these things isn't it?

NC: The Dutch are amazing in that respect!

SC: It's a highly enduring album, that first one isn't it? It'll live forever.

NC: Oh it's great and I've just been listening to it a lot again because of this and umm, you know, trying to work out the right songs for him to sing and stuff like that.

SC: And so how did the Scott Walker connection come through for "To Have And To Hold" (movie soundtrack)?

NC: That was very much Johnny Hillcoat (Director of "To Have And To Hold") wanting us to do a record, a kind of 60's or 70's sounding song for the film he was doing. He wanted the Bob Dylan song whatever it is... "I Threw It All Away" and he kind of thought of different singers to use to sing this. People from the era. And I think PJ Probey was one idea and Scott Walker was the other one. We agreed on Scott Walker and I had a like 5 minute meeting with him where I kind of tried to explain how I wanted him to sing it, which was a reasonably arrogant thing for me to say, to suggest the thought. And I asked if I could could come into the studio with him, and he said "no". He didn't wanna have anything to do with that. He just went in and did the song and kinda posted it to us and ahh that was kinda our involvement with Scott Walker.

SC: Were you pleased with the outcome?

NC: I think ot was alright. I think it's a little over dramatic or something. There was something in the last verse that I find a bit irritating, but basically I think it's great.

SC: When I listen to his records, especially the really 'mega' orchestrated ones I i always tink it's like him kinda doing battle with the BBC sound Orchestra or something. They're rushing off to do a 'Goons Show' a bit later on.

NC: There is that feel, definitely.

SC: Are there any sort of contemporary artists that you think are as unrepentant as guys like Tim Rose and Scott Walker?

NC: Oh I don't know. (laughs) Oh I have no idea!

SC: I know that yoiu're quite a big fan of the Palace Brothers, Do you think that they'll kind of carry on this sort of tradition?

NC: They may do, well Will Oldham may do. I mean I love his music very much and I hope he continues to do it. I think his last record was fantastic. I don't know about unrepentant, but he's brilliant. The Dirty 3 I think are a really incredible group in anyone's standards. They're in America and around Europe, blowin everyone's heads off and they are an incredible group. I mean I haven't seen a band as good as them in years.

SC: I had some vague recollection of an interview you did I think after the "Henry's Dream" album where you made some comment about the sort of on-going expectations that heap up, album after album, that each one's got to be bigger or better that the ladt one, and you wanted to slightly pull back from that and do something out of sync with that expectation. Is the new album an opportunity to do that?

NC: Well I mean the ‘Murder Ballads’ record we sat down as a group and decided we’d make an album that was just really difficult for people to like and was something basically for our fans and that everyone else would just consider to be unlistenable and would do really badly and settle everything down again. Umm, we kind of looked at the ‘Murder Ballads’ as gonna be our kind of ‘Self Portrait’ or whatever that Bob Dylan did, umm where everyone just sort of thought ‘what a pile of shit, whose indulgent rubbish?’. And that was our kind of ‘aim’ with that record but it did quite the opposite and everyone bought it, and loved it and so you never can really tell. Umm, I’ve ceased to have any control over those sort of things.

SC: It’s interesting you should mention ‘Self Portrait’ ‘cause that’s exactly the album I had in mind ahh, in that it’s the album that everybody really dumps on but I think if you approach it as being somebody doing a fairly heartfelt, very simplistic, sort of natural album it’s actually a very pretty record.

NC: Ohh it’s a great record. I love “All The Tired Horses In The Sun” it’s one of my favorite Dylan tracks.

SC: So did you view ‘The Boatman’s Call’ as a kind of ‘calm after the storm’ of the ‘Murder Ballads’ album?

NC: Well for me ‘The Boatman’s Call’ is the MOST important record I’ve made. It’s a record I’ve really wanted to make for a long time. It’s a record that I actually go home and listen to because it’s the kind of music I really like and I’ve never done that with any of our other records. I’ve always liked or admired my records from afar in a way. It’s not like you’d actually put them on your record player and play the bloody things! Umm, and this record I do.

SC: Are you gonna tour the album?

NC: Ahh yeah we are.

SC: Will the live show be a more stripped down thing as well?

NC: Yeah, I mean we’ve talked a lot about how we’re gonna approach touring in general, none of us wanna do it in the same way anyway. We don’t wanna just extend what we’ve been doing and kind of carry that on for another year and hopefully we’re still kind of ‘vital’ enough for it to be OK. Rather we’re gonna take things back to basics and do shows that are in keeping with this new record.

SC: So there’ll be reinterpretation’s maybe of some of the earlier material?

NC: Yeah, that’s right. Have you been talking to Mick Harvey(the Bad Seeds) or something?!

SC: Not really!

NC: You know all our secrets before we even know ‘em ourselves!

SC: I just figured the new material probably wouldn’t sit that well in a standard set or whatever.

NC: No well I guess not. I mean I think one of the things we’ve managed to do over the years, and increasingly so, is to put fairly aggressive music together with very fragile music, and we’ve done that reasonably successfully. But there’s a certain amount of control that disappears for me as a singer, singing loud stuff where it’s very difficult to sing the softer stuff properly. It’s just something in regard to the breathing and all of that sort of stuff, so to do this record properly we will need to basically do the whole set at that level.

SC: And I noticed in a glimpse I got of a promo shot the other day that Warren Ellis is featured in the promo shot. Is he ahh, now a part of the extended family?

NC: ...part of the gang! Yeah, well his contribution on ‘The Boatman’s Call’ was really significant and fantastic what he did. He doesn’t operate in a kind of session muso way, he comes in and he thinks the songs through and he does exactly what he wants to do and so, he contributed as much as anybody else did. He gets to join the club!

SC: And of course you just got the award for Australian Songwriter of the Year which I guess goes back to the irony of doing the ‘Murder Ballads’ as a fairly extreme thing only to have a massive hit with the single off it.

NC: Ohh it’s all pretty funny, the whole thing. But umm, I mean a reasonable amount of effort went into the Kylie(Minogue) song and I had written several songs for Kylie Minogue in the past which I had screwed up and thrown in the bin and never dared to sort of send her. So a reasonable amount of thought actually went into the writing of that particular song, but the other songs in terms of songwriting were sort of thrown together, with very little thought whatsoever. I mean the words were written, but musically it was just someone tappin’ out a beat that was appropriate to what the lyrics were. Umm, very little effort was done in that regard. So to have kind of ‘won’ an award for those songs was quite ‘odd’. Maybe I should work like that more often in future!

SC: Somebody told me kind of fifth hand and God knows how accurate it is but, I think it was that ‘Stagger Lee’ was done on a first take, just reading the lyrics off a sheet. Is that true?

NC: Yeah it was, yeah.

SC: As Australian Songwriter of the Year would you...

NC: Yes, what would you like to know?!!?

SC: ..would you like more people to cover your work?

NC: Yes I would. I’d like everybody to do that.

SC: Indiscriminately?

NC: Absolutely yeah!

SC: I was wondering what you thought of that cover version of ‘The Ship Song’, was it Dennis Walter?

NC: I thought he did a pretty good job actually. Umm, might have been slightly over interpreted I don’t know, but I thought he did a pretty good job.

SC: It kind of really set the cat amongst the pigeons amongst some fans who thought it was a bit sacrilegious for him to dabble with your cannon of work.

NC: Ohh please.

SC: At the award ceremony at the APRA awards, your publisher(Roger Grierson) made a very stirring speech about the kind of victory of the Class Of ‘77 and how punk rock had won. Do you feel like the Class Of ‘77 has been or even should have been vindicated?

NC: Umm, ohh I don’t know. I mean I always thought some amazing stuff was done in Australia, and in particular in Melbourne. And I always felt that the bands were short changed and that they didn’t get the recognition that they should have done. I felt that the Australian rock industry as such who were giving out these awards could have been a bit more supportive to bands or could be more supportive to bands in their formative years in some way and have a bit more confidence in Australia’s actual product without groups having to kind of go overseas and try and slog it out and get patted on the head by England and America before they kind of get any recognition here. Although maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a good thing that a lot of bands have to leave Australia to get somewhere. Umm, it’s difficult to say but for me, it doesn’t give the awards much value, to me. You know to me an ARIA Awards doesn’t hold much value because I feel that we worked outside of the Australian rock industry. And we had to, because largely we were ignored.

SC: Did that make you stronger do you think?

NC: Well I’m glad in a way that we had to leave and we had to sort of go at it on our own overseas and it worked for us in some way but I think it’s been a real struggle for a lot of other groups. That’s my little personal opinion about it.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ‘The Boatman’s Call’ is out now thru Mute Records via Liberation Music.