RETURN OF THE SAINT

(this article appeared in Mojo, March 1997)

 

By James McNair

It's five minutes to 11 on Sunday morning in Brompton Road, London SW3, just past the Victoria and Albert Museum and up the hefty wooden portals of the Brompton Oratory. A Catholic mass conducted in High Latin is about to begin.

Inside, all is ritual, serenity and intercession, an atmosphere redolent of The Name Of The Rose. Heavy-laden candelabras form a city of tiny lights. A pipe organ slowly empties its long metal lungs as a procession of holy men trundle in as if on castors. There's a silence, then a baby burbles into the cavernous quiet. The congregation are seated, unaware that they have a rock star in their midst.

High in the altarpiece, cherubs recline on clouds set in skies of kingfisher blue, whilst underneath, against a backdrop of golden finery and white marble, stands the priest. The hypnotic pendulum swing of the censer frees the mind, releasing delicate puffs of incense smoke like dry-ice for the righteous. The scent of frankincense slowly shins up the nostrils of Nick Cave's blunt nose.

The choir begins to sing, their a cappella incantations beautiful and mysterious. Each note dies, then ghosts on in two seconds of natural reverberation. The congregation are expectant, focused. The first reading is taken from Luke 24, in which Christ returns to His loved ones...

Some months later and a few tube stops further North, Nick Cave and I take our pews in the rather less salubrious setting of the Portobello Cafe. We commune over coffee, Cave reclining with legs crossed in a voluminous armchair, fag as prop. He's come straight from the airport, having just flown in from Amsterdam.

With evening falling in Notting Hill, much of the light in the spacious upstairs room comes from the open fire. Its yellow-white flames are reflected on the lenses of Cave's Eric Morecambesque glasses. It is not, however, quite the right moment for a 'Wey-hey'.

"Very often people are driven towards a spiritual life through the failings of their personal life," Cave muses. "In the Brompton Oratory I was thinking about a particular girl that had left me, and found that the church wasn't a lot of help. I went along more for the event really, for the Catholic mass in Latin. When I go to church I have to take so much of it as metaphor, and I find it very irritating. The sermons are often pathetic and untrue, based on terrible misrepresentations of the Bible.

"But I like the order and ritual of a church service, the way it facilitates some kind of spiritual meditation. It gives me an elevated feel about the mundane. I'm more aware of things. It would manifest itself in the way I behave towards other people. There's so much mystery and beauty within the word of God, and what becomes the sermon is often just an awful demystification of that. For me, this whole business is very much a journey that I'm doing on my own. The very foundation of my spiritual belief is doubt about the whole thing. I haven't had any great epiphanies. I just feel it's my duty to educate myself about the concept of God."

At eight years old Nick Cave was a choirboy at the Wangaratta Cathedral. At art college in the mid-70s, it was the Renaissance and Gothic religious paintings which excited him most. His 10 albums to date with the Bad Seeds are saturated with Biblical imagery, and the title of his 1989 novel And The Ass Saw The Angel (which sold a respectable 50 000 copies in paperback in the UK) was taken from Numbers, Chapter 22.

Lapsed heroin addict and alleged misogynist he may be, but when it comes to God, Nick Cave has read the book, and thoroughly. But what kind of rock star prefers church to MTV Awards ceremonies? And what specifically has led Nick Cave to the Brompton Oratory? If there's a crisis, it's not in his career. The formerly self-styled King Ink may still have his raven barnet, but the further he's wandered from his Gothic roots, the more successful he's become. Consider the Murder Ballads album - on Top of The Pops with Kylie; a deux with P.J. Harvey - which has become his biggest seller to date, shifting around 800 000 copies worldwide. Not bad when you consider that it was ostensibly an exercise in genre-specific songwriting: a somewhat throwaway record cobbled together in the studio to buy time for an infinitely more personal and intimate work.

That was The Boatman's Call, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' forthcoming album, due for release in March. Sparse, stark and unrelentingly honest, the record seems likely to become the career milestone for Cave that Blood on the Tracks was for Dylan. And it's on this new album that Brompton Oratory slots into place, one of the 12 confessional songs which intimately portray recent events in Cave's private life.

 It seems that there are several songs on the album which concern the mother of your son Luke, Viviane Carneiro, and others about P.J. Harvey...

Well, hopefully the songs work in some kind of way without having to worry about the 'who' of them.

Yes, but inevitably people will ask who those particular songs are written about.

People will ask, but I think there's enough said in the songs. I did my best to articulate for myself what went on as accurately and clearly as I possibly could, and I think I did that quite well. There were some things going on that I wasn't aware of at the time, so there are inaccuracies in the songs - and I can only talk about this in the most general of terms - but as far as I'm concerned they tell the truth about what went on as I understood it at the time. Far From Me, for example, documents the slow deterioration of a relationship, and the song was written throughout its duration. It starts quite beautifully and ends quite bitterly. There was something significant about writing that way at the time, and about actually getting it right. In the past I've fallen prey to tendencies to write things that simply sounded good or rhymed well, though they didn't convey what actually happened or what I actually felt or meant.

People Ain't No Good seems to relate the collapse of your relationship with Viviane.

Well, yes it does.

In the last three verses there's some lyrics which say: "It ain't that in their hearts they're bad / They'd stick by you if they could / But that's just bullshit / People just ain't no good."

It's a comment on people's morality. I'm not saying that people are bad; I'm saying that people aren't any help - that ultimately, we're no use to each other. What I'm trying to put across on this record is that we have each other, and it's really not enough, but it's all that we've got. And there's a religious side to this record too. I don't believe that God is there to make us feel better, to intervene and change things. God is there as a higher entity beyond our questioning. We're given brains and hearts and wills and each other, but in the end it's just not enough. We're locked into our own worlds, and our own obsessions and problems. We can get support from each other, but there are things that happen that just can't be fixed.

And you felt you'd reached that point with Viviane?

Well, I think most of that's there. I was pretty straight forward with the stuff about Viv, and I've been exposing our relationship in one way or another on record for years, so I don't think it's really fair to open it up any more than that in interviews. I write about it because that's what I have to write about. I think Viv understands that to a certain degree, and so she accepts what...she puts up with what I write. But I don't think it does any of us any good to talk about this kind of thing in interviews.

There's always been conjecture about the women you've been close to and their representation in your songs; Anita Lane is associated with the tracks Lucy and Six-Inch Gold Blade, and some people recognised Viviane in Lament. It's clear that West Country Girl and Black Hair from the new album are about P.J. Harvey...

And Green Eyes is about Tori Amos, the line about the "twinkling cunt" particularly...

Are you taking the piss?

No, it is. She sews sequins into her pubic hair.

You have first hand knowledge of this?

Yeah, absolutely...I've never really been asked before who songs are about, not until this album. People work their way up to the big question about Polly Harvey by talking a little bit about Viv, who no-one's actually interested in at all, because there's no copy in it.

Did you have any misgivings about identifying P.J. Harvey so clearly or detailing your relationship so intimately?

I don't know that I did.

A "West Country Girl" with a "heart-shaped face", "widow's peak", "black hair" and "lovely lidded" eyes?

Well, I don't know. I just wrote some stuff and it came out that way.

Are You The One That I've Been Waiting For discusses the idea of the perfect love, the perfect partner. There's a moving section where you sing: "Oh, we will know, won't we? / The stars will explode in the sky / Oh, but they don't, do they? / Stars have their moment and then they die." Do all relationships have their shelf-life?

I don't know. These songs were written over a period of time. Some of them are very optimistic, some aren't. I'm not an authority on relationships. I'm not an authority on much at all, I don't think. I'm simply trying to write the songs in the best way I can, and each song is very much tainted by the way I feel at the time of writing. So there are no ultimate points being made here about love, or about God, or whatever...I have felt distrustful and bitter about relationships, and that's there on the new record occasionally.

You've been working with Mick Harvey for around 20 years now. Does he still play a key role as a sounding board for your ideas?

Not really, no. There are occasions when someone in the group will turn around and say that they think a song's not very good, or that they think I'm slightly misguided about something. There was one song which I'd written for my kid which was going to be on the album - a pretty sentimental piece of crap, actually - and Blixa [Bargeld, one of The Bad Seeds' guitarists] took me to one side, patted me on the shoulder and said, "Why don't you spare the world this particular masterpiece and give it to Luke as a gift when he's a little bit older?" Haha. I was pleased that he said it. I can get very angry when I'm allowed to gnaw away endlessly on an idea which actually isn't very good.

I do like to record all the songs that I write though, because otherwise I forget them and they get lost. For me, it's a way of making concrete a memory or a feeling which can become tainted, or which the future often dismisses in some way. And that's particularly true where relationships are concerned. I know that there are songs where I've felt a particular way about a particular person, and when I've recorded them that's down there in black and white, although perhaps two months down the line I can't conceive that I could possibly have felt that way. So sometimes later when all is bitterness, I'm reminded that there was actually something good there once.

For years Mick Harvey was the one who was able to reassure you about the quality of your songs.

Actually, I think nowadays I spend more time reassuring everyone else that the songs are OK. On this album there are certain issues that I'm dealing with lyrically which are possibly quite hard to swallow for certain members of the group. I'm dealing with things that are ultra-personal, and certain religious notions. There's a polemic there, a statement being made, that they simply don't agree with. This is becoming more and more clear, although it hasn't caused any friction between us. Before, I would use religious imagery in a fairly vague, colourful way and it was tolerated. I mean, it still is, but I know that there are things which I say in these new songs which some of the band just don't believe. I've had to persuade them to stand by the songs, to see them through to the end - and they have. But they've made it very clear that these are my particular views. They're no Mick Harvey's or Blixa's.

So really this is the closest you've come to an out and out solo album?

In a way, yes. All of the songs were written very much on my own, and I was very much absorbed in my own world at the time of writing them. Blixa would be saying, (puts on German accent) "So why am I here then, why am I here?" And I'd be saying, "You're here because I like the economy of your guitar playing and the fact that you don't feel the need to play over everything." It's ironic that it's the largest band photo we've ever had on an album, but there's hardly any instrumentation on it. Everyone in the band suppressed their ego for the greater good of the record. Apart from me, of course, haha. My ego runs riot, as ever. The album was recorded quickly, so it retained some of its freshness in my mind. The idea was to preserve the rawness of the demos, and some of the songs were actually only re-recorded for academic reasons, to get separation between a vocal track and a piano track so that the songs could be mixed properly.

You have been portrayed by friends as someone who has always had a natural rapport with kids. There's a line in Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere about a child being startled by the crack of a drum and pressing his tiny fingers into your hand.

Actually, I'm describing a time when it was carnivale in Brazil; we were watching a parade and I was holding this little Brazilian kid's hand. What I was trying to say was that the feeling of his fingers pressed into my hand kind of prefigured the birth of my own son in some way...

I suppose Luke was a natural choice of a name for your son...

Yeah, there were only four to choose from, really (smiles). He just really loves me and accepts me, and that's a great feeling. He doesn't question who I am. Yet. I'm able to be myself with him, and that's very liberating. And I've found too, that over the last couple of years I've become very connected to my father, which is something I hadn't really thought about that much since he died. [He was killed in a car accident in 1978.] Being with Luke I find I remember my father a lot more. As a father the only reference point I have is my own dad, and I feel now that I'm able to do all the great things he did for me with my own son. Also I feel that I'm able to repair some of the mistakes that he made with me. I see it as a kind of evolutionary process from one father to another. I'm a slightly refined model of my own dad. I'm very much like him in personality - self-interested.

You'll be 40 this September. Do you mourn the passing of the years?

I feel like I've reached 40 and I still don't know anything. I'm still struggling with relationships. I feel that one should accumulate some knowledge about how they work, and how one can go about making them work properly, I'm still constantly baffled by the situations that I find myself in. So it's not like I'm entering middle-age thinking that I can relax, because I don't feel that I have life sussed out in any way at all. I think there are certain social skills which I didn't learn properly because I was preoccupied with other things. So far I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy into writing and solitary activities, and I've come out of the whole thing with somewhat retarded abilities where relationships are concerned.

When the author Martin Amis reached 40 he described the awful realisation that girls in the street now looked straight through him, that their eyes didn't 'snag' on him anymore. Surely that's one problem you won't have to face?

I don't know, haha. I never had the feeling that girls did that anyway, and I've never felt that I was that attractive. Martin Amis is a good-looking guy. He has a certain charm.