Nick Cave

The recent publication of “Nick Cave. Bad Seed – La Ballata di Re Inkiostro” by writer and music critic Massimo Padalino has given us the chance to once again shine a spotlight on the great Australian artist, the architect of a songbook that, as the cover notes of the aforementioned book remind us, “rivals in power and beauty the work of the likes of Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan“. Padalino's fine book, published by Odoya and focused chiefly on the analysis of Cave's lyrical universe, has the merit of being both engaging and passionate, making it highly recommendable for both Cave fans and those who, for one reason or another, have never had the chance to dig deeper into his discography. 

To unpack a few questions related to Cave's music and lyrics, we put some questions to the author of the book himself.

From Boys Next Door/Birthday Party to Grinderman, passing through the long series of albums released as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Australian artist's music has moved through various eras of popular music, always staying true to itself and always backed by a genuinely remarkable body of lyrics. Since your book focuses mainly on analyzing Cave's lyrics, how has his writing evolved over the years, and what are the core themes of his poetics?

In the Birthday Party days, Nick is a young man fascinated by the French poets, by certain literature discovered during his time at art school, by some significant legacies from his father's bookshelf (see: Nabokov), but above all he's a young man with a strong pull toward the grotesque, understood in the sense of Black Humor — those dark tales collected in the famous surrealist anthology by the equally famous André Breton — and also toward the gruesome, plain and simple. Add to these elements a certain taste for cinematic framing, for psycho-pathological depth narrated from the inside (that is, from the point of view, when not literally in the voice, of the one who suffers it), and for meta-biblical, even slightly Manichean, Old-Testament-style shadings, and you get the palette of “literary colors” that Nick will draw from throughout his entire career. His favorite themes? Guilt. Atonement. Redemption. God. And in the background there's always the Bible, or the Gospels, and very often a disguised form of Imitatio Christi, which is really the true keystone of the entire mystical-spastic edifice of Nick-the-obscure (meant quite literally à la Thomas Hardy).

From a musical standpoint, what are Cave's greatest influences?

Gospel. Early rock'n'roll. Delta blues. Apocalyptic folk, broadly speaking. Dylan. Cash. Cohen. From gospel he takes the intensity, filtering it through the teachings of spirituals and the African-American Christian-Methodist congregations typical of the States. From early rock'n'roll he takes the use of the voice, the pauses, the howling surges, as well as the taste for echoes and reverb typical of rock'n'roll's first season, precisely. From Delta blues he takes the hypnotic, swampy instrumental gait so well suited to the Bad Seeds. From apocalyptic folk, whatever that may be, he draws on it to better illuminate his sermons as a mad preacher essentially talking only to himself. From Dylan he takes without ever seeming to have taken anything. From Cash he takes that peculiar way of talking about love and death, halfway between black humor and divine/damned obsession. From Cohen he learns how to use biblical metaphors in the simplest, most direct and most effective way.

In your opinion, what is Cave's masterpiece, and why?

There are several masterpieces. In my view, “The First Born Is Dead” is a masterpiece of skeletal, and in its own way epic, blues introspection. Then there's “The Good Son“, which for the first time fully reveals a different side of Nick the writer of story-songs in the short-story mold — that is, it presents the Australian in a guise closer to that of the poet (though poetry is of course a different thing from song, it must be said), a creator of laconic but effective metaphors that often draw on a biblical text or subtext, able to bring out the figure of martyr and prophet at once that so well suits Nick's psychology, but above all the psychology of his world, which is always made up of borderline people, of extreme situations, of truths that turn out to be lies, and of lies that conceal within themselves the key to one's own truth. Nick is a “religious” figure, above all; in him, existential dissipation and Sadean enjoyment of moral self-flagellation (or self-absolution) are constant, pure, precise, even amid the imprecision of his, so to speak, ideological contours (broadly speaking: because Nick is, after all, a strange figure of a believing gnostic).

What about the albums where Cave failed to come to terms with his own inspiration… in short, his least successful records?

“Nocturama“. “No More Shall We Part”. And a few others. After so many years at the top, after so much time spent recording and releasing albums, you can't exactly demand a new masterpiece from an artist with every single release. But Nick is still a thoroughbred, so he can always pull off something special. That's why he's worth following, even when he's less than convincing. His last three albums are more than anything recitals in the form of a stream of consciousness… do they work? Maybe. As far as I'm concerned, it's at least admirable that Cave has such a clear sense of the arc of his own trajectory as songwriter/performer/musician, which makes each new album also, or perhaps above all, a musical meta-reflection on his own path as a singer-songwriter. We're bordering on subliminal psychoanalysis, paradoxically enough.

One of the most traumatic events in Cave's life was undoubtedly the death of his son Arthur in 2015. How have his music and lyrics changed since then?

Ever since Arthur died, falling from a cliff, probably under the influence of LSD, Nick has simply shifted into fifth gear in a change, in terms of his songwriting, that had already been underway for some time. In fact, since the days of "The Boatman's Call", Nick has been saying that he no longer wants to sing (only) "invented" stories about paradigmatic characters (his whole songbook is full of them, of figures à-la "Spoon River Anthology", who speak through his songs of a world all their own, almost always extreme, that exists only there, in those snow globes complete with landscape that are his songs), but wants to "give voice" to his own interiority, putting down on paper small poems, often Zen-flavored, if it weren't for the fact that they retain the "macabre" quality of his writing, poems that say and (above all) don't say what the (verbal) world of Nick Cave is.

Two of Cave's most important collaborators have been Blixa Bargeld, founder of Einstürzende Neubauten, and Warren Ellis, formerly leader of Dirty Three. Which of the two has had a greater musical impact on Cave's career?

Blixa Bargeld, right from his physical appearance, gaunt and bloodless, his anti-punk punk look, his way of playing that concedes nothing to spectacle, reveals himself to be a precious medium for that form of maniacal, even somewhat mystical introspection that belongs to Teutonic culture at least since Meister Eckhart: expressionism. Blixa and Nick are what the English call "a marriage made in heaven". Now let's move on to Nick and Warren. Well, it's undeniable that the phase of greatest commercial success, built nonetheless on a "consistency" with his own persona and his own poetics as a "man in black" sui generis, Nick achieved through his collaboration with Warren. Equally undeniable is that Warren and Nick very often lean toward a kind of intellectualized symphonism, which the public nonetheless loves, because, I believe, it's often the sadness conveyed by the songs, more than the songs themselves, that acts as a Trojan horse for this strange (though by now not so strange anymore: these two have been collaborating for a quarter of a century) Nick & Warren partnership.

One of his most famous records is "Murder Ballads" from 1996, in which Cave grapples with the tradition of "murder ballads". In your view, was that a mere exercise in style, or did that album say something new about that very particular type of ballad?

"Murder Ballads" is an excellent exercise in style, but an exercise in style all the same. Still, even here Cave manages to stamp it with his trademark; because he bends the guilt/punishment tropes typical of traditional murder ballad characters to his own literary ends, that is, to the creation of a world where criminals, somewhat in the manner of De Sade, live out their criminal acts without false remorse, but with a dark, wicked, scabrous and at the same time proud joy, and in doing so prove themselves standard-bearers of that humanity which, from the song "Wanted Man", a Bob Dylan cover, to the character of the condemned man in "The Mercy Seat", is confirmed to be made up of outsiders who experience evil either as a challenge to society or as an act of rough, joyful rebellion tout court, and of this they are proud!

Cave is also the author of two novels ("And the Ass Saw the Angel", from 1989, and "The Death of Bunny Munro", published twenty years later). Can you tell us what are the most notable features of his prose? Beyond the obvious formal differences, how does his prose differ from the lyrics of his songs?

The prose of "And the Ass Saw the Angel" is substantially different from that of "Bunny Munro". The first novel, which was a long and difficult labor, combines the stylistic traits of the "rural" Faulkner of "As I Lay Dying" with biblical ones, evoking an imaginative world that ranges from Prohibition-era America to an entire cast of characters who would put Job to shame, the servant of God in the Hebrew Bible who lived rich and happy until God himself decided to test him to prove to Satan that he would remain faithful even when struck by a hailstorm of apocalyptic misfortunes (oops!). "Bunny Munro" is a different story altogether, a character who from the very start is Bukowskian, a womanizer suffering from priapism whose wife commits suicide while he's off sleeping with a prostitute, and who is then forced to look after (really, or maybe not) their only son. On top of that, he's a door-to-door cosmetics salesman. Which, in itself, is almost a topos worthy of Bukowski. The style in these pages is less solemn and looser than in the first novel. The problem is that the story relies almost entirely on the linguistic scalpel of the character (that is, of Cave, who gives him his inner voice), as if it could get by, just like that, on this narrative device, which in its author's intentions should make up for a (more or less conventional) plot development. The result: a novel that could have been better than it is. Now, it's not that Cave is a crap novelist, as many say. It's that his fascination with words anchors him to a flow of words, and therefore of thoughts, which inevitably relegates plot development to second place, if not to little more than a pretext, a trigger for a stylistic exuberance that explodes in your face like a firecracker. There's a lot to calibrate in Cave the novelist. But there's substance there. That much is true.

Does it make sense to speak of Nick Cave the poet?

It could. But perhaps that's an exaggeration. The fragments scattered here and there by Nick in his miscellanies show us an author who has read a great deal of late nineteenth-century French poetry, but who is also, indeed above all, intent on forging through poetic language the world in which the anti-heroes of his imagination act, the ones who will later end up in the lyrics of his songs. In this sense, poetry is for Cave something unfinished, which here and there finds, almost always echoing the poetic language of the Symbolists or that of the Bible, the jolt of a dense poetic line, one that cuts a fine figure in the song that contains it, but that would not look out of place in a poem intended as such.

Is there any songwriter around today who has been able to pick up the torch of Cave's poetics, or who, in any case, you consider worthy of being regarded as his heir?

No.

A selection of Nick Cave tracks curated by Massimo Padalino.

"Mr Clarinet"

An unforgettable single, which combines the pounding racket of Suicide with lyrics, and a Cave-esque vocal delivery, both sly and perverse at once.

"Kwpie Doll"

The famous comic strip created by Rose O’Neill in 1909, populated by seemingly harmless baby cupids, is transformed, in the hands of the Birthday Party, into a sumptuously dissonant, gothic and, last but not least… perverse track.

“From Her To Eternity”

A masterpiece of suspense from Cave.

“The Carny”

A horror piece with all the stereotypes of horror, and yet… it transcends them.

“I’m Gonna Kill That Woman”

A great reworking of bluesman John Lee Hooker.

“The Mercy Seat”

Electrifying, a genuine electric shock. Literally.

“Up Jump The Devil”

One of the topoi of blues reworked in a minimal guise.

“The Good Son”

The parable of the prodigal son and a chill-inducing crescendo of emotions.

“The Witness Song”

Rhythm'n'blues, Cave-style.

“Christina The Astonishing”

The story of a woman given a funeral who instead discovers she's alive… and a saint, no less!

“Loom Of The Land”

A “pictorial” masterpiece worthy of Caspar David Friedrich.

“Jangling Jack”

Sonic violence and verbal accumulation in one of the most relentless tracks of Cave's mid-Nineties.

“I Let Love In”

A simple parable, perhaps a bit formulaic, but still a fine listen.

“The Curse Of Millhaven”

The archetypal murder ballad on his album “Murder Ballads”.

“Black Hair”

A great confessional moanin’ number, and a highly atmospheric one too.

“Babe, I’m On Fire”

A long, sprawling ride that sums up within itself many if not all of Cave's souls.

“The Lyre Of Orpheus”

Blues, complete with call'n'response, that drags itself along wonderfully minimal right to the end.

“Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”

A remarkable retelling of the parable of Lazarus of Bethany from the Gospel of John.

“Jubilee Street”

Warren and Cave at their best, perhaps.

“In The Ghetto”

Cave is an Elvis without the quiff, with a passion for the dark side of life. A remarkable cover of The King.

“Tupelo”

A masterpiece. An absolute one. One of the reasons we love Cave.

“Wanted Man”

A masterpiece. An absolute one. One of the reasons we love Dylan, and therefore Cave.

“Rings Of Saturn”

A period-piece "Arthurian" stream of consciousness that wouldn't have been possible without mr. Ellis.

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22/07/2025