It's August 1988 and the Bad Seeds frontman and 'journalist's nightmare' is in ferocious, fighting form. Jack Barron's interview, originally published in NME, is from Rock's Backpages • Watch a trailer for a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' gig as part of our Live for 2014 series

Nick Cave is a man of many voices. Right this second, outside the VIP Hotel in Hamburg's Holstenstrasse, his larynx has the timbre of The Reaper.



"You scum-sucking shit!" he screams at me, aiming a scuffed cowboy boot at my groin. Luckily he'll never play football for Australia, even the junior squad. The foot misses its target, resulting only in a bruised thigh.

I'm stunned. Reeling. "You're nothing but a shite-eater," he shrieks, taking a scythe with his fist at my head. He'll never get a gardening job chopping down weeds, let alone collecting my skull. It misses.

The hate in Cave's eyes burns more fiercely than a funeral pyre. We're too far into this ugly scene for him to quit or back down now. "I'll fucking kill you, you bastard," he bellows, trying to tear out my left eye with filthy spatula nails. He couldn't drive in a tack with a mallet. He misses.

Nick spies my travel bag nearby. He lunges after it. Picks it up and runs like an ostrich with its head still buried. Nowhere far. "Where's that fucking interview tape," he hisses, ripping the contents of the bag out into the street. "If it means that much to you, I'll give it to you," I offer. It's no big deal. All I want is to get out of this damned city and never have to look at Cave and his dishrag limbs again.

"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. "Stop acting like a child. Do you think that Jack hasn't got a memory?"

Nick stops. Dead. Something is sinking in. But not far enough. While I kneel down in the street and gather up the gear Cave cocks his boot at my head. He'd have trouble pissing against a lamppost. It misses.

Eventually the press officer comes between Cave's gale-force windmill limbs and my passive resistance. I'm glad. Horrified. Angry. And scared. Nick has had his revenge. The "fight" is over. The story has just begun. It's time to tear out the pages of his book and light a fire.

Up Jumped the Devil

Nick Cave is the voice of desperation onstage. A man trying to exorcise the ghosts inside his head through limited means. The cramped parameters of his singing are his strength. Vulnerability, sentimentality, bitterness, abrasiveness, humour and morbidity – all peel from his stretched larynx like a snake shedding skins. Above all he's hypnotic.

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.

Inadequacy? Yes. The Cave constituency tonight in Utrecht, and virtually every night elsewhere, couldn't change its underwear without help. Barely moving, they're like hyenas attracted to carrion. The body they're feeding off is a mirror of their own emotional turmoil. The blood they're sucking is clotted.

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. Whether it be biblical morality or unrequited love. Many of his recent songs have been a collapsing of both. With Cave's own unique slant.

The viewpoint of a wretch. Nick might feel sorry for himself beyond belief, but belief is often the problem, the search for or lack of it. That or Cupid's eyes poked out blind. His talent is he can tell fantastic musical stories that encapsulate those emotions. 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. Along the way he has left a narrative trail of picaresque characters. Nightmares. Delusions. Frenzy. Compassion. Romance. Idiocy. Fallibility.

And in the process became a junkie.

And so much for that. 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. Up there with Dylan. Presley. Reed. Pop. Williams. Cash. Anybody you care to mention. Hey, but mention writers … because, as Nick is the first to admit, he's technically a lousy singer.

Backstage tonight it's like a grave. There's no party. 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. A talented multi-instrumentalist, Harvey is the musical arranger for both the Bad Seeds and Crime & the City Solution. He's one of nature's organisers, with a Filofax in his head rather than his pocket, as well as a wicked wit.

"Tour managers are parasites," he later explains. "They want 10 or 15 per cent of your money and then drink all your booze. It's a joke, that's why I set up the tours. It's not hard. I have this new system. I get everything organised in advance. Then when members of the band come up to me and say, 'Hey, have you seen this or got that?' I just say 'No'. After all, they're big boys now."

Cave, meanwhile, is slumped in his chair. He looks ash-grey with exhaustion. This is more than the result of tonight's exertion, it's a cumulative thing. Nick has been going through perhaps the most productive year of his life so far.

Aside from writing and recording the exercise in musical styles that form the forthcoming album, he's virtually finished editing his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, and had King Ink – a collection of lyrics, snippets of prose and short plays – published by Black Spring Press. On top of that, the Bad Seeds perform in Wim Wenders' movie Wings of Desire, while Cave has partly scripted and acted in another film, Ghosts (of the Civil Dead).

The latter is the story of prison authorities deliberately making inmates' lives hell in order to instigate an insurrection which they then violently squash, thereby gaining legitimacy for increased penal powers. In Ghosts, Cave plays a psychotic provocateur with a death wish. This simply involves a lot of swearing, rolling of eyeballs, gouging of flesh and spitting. Cave, on this appearance, doesn't seem to have the makings of a great thespian. The soundtrack parts provided by Bargeld, Harvey and Cave, are, however, fine.

Back in the dressing room, Cave has been cornered by a piece of rotting flesh called Moan. We're all fatigued. Somebody doles out that vitamin known as speed. I don't refuse the offer. Two days and one country later, just before a glass comes whizzing by my head and smashes against a wall, Cave will insist that "people don't bring us drugs … all that happens backstage at our gigs is that people drink our alcohol".

Right now, though, our hearts are pounding like jackhammers. The world seems like a fine place, full of people to bore senseless with our speed-babble. As the sun comes up like a pat of rancid butter over the canals, it feels like we're engaged on a one-way trip to purgatory. Drugs can do strange things to people.

The Carnival Is Over



Nick Cave's voice, late afternoon in the bar of Amsterdam's Museum hotel, is laced with humour. He looks sharp, dressed in an immaculate black evening suit topped off by a belt with a massive gaudy buckle depicting Christ. He's just been doing television interviews.

"I couldn't believe it," he laughs, "they wanted me to go on one of those pedalos to do it. I told them, 'No way', and took them off to interview me among the prostitutes. I mean, can you see me on one of those contraptions?"

Publicist, photographer, Seeds piano player Roland and I crack up at the thought. Together we head off to eat. Nick escorts us to a Surinamese cafe. As soon as we're seated, he disappears off into the red-light district.

With Cave gone and Roland captive it seems a good time to interview the classically trained German keyboardist. Our conversation goes like this:

We're dog-tired. Do you know where to get any speed?

"No, I think it's a bad drug. It destroys your body, fucks up your mind," says Roland.

So what do you recommend?

"Smack. Look how young-looking I am," says Roland, who's 23 going on 99.

Stranger than kindness, the singer returns and takes us back to sample his go-faster vitamins at the hotel. Thirty minutes later he's onstage at the Paradiso Club. As the Bad Seeds' rhythm section of Harvey and drummer Thomas Wydler deliver the uppercut of another new song, Oh Deanna, Cave jack-knives around the stage. Nick's lyrical concerns might sometimes rattle like skeletons in shallow graves, but his current band set his prayers on fire like no other.

Riding on the wave of energy, with typical perversity Nick rasps. "I remember the Paradiso. We played here when we were the Birthday Party. I remember smashing somebody's teeth in with my microphone stand." Slowly, the band lower a coffin of scales and Cave, with a voice like freezing fog, groans, "I am the crooked man, I walked a crooked mile." Your Funeral, My Trial is in session.

It's the singer not the song



Three in the morning. Night hangs like a lead shroud. Nick Cave's voice speaks in quiet, measured tones in the hotel lounge. Any hesitation is due, not to inarticulacy, but to wanting to frame precise answers. I had hoped that Bleddyn would be here. Aside from being a fine photographer, Butcher is a long time friend of Nick's who takes most of the shots for the Bad Seeds' record covers. Between us we hoped to map the definitive guide to Cave's creativity. The only problem is not even Jesus could raise Bleddyn from his bed. Lazarus? No problem. A tired Antipodean snapper? Well miracles take a little longer.

Nick says he often comes over as retarded in interviews because he can't trust journalists, especially English ones, who nod in agreement to his halting answers and then ridicule him in print. He cites two interviewers who've recently grilled him for another British paper as a case in point. "I only trust somebody when I feel that they are genuinely on my side," he mentions pointedly.

Nick Cave is a journalist's nightmare. An artist, who through such emotional blackmail tactics, expects a writer to snip off the barbs of their questions and place their tamed tongues in his rectum. He wants respect but doesn't seem to respect a journalist's freedom to inquire. Cave has even written a song about two ex-NME writers called Scum. It bookends his anthology King Ink. That's how obsessive he is about the press …

The songs on the upcoming album seem to have less narrative form than before. Why?

"Well I think Your Funeral, My Trial was particularly narrative. The new record is coming back to a more conventional sort of lyric. There still are stories, but they're a lot more disguised. Like Oh Deanna is a retelling of a true relationship that I had with somebody through the story of somebody else, even if it doesn't begin with 'Once upon a time'. Deanna was a girl I knew when I was about eight. She lived in a trailer on the outskirts of the town with her old man who was basically this drunken, wretch of a character. Our relationship was kept a secret from him because he frequently beat her. I was just one day older than her. It was a very equal relationship we had.

"Anyway, we used to play truant from school and go to this little hideaway that she had fashioned under this bridge over a dry river creek. It was impossible to get to because of the briar that surrounded it. But she made this tunnel through the briar. Inside this place she had a collection like a magpie's nest. We used to go on these day raids on the different houses around the town. We knew the people wouldn't be in the houses and we used to eat their food, lie on their beds, and steal all sorts of stuff like letters, cutlery, clothes and money. The story is important because I've tried to write a lot of songs about it."

Do you mean you've actually written a lot of songs about her then?

"No, I've only tried. She was never any kind of threat. I never had any reason to feel anything against this girl because she was really my best friend at this time. The kind of things I've written after this time have a different kind of bent to them altogether, although they might be the same kind of melodramatic fantasies. So one day we robbed a house and found a handgun which we took back to our little grotto. We, I should add, robbed by ourselves, separately also. One day she was caught by this guy who was in this religious-instruction teacher's house. The wife of this teacher thrashed her and the guy did something to her, but I really don't know what it was.

"The next day I was woken up by my mother and had to answer all these questions from the police. Deanna had gone back to the home and shot the strange man and woman in the religious teacher's house. How the stranger fitted into their lives was a bit of a scandal.

"That's the basis for the song. I've tried to write about it many times but I've never felt able to do it justice because it sounds like some sort of fantasy or some Disneyland type of thing. Nonetheless, after that happened she was taken off to some sort of child psychiatric place. And I was taken out of (the local) high school and sent to the big smoke to a strict all boys boarding school to have a bit of sense knocked into me. I dunno."

Neither do I. Cave is an epic storyteller of Grimm proportions. He'll make up what you want to hear.

We turn from the fantastic to the relatively mundane, the stylistic beggar's banquet to be heard on the upcoming album, Tender Prey. As the provisional title implies, the record marks a continued shift in Cave's attitude to, and use of, biblical imagery, compared to say the Birthday Party's venomous Prayers on Fire, with songs like the almost redemptive tones of New Morning.

"Each song has a very distinctive kind of style to it, as if it is the Bad Seeds playing 60s garage band music, as in the case of Oh Deanna, or kind of Bacharach stuff like Slowly Goes the Night. It's all fairly stylised and each song is very stylised within itself. As the record evolved, we saw this happening and rather than rectify this disjointedness we decided we'd play on what would normally be a weak point within a record and make it its strength."

Cave happily admits a lot of the musical tendons that lift his work are provided by the Bad Seeds, especially the arrangement and interpretation that Mick Harvey brings to bear on the embryos of Nick's ideas. Typically, in rehearsal, he describes in emotional terms – lechery, compassion, violence etc – the sort of atmosphere he wants the band to create. The fact that he can rope in some of the most gifted musicians of the era, be it Kid Congo or Bargeld, is testament to the esteem he is held in popular music's more fractious quarters. Either that or they all need a meal ticket.

Despite popular myth, Cave isn't always deadly serious. Anybody who rues on about his "Hump of sorrow and sack of woe," as he does on the new tune, Up Jumped the Devil, can't be as deadpan as rigor mortis.

Do you think you're lyrically funny at all?

"Well I never said I was serious all the time. The way I'm portrayed I find particularly funny sometimes, this supposed pessimism I'm meant to harbour towards everything and anything. I think something like Your Funeral, My Trial has got its humorous side, because I'm reasonably aware of the reputation that I've got. I find it curious to think certain people would find songs I write so continually harping on the same themes to be irritating, pathetic and so on. I kind of find some sort of enjoyment in that.

"I think my own view of things is quite irrational in a lot of ways; the way I see certain things, like the way an audience reacts, or the way people will interpret lyrics. Mick Harvey is continually telling me the way I've responded to a situation or what I've felt coming off an audience has not been really realistic … I think our group is capable of supreme disappointment, far more than other groups. I really care about what we do and I really care that the shows are good and try my hardest to make them that way and I'm always upset if they're not as good as they should be."

A lot of this, obviously, hinges on Nick's voice itself. Is he happy with it?

"Only when I sing well. One has to use what resources one has and live with these things. I am quite aware that my voice is basically unlikable. And I think what I've managed to achieve with it has been quite a feat in itself. It's like trying to play great guitar on some sort of Gibson copy or ten-dollar guitar. The edge and depth of my voice is not a natural thing that great singers have, like Chris Bailey or Tom Jones or even Simon Bonney. People whose voices automatically give you a nice feeling."

Would you like to have a voice like Frank Sinatra's?

"No. That would be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. I think trading my voice for Frank Sinatra's would be a pretty poor deal all round. Neither of us would fulfil our potential."

You're involved in a lot of different projects, films, records, a novel. To be honest I thought your acting was really over the top in Ghosts to the point of being funny. From what I've seen of you so far you seem quite the opposite of the character you portray in that you're quiet and considered offstage, despite the media image of you.

"Quite possibly. I'm quite nervous and not a racist, which is the opposite of this character. Is that what you mean? I dunno but I suppose that's what acting is supposed to be about, playing a character opposite to your own. Anyhow, I really did enjoy doing the acting, though I admit it was very kind of caricaturish. Basically in the script there were these big gaps which just had Nick Cave and no dialogue written down. I wasn't given any of the coaching the other actors were given, it was just assumed I could walk on and be this particular character. So basically I just had to be in front of the camera and scream abuse out."

Cave part-scripted Ghosts for producer Evan English. Ironically enough, Nick's first script for him, put together in LA several years back, was completely unfeasible and has now turned up as the basis of his novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel.

"Evan English and his partners were video-makers called the Rich Kids who wanted to make their first feature film. So they got me to write the script. The script I turned out was absolutely ridiculous. It would have cost millions to make. I had no idea of the expense involved in creating a film that would have an entire town in it and aerial zoom shots that started at one end of the town and zoomed in to a person's eyeball."

Are you a voyeur as opposed to a participant?

"Well, I've always felt much more comfortable writing in the third person. I would find it impossible to write a book that was written from the author's point of view about myself. But I could write it quite easily by putting a character in to portray me and writing from an outside point of view. In And the Ass Saw the Angel, the photographer is in fact a chronic voyeur.

"His entire life is spent on the periphery of things. He acknowledges this fact and spends the entire time recording what goes on in the town that he lives in. It's only in the last two years of his life that he swings into action and creates situations with consequences. That's what the book is basically about, a voyeur, someone who's chastised by the townsfolk or the general mass."

Are you aware that you've got this myth that you carry with you that could be held responsible for the launching of a thousand goth bands? What a horrible thought!

"Heh-heh. Unfortunately all the worst sides of my output in my creative life seem to have been adopted by people as the most influential ones.

"What you become is that which is taken up and aped by other people. But when the things that people take from you are the most repulsive misconceptions about you – the way the goths do, for instance – that's all pretty frightening. I'd hate to go down in history as the No 1 goth, the man who spawned a thousand goth bands with stacked hairstyles, no personality, pale sick people. I really don't want to be responsible for that sort of thing at all. I think there are a lot more interesting things about what I've done than what seems to have most affect on people."

How much of an effort is it to keep recording?

"Every record I feel like I've really wrung the sponge out this time and there isn't anything left of me to give and I've felt that way ever since Mutiny. Only with the last couple of records I've realised that actually you do fill up again and can do it again. But I always really worry before I make a record that it's just not going to be there. And this is one of the prime reasons that I do continue to make records, to ward off this fear that grows in me after three or four months."

Despite what he calls "the monumental task" of editing his novel, Nick says he will still be unsatisfied with it when it is published. I wondered, therefore, whether he has been totally happy with any of his recorded work?

"There are a couple of moments that I'm really proud of but that's all. Like Mutiny, that particular song, and Sad Waters. Just a couple of moments here and there. But I find a lot of my work grotesque and tasteless in a lot of ways. Things like Deep in the Woods are diseased with grotesqueness."

Do you feel that you are grotesque like some of your characters?

"Well, no I don't actually feel that. I feel like I tend to forget about really significant aspects of what I do that people will generally take notice of. On Deep in the Woods (a song whose treatment of the female character was interpreted by many as misogynistic – JB) I concentrated so much on sort of lyrical flow and nice use of words that the actual story behind the song is really ridiculous, a grotesque exaggeration that's ultimately really kind of comicbook and shallow. I find I do that quite often."

Sensing the interview is winding down, I decide to put a final shot to Cave. It's a secret personal project that Nick is going to be involved in the coming months, concerning his drugs problem. Nick is mortified when I broach the question, but leaves the tape recorder running while he talks extensively about the subject.

Because of an agreement settled upon the following day, that particular subject matter has been left out of this article.

Nick Cave, before we split for bed after our four-hour interview, summed up his feelings about his heroin addiction in the following way:

"I've always wanted to hone my music, writing and lyrics down, so they are as pure as possible. It has always worried me that drugs retard the development of ideas. They also retard other things like your physical development.

"I don't want to encourage people to take drugs or be an example of somebody who takes a lot of drugs and hasn't burnt out just because I don't feel burned out. But it does distress me that I have an influence over people in that way. I've seen myself have an influence over people, in regard to drugs. I really think drugs are quite an evil thing and I really wish I hadn't become involved with them myself because I'm in a situation now where it will take quite a concentrated effort to live without them and it will require quite a major life's fight to stop taking them."

If This Is Heaven Ah'm Bailing Out

The shitstorm begins. Packed and waiting to catch the next plane home, the sound of perhaps Cave's most possessed performance, an obscene song partly about kicking heroin, Mutiny in Heaven, replays itself in my mind.



Upstairs in the Museum Hotel, meanwhile, Cave is freaking out. He's already castigated his PR for talking to me about Simon Bonney and is now giving his friend Bleddyn Butcher the third degree. Nick is bitterly concerned that I haven't yet given an undertaking not to write about his secret project, despite the fact that he has offered to tell me the whole story after its completion.

Though I'm satisfied with what I've got on tape already, a compromise is eventually reached. I'm informed that Cave will quite happily talk about his use of heroin in detail so long as I draw a veil over his secret project. Given that Cave's drug abuse has only been snidely insinuated in the press, and this is a chance to get the story from the horse's mouth, so-to-speak, and in the process deglamourise the sick junkie chic that surrounds him, I agree. We fly on to Hamburg.

The PR is told by Cave that one of the singer's minions had been dispatched earlier to get us up. Our response to the invitation was supposedly to tell the minion to "Fuck off!" A pretty neat trick since we were both asleep.

"You're the person, it's your type that are responsible for those people dying for insisting on writing about it." Cave's voice is snarling now. Our second interview is closer to a war. Overnight it seems Nick has changed the game-plan. He doesn't want to talk about heroin any more and we're well on the way to a head-to-head collision.

"I can't help it that I take this particular drug," he continues. "I mean, it is that evil and insidious and it does worm its way into your life and it's very difficult to get it out again. Never have I spoken about it in any other way."

I haven't really seen it mentioned (openly).

"It isn't mentioned. I've talked about it a lot, in fact. Usually it's considered to be … There are reasons that I don't want you to write about it. Or one of the reasons. You know, I don't write endless songs about it, for example."

This is, of course, true. Cave hardly has a mono-dimensional talent as should be clear. The sensible thing to do would be to terminate the interview here and now. Instead we bicker on, with the abuse level rising.

"I work from the time I get up to the time I have … I have to go to the sound-check and do the concert. I have to spend hours talking to fucking idiots like you who have no kind of notion about anything."

Yeah, well, let's just forget It. Bollocks.

"Jesus Christ!" snaps Cave … "You're insulting me so much and you don't even realise it."

I haven't insulted you!

"You're so numb through your occupation that you can sit there and say that I'm responsible for the deaths of young children – or that your girlfriend told you that."

About now, I start collecting my belongings from Cave's room, since the whole scene is getting beyond pathetic. Earlier on I'd telephoned my girlfriend who said a couple of friends of hers had become addicts in part because they dumbly wanted to ape the kind of lifestyle Cave exhudes. His initial response to this was (a) I didn't have a girlfriend and (b) I'd made the story up. Now, apparently, he thinks I'm accusing him of killing young kids!

"Listen," says Cave as I make for the exit. "We started up a whole new interview while there are other people out there who've got to do interviews. We try to do it again and all you can ask me is questions related to heroin. Again … I talked to you the other night about heroin. I told you everything there was to know about it in relation to me. And I really regret ever having opened my mouth about it."

"I'm sure you do," I reply, opening the hotel bedroom door.

"Because I didn't realise what a fucking scumhill and what a filthy little prick you were," snorts Cave, shoving me out into the corridor and slamming the door behind me. A couple of seconds later a glass comes hurtling past my skull and smashes against the wall. Nick, meanwhile, is getting a psychotic head of steam up. Only this time he isn't play-acting.

© Jack Barron, 1988