Nick Cave Drops In From Neptune

11/24/08 6:15pm

by Noah Love (CHARTattack)

You can spend four years interviewing every musical hero you've ever dreamed of and it still can't necessarily prepare you for that one where you know you'll be brutally overmatched. Such is the feeling of sitting in a posh Toronto hotel room with Nick Cave.

You need only to see footage of his performances or past interviews to know he's equal parts komodo dragon and pure ice. At the very least, he's a relatively courteous ice dragon.

In any event, CHARTattack sat down with the Australian legend to discuss the latest Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his other band, Grinderman, and his work in film and print. Here are some of the outtakes from the article on Cave that you can read in Chart's November issue.

ChartAttack: Before Grinderman, it was three years since you released an album, which is a pretty long time for you. Were there things you wanted to do in the Grinderman set-up that you hadn't had a chance to do with the Bad Seeds?
Nick Cave: Was it three years?

Yeah, Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus was 2004.
Yeah, I'd been doing solo shows where I'd play the piano and sing, and Warren [Ellis, Grinderman/Bad Seeds instrumentalist] and Jim [Sclavunos] and Marty [Casey] had also been backing me up with that, so we'd kind of been getting a sound together there. And I was talking to Warren a lot about how we should just go in and do something, just the four of us, kind of reduce the sound. And we're very much looking forward to going and doing that again.

What would you say was captured in Grinderman that wasn't in Bad Seeds?
It's a leaner, kind of more direct, less cluttered sound.

Is it easier to get things done with four people instead of eight?
No.

Is it the same process?
Well, we wrote songs together in Grinderman. Most of the songs on that record are... we went into a studio together and played music and kind of worked stuff out together. At least kind of rhythms and riffs and all that sort of stuff, so they're all kind of co-written. That takes a certain amount of pressure off of me.

Whereas Bad Seeds is all you?
More or less. It kind of depends on the record. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! had 30 per cent on my own, 30 per cent with Warren and 30 per cent with the other members of Grinderman. Something like that. Ten per cent with the Lord Almighty.

Has it gotten easier or harder to write after so many years?
It just depends. It doesn't get harder. It doesn't get easier, either. The process is to just sit down and write the songs. There's no other process.

Truth of the matter is that to write a song, you just have to sit down and do it. They don't magically appear. I don't wake up after a lost weekend and find out I've written an album. I just sit down and write the stuff. Always have. I assume most people have to do that. I don't know what other musicians do. But I don't see how anybody else does it.

Will you record a Grinderman record right after you finish touring with the Bad Seeds?
No, but it's gonna happen soon. We've got a whole lot of other stuff we're working on. Me and Warren are doing the soundtrack to The Road. I've got a new novel coming out. I've got a screenplay to write, which I've got to start today, which I'm supposed to be doing now but I've got to do this fucking stuff [interviews]. It's all backing up. But the next rock 'n' roll thing is to do the Grinderman record.

Are you and Warren finished scoring The Road?
No, we're nearly finished it. We've submitted the music with the understanding that there's stuff we need to add, strings and stuff like that. It's great, though. The film is fantastic. It's a proper film.

It's fair to say you've scored some proper films already, though.
Yeah, but this one's — well, they're all important — but this one's really important because of what the film's about, and the way that it's being filmed is so timely and terrifying. I mean, it just seems like it's today. The apocalypse has happened, but it feels just like looking out the window, except that everything is covered in ash, which, the way things are going on at the moment, it's very much about America.

I dunno, it just seems like, fuck. You see things like I Am Legend, and it's still fantasy. This isn't a fantasy film, and for that reason it's fuckin' terrifying. And not only that, you watch this film and it's pretty much one colour because it's happened and one of the things that's gone is colour. And occasionally the hero dreams of what it used to be like and it's very moving, what we're sort of sacrificing.