The Best Australian Essays 2015 (11 page)

Elsewhere, the enigmatic narrator of ‘Hiding All Away', from the Bad Seeds' astonishing 2005 double album,
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
, recapitulates the trials of his questing lover, who searches the sea, a museum, a cathedral and the hall of fame for her man. Along the way her search is frustrated by a host of predatory authority figures, some of them violent, all of them male: a sadistic high court judge, a group of leering policemen who ‘rub jelly on their sticks', a celebrity chef, her own doctor. Assault stacks upon tribulation for the woman to such an effect that when the lyric's climactic foretelling of a war ‘coming from above' arrives, one has the sense that this world may deserve its bleak fate.

The same album is home to Cave's most genius ‘list song': the ecstatic plea for divine inspiration, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World'. Its writer-narrator, words ‘vibrating in [his] head', lies in bed, chastising himself for his inability to write. He knows full well how many great works have been authored under duress:

Again, the effect here is cumulative: the narrator's inadequacy becomes our own as the examples mount. Pulverised not only by a consciousness of the greats, but also the unstimulating nature of his own circumstances, he has become depressed.
Where is my life-threatening illness?
he seems to entreat.
Where is my reason to write?
But then there's Nabokov, comfortably domesticated, working away on
Pale Fire
. He is the narrator's own Remiel, angel of hope: proof defiant that even when the muse is MIA, hard work can still beget good work. Soon the narrator becomes galvanised by the can-do ethos of punk: ‘So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it.' By the song's end, he has made peace with relative mediocrity:

What is important, it seems, is making the effort – of knowing you have put in the hours.

Nick Cave: The Exhibition
revealed Cave as an obsessive chronicler. Amid the mélange of 25-year-old shopping lists, countless scrapbooks and discarded lyric sheets, there was also Cave's ‘Weather Diaries', diligently kept since the turn of the millennium.

Cave's zeal for itemising, for ingeniously articulated variation, can breed work that at times feels inspired by some kind of Oulipo-like obstruction. It is in ‘Babe, I'm on Fire', the ultimate song on the Bad Seeds' 2003 album,
Nocturama
, that this penchant of Cave's finds its most extreme expression. In thirty-eight verses (not including choruses) and across nearly fifteen minutes, Cave seems to respond to the challenge:
exhaust cliché, originally
.

A sample verse:

We also meet an ‘unlucky amputee', a ‘fucked-up Rastafarian', a ‘menstruating Jewess', a ‘Jungian analyst', ‘Picasso with his
Guernica
', a ‘Christian apologist', a ‘hymen-busting Zulu', ‘García Lorca', ‘the old rock'n'roller with his two-seated stroller', ‘the man from the
Daily Mail
with his dead refugee' and a ‘doomed homosexual' with a ‘persistent cough' – among many, many others.

The song is significant not only for its length. (It is the longest song in the Cave canon, outlasting even the brutal narrative of ‘O'Malley's Bar' from the Bad Seeds' 1996 album,
Murder Ballads
.) In its delirious cherry-picking of racial and cultural stereotypes, prominent historical figures and characters plucked right out of the headlines, the song ushered in a new phase in Cave's writing: after years of stubbornly resisting the sweeping current of modern life, Nick Cave was at last implanted in the Information Age.

*

‘My God is the God of Walkers,' writes Bruce Chatwin in
In Patagonia
(1977)
.
‘If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.' For a time, the characters of Nick Cave's lyrics walked, hard. The dark Romantic vignette ‘Loom of the Land', from
Henry's Dream
(1992), tells the burgeoning courtship of a young man – ‘a boy of no means' – and his delicate lover as they walk ‘hand upon hand' in bitter cold. There is an erotic union, and a whispered promise. The song's parting image is dreamily metaphysical: suddenly, it is winter no more and the young sweethearts drift in mutual solitude – perhaps forevermore – ‘across the endless sands'.

While that song's young lovers may have no need of god – they have found all the meaning they need in each other, at least for now – the same cannot be said of most of Cave's peripatetic characters. The gigolo-boy of ‘Do You Love Me? (Part 2)' from the Bad Seeds' 1994 album,
Let Love In
, wanders desultorily as his few coins ‘jingle-jangle' in his pocket. He is on the beat again, but the life has taken its toll: the city is ‘an ogre squatting by the river' that ‘gives life, but it takes it away, my youth'. Prematurely jaded, he sees in everything the Grand Guignol: the streets crack and swallow him, depositing him in a smoky cinema with walls and ceiling ‘painted in blood' and upon the screen a death plays out. He may not find god, nor outpace his need to, but he does find the john he needs in order to add to the coins in his pocket.

Similarly hellish imagery abounds in one of Cave's great walking songs: ‘Papa Won't Leave You, Henry' from
Henry's Dream
. This song's narrator recalls navigating a monsoonal apocalypse in process, tortured by the memory of a deceitful lover. He abandons sensibility in a bordello ‘where wet-lipped women with greasy fists / crawled the ceilings and the walls'. Then things turn positively Boschian as Cave's word rush hits fever pitch:

A recurrent trait of these songs of restless souls on the move is collapse: environmental, spiritual, social, psychological. Hoping to elude private entropy, their characters put foot to terra firma, only to find their distressed psyches have infected the exterior world – or perhaps it is the other way around. ‘Darker With the Day' – one of Cave's most unsung minor masterpieces – is also concerned with the breakdown of meaning and order, yet occupies a less hysterical register – mania has been traded for a sinking hopelessness. The closing song of 2001's
No More Shall We Part
finds Cave weirding his own experiences of emerging from rehab, looking for ‘an end to this, for some kind of closure'. The narrator visits a church (the experience is unnourishing), then continues on his way, dismayed by the sights that surround him:

He is engulfed by a cultural decay that is dispiritingly prosaic. Even cataclysm is decidedly listless when it comes:

While driving with his sons by Hove's shoreline in late 2010, Nick Cave lost control of his car and collided with a speed camera. All three were unharmed. In ‘Mermaids', a voyeuristic reverie from the Bad Seeds' 2013 release,
Push the Sky Away
, Cave drolly draws upon the experience to stress his wistful narrator's shortcomings:

While the notion of ‘husband alertness course' is a great, self-deprecatory gag, there is a very real failure here: solipsism. But beneath the defeatism, there is the wish to improve – to become more outwardly attuned.

*

In recent years, the walking song has been superseded by a newer vehicle for Cave's social observations: the ‘driving song'. Given Cave's post-millennial interest in the data blitzkrieg that defines the current epoch, an increase in spectatorial velocity makes sense. The cocoon of the car – where the world wheels by, a phantasmagoria out the window – evokes the condition of the net surfer, too: historically significant events and profound encounters blur remotely with a vast corpus of inanities and trivialities to create a juggernaut of stimuli, wherefrom no fast meaning may be mined. In ‘Abattoir Blues', Cave captures the plight of the modern individual enmeshed between so much warring data in a single lethal couplet:

Cruising in his car with his lover, the song's melancholic narrator is ‘drifting down into the abattoir'. Cave's lyrics abound with references to social degeneration. Some of this is incremental and seems almost ordained:

And:

Other lyrics evoke sudden catastrophe:

As in Cave's walking songs, an ambiguous relationship is established between the self and the world: which inflects which?

The song's final verse finds its rueful narrator lamenting his own failures as a partner and a man:

Push the Sky Away
gave us what is arguably Cave's ‘Desolation Row', the febrile odyssey that is ‘Higgs Boson Blues'. Over a long, hot night, its narrator sets out in his car for Geneva, Illinois. He seems to have conflated the city with its namesake in Switzerland. The latter is home to the Large Hadron Collider, designed to test the existence of the Higgs boson – the socalled ‘god particle' that was the long-conjectured lynchpin in physicists' explanation of the universe. Along the way, he sees blues musician Robert Johnson at the crossroads with the Devil. Blues apocrypha tells that Johnson bartered with Lucifer for his talent, parting in the bargain with his soul. Still, from his cynical modern-day vantage, the narrator is not sure who gets the better deal:

He drives on. There is a detour to Memphis's Lorraine Motel where time stands still; Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated here in 1968. The narrator seems to hear the great man's ghost speaking down the decades: ‘Hear a man preaching in a language that's completely new'. A gunshot resounds, and the delirium escalates; the narrator is back on the road, tired witness to a starburst of jumbled modernity: cultural imperialism, AIDS, Muslim–Jewish antipathy and Miley Cyrus are all cited. The song's ragbag of references – obliqued by Cave's wordplay – and its narrator's book-ending claims of insensibility (‘Can't remember anything at all') imbue it with an oracular dimension, at once summative and prophetic.

On this latter quality the song has already made good – twice. In light of the controversy Cyrus incited with her twerking performance at 2013's MTV Video Music Awards, the lyric ‘Hannah Montana does the African savannah' now seems visionary. But perhaps more uncannily, Cave has told in interviews how an excited assistant raced into the studio after the band had laid down the song. ‘That thing you've been singing about, the Higgs boson?' they said. ‘It's just been announced: they've found it!'

It might here be worth noting that Studio La Fabrique, where
Push the Sky Away
was recorded, is located in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France: the birthplace of Nostradamus.

*

The glut of high- and low-brow figures that have invaded Nick Cave's recent songwriting strengthens oft-drawn comparisons between Cave and Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen – fellow author-songwriters who similarly cavalcade well-known personalities in their lyrics, often placing them in unexpected contexts. But in this, one crucial influence has to date remained all-but uninterrogated: the great American poet John Berryman. On Cave, his impact runs deep.

In
The Dream Songs
(1969), Berryman compiled a profoundly personal opus that spanned two-or-so decades and 385 poems. Berryman's ‘songs' are obscure yet earnest, addled by lunatic syntax, passionate, ironic, juvenile, academic and wracked. Hepcat slang mingles with minstrel-speak and arch-poetic Middle English to elucidate the shifting facets of a middle-aged man named Henry, whose biographical resemblance to the depressive Berryman mounts as the poems progress. Kierkegaard, Plath, JFK, Saint Augustine, Beckett and actors George C. Scott and Lana Turner all put in appearances, while narratorial perspectives haze to heady, confounding effect.

It's tempting to think that
Henry's Dream
took its name from
The Dream Songs
. But it would be another fifteen years before the poet's influence would incontestably combust at the heart of Cave's practice.