Opinion: A look at the music and lyrics of Nick Cave

Revisiting the enigmatic Australian singer on the eve of his upcoming tour.

I first encountered the music of Nick Cave as the opening song on a compilation tape which my brother had made in 1989 or 1990. At the time, the bands I was listening to were The Doors, Joy Division and The Velvet Underground, and I immediately had the sense, even among that motley, of encountering something original and haunting. The song was “The Mercy Seat,” a song which is not merely staple Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but has been identified by the musicians themselves as the signature anthem which defines both their ambit and their vision. The song is written from the point of view of a killer on Death Row and compares the electric chair to the throne of heaven; so the song, even in its concept, is set apart from contemporary music. Lyrically it is literary in its imaginative scope and description and the reeling and cyclic rhythm seems to mount and descend simultaneously as the unrepentant killer awaits electrocution for his crime.

Soon after that I heard, while in a closed bar in my Midlands hometown, the entire album of The Good Son.  Contrary to the popular critical opinion that claims The Boatman’s Call is his best album, the run of Tender Prey, The Good Son, Henry’s Dream and Let Love In is by far better, where the music is equipoised between the cacophonous early career following The Birthday Party and the tamer, more anodyne lullabies of The Boatman’s Call, No More Shall We Part and Nocturama. Murder Ballads, while worryingly amusing, is something of a purgative self-parody, because so many of Cave’s songs could be termed murder ballads.

As with other singers often considered dark or maudlin, like Leonard Cohen or Morrissey, Cave’s lyrics are often wittier and more humorous than any songwriter who is considered upbeat. Perhaps what people find disquieting is that it is closer to reality than the coloured sugar of escapist pop melodies manufactured to make the thoughtless even less thoughtful. If there is escapism in Cave’s words, it is an escape into brooding and bloody fantasy, into a barren lawless landscape of rock and vine and thistle, populated by drifting killers and Biblical prophets, where sirens have “legs like scissors and butchers’ knives” and mankind is a distant memory in the mind of his Creator.

The songs which are abrasive seem obdurately to exist on their own terms and not merely to placate the current mood of the listener or to gratify his or her desired emotional state. Sometimes the words are tender even where the music is ragged and jarring:

O little girl the truth would be

An axe in thee

O father look to your daughter

Brick of grief and stricken mortar

With this ring

This silver hoop of wire

I bind your maiden mainstem

Just to keep you as a child

Cave, a novelist in his own right, is literary not only in the texture of his songwriting but also in its allusiveness: for instance, nobody seems to have noticed that in the fine song “The Loom of the Land” the line “The elms and poplars were all turning their backs” is lifted straight from Lolita: “The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.” Cave’s lyrics are often gnarled and lumpen and his music, more acoustic than electric, is deliberately sinister, depending for its effect no less on how the instruments are played as for the chordal composition, the theological substance of evil made manifest in dark-hearted and dissonant tones.

His following is now large, receiving wider audiences by accumulation and consistency but also from the inclusion of his songs in film. No small number of his songs are as good as “Red Right Hand”: the popularity of that song is due as much to commercial airplay and its presence in a Hollywood movie as to the mystique of the cogitating protagonist in the gong-tolled badlands of the Outback. The suggestive but undefined image of the title comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In another song he sings “Once there came a storm in the form of a girl,” and Cave would no doubt be familiar with the Biblical line from The Song of Solomon: “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” The Victorian poet Tennyson famously wrote: “‘This better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” which Cave rephrases as: “Far worse to be love’s lover / Than the lover that love has scorned,” acknowledging that amorous love can be agonizing and destructive no less than unifying and harmonious.  It is for these reasons that he is one of the finest singer-songwriters of our time.