NYLON - May 2008 - (Page 104) NO REST FOR THE WICKED If you’re lucky enough, one day, to find yourself on the oceanfront in Brighton, England between the hours of 8 and 9 a.m., you could witness a curious spectacle: a man, stark and slim as a scarecrow, striding purposefully along the promenade, his black-clad form silhouetted against the sea. He might look for a moment like a lost Wild West preacher, or an extra from a film about Victorian undertakers—but what you’re seeing is something altogether more ordinary. It’s just Nick Cave, heading to work. For a man whose feral stage presence and visceral fireand-brimstone lyrics are as legendary as his former heroin addiction, Cave has a surprisingly structured approach to the business of rock ’n’ roll: From 9 to 5 every day, he leaves his wife (model Susie Bick) and his two sons, and works alone in his office, wearing one of his many custom-made suits. He pores over his lyrics painstakingly, preventing himself from penning even a single line he doesn’t find perfect. “I stand over them like a kind of totalitarian school marm,” he says, a flicker of laughter darting around the edges of his deadpan baritone. “And I make sure they behave themselves.” And although one might think that 30-odd years into his career, songwriting must come easy, he’s quick to make assertions to the contrary: “Initially, it always feels like it’s not going to happen. Like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. Like there’s nothing there.” Nevertheless, at the age of 50, Cave is currently experiencing one of the most prolific periods of his career. Last year, after composing the score for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (and appearing in the film, briefly, as a minstrel who irritates Casey Affleck in a saloon), he corralled three members of his longstanding backing band, the Bad Seeds, to start a new group, Grinderman, whose critically acclaimed debut album spawned “No Pussy Blues,” arguably the dirtiest, funniest, most bone-rattlingly angry track of 2007. And that record had barely hit stores before he began to work on his 14th album with the Bad Seeds, Dig! Lazarus! Dig!!!—the Like a man possessed, Nick Cave continues to brew up one devastating new musical concoction after another. By April Long. Photographed by Polly Borland recent release of which was heralded by a series of short teaser films posted on YouTube, starring Cave as a hammy huckster clairvoyant. “Once we’d made the Grinderman record, for some reason it became a matter of great urgency to get a Bad Seeds one out,” he explains, stretching a long-fingered, ringadorned hand up to scratch his brow (his receding hairline having made the strangely suave mullet he’s had for decades untenable, he is today sporting another dodgy-yet-dapper follicular flourish: a thin, jet-black moustache). “But it did take me a couple of incredibly frustrating months to find a way that it could be different from what the Bad Seeds had done before and also not be a repeat of the Grinderman thing.” As it turned out, however, Grinderman’s sparse, jagged blues-rock—a vivid musical flashback to Cave’s early days in seminal garage-goth group the Birthday Party—opened up new doors for the musicians quite naturally; they had shaken themselves loose. “Grinderman was deliberately spare and simple, so that gave us the opportunity to do something more expansive,” Cave says. “This album has a whole lot of highly electric shit all over the top of it. Also, the Grinderman record was mostly ad-libbed, so I wanted to go back to writing complex lyrics that work on several different levels.” He sighs, then adds, wryly: “Even though people probably don’t really want that kind of stuff anymore.” Cave is someone who employs the English language with relish and reverence. You get the impression that he might write an entire song just to be able to use the word “myxamatoid” (as he does in “Call Upon the Author,” along with “sprattle” and “jejune”) or indeed that he might have selected some of his musical accomplices over the years purely for their names (Blixa Bargeld, Jim Sclavunos, Conway Savage). Dig! hearkens back to the kind of picaresque narrative songwriting that characterized his mid ’90s work— in the lead track, an Old Testament Lazarus (whose friends, evidently, call him “Larry”) is astonished to find himself resurrected in New York City; the titular character of “Albert
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