Nick Cave’s grief for son Arthur laid bare on Skeleton Tree album, doco
In his first interview since the death of his son, Nick Cave talks about loss and the transformative power of music.
Bereft of an audience, save for a few technicians and staff, the Merlyn Theatre in the centre of Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre complex is a forbidding structure, flanked by dark iron balconies and grim-coloured walls. The only white in the room is the collared shirt worn by the man in the middle of the floor, Nick Cave, who, in a series of stops and starts, is leading his band the Bad Seeds through material from their most recent album, Skeleton Tree.
It’s day two of rehearsals, just a week out from the first show of Cave’s Australian tour, which began in Hobart last night. Running through the new songs is a delicate process, for a number of reasons. These are the band’s first shows in two years, so there’s some reconnecting to do. Also there’s less of a rock ’n’ roll agenda to Skeleton Tree than on many of the collective’s earlier work, so that subtler ambience has to be negotiated on stage. Most significant of all, however, is that this is the first time Cave and his colleagues have performed songs such as Girl in Amber, Skeleton Tree, Jesus Alone and Distant Sky since the tragedy that befell the singer during the album’s recording in 2015, when his 15-year-old son Arthur died after a cliff fall near the family home in Brighton, England.
Cave, 59, has shied away from the media since then, as one would expect in the circumstances. The only publicity for Skeleton Tree and comment on the family disaster came in September last year, when filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s documentary One More Time with Feeling screened globally a day before the album’s release. Designed originally as a fly-on-the-wall account of Skeleton Tree’s recording, the film, which has had a subsequent limited cinema release, became something more profound as the cameras kept rolling in the studio after the accident, with Cave’s wife Susie Bick and their other son, Earl, also featured.
Now, in his first press interview for two years, Cave is keen to address what he and his family and his long-serving and loyal band members went through in the wake of the tragedy and how work, much of it writing film and television soundtracks with his friend and Bad Seed collaborator Warren Ellis, helped him through the grieving process. The generally positive response to the film (and the album) was also a comfort.
“Originally, we had the idea to make a film that promoted the new record,” says Cave. “Nothing more than that really. We would be filmed playing the songs live and people could go and see us at the cinema, then run out and buy the record.
“But, you know, Arthur died and everything changed. The only thing that I could hold on to at the time was that the work would continue.”
Cave, who with Ellis, wrote the soundtrack to and appeared in Dominik’s film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), was apprehensive about continuing the film project following the accident.
“Andrew agreed to make the film,” Cave says, “as long as we could broach the subject of Arthur’s death, because he felt that it would be impossible to make a film of any real meaning without acknowledging the death of my son. So, I was ambivalent at the time, obviously, but agreed to his terms.
“On some level I trusted Andrew that he would not exploit the situation. You know, he was a friend.”
Cave is nursing a cup of tea in the dressing room during rehearsal lunch break. Approaching his 60th birthday (in September), the singer has retained his youthful, wiry physique, enhanced by his familiarly sharp black and white attire. A slightly menacing look lingers within his well-preserved features, but he’s in good spirits.
“You know, I saw the things people wrote about the film on social media,” he goes on, “... the way the film seemed to open something very deep for people, and how so many people out there had lost people they loved, you know, just how many grievers there were. It was a very powerful feeling, and ultimately shifted something in me, and Susie too, and stopped us feeling so completely hopeless all the time.
“It was like we had done something good for Arthur, all of us, and had placed the memory of him up there in the stars.”
Skeleton Tree, Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 16th studio album, was recorded over 18 months, beginning in late 2014. The bulk of it was recorded in Brighton in several sessions. It is one of Cave’s most beautifully sculpted creations, the ambient, deconstructed music crafted by him and Ellis musing on familiar themes of love and despair, coloured often by lyrics he made up on the spot and added to later where he deemed it necessary.
What you hear on Skeleton Tree comes largely from those Brighton sessions, but that is not how the album was mapped out. The idea was for the Bad Seeds (Cave, Ellis, drummer Thomas Wydler, bassist Martyn P. Casey, multi-instrumentalist Jim Sclavunos and guitarist George Vjestica) to build on the sparse tracks during further recording sessions in a Paris studio, but those sessions, following Arthur’s death, were a disaster and so the songs remained in their original condition.
“For me, going into the studio in Paris was not a good idea,” Cave says, “and I hope I never have to do anything like that again. It was only a few months after Arthur died. It was too early. But it just felt important that I do it. You know, life goes on and all. It was crazy. Terrifying, really. I was a mess, big time. So was everybody, actually. It was a very difficult time. Much of what we did simply did not work. We tried re-recording the songs; putting them in time, in tune, whatever. Pretty much everything we tried to do sounded bad. It was like the record itself, in its untreated state, was simply refusing to allow itself to be embellished or polished. So, in a sense, Skeleton Tree was the product of that.”
■ ■ ■ ■
Cave had a pivotal moment as a teenager, growing up in and around Wangaratta in Victoria’s northeast. As a choirboy at the local church the young student had already latched on to religious art, something that would play an important role in the Old and New Testament imagery that would colour his lyrics later on, but there was another profound influence, yet to be realised, on his work, one that has remained with him to this day — Leonard Cohen.
“You know, Leonard had such a huge impact on so many of us,” he says. “He was the one who kind of drew back the curtain and showed us things that no one else had ever dared to expose. In Wangaratta, where I grew up, my best friend’s sister bought Songs of Love and Hate. We listened to it out in her back shed on her record player, over and over again, night after night. We were basically having our young innocent minds perverted, and the course of lives changed, listening to that dark, sinister, sacred music. There probably should have been a law against that record.”
The singer describes Cohen’s death in November last year as “devastating”. “It came at such a crazy time, you know, with [Donald] Trump being elected and all,” he says. “I think for a lot of people it just felt like the last f..king straw. It felt so personal.”
Cave’s career trajectory has been upward and multifaceted since he emerged from Wangaratta in Melbourne post-punk outfits the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party in the late 1970s. Since forming the Bad Seeds in 1983 and releasing their debut album From Her to Eternity a year later, he and the band (through numerous changes in personnel) have channelled everything from blues and punk through to country, folk, rock, jazz and pop balladry on a variety of albums including Tender Prey (1988), The Boatman’s Call (1997) and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008).
More recently, on the new record and its predecessor Push the Sky Away (2013), Cave’s songwriting, musically and lyrically, has taken another twist, leaning more towards elegant, fractured soundscapes and lyrics that have moved on from the distorted narratives of his youth and earlier Bad Seeds tenure.
“The sound of the band changed dramatically with Push the Sky Away,” says Cave. “The Bad Seeds moved away from being a guitar-dominated rock band. And Skeleton Tree feels like a great leap in another direction.
“Warren and I were thrilled to see Skeleton Tree as the record of the year on some obscure electronica website.”
There are a few reasons for this musical reinvention, but chief among them must be the singer’s relationship with the multiskilling Ellis, a founding member of Melbourne’s anarchic post-rock trio the Dirty Three in the 90s, who joined the Bad Seeds as violinist in 1995. Since then the pair have become inseparable musically, creating a huge body of work for the stage and screen as well as for the Bad Seeds and in the rock side project Grinderman.
Last year the pair completed six soundtracks, including one for the upcoming American thriller Wind River and the TV drama-documentary series Mars.
Cave is mildly dismissive of his own contribution to the screen composition process. “I just sit in the studio and watch Warren be amazing, mostly,” he says, “then drop some piano lines over the top.” A pairing stretching across 20 years, however, demands a pooling of resources, even if Ellis’s presence has increased.
“Warren came in as a violinist initially,” says Cave, “on the Murder Ballads [1996] record, but his position within the band has become more and more important. We have developed a kind of telepathic connection over the years, where we both tap into each other musically and interesting things seem to happen. I don’t think either of us really knows why. We have developed a way of writing songs that seems to be based around epic musical misunderstandings, where beautiful things seem to emerge out of a clash of opposing musical wills.
“And of course we are working together all the time. Warren has been extraordinarily helpful to me as a songwriter. Inevitably, you burn out if you exist inside your own solitary head the whole time. You see it all the time. People running to the end of their ideas.”
Ellis, a distinctive, Fagin-like presence on stage and off it, is equally complimentary about his co-conspirator.
“It feels like it has evolved organically through our desire to make music together,” he says. “Initially when we met we enjoyed playing together, but then when we started doing soundtracks like The Proposition [2005] it became apparent that we both like to push things as far as we can and push each other and find ourselves in unknown waters. It’s harder to negotiate those when there are fewer of you.
“The soundtrack stuff felt very exciting and out of our real house in a way. It’s a process of discovery that is going on. As long as that flourishes, we’ll continue. Nick pushes me in a way that has made me grow a lot as a musician. He has a really good work ethic, too. He has had a big impact on me as a person and as a musician.”
What’s clear also is that Cave, deliberately or otherwise, has moved on as a songwriter, particularly as a lyricist. As with many artists, it’s this change of direction that has kept him relevant and successful. He admits, however, that the process gets more difficult the older he gets.
“I’m a lyric writer,” he says. “That’s the thing that I’m naturally predisposed to doing. But writing lyrics that are true, or at least authentic, is hard. It’s tough. It’s always difficult. Increasingly difficult, I would say. The words make greater demands on you as you get older. You understand that if you write a substandard lyric, or an inauthentic lyric, it’s not going to go away. It’s gonna come after you and haunt you every day of your life. So there is a lot of anxiety there. Your work becomes the measure of you. Not your past achievements, but the last song you have written. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. And the pressure gets greater the more songs you write. But the actual music, though, all the recording and rehearsing and playing the music live, this is all just joyful.”
■ ■ ■ ■
Back on the theatre’s makeshift stage after lunch, Cave and his colleagues (including vocalist/keyboardist Conway Savage and keyboardist Larry Mullins) once again try to take the songs from Skeleton Tree into slightly more inclusive ensemble territory. One song in particular needs repeated attempts to get the ambience just right.
Distant Sky is the penultimate track on the album and serves also as a powerful component of Dominik’s film. Its hymn-like solemnity is reinforced by the emotive contribution from Danish soprano Else Torp, whose voice appears over the PA system during the rehearsal.
“Let us go now, my darling companion / Set out for the distant skies / See the sun, see it rising / See it rising, rising in your eyes.” When Cave counters with “They told us our gods would outlive us, but they lied”, the emotion is almost palpable. On record and on screen, this song more than any other on Skeleton Tree is wrenchingly overpowering in the context of Cave’s personal loss.
The singer acknowledges that some lyrics were written after Arthur’s death, but adds that “it’s kind of pointless to try and work out what was and what wasn’t. The truth of it is that there is not a note or word on the album that is not affected by Arthur’s death. It is also true that I was surrounded and supported by a group of musicians that had the courage and awareness to see the beauty in the record, raw and brutal as it is.”
And now, before anyone else, Australia gets to see, hear and, one suspects, feel that raw beauty, as Cave and his cohort head around the country on tour.
“I’m excited,” he says. “What we are looking for when we do concerts is that they are a step forward and that there is something challenging about them. To play Skeleton Tree live ... well, it’s a different thing. We have to redefine our basic approach. But I guess the aim is the same as it ever was — to blow everyone’s heads off.”
The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tour continues tomorrow night in Ballarat, Victoria, and ends in Perth on January 31.
Admit it, big predictions are rarely a good idea
The best antidote to our prediction addiction is to start holding wayward pundits to account. Perhaps it’s time we all started keeping score.
Think you’ve got a book in you? Keep it in there
When I was asked by a state writers’ centre to give a talk, I declined, saying the only thing I could honestly tell prospective writers is: don’t bother. These are my reasons.