This is a weeping song(s)I'm launching rather prematurely into a topic I'm destined to obsess over in this blog. This will be the first of many postings on the pleasure of melancholy music, or weeping songs as the gentleman to my left calls them. I pre-empt a more planned rumination on this subject because I went to see Nick Cave live a few nights ago, and he is much on my mind. I thought I'd simply get off my chest something that's been bugging me for years about Cave. How to reconcile the two sides of Nick Cave's art - the tender lyricist of some of the most heart-rending reflections on lost love, and, a barn-storming, hell-raising, fire-and-brimstone, demonic preacher of twisted despair, damnation or redemption.
Nick Cave generally rocks. He came from rock - a cauldron of punk-goth-Cramps noise making in his earliest days as The Birthday Party from down under, and he seems determined to return to hell in his latest handcart, the rather noisy Grinderman venture. His latest studio albums, and also his live performances favour the rock side of things, and are very very noisy. He shouts, he struts (he even did a crowd dive the other night, something I had never seen him do before, and which a 50 year old should think twice about), and he and the band have a wail of a time kicking up an aural rumpus, and the fans love it too. Now, that might be stating the bleeding obvious to long-standing Cave fans, or serious musos, and simply describing what he has always been about, with a possible, and in their mind, rather regrettable period around 97-01, when he did a lot of ballads and took the tempo and noise right down. The thing is, that's when I got into him, and that's the Cave I know and love and need. I'm not a big rock or noisy rumpus fan (vide my Lexicon of Love posting), and so for me this middle period was at his best, albeit unhappiest.
The Nick Cave of The Boatman's Call, and No More Shall We Part, who was getting over a very messy break up with P J Harvey, and poured a lot of his grief - both general and specific - into his piano and typewriter. In 1999, the first time I went to see him at the Royal Festival Hall, he did nearly all ballads from The Boatman's Call (with a few of the old hell-raisers for the encore just to please the crowd and give his band of hardened rockers The Bad Seeds something to justify their bus fares), and I thought I had died and gone to hell - a happy hell of melodic misery. But this seems impossible now. When he throws the occasional ballad into his live shows now, it seems out of place, and the audience doesn't know what to do with it. I do, I stand there with wet eyes wishing it was all like this, that his heart was still broken, and he would carry on penning what he once called 'lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man'. He was describing what all love songs should be, and he was talking in 1999, when his certainly were back then.
But he's happily married, living by the seaside now with wife and kids, and no longer drowning but waving. I miss the misery. Songs like 'People they ain't no good' (the title says it all); 'Brompton Oratory', and 'Love Letter'. The last I've even written about in a chapter I wrote about love and love songs in a book I wrote about sunshine (about the weather imagery in the song), but I haven't exhausted it, and I haven't stopped playing it. And I didn't stop playing these slices of eloquent anguish through a very rocky emotional patch I went through just as I discovered Mr Cave. They are so entwined with my emotional memories of a messy break up of my own back then that they now have a near Pavlovian potency, inducing a second-hand heartache when the actual wounds have healed. These songs are aural gin for me. Best mixed with tears. And that's why I needed him then, and why I bitterly resent him now howling away and waving to me from the top deck of the happy bus of rock.*
*I confess I'm guilty of absurd simplification here, as any Nick Cave fan would testify. The man released an album called Murder Ballads after all, and so the 2 sides - the howling hell-raiser and the heart-break balladeer - are of the same highly original coin. It comes down to what I would like to call 'eloquent anguish', which Mr Cave, howling or weeping, has by the bucket load. I do enjoy many of his barn-stormers (The Mercy Seat, Papa Won't Leave you Henry, Yes, We Have No Bananas), when he serves them up, but I'm just making a rather sulky point that I wish he wasn't so happy now. His gain has been music's loss in my view, and I'm still standing here needing lifelines to the galaxies.
