Long black haired, pale faced, dark look: Nick Cave has the damned poets "phisyque du role". And his music follows the same path: desperation, horror and death are melted together in his sick, obsessive songs, even if a redemption's desire is always present. But the Australian songwriter carries his vampiresque images as a weight. "Just call me dark and sad but, believe me, I'm constantly working against that myth". English tabloids wrote he practised "Satanism". "That's a very insulting lie", he replied.

A river in Melbourne
Every alternative author, like Cave, has always been misunderstood, maybe that's because of their nature. So the conflicts between good and evil, life and death, madness and sanity have always marked the work of the "bard of Melbourne". Yes, Melbourne, Australia, where the young Nick, son of a bourgeois family, sketched his early artistic attempts: "At school I wrote terrible poems. I had learned a couple of chords on the piano and started to add music. The result was some of the worst songs in the world. Since that, I've done more or less the same thing".
Nick Cave has never been tender with himself, as when he said: "Technically, my work has always been chained to the same bowl of vomit". It happened twelve years ago, during the darkest period of his odissey. "I've always been seduced by destructive forces - he remembers. "In Melbourne, there was a river that divides the city. On a side there were the universities and so forth people. On the other side there were the junkies and the prostitutes, and that was the side of the river I was on...".
When he was 19, he had his first experience with heroin: "Taking drugs was like drinking a cup of tea in the morning. It was like sitting on a chair and pulling on the feet: the feeling of being at home. Unfortunately, it was soon over... Now I'm under control, even if the idea of starting again lurks in the back of my head all of the time".

Gothic novels and poetry
"Everything leads to Edgar Allan Poe", Allen Ginsberg said once. He referred to Baudelaire, Burroughs and, in music, Dylan. Today, in rock'n'roll, it's only Cave that translates in music the damned spirit of the Gothic literature's father, with his obsessive songs, with his funeral's poems and with the sick colours of his theatre. Not only are Poe and all the gothic writers, from Le Fanu to Faulkner, his main ispiration; but also the apocalypse of Milton, the delicate desperation of Keats, the predictions of Blake, the Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the Holy Bible. And there's also love, a heartbreaking and atrocious love, in his stories. Stories which are not only expressed in the shape of songs. In 1988 Cave published his first novel, "And the ass saw the angel", inspired to the Bible and the gothic-southern novels of Faulkner and O' Connor. The book was published also as a compact disc by the Dumb Records. Cave's readings of the novels were accompanied by the music of Mick Harvey and Clayton Jones, for a production of the Sydney's Theatre. 

The Australian songwriter used to attend many cultural festivals too, like Mantova's "Festivaletteratura" some years ago. In fact, Cave is basically a poet: "I don't know if the fracture that tv created in the language of communication is incurable", he observes. "They have stolen the lyric language and imagination. But if there is also a single chance to come back to the culture of the deepness, we must try: Poe, Eliot, Dickinson, it doesn't matter who is. We must give the poetry a light, because  poetry needs a light, even if the best poems live in the dark". So it seems quite outrageous the fact that in the record released by Hal Willner, with the poetries of Poe played also by musicians, the dark voice of Cave was absent. A voice that bewitched also the audience of Mantova, where the Australian, on the piano and together with a bass-violin-drum set, played his dark and gloomy ballads, together with his typical (and frightful) delirium, that burst out in frantic gospels and blues. It was as if the crooner in black clothes who till then had played archaic melodies was suddendly possessed again by the demon that has always marked his life. And Cave brought that demon on the big screen. He played the part of himself in Wim Wenders' "Wings of desire". Then, he was a psychotic prisoner in John Hillcoat's "Ghosts... of the civil dead". With his hyper-alcholic friend Shane MacGowan (Pogues) he cut an unforgettable video of a strange version of Louis Armstrong's hit " What a wonderful world".

The voice of the Apocalypse
Nick Cave is the most important singer of the Nineties. He's also one of the few rock musicians who can write lyrics that deserve to be read. This Australian songwriter goes into deep. He knows how to explore the abysses of the mind, on the edge of (and often beyond) madness. He knows how to scary and to enlighten, to shock and to touch. Nevertheless, his debut had been pure cacophony, with The Boys Next Door, a mediocre punk group influenced by the English sounds of the Seventies. But with the Birthday Party, a rebel band who played raw blues, Cave inflamed the Melbourne underground's audience. With that group he approached London and gave birth to the "Bad Seeds" (from a passage of the psalms about cruelty). The group, leaded by the guitarist Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten), is continuing supporting Cave till today. In the meantime, music changed: punk rock was replaced by a blues liturgy, with dramatic tones, that sometimes turned into a gloomy gospel. It was a sort of a mutant amalgam of the Stooges, the New York Dolls and the damaged psycho art-blues of Captain Beefheart, all of this fuelled by the liberating spirit of punk.
An apocalypse of sounds is the essence of From her to eternity, his first solo album. The atmosphere is made even more dramatic by his frightening baritone's voice. A style that returns in the following The firstborn is dead, in which Cave gave vent to one of his obsessions: the America of the deep South, the Frontier, the land of the preachers, the "desperados" and the cardboard myths. So in "Tupelo", the Messiah Elvis Presley became the rock incarnation of Jesus Christ. But for an Australian the States are difficult to understand: "I like the American people, but the system of values in America is completely fucked. I wouldn't be strong enough to survive in such a place", said Cave who also dedicated a song, "The mercy seat", to the death punishment's tragedy.

Brazil: love and ruins
New York, Berlin, London: these are the cities Cave especially loved. But is Sao Paulo, Brazil, the town that left him the deepest mark. A brazilian feeling of "saudade" is the main athmosphere of the excellent The good son (1990), wrapped in slow and majestic melodies. It's really hard to resist to commotion listening to the funeral prayer of "Sorrows child" or to the solemn lament of "The weeping song". Sao Paulo, land of poetry and bitter feelings: it's here that Nick met his muse, Viviane Carneiro, a fashion designer who became his child's mother and who gave him atrocious love pains. "Darling, you're the punishment for all my former sins", he shouted in "Let love in". "Once there came a storm in the form of a girl / It blew to pieces my snug little world / And sometimes I swear I can still hear her howl/ Down through the wreckage and the ruins", he sang in his touching ballad "Ain't gonna rain anymore". These are two songs of Let love in, the album that turned him from an underground artist into a rockstar. The success of the album is also due to the dragging hit single "Do you love me?", the story of the violent sexual initiation of a child in a cinema. In fact, before smashing in all over the world, Cave lived for a long time in the obscurity. In the memory of many people his name only recalled a video of the Cars in which the singer Ric Ocasek attached the playbills of his concerts everywhere. Nowadays, the great success is come. But Cave remained a sullen and introverted guy. He refused to participate to the Mtv Music Awards. He asked to be wiped out from the nominations because his music "doesn't even want to be in competition with nobody". His relationships with the press and with the audience are difficult as well. Still his fans idolize him . It's impossible to turn the eye away from this lean storyteller, who spreads ash and papers all over his piano. His shows have a hypnotic strength that last beyond the songs keeping the suspence also in the softest moments.

Women like demons
His conflicts marked also his relationship with women. A relationship that, in his hallucinatory songs, is turned into a gallery of fatal prostitutes, evil wifes, girl-devils. That's the contest of his Murder ballads with their alarming "budget": seven murders, three assassins and 66 victims. Influenced by a typical topic of the Anglo-Saxon folk, it's one of his besteller (almost a million of copies sold) that takes his passion for the thriller to the top. The main characters are charming victims, like Elisa Day, killed from her first lover (and played by the australian popstar Kylie Minogue in the magical duet "Where the wild roses grow"); or like Mary Bellows, handcuffed to her bed with a bullet in her head. But they are also brutal killers, like the disappointed lover of "Henry Lee" (whose voice is given by the English songwriter PJ Harvey), or like Lottie, the little fifteen of "The curse of the Millhaven", who burned an entire zone of shantydwellers, killing twenty children.
Too much hate? In an interview to "Melody Maker", Cave begged women's pardon: "I know I badly described women and my feelings towards them in my songs. I created a certain kind of woman only for my artistic aim, just in order to burst out my feelings of hate. I'm sorry. It was as if I took revenge with my pen: I have did it just to to hurt some persons". 

The redemption

Maybe it's a step of his redemption process. Cave entered the new century in a very reflexive mood. He's recalling the Canadian Leonard Cohen redemption's ballads and he's looking for a shelter in the Christianity. The damned poet of the early times is turning into a preacher. So, in The Boatman' s call, the rocker who sang about Elvis Presley, the "King of the skies" who was born in Tupelo, exhorts to listen to the call of Jesus "the boatman", looking to the consolation between the men. "Love and theology are the only topics I'm interested in", Cave said in a recent interview. "My responsability as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God". Not bad as a faith's declaration for a damned spirit...
"Cave is a Christian, but not in the traditional way" Phil Sutcliffe wrote on the British magazine "Q". "I don't believe in an interventionist God", Cave pointed out in "Into my arms". "Cave thinks the human love is great, but he doesn't keep in touch with it. He believes that God is great and reliable, but he thinks he doesn't exist, or, if he exists, he doesn't do anyhing to show his power", Sutcliffe added.
Before getting famous, the Melbourne rocker was almost in the point of entering the pantheon of the "burnt idols" of rock'n' roll. In 1988 he was hospitalized to get rid of heroin. And the staying in the austere Broadway Lodge Clinic was necessary to escape to a heavy penal sentence (he had been arrested for possession of 884 grams of heroin). It was the beginning of a new period of his life, after that, maybe, he became maturer. In his music, the harmonies have replaced the noises of the debut. And this is the sensation you have listening to his latest record, No more shall we part. It's a tender and grave album at the same time. In twelwe tracks Cave looks for a rendez vous between his most recent productions: the solemn ballads of "The Boatman's Call" (1997), the "love and death" taste of the "Murder Ballads" (1996) and the betrayed lover's rage of "Let Love in" (1994).

Musically, "No more shall we part" is made by an impressive cocktail: the violin magically played by Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three ("Oh My Lord", "Sweetheart Come"), the deep vocals of Kate and Anna McGarringle ("Hallelujah", "Love Letter", "Gates To The Garden"), the grave guitars of Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey (the Bad Seeds), the passionate crescendo of the piano ("Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow") and the usual desperate singing of the Australian songwriter. The rage, the violence of the Cave's debut are softened in a grave musical contest, but always marked by a dramatic tension, while the lyrics alternate deep spirituality and human desperation. 

"No more shall we part" starts with the single "As I sat sadly by her side", a tender ballad that Cave sings in an inusual decadent register. Then it comes the gloomy title track, a melody for piano and voice. Afterwards, the religious themes rule with "Hallelujah", "God is in the house" and " Oh my Lord". But under the apparent quiet of this music, a punk flame is still burning, as you can hear in "Fifteen feet of pure white snow". The most sentimental songs are "Sweetheart come" (with a piano and violin arrangement), "The sorrowful wife" and "Love letter", that sounds like a sort of lover's prayer. The end is even more melancholy, with the gloomy "Darker with the Day". "No More shall we part" is the new proof of the Cave's religious search, but also a sign of his lonelyness, of his desperate need of love.

Nowadays, Nick Cave can be considered as a "classic" like his masters: Cohen, Dylan, Waits, Cale, Beefheart. He's a rocker who has learnt a lot from the Bible and from the mythical world he lived in for years: "It was a sort of magic world in which I could live and in which Good and Evil didn't meet each other". So it can't be astonishing to see the former punk of the Australian underground walking along Portobello Road, London, holding in his hand his little Luke, the son born from the relationship with Viviane Carneiro. The bacchanals of his youth have gone, now it's time for self-irony: "The advantage of getting older is that you don't have to attend young people". So said Nick, "the good son".

In 2003 Cave released the disappointing Nocturama. Recorded in only a week into his home studios "SingSing" in Melbourne, accompanied by the Birthday Party's producer Nick Launey, this was expected to be Cave's return to a simple blues-rock, in the style of his early works. Unfortunately, the album failed to realize its extent. Cave is now a quieter man and every song of the "peaceful" Cave makes you miss the "damned" Cave. "Rock of Gibraltar" is maybe the most touching ballad, while the single "Bring It On" is only an easy pop song that doesn't get advantage by the presence of Chris Bailey. Few episodes recall the "damned" storytelling of the past records ("Dead Man in my Bed") or let the Bad Seeds show all their real talent (the jam "Babe I'm on Fire").