Songbook #7: The Nick Cave Omnibus

Music and its moments of transcendence

If you told me that a parallel universe exists where I have only my Nick Cave related memories, I wouldn’t mind trading places for a few days. In many ways, Nick Cave has punctuated the most pivotal times of my life — a leitmotif of sorts. 

It’s impossible for me to think about Jules and my wedding day without hearing Breathless, and I have sung the opening verses of Into My Arms many times to my seven-week-old boy, Thomas. Through the peaks and troughs of my life, I don’t have to reach too far to find a Nick Cave memory that carries some significance. This essay reflects on seven of these memories.

You may want to accompany your reading with this Spotify playlist of the songs mentioned in this essay.

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One - Where The Wild Roses Grow (with Kylie Minogue)

I’m sixteen and I’m at my best mate Deacs’ house. His dad, Willouw, plays me my first murder ballad, Where The Wild Roses Grow. It’s an enchanting song that you feel may just be the most beautiful love song you’ve ever heard — until it’s not. The red-lipped temptress, Elisa Day gets murdered by the protagonist in the final stanzas.

Like many teenage boys in 2001, I was bewitched by Kylie Minogue’s gold hotpants from her Spinning Around music video. Here she was, singing a chilling duet with an Australian I had only just heard of, on an album called Murder Ballads. Hearing Kylie’s honeyed vocals juxtaposed with Nick’s baritone for the first time is a wonderful sensation.

The song sat side-by-side with The Ship Song on the “Best of…” album that was my Nick Cave gateway drug. The Ship Song is a traditionally beautiful love song that dances between metaphors of ships, dogs and wings in a tale about losing yourself in the arms of another person — a lot for my sixteen year old brain to process.

On the last day I took her where the wild roses grow
And she lay on the bank, the wind light as a thief
And I kissed her goodbye, said, "All beauty must die"
And I lent down and planted a rose 'tween her teeth

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Two -  Straight To You

As a teenager, my musical education really took place in my older brother Gareth’s bedroom, late on many school weeknights, fueled by sweet Joko tea. We theorised about the meaning of life through rock music — to me, the three year age gap, and surprisingly powerful Philips CD player, had provided him with infinite wisdom on these matters.

He has always had great taste in music, so I’ve always been partial to his habit of playing music a few decibels higher than he ought to. Mom would come check on us and hear us listening to Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews and Nick Cave (to name a few) and tell us quite politely to go to bed. I can’t help but think that she may have been more forceful if we were listening to Limp Bizkit or Eminem. 

I love the memory of coming home from sports practice to find my mom in the kitchen, making bolognese and singing along to my favourite songs. 

All the towers of ivory are crumbling
And the swallows have sharpened their beaks
This is the time of our great undoing
This is the time that I'll come running

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Three - God Is In The House

After my parents divorced, my relationship with my dad hinged mainly on music and sport. Amongst the folk classics such as Jim Croce and Leonard Cohen, he loved Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album. Aqualung’s single Wind Up provided my introduction to satire in music. It pokes a little fun at the Christian institution when the higher being responds to the protagonist’s pleas for the truth: “I’m not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday”. 

Nick Cave’s God Is In The House was our attempt to see him, and arguably raise him on the satire front. It’s an iteration on the same theme — just because you clothe something as sacred and pure, it doesn’t necessarily make it so. God Is In The House takes aim at the god-fearing in a playful black comedy that meanders between the triumphant and the macabre. It is wildly fabricated yet deadly serious. 

Our town is very pretty
We have a pretty little square
We have a woman for a mayor
Our policy is firm but fair
Now that God is in the house

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Four - There She Goes My Beautiful World

I’m days away from my nineteenth birthday, living in London on my gap year, walking through Camden Town on a Sunday afternoon with Gareth and Deacs. We make a stop at a record store and see that Nick Cave’s Abbatoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus album has just been released. It was one of those albums that ditched the crystal case and had a wonderful canvas cover with a picture of a white flower.

Days later, we see that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are playing live at Brixton Academy in November on the Abbatoir Blues tour. We are going. Deacs’ dad Willouw - who introduced us to Nick Cave in the first place - flies over to London to watch the concert with us. The Bad Seeds looking every bit the part, the intensity of Nick’s movements resplendent in black tie and the backing vocalists’ afros, There She Goes My Beautiful World remains imprinted in my memory to this day. 

My life since that day is old enough to order itself a beer. The performance was, after all, on 11 November 2004 — eighteen years and one day ago. I’ve discarded my entire compact disc collection in the years since they became increasingly obsolete. Not the Abbatoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus double album.

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world

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Five - Push The Sky Away 

I’m twenty-seven and my friend, Sean, says to me: “I have a ticket to Glastonbury with your name on it. Get to London in June and we’ll take it from there.” A few months later, we are pitching our tents on a Wednesday morning on Glastonbury’s Worthy Farm.

On the weekend where Arctic Monkeys, Rolling Stones and Mumford & Sons headlined the festival, we spend our Sunday evening watching Vampire Weekend, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Phoenix back-to-back. 

There’s an otherworldly moment between Nick and a beautiful raven-haired maiden in a white dress sitting atop the shoulders of a friend during Stagger Lee. Moments later we are repeating the chorus to the lyrics from Push The Sky Away, feeling like we indeed got everything we came for.

And if you feel you got everything you came for
If you got everything and you don't want no more
You've got to just keep on pushing it
Keep on pushing it
Push the sky away

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Six - Red Right Hand

I’m thirty three when I first subscribed to The Red Hand Files newsletter. Named after the song Red Right Hand, each of the editions is a written response to a question sent to Nick from a fan — there are over 200 Files.

My first interaction with Red Right Hand unfortunately does not reflect a refined palate for the good things in life. The song features on the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. We had a VHS growing up which had the two glorious Farrelly Brothers movies recorded back to back: Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. My younger brother, Matthew, and I watched that one VHS a shameful amount of times, and still have inside jokes running from the lines of those movies.

The Red Hand Files have had a profoundly positive impact on my life since it started trickling into my email inbox in 2019. In it you may find solace for the loss of a loved one, musings on loneliness and aloneness, lessons on friendships and love and wild stories about band members, flutes and Nicolas Cage. After reading enough of the Files, it starts to feel like a friendship, and I find myself regularly forwarding on the emails to spark discussions.

Take a little walk to the edge of town
Go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms
Like a bird of doom
As it shifts and cracks

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Seven - Bright Horses

The album Ghosteen was written and recorded in the years following Nick’s loss of his teenage son, Arthur. It’s a wondrous sprawl of an album that untangles itself beautifully in just over an hour. Nick’s grief is palpable throughout, and the vivid imagery conjures wild apocalyptic landscapes that allow you to drift into another world.

In Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick says “I think music out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.”  In many ways, this Songbook newsletter is motivated by this idea. The idea that music moves us in ways that we can’t really explain. It certainly does for me. 

The Bright Horses are a metaphor for his son’s wild and enlightened spirit and I’m not sure what else I can say about the painful refrain “And I’m by your side and I’m holding your hand” other than — it transcends.

The bright horses have broken free from the fields
They are horses of love, their manes full of fire
They are parting the cities, those bright burning horses
And everyone is hiding, no one makes a sound
And I’m by your side and I’m holding your hand

To love the world is a participatory and reciprocal action — for what you give to the world, the world returns to you, many fold, and you will live days of love that will make your head spin, that you will treasure for all time… I have only one piece of advice for you, and it is the very best that I can give. Love. The world is waiting.
The Red Hand Files #177