I recall, vividly, when I interviewed Cave in 1992, as he remembered moving to London in 1980 with The Boys Next Door, or The Birthday Party as they became, and him saying, “I originally developed an intense, blind, boiling hatred for England.
#Nick cave discography song of joy crack#
He’s been known to crack a smile, but only in the same way that Satan grins when he’s tossing pathetic souls into the inferno: no, life is grim (the evidence, even more so in the supposedly advanced 21st century, tells us he’s right), and everything comes up short. Before the director had confirmed it, I’d concluded my original feature by wondering if this was the real reason Skeleton Tree was being held back until after the film it was too personal, too precious, to let a pack of writers at it (Cave has noted before that “The critic is the true voice of our destructive nature”) before it’s delivered in the artist’s own words, or through the eyes of his film, in what the press release calls “a true testament to an artist trying to find his way through the darkness.”Īctually, Cave’s career trajectory has always followed a path through the darkness, starting from the late Seventies, when he emerged as the sallow, horse-faced pouter fronting Melbourne’s wayward Boys Next Door – a force of nature, a lightning rod for conflict and pain, a kind of violent Rimbaud-meets-Dostoevsky-meets-Dionysius-meets-Iggy character with a PhD In Misanthropy. “An instinct of self-preservation,’ Dominik called it. The catastrophe took place in July of 2015 when Arthur, one of Cave’s 15-year-old twins, died after a fall from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, while Cave was halfway through making his new record. But what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that you just… change? You change from the known person to an unknown person… so that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognise the person that you were, but the person inside the screen is a different person.”
I mean, why should we? What we do want is sort of modifications on the original model … hopefully better versions of ourselves. Or so I thought when I first wrote this feature, before One More Time With Feeling director Andrew Dominik told the Venice Film Festival crowd that Nick Cave decided to make a documentary about Skeleton Tree to avoid having to discuss the subject of his son Arthur’s death with the media.Ĭave’s voiceover in the film trailer begins with the admission “Most of us don’t want to change. Yet the campaign around Skeleton Tree infers an importance, a status, like musical aristocracy elevated above the proletariat. Nor has it been unveiled in the suspenseful manner of the drip-drip feed of information that preceded Frank Ocean’s Endless and Blond. Skeleton Tree may not join the exalted company of the album that lands unannounced – for example, Bowie’s The Next Day, more than one Radiohead album and Beyoncé’s Lemonade (accompanied on release by a film that aired the same day on US channel HBO). Not for Cave, it seems, an album simply served to the media upfront so we can dissect it.
Given the moodiness of the trailer, and that the film will debut in 800 cinemas worldwide the day before the album is released – and only then will the public be able to hear Skeleton Tree – the none-more-weighty ‘portrait of the artist as a serious artist’ vibe is palpable. ‘Why should we?” Warren Ellis, Cave’s principal creative collaborator of recent years, waves a conductor-style arm, and a bow scrapes across a cello, both solemn and frenzied, as the camera zooms toward Cave’s face, tough and immovable like granite. “Most of us don’t want to change, really,” he gravely intones. What director Andrew Dominik intended to be a performance-based affair, he says, grew as it was made, to incorporate interviews and Cave’s “intermittent narration and improvised rumination,” which can be heard over the trailer – deliberately classic/cinematic in its moody B&W chiaroscuro, as Cave sits at the piano, in front of his band of Bad Seeds, tinkering with solitary notes, as if searching for that divine spark: once more with feeling, then. Six weeks before the due date (9 September) of Nick Cave’s sixteenth album Skeleton Tree, a trailer for his equally new film One More Time With Feeling set the ball rolling. Martin Aston traces Cave’s path through the shadows, ahead of what will be his starkest and darkest work to date. Out this week, new album Skeleton Tree and accompanying concert film One More Time With Feeling together confront the tragedy of his son’s passing.
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