Fairytales and lullabies

Looka yonder! Looka yonder! A big black cloud come! O comes to Brighton promenade!

On Marine Parade, in the livid eye of the storm, a lanky Australian in an inadequate suit wrestles with the raincover of a twin push-chair. His boys squeal with two-year-old delight at every terrible boom of thunder. The cover flaps furiously, refusing to fasten. As he kneels to retrieve it, the sharp spring rain pelts his back and drips down to his skinny middle aged arse. Oh Lord! Why hast Thou forsaken me?

Nick Cave is 45. He has lived almost half his life in this accursed country, but it still finds new ways to torment him. He recently resumed his study of English weather, notating the silvery sky from his office each morning, as if he might master the climate in language. But it will not be tamed. There’s a cold gale howling in from the sea through his thinning gothic mane.

Nocturama, recorded in four days back in Melbourne last year, with old Birthday Party producer Nick Launay and the Saints’ Chris Bailey, was an attempt to hotwire the old Bad Seeds jalopy at the original scene of the crime, but it has backfired badly. Since the recording Blixa has stormed out of the band, infuriated at what he saw as a long descent into self parody (“I did not get into rock and roll to play rock and roll!” he barked. “You be a fucking Muppet!”). It feels like the ravens leaving the tower.

Now the album’s been released to the worst reviews of his career. Even the frantic closing 15 minute rocker “Babe I’m On Fire” feels like the sound of someone protesting too much. The most acute song on the album might be “Dead Man In My Bed”, which on certain mornings sounds like a bitter prophecy of creative bankruptcy.

With each step along the waterfront, pushing the pram homewards, his soaked socks squelch inside his black Gucci loafers.

It’s a long way from São Paolo. After he first became a father, back in 1991, he would collect little Luke and mosey up the hill to Merceario São Pedro, where they would sit on a pair of bar stools, shooting the breeze with Pedro, Luke sucking on his Chupa-Chup, Nick on his Skol and Marlboros. But all he could write were fairytales and lullabies.

He chose to return to this country, slunk back to the dank, dismal shooting galleries of  west London, where naturally he suffered, got strung-out and scored. Firstly, of all things, a genuine, murderous, novelty hit single, alongside Kylie Minogue. Swiftly followed by the more debilitating hit: a four month affair with Polly Jean Harvey that sparked the stricken soulstorm of The Boatman’s Call but left him alone, forsaken, flat on his back in a Notting Hill junkyard.

Brighton had seemed like a fresh start. He and Susie moved here in 1999, in the first flush of new love. They had met, as though in some screwball comedy, beneath the tail of the Natural History Museum’s diplodocus, at a Bella Freud catwalk show. Nick was thunderstruck, dumbstruck, even, as Tracy Pew might put it, cuntstruck. It was like a lifetime’s worth of ionic erotic disturbance - from Tinkerbell to Jenny Agutter to Anita Ekberg and Carolyn Jones - had suddenly flamed into being in the form of a pale, nervy gothic dreamgirl from Cheshire.

It is surely divine providence. When friends and family warned her off him, the thought of losing her, the suggestion of enduring that kind of cosmic abjection once more, was enough to make him finally quit junk for good. 

He’d been born again, and suddenly the universe was saying yes to Nick Cave. 1998, over the flooded fields of Glastonbury, a hooded, whiskered Bob Dylan extends a friendly hand to say “Hey man, I like your stuff”. 1999, the Southbank Centre asks if he fancies curating two weeks of performances, inviting the likes of Lee Hazelwood, Harry Dean Stanton and Nina Simone to perform. 2000, the phone rings and it’s Rick Rubin calling to say that Johnny Cash has covered “The Mercy Seat”. 

Domestic bliss, twin baby boys, the acclaim of both peers and idols… He is old enough and maybe wise enough to suspect that this will come with a price. 

He caught a taste of it back in 2000, when he and Susie, by then a very pregnant “elephant of woe”, visited the West Sussex estate of Bryan Ferry. Standing in his perfect swimming pool one summer afternoon, in the grounds of his gated manor house, beside his apple orchard and his horse paddock, Bryan confessed that he hadn’t written a song in three years. Why? He gestured simply at his surroundings  and sighed. “There’s nothing to write about…”

There has never been a chance that Nick Cave would succumb to the blank page. His one remaining habit is his furious, incurable graphomania - he can’t be left alone with a fag packet, an old envelope, a plane sickbag, before he is festooning it in couplets, tour plans, dirty sketches. Even now, as the storm blows out with every iambic step along the Georgian terraces, he is composing one more chapter for his own personal Book of Job, updated to incorporate the modern pestilence of Brighton cab drivers, crusties and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Home at last, he opens the door, heaves the buggy up the steps, unstraps his boys and they are away - toddling off to wreak havoc once more. The stroller drips quietly in the hallway. There is no cliché in heaven and earth that infuriates him more than that old line from Cyril Connolly - “the pram in the hall is the enemy of good art”. Some days, maybe right now, as he dries off and reaches for his notebook, he finds nothing more inspiring. He needs to reclaim the fierce energy of these twin lightning bolts as they are unleashed upon the world. He knows that somewhere in his old groaning bones the spark is still there.