Nick Cave on why King Crimson were “masters of the sudden violent eruption”
Throughout his long and storied career, Nick Cave has adopted many different musical guises, often within the confines of the same project, and yet, it frequently proves to be a fascinating revelation whenever he changes his approach.
His early years as a founding member and the frontman in The Birthday Party were angsty and angular, with the band frequently hailed for their blend of punk, goth and blues that often morphed into some of the most challenging work of these respective movements in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. While this venture didn’t last long, it quickly became clear that Cave wasn’t going to rest on simply having made a brief impact.
After The Birthday Party disbanded, he would then go on to establish the Bad Seeds, a group which has shown flashes of his former identity, but also has its softer moments, despite there being a bleak and noirish filter draped over the top. Perhaps best known for his commandeering of the band for over 40 years and his restless ambitions to allow the project to mutate in fascinating ways, this, more so than The Birthday Party, has showcased a greater range of Cave’s ability to adapt to new ideas.
On top of this, you’ve also got projects such as Grinderman, a band that, over two albums, delivered a much more direct burst of fury, and also his solo work, which encompasses many of these different facets of his identity.
It’s always hard to second-guess where Cave is going to go next artistically, but a large amount of this is down to the influences he’s always looked towards for inspiration, some of whom have taken a similarly nebulous approach to fitting within the confines of genre classification.
However, one of the things that all of Cave’s work does have in common is its propensity for being explosive, and how each song, whether or not it truly manages to burst into a feral howl of emotion or allows itself to bubble underneath, always has the capacity to collapse in on itself under the weight of all of its tension. Plenty of artists have inspired Cave in this sense, but none more so than King Crimson.
In the July 2019 edition of Cave’s monthly newsletter, The Red Hand Files, he responded to a question from a fan about who his favourite guitarists of all time were, and responded by saying that King Crimson’s leader, Robert Fripp, was perhaps one of his biggest inspirations for how he managed to capture this explosivity.
“King Crimson was able to combine extraordinary moments of purity and fragility with super heavy rock ‘n’ roll,” Cave stated. “Maybe they imprinted somewhere in my mind the template for some of the more schizophrenic Bad Seeds songs. King Crimson were masters of the sudden violent eruption. Bill Bruford, their drummer, was simply off the planet, and Robert Fripp was my favourite guitarist at the time, along with, of course, David Gilmour.”
A truly singular band with no clear, longstanding motive other than to make music that was challenging for the listeners and those involved in playing, King Crimson are often seen as the pinnacle of progressive and experimental rock, and a large amount of that is down to the creative bravery and refusal to play by the rules that Fripp has always followed. While Cave’s work doesn’t always sound as complex and knotty as King Crimson’s does, it’s certainly always had that ability to erupt, and these explosive moments are what has helped both acts firmly maintain their status as two of the most fearless.
