How a bizarre trip to Madame Tussauds inspired Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ classic ‘Higgs Boson Blues’
There are a few things you can’t picture when it comes to the erstwhile gothfather of music: you can’t picture Nick Cave on a beach, you can’t picture Nick Cave celebrating a goal by a sports team, and you sure as hell can’t picture him in Madame Tussauds. With the exception of his immovable wax work-like hairline, nothing about him scans when it comes to a trip to the strange tourist trap destination.
However, as his Red Hand Files fan-answering interface has proven, lifting the veil of the rock star mystique, he’s also a family man who goes to his office from 9 to 5 in a suit. He might be one of the greatest songwriters of all time, but as his fan, Bob Dylan, once proclaimed, “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”
So, although it might not play out well in the playground of the imagination of fans who have mythologised their hero as sort of sartorially smart, modern-day Dostoyevsky, he’s not only been to Madame Tussauds, he’s also likely frequented McDonald’s, pushed a trolley around ASDA, and scraped an unruly fish finger from a knackered baking tray. It’s just that the former conjured an image that proved to be a formative development when it comes to his recent take on lyrics.
In the song ‘Higgs Boson Blues’, he rattles off a string of pop culture references, from the deal that mystic bluesman Robert Johnson made with the devil to Miley Cyrus. The latter succumbs to an unfortunate fate as he sings, “Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake,” later confirming that the floating is the tragic face-down variety rather than upright on an inflatable with a Tequila Sunrise in hand.
He’s no stranger to adding a dark edge to pop stars. In his book The Death of Bunny Munro, he offers up the following passage to explain the warped mind of his rabidly sexual protagonist, “Before he renders himself completely to that oblivious sleep. He thinks with a sudden terrible bottomless dread of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.” In fact, Lavigne’s vagina and Kylie Minogue’s back passage are so prominent in the book that they pretty much dominate the press talk upon its release.
While provocation and comedy might have been in mind with those literary examples, it was a specific image that prompted Cyrus’ inclusion in the masterful Push The Sky Away track. “Let me just say: I’ve got nothing particular against Miley Cyrus,” he told the Guardian. “The whole thing came about because I was in Madame Tussauds with my kids and they were hugging Miley Cyrus’s waxwork.”
He colourfully recalled, “Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra was in the next room. They were groping Miley Cyrus, and I’m going, well, hang on a second, you’ve got Elizabeth Taylor here. ‘Who?’ And that had some impact on me, and that’s why she’s floating in the pool.”
Why one thing leads to another so obviously in the mind of Cave is another matter entirely, but this kind of poetic, as opposed to lyrical, style of songwriting has been potent in his work ever since. He happily braves breaking free from neat rhymes in favour of evocative imagery and mood. There is a dark portent to be found in the Cyrus line, fitting of the track’s god particle bemoaning title, and it was a simply family outing that spawned it.
