Nick Cave, Mark E. Smith and Shane MacGowan arguing in a pub, 1989
“How, unless you drink as I do,” the writer Michael Lowry once asked, “could you hope to understand the beauty of an Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?” Not to glamourise heavy boozing, but Nick Cave, Mark E. Smith and Shane MacGowan are three wise men who knew just what Lowry meant. In 1989, this triumvirate of unlikely saviours were following a star towards a bright new future and finally pulling the ‘80s away from the gaudy vapidity of synth-pop.
Thus, the NME brought them together for a ‘Pop Summit’. This consisted of a £20 bar tab per head and the presence of shepherding hosts James Brown (not that one) and Sean O’Hagan (yes, that one, provided you were thinking of Cave’s recent memoir collaborator). In part, this journalistic duo were there under the proviso of recording the splurge of ramblings on offer from the trio, but you also wonder whether it was a two-person job to cajole the conversation towards some sort of coherence. The setting was apt, given that they met at a gothic pub called The Montague Arms in central London, and the rest is ancient drinking history.
“So the NME thinks we’re the last three heroes of rock ‘n’ roll, do they?” Nick Cave began. “Smarmy fuckers,” Shane McGowan counters, “What they actually mean is that we’re the three biggest brain-damaged cases in rock ‘n’ roll”. In fairness, the rendezvous setting of a grotty pub near Millwall’s infamous Den helped to imply this. However, the attentive Mark E. Smith explains, “Apart from Nick. Nick’s cleaned up”. Thankfully, Cave remarks: “Yeah, my brain’s restored itself”.
Nevertheless, Smith was happy to accept Cave’s company no matter what state his cerebral cortex was in. When The Birthday Party emerged on British shores like a gang of larrikins who traded Bondi tans for the complexion of Alaskan vampires, Smith and his revolving cronies in The Fall were the only people happy to hang out with them. “We were friends with The Fall, and we were friends with The Pop Group, and these were great English bands. Particularly at that time. They were the saviours of the music scene because there was so much shit that was happening at that time. Terrible, boring kind of stuff. And Mark Smith’s lyric writing was just incredible, so they had a huge impact, but we weren’t involved in a scene, we just knew them.”
Thus, they were friends from the start, and Smith was notoriously unfriendly, so it was far from hobnobbing among the ‘cool kids’. It wasn’t just excesses and an outsider status that brought them together, there was a reason that this piece started with a literary quote about drinking as opposed to some doggerel slop scribbled on the back of a men’s room door. It was this literary link that Cave mused upon when he added to the discussion: “I think we’ve all tended to create some kind of area where we can work without particularly having to worry about what’s fashionable.”
For the only time in recorded history, Smith found himself in agreement with this. “Yes, fair enough,” he said in a foreign tongue. “But I think there’s a lot of big differences in this trio here. Nick was very rock ‘n’ roll to me but he’s turned his back on it which was cool. Shane’s more, I dunno. To me, The Pogues are the good bits from the Irish showband scene, like The Indians. You had that feel, probably lost that now. Your work’s good though.”
MacGowan kept it simple when appraising his own artistic pariah status: “Fuck it man. Who wants to work in a place where there’s all these people looking at you?” Not content with his former note of sincerity, Smith quickly came back to his senses and quipped: “Are you talking about your gigs? You should stop doing them, then.”
Thereafter, a brief drunken squabble of controversy-courting remarks ensued. Such as McGowan’s quip: “I don’t go round saying Socrates was a c***, Jesus Christ was an idiot, do I?” and Smith’s Smithesque retort, “Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists – second rate Christianity. It’s alright for you Catholics.” Before comically adding like an archetype racist, “I was brought up with Irish Catholics. Some of my best friends are Irish Catholics.”
As comical as they are, these ramblings begin to seem like an alluring distraction that pulls you away from their actual applaudable art, and when the conversation is pulled back towards something resembling an interview, MacGowan chooses to muse on this matter. “Nobody created my mythology,” he claimed, “I certainly didn’t.” And then, as if to prove that mythologies come from afar, he added: “It seems to me that in your songs, Nick, you’re doing a Jung style trip of examining your shadow, all the dark things you don’t want to be. A lot of your songs are like trips into the subconscious and are, therefore, nightmarish.”
Poetically continuing: “You’re exploring the world through the subconscious. I’ve done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self-abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don’t write them or sing them. I couldn’t write them the way you do, I couldn’t – making nightmares into living daylight…” To which a blushing Cave said: “I think you do a pretty good job of it in some of your songs.”
They all did (and continue to do so in some cases); that’s what makes them remarkable. Their interest was mutual in humanising the ragged dispositions of our disenfranchised edges. In a way, they do that not only in their songs, but also in their waffling patter throughout this famed ‘Pop Summit’ feature. Not all waywardness is beyond reason, and that soars in the crock of gold that is their art. However, Cave’s most recent chat with Hagan proves one sober lesson: moderation is far more conducive to a healthy life, outlook, and output.
The full transcript of the conversation is available over at The Quietus, but below, you can read a relatively small excerpt.
Do you think it’s accurate to describe the three of you as outsiders?
Nick Cave: “I think we’ve all tended to create some kind of area where we can work without particularly having to worry about what’s fashionable.”
Mark E. Smith: “Yes, fair enough. But I think there’s a lot of big differences in this trio here. Nick was very rock ‘n’ roll to me but he’s turned his back on it which was cool. Shane’s more, I dunno. To me The Pogues are the good bits from the Irish showband scene, like The Indians. You had that feel, probably lost that now. Your work’s good though.”
Shane MacGowan: “Fuck it man. Who wants to work in a place where there’s all these people looking at you?”
MES: “Are you talking about your gigs? You should stop doing them, then.”
SM: “Can’t afford to.”
MES: “Fuck it, you could fight not to if you don’t like it.”
SM: “…and leave the rest of them in the lurch?”
MES: “Nah, the rest of your band will always complain about not working. If you’re paying them a wage tell them to stay at home and behave themselves.”
SM: “It’s a democracy, our band.”
MES: “Why aren’t they here with you then?”
SM: “Cos the NME didn’t want to interview them.”
MES: “Cos nobody’d recognize them.”
SM: “That’s it! They want to interview us because we’ve got distinctive characteristics. They just want to interview three high-brow loonies. (Laughs)”
MES: “In that case you should have brought your mate Joe Strummer along.”
SM: “I said high-brow loonies.”
How do each of you approach the actual mechanics of songwriting?
MES: “When you ask about that, you just induce fear in a songwriter. I just go blank.”
NC: “It’s not a cut and dried process.”
SM: “For a start I ‘ve got to be out of my head to write. For a lot of the time it’s automatic writing. ‘Rainy Night In Soho’ was automatic.”
MES: “It’s gotta be subconscious and off the wall. He says he’s got to be out of his head, and a lot of the time I have too. Sometimes, I just wake up and do it. It’s one of the hardest questions you ever get asked. For instance, you sometimeshear things that would make a great idea for a song but you never carry them out.”
SM: “I do. Like ‘The Turkish Song Of The Damned’ was a Kraut trying to tell me something and I misheard him. He said ‘Have you heard ‘The Turkish Song’ by The Damned’. Then I woke up.”
MES: “My German song’s better than yours, I bet. This is like one of those night-time discussions on Channel 4.”
NC: “I write songs in batches and then record them and then can’t write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.”
SM: “You haven’t been back to the swamps for a while, have you.”
NC: “The swamps? Heh, heh. I’ve written a novel about that.”
MES: “Nick thinks a novel’s two pages long. Very novel, heh, heh.”
SM: “What’s it called?”
MES: “It’s called It’ll Be Ready In Another Five Years. You should write more aggressive songs, Nick, you’re getting too slow.”
NC: “I haven’t sat down and thought about the mood before I wrote them.”
MES: “I find your work almost English Lit oriented, like Beckett, things crop up again and again.”
NC: “And your songs are very deceptive Mark, in the way they’re sung. They may appear at times like streams of consciousness but that’s deceptive.”
MES: “One thing that really annoys me is that stream of consciousness thing. I wouldn’t let on to it normally, but it annoys the shit out of me. I put a lot of hard sweat into them, I think about them. They have an inner logic to me so I don’t really care who understands them or not. I see writing and singing as two very different things. My attitude is if you can’t deliver it like a garage band, fuck it. That’s one thing that’s never been explored, delivering complex things in a very straightforward rock ‘n’ roll way. My old excuse is if I’d wanted to be a poet, I’d have been a poet.”
SM: “And starved.”
MES: “I listen to your songs, Shane, and I see the old Ireland coming up there and it moves me and I boogie to it. I like your stuff believe me or not. I can listen to Peter Hammill and I know he’s not enjoyable, not even entertaining but I like it. I’ve got a very old fashioned attitude that I shouldn’t give any of my secrets away.”
SM: “What are you doing here then?”
MES: “I can write, boy, I can write. That’s what I do. People like you sit round moaning about the state of pop music… The trouble is that it’s too bloody easy for people, that’s why music is in the sorry state that it is. Any idiot, actors mainly, can go in there, sing a chord, bang on a machine… I’m not objecting to that but when people get at me for trying to say something in a rock ‘n’ roll mode it’s as if I’m the freak.”
SM: “All this talk about the state of music, rock ‘n’ roll music, Irish music, soul, funk.”
MES: “Salsa.”
SM: “It’s been proved by Acid House that anyone can make a record.”
MES: “We’re not thick, we all know that.”
SM: “Look, I’m talking about the implications of Acid House.”
MES: “There’s nothing new in Acid House for me, pal. I’ve been using that process for years. Bloody years. It might be new for you but don’t assume it’s new for anyone else, because you’re fucking wrong, pal.”
SM: “What the fuck are you talking about? Have you made an Acid House record?”
MES: “It’s the same process, right. Have you had some sort of bloody revelation about Acid House?”
SM: “Hah! It’s obvious if you listen they put Eastern melodies over it, bits of this and that…”
MES: “That’s what music should always have been like.”
SM: “It always was.”
MES: “Why haven’t you been doing it for years then pal?”
NC: “I think they have been doing it. I’ve heard zithers and so on. Eastern stuff, Turkish stuff.”
MES: “We had jazz arrangements in ’82 when the rest of those tossers were playing cocktail lounge music and fucking pseudo new wave, so don’t talk to me about it because I know what I’m talking about pal.”
SM: “Fucking hell, what’s he on about?”
