Nick Cave on the album he found “pretty disgusting”, and the family member who loved it
Nick Cave is the one-man Coen brothers of rock ‘n’ roll. Like the Hollywood maestros responsible for The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men and Fargo, Cave is able to slip between macabre wit, genuine horror and life-affirming beauty in his work with ease.
To be clear, each of them has been recognised as the auteur geniuses they are. However, like the movie-making siblings, the darkness is arguably what they’re all best known for, with very good reason for it.
In fact, there was a period of Cave’s career after breaking up The Birthday Party when all he was really known for was purveying cheap, shlocky thrills. As masterful as his first four solo albums are heralded today, the sheer, visceral discomfort with which his storytelling was deployed put off many people. Especially those who weren’t quite on board with the subtlety hiding under his free-form garage rock thrills.
From 1988’s Tender Prey onwards, though, something changed. Tracks like ‘The Mercy Seat’ showed that Nick Cave could still unsettle with the best of them, but with a novelist’s flair for words, more Cormac McCarthy than John Carpenter. ‘Deanna’ was even more shocking, as it showed Cave making what could be called a (perish the thought) pop song?! With more structure built into his sound, the early 1990s saw Cave and his Bad Seeds make a pretty successful break for the mainstream.
Henry’s Dream and the ‘Red Right Hand’ toting Let Love In turned Cave from a cult curio to a genuine, bona-fide artist that people truly believed could skyrocket in the coming years. Weirdly enough, that’s exactly what he did, yet he did so with an album that doubled down spectacularly on all the grisly, violent parts of his storytelling. A record that Cave found even shocked him to his core.
What was the Nick Cave album that shocked him so badly?
1996’s Murder Ballads is exactly what it says on the tin. A vicious, black-hearted little grindhouse splatterfest that, two minutes in, is depicting the murder of a woman and her three daughters in fairly graphic detail. The album does not let up from there. Two tracks in sees Cave telling the story of ‘Stagger Lee’, a gay serial killer forcing men who step to him to, let’s say, pleasure him, before shooting them between the eyes.
Would you believe it, this is also the album that gave Cave ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow‘, his first mainstream hit. A duet with Kylie Minogue, no less, on a song that sees the character Minogue plays get, you guessed it, bludgeoned to death with a rock. I love this record deeply, but to call it a little much is an understatement. Cave himself said as much in an interview with the magazine POP in 1996. The interviewer admitted that the album made him feel sick, and Cave responded, “I must say it has a similar effect on me”.
He went on to say, “I remember when we had finished working with the record and I had it on tape. I said to my mother—who I was living with at that time—’Eh, mum, I have my new record here, would you like to sit down and listen to it?’. And she was enthusiastic. So I put on the tape, sat down on the couch, and after three or four songs I began to think ‘what the hell kind of record is this really…it’s just grotesque and disgusting’.”
One might think that Cave’s dear old mother would agree, but apparently he got his macabre streak maternally. “My mother still was enthusiastic—’This is fantastic, oh, I love it!’—so I said ‘Okay, you continue listening, I’ll go and take a hot bath or something…’ So I agree, it is a pretty disgusting record.”
Almost as a direct response, the next record Cave released was The Boatman’s Call, a dazzlingly romantic collection of love songs that his mum probably thought was naff.
