Nick Cave’s six year plan to work with Kylie Minogue: “Obsession”
Let’s not beat around the bush: Kylie Minogue is the vision of many men’s dreams. But in the case of Nick Cave, his ambitions stretched far further than most.
After all, Australia is a big country, but not so big that its music industry doesn’t move in pretty close circles. Indeed, despite hailing from two entirely polar opposite sonic backgrounds, a pop princess and a deep-seated alternative rock band could come together, and it didn’t sound wholly unnatural. But, you see, that was all part of the plan.
It might come as a surprise to some that Cave fancied himself as the next in line to Jason Donovan, even if he didn’t use those precise words himself. However, that was essentially what he meant when he said he had been pining to work with Minogue for a vast number of years, ever since she first hit the small screen, and set in motion a goal of achieving that.
It did end up taking a while, but eventually the frontman reached his ambitions in the form of the song ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, released in late 1995 as a single from his album Murder Ballads, which arrived the following year. Penning a duet with Minogue might have seemed an odd choice to some, not least tokenistic because of their shared national roots. But Cave never felt this, even for a second.
“‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’ was written very much with Kylie in mind,” he explained in 2007. “I’d wanted to write a song for Kylie for many years. I had a quiet obsession with her for about six years. I wrote several songs for her, none of which I felt was appropriate to give her.”
Inherently knowing that he had to deliver the goods, only a dark, brooding, sinister pièce de résistance would do – ironically, the very opposite of anything Minogue has ever created. “It was only when I wrote this song, which is a dialogue between a killer and his victim, that I thought finally I’d written the right song for Kylie to sing,” Cave said. “I sent the song to her, and she replied the next day.”
Maybe Minogue hides deeper layers to her than anyone gives her credit for. Singing from the perspective of a woman about to be murdered by a crazed lover is certainly a far cry from ‘The Loco-Motion’. Yet it’s also somewhat a symptom and story we hear time and time again, even to this day. Female pop stars are hemmed into one box, and the simple act of breaking free is met with mania.
This is not to say that Cave was a beacon of feminist foresight when he wrote the track, but what started as seeming like an odd collaboration soon transformed into a testament to the potential that the frontman saw in the pop star before large swathes of the world did. He could, of course, claim that this was all factored into the stages of his six-year plan, too, but that might be taking things too far.
It goes without saying that the combination of Australia’s two musical sweethearts went down like a firestorm and has since become a seismic sonic legacy for them both. Cave is entitled to feel smug as the mastermind behind this, but really, we all know who actually wore the trousers.
