How Nina Simone delivered the greatest performance Nick Cave ever seen
In 1999, Nick Cave was in the privileged position of curating his own festival. He was even luckier to secure the successful booking of Nina Simone. Her resultant performance would prompt his Bad Seeds bandmate, Warren Ellis, to write a novel about the life-changing experience. Meltdown Festival was crammed with greats like Mark E. Smith and many others, but Simone soared to rarefied heights.
As Ellis’ book blurb decrees: “On Thursday 1 July, 1999, Dr Nina Simone gave a rare performance as part of Nick Cave’s Meltdown Festival. After the show, in a state of awe, Warren Ellis crept onto the stage, took Dr Simone’s piece of chewed gum from the piano, wrapped it in her stage towel and put it in a Tower Records bag. The gum remained with him for twenty years; a sacred totem, his creative muse, a conduit that would eventually take Ellis back to his childhood and his relationship with found objects, growing in significance with every passing year.” If that doesn’t signify a great performance, what does?
Prior to the gig, however, Simone was stern. Before taking to the spotlight, a runner went into Simone’s dressing room pre-gig. There she slumped, decrepit and cranky, demanding to be called Dr Simone. The unfettered runner then asked her if everything was alright to which she fatefully growled: “I’d like some champagne, some cocaine and some sausages,” aka the holy CCS of debauchery. Off the rider scuttled with a wry smile explaining that he would do his best. Interestingly, in the rock ‘n’ roll world other people backstage probably exclaimed, ‘Where the hell are we going to find sausages!’
She emerged onto the stage and looked at the audience in a strange state of near disgust. The whole thing was poised on the proverbial knife edge. She turned out, however, to be the hero Cave had always held her as. In fact, there are few people that Nick Cave has celebrated more than the legendary Nina Simone.
In the film 20,000 Days on Earth, Cave recalls the same concert in glowing reminiscence: “Nina Simone is hugely important for me. She is the real thing.” He continues: “We’re far from the experience of the blues people. But for me, from a literary point of view, there was a haunting and beautiful use of words.”
Her performance that evening is something that he has aspired to emulate ever since. “As the songs progressed, they got more and more beautiful and she became inflated with the whole thing,” he says. “It was just an absolutely chilling thing to see. By the end of it, she had been kind of transformed and redeemed in some way.” Now, he strives for that same exultation. Gone is the brash Birthday Party desire to shock, he’s all about deliverance when he takes the stage these days, this was a space illuminated by Simone before him.
