The pop group show that changed Nick Cave’s life: “Your life is going to be irreversibly changed forever”
Nick Cave is an artist who doesn’t know the meaning of plateauing. Many people find something that works and keep beating that dead horse until it stops spitting out money. Not Nick. Nick Cave is constantly looking for different musical avenues, exploring new themes and sounds and pushing himself as a lyricist.
“What Nick has is a very unique way of doing things. He’s got such a distinct voice and way of presenting his songs,” said Bad Seed George Vjestica in an interview with Far Out, “But he’s not afraid of trying things out. He’s very experimental; he always has been, he’ll go for it.”
Vjestica went on to talk about the fact that Cave is always keen on trying different things when making music. You don’t get as far as him without pushing musical boundaries and being willing to get things wrong. “That’s the thing about him that is captivating,” he said, “You can feel that he’s pushing for something else like ‘Let’s do this’, ‘Let’s try that’. That’s what’s so inspiring about Nick and his method of work.”
Cave is constantly looking for new music to be inspired by, and this has always been the case. One of the bands that completely changed the way that Cave perceived music and the creative process was The Pop Group. The punk band from Bristol, fronted by Mark Stewart, might not be considered one of the biggest punk bands on the planet, but they do have a deep-rooted influence that projects around the world.
“I thought I was making funk music,” said Stewart, “But a track on Veneer of Democracy supposedly inspired all the American industrialists, like Front Line Assembly and Skinny Puppy, while another track supposedly inspired the Bristol kids.”
It wasn’t uncommon for Stewart’s musicianship to reach different parts of the world which seemingly weren’t connected. “It happens all the time,” he reflected, “I’ve got this nonchalance that nothing is sacred so I’ll crash a Slayer guitar line with Rotterdam gabba beats. For me, it’s like colours. I grew up doing montages; like I did this collage of Ronald Reagan’s head on this gay porno cowboy. In fact, I’ve never really grown up at all. I’m still trying to put round things into square holes.”
As a result of having work which somehow travels around the world and inspires a select few, it found Nick Cave at a gig in Australia and was a massive influence on the music he wanted to make and how he wanted to perform. “…It was one of those moments,” he said, “We just feel the cogs of your mind shift, and your life is going to be irreversibly changed forever.”
Since then, Cave has never stopped letting himself be inspired, whether in the world of music or just the world in general. The result is an incredibly versatile discography that could only have come from one mind.
