“Narcissistic”: Why did Nick Cave call PJ Harvey an egomaniac?
While the workplace is often a common place to find your soulmate, given how much time you find yourselves in each other’s company, it isn’t always the greatest idea for rock musicians to find themselves falling in love with a creative partner.
We all know how things ended up with Fleetwood Mac’s romantic carousel, and it wasn’t pretty for any of the people involved. Seemingly unable to stop each other from bedding other members with whom they weren’t in a romantic relationship at the time, things got particularly ugly towards the end of the 1970s, especially while recording their classic album, Rumours. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks entered the group together as more than just a creative pair, and found it all collapsing a matter of years later because of the intense environment they were working in.
On the other hand, even though they didn’t stay together romantically, The White Stripes had a pretty good run working together as a former husband and wife duo. Jack and Meg White may not work together anymore, but the demise of their marriage didn’t prevent them from making six studio albums together and cementing themselves as one of the great modern rock groups.
But sometimes, musical romantic connections can blossom without there being too much of an impetus for there to be a collaborative aspect to it, no matter how much fans might plead for it to happen. In situations like this, the line drawn between the duo’s creative work and personal relationships might serve them better in the long run, but at the same time, it also doesn’t prevent toxicity from developing as a byproduct of the respective worlds in which they work.
On paper, you’d have thought that PJ Harvey and Nick Cave would have been a perfect fit for one another, with both of them operating in a similar creative space and making emotive punk blues, and when they found themselves connecting over more than just music in the mid-1990s, people were quick to assume two things: that it would be a match made in heaven, and that music would inevitably come as a result of this pairing.
The duo worked together on Cave’s Murder Ballads album, most notably duetting on the song ‘Henry Lee’, which was released as a single. However, despite this connection blossoming, further, more in-depth collaborations evidently weren’t going to materialise, and behind the scenes, things weren’t going as well as onlookers may have expected.
Cave later admitted that his own struggles with addiction and his inability to maturely navigate a monogamous lifestyle got in the way of their relationship, but in a response to a question on his blog, The Red Hand Files, in 2018, he noted that Harvey was no angel in the relationship either.
“Polly’s commitment to her own work was probably as narcissistic and egomaniacal as my own,” he argued, “although I was so deep into my own shit that I can’t really comment on this with any certainty. I remember our time together with great fondness, though – they were happy days, and the phone call hurt, but never one to waste a good crisis, I set about completing The Boatman’s Call.”
The tumultuous relationship may not have been a great experience for either of them, but it led Cave to write one of his best and most personal records, evidently helping him to acknowledge some of the pain buried deep within him. One may wonder what could have become of any potential future collaborations had it not been such a dismal and toxic relationship, but arguably, it’s probably for the best that they called it off before damaging each other even more.
