Nick Cave: “Nina Simone was a god to me”
There’s an argument to be made that the key to being a great musician is harbouring a deep love for Nina Simone.
It always comes up when performers talk about their greatest inspirations. Cameron Winter is devoted to her, and Elizabeth Fraser studied her vocals, but for Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Nina Simone was more than just a musical influence; she was a god to them.
In 1999, Cave, at a new height of his power after the release of The Boatman’s Call, was invited to host the Southbank Centre’s prestigious Meltdown Festival, in which one artist gets to curate the lineup. It was a stupid, preposterous call when Cave and his collaborator Ellis sat down and decided who to try and get involved, instantly writing down Nina Simone’s name. They assumed it would be a sure-fire rejection, but in an act of complete and utter miracle, she accepted.
Imagine not only achieving something huge for yourself, but having that achievement also bring you face-to-face with your ultimate hero. Even just thinking about what that moment must have felt like in music history makes me giddy.
That’s what it was for Cave and Ellis, who absolutely, categorically do not mess around when it comes to Nina Simone. “Nina Simone was a god to me and to my friends,” he told The Guardian. Nothing more, nothing less, a god.
“The great Nina Simone. The legendary Nina Simone. The troublemaker and risk taker who taught us everything we needed to know about the nature of artistic disobedience,” he added.
At the start, Simone and Cave’s music couldn’t have been more stylistically separate. There’s not much in common between the latter screaming bloody murder and the former’s classical and jazz background. But over time, the poles have grown closer together. More and more, even Cave’s punk started to take on the same impassioned fury as Simone’s most rageful protest tunes like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ or ‘Backlash Blues’ as she became an activist and a voice for change as much as anything else.
Or, by now, on albums like Ghosteen or Wild God, or especially on Cave and Ellis’ duo album Carnage, Simone’s genre-blending comes out more. From the soft, balladic energy of ‘Balcony Man’ or ‘Joy’, or the euphoric build of ‘Frogs’ or the wildness of ‘White Elephant’.
Mostly, it comes down to an attitude. Nina Simone gave no fucks and took no shit. At her Meltdown show, as Cave and Ellis hung around like giddy children, resulting in one of the only known pictures of Cave smiling ear to ear, Simone demanded to be introduced as “Dr Nina Simone” and wouldn’t do anything, or sing anything, before she was delivered “champagne, some cocaine, and some sausages”.
“She was the real deal, the baddest of them all,” Cave said in 2021, still in awe, decades on. To him, that show and Simone as an artist was so much more than just an inspiration. She was a deity and a representative of “the transcendent power of music itself”.
