He’s collaborated with Kylie, Shane MacGowan, PJ Harvey, Johnny Cash and Marianne Faithful.
Now Nick Cave and his band The Bad Seeds have a new album out – the fantastic Dig Lazarus Dig.
Recorded in just five days in London last summer, Nick says it’s the most liberating album he’s made.
“I think within the Bad Seeds these days, more so than ever, everyone has permission to do whatever they like, you know, and there’s a sense of freedom about what people play and we can do that quite quickly,” he explains.
“I wanted to make an acoustically driven record that was at the same time electric, so that it had the basis of the sound was acoustic guitar, drums and bass – that was the sort of thrust of the music - and over that there was a kind of heavily charged electric sound that went over it, so that there was underneath it there was the fragileness of an acoustic record, but it didn’t have the kind of heaviness of a rock record.”
Is it quite liberating to have less people playing on the record?
“Yeah, it is,” he says. “You know, I mean, it had gotten slightly out of hand, because our band’s grown bigger and bigger and I would go in with a song and play the song and everyone would just jump on an instrument, their instrument and start playing it, so it was very difficult to hear the song in any other way than everybody playing at once. It’s much harder to subtract instruments than to actually add them.”
The album hasn’t all been plain sailing for Nick, he’s keen to explain.
“This new record was really hard to write,” he laughs. “It took a really long time. I mean, lyrically, it took a really long time. It took a month to sort of clear the decks and get rid of old Bad Seeds or old kind of Nick Cave song style influences and try and write something that was a bit different, you know, and that’s not something I can do overnight.
“It’s a process of kind of exorcising the past and kind of hopefully stumbling on something different and that is just kind of suddenly writing a line that’s different, you know, it just doesn’t really sound like a line that I felt that I would have written and it’s exciting when that happens, because you attach another similar kind of line to it and suddenly you’ve kind of got a song that’s taking you somewhere quite different to anywhere you’ve been before.”
Are you planning to tour the album – might we see you in Liverpool soon?
“Yes, we’re doing a European tour and an American tour and an Australian tour, no doubt, and quite an extensive one, as far as Bad Seeds tours go and hugely looking forward to it,” he grins. “I mean, really, we are.”
Click here to read our review of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!