A force of nature

One of my favourite records turned 20 last month. What is it about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, that I continue to love it so much?

Without looking, can you name the most played Nick Cave song on Spotify? 

Did you think first of Red Right Hand? Surely an afterlife as a TV theme tune counts for something. Those Peaky Blinders-assisted streams; the lads, their caps and dupes, their skinny jeans, soundtracking one last bump before heading into town. Or maybe you thought of Into My Arms. A different kind of public property, these days - even had the Soul Music treatment. A standard. A lit-lovers’ love song, a goth first-dance.

Is it that?

No. The answer is neither of these. It took me a minute, even with Spotify open. You see, I forget that O Children, the sad and beautiful closing track from 2004’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, is in one of the world’s biggest film franchises. Yet there it is, would you believe, at a critical moment in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1 - the penultimate episode. Two friends dance. They are children on the cusp of existential danger, and of adulthood, which amounts to the same thing. They dance to forget the world, and to honour something true and real - friendship, their shared experience - in the face of a future freighted with uncertainty. It is rather lovely, and defiant and cinematic: a tender, wordless scene, ambiguous; Cave’s stately, ominous hymn to change and transformation centred. It belongs to the film, not the books.

Not an obvious alliance, at first - the earnest Old Testament fan and the corporate adaption of YA books about a wizard. But the two worlds share ideas: the threat of apocalypse hanging in the air, an ongoing battle between good and evil. The sense of a reckoning foretold. The healing force of love, which is the connection in each world between all things, powerful but fragile. And, yes, change. That’s in both, too.

So it actually makes a kind of poetic sense, that Cave's most-streamed song is down to its adoption by another obsessive fandom, and that it finds its place in a very different realm of magic shaped by pain and loss. Moreover, there is a poetry to it being this song, O Children, which is about the transition from a state of innocence to the state of knowing, about the pain this journey entails and the impossibility of avoiding it. Listening today, it’s hard not to perceive the song (and its breakout status) as an uneasy augury - testament in advance of unwanted experience down the line. From here, Nick Cave’s 2004 seems positively prelapsarian: remarried, a dad again, songs tipping over into mainstream culture, a band firing on all cylinders. He couldn’t know it, but change and transformation and uncertainty were right around the corner. Some self-imposed. Most of it, the serious stuff, was not. 

But back then, in the beforetimes, in that fertile 2004 moment, Cave’s cup really did runneth over. Indeed, we might call Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus (a joint release of two separate but related records) his most fecund album. Everything about it is overflowing, not least the surfeit of songs - 17 in all - and the ever-present gospel choir. “Lift up your voice”, they sing on O Children, but they elevate the whole album, pouring everything from Armageddon (“there is a war coming!” in Hiding All Away) to redemption (the soothing balm of Carry Me) from the speakers. When Cave exhorts us to “Praise Him till you don’t know what you’re praising Him for” in the opening blast of Get Ready For Love, they sing back: “Praise Him a little bit more!”. Everything is excess. That includes the Bad Seeds themselves, who by then had two of everything (even drummers) and could play anything. They sound golden and sparkling, abrasive at times, but “full of love”, as the choir sings in Spell. “I’m full of wonder, and I’m falling under your spell” - in his lyrics, Cave seemed assailed by wonder too, and by nature, and love. His world is stuffed with edenic imagery, humour piled on top despite there being no room for it. The couplets are among his most extravagant, delivered as a tightrope walk towards the rhyme’s punchline. He is a hitter racing for home base: “I was walking around the flower show like a leper / Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria,” he sings on Nature Boy. “When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair / Up against the pink and purple wisteria.” It’s good! 

(See video below for three-pianist action on Later.)

That our vantage point on this is 2024 feels almost too much, too. Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus came 20 years after their first record, and is 20 years old this year. It’s at the exact midpoint of the Bad Seeds’ career so far. In plot terms - that is, if this were a book or a film like Harry Potter - the midpoint of a story marks the ‘point of no return’, the act from which there is no coming back. You can’t, the writing teachers tell you, un-kill someone, or un-sleep with them, or un-find out they killed your parents. The story must resolve having crossed that rubicon; the protagonist should be changed by it. But the midpoint also signifies something more fundamental: the story’s thematic truth. Its meaning. Go to the halfway mark in most classic movies, you’ll find a moment that embodies this. It’s where the alien bursts from Ian Holm’s chest. It’s the fishing trip in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. When Janet Leigh dies in Psycho, and so on. A midpoint tells us how high the stakes are set. The story its protagonists are really in. 

If Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus is a midpoint, then - and it is, chronologically, at least for now - what does it tell us about the story Nick Cave is really in? What meaning is there? What themes emerge? Well, what emerges, I think, is the first glimpse on record of the Nick Cave we know today. The persona we think of as shaped by events and decisions that came later, and which became familiar via the Red Hand Files, we first heard, I think, on this record. A prototype elder statesman. A funnier, more self-aware Nick Cave. Relatable, even. The songs still play out that grand battle, but in a world that acknowledges the existence of Frappuccinos and low interest rates. A song about the ultimate fight between love and death - Orpheus’ journey to Hades to save Eurydice - is played for laughs. This Nick Cave is wry but content, confident but humble, has one foot in his imagination and the other in a decidedly middle-aged modern reality. He is midlife but happy: vigorous enough to kick against Nocturama’s dying light, and sufficiently self-assured to sing indelible songs of faith and devotion to poetry, to his wife, to Johnny Cash and, yes, to God. 

In short, he writes about what he writes about today to fans. And it’s all laid out in front of us, over some of the richest music he’s ever made. 

That said, this was very much NOT a ‘point of no return’ for the group, musically speaking at least. As midpoints go, this is not the first step to victory. No powers are unlocked that they learn to handle in acts 4 and 5. Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus had a huge sound, its pillars built from gospel fervour and a conventional classicism, and if there is a technical term for how quickly Cave rowed back from it all, it might be something like ‘pretty fucking quickly’. He wrote songs for the follow-up using a guitar, deliberately choosing an instrument he didn’t play well. He wanted a pendulum swing, a violent one, a conscious rejection certainly of the piano and maybe of proficiency itself. The Bad Seeds’ aptitude had grown beyond his control. This dictator demanded a purge. What he got was the swing he wanted. A swing to drooping moustaches and open shirts. To libidos off the leash. To priapic punk that revved like a Porsche 911. This was Grinderman - Cave’s id-life crisis. No gospel, just a funeral pyre of tasteful pretensions. The promise of rebirth in the flames.

The meaning in that pendulum swing? That Cave saw there was something to be dealt with. I mean, duh - middle-age was kicking in, after all - but knowing it, and doing something about it, something constructive, well - that seems to me characteristic of the man Nick Cave would become. A blend of instinct and intellect. One might even call it wisdom. This was not a trait easily bestowed on him before that point, and not much in evidence the last time he’d swung so violently (musically speaking), during the screeching turn which saw him veer from Murder Ballads to The Boatman’s Call. At that point he was caught between two mutually exclusive obsessions, one with Polly Harvey, one with heroin. This time around, he was in control. An adult. That said, the choice being exercised was a retrograde one - an enforced step back, I think, from the precipice of respectability. He was 46. He’d had the South Bank Show treatment. There was an undeniable touch of the Springsteens to the simultaneous release of two albums (Bruce put out Human Touch and Lucky Town on the same day, though as separate records). Were the Bad Seeds, those enfants terrible, really sucking up to the Boss now? Perhaps Blixa had been right, after all. The German sideman left before Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus was begun, but his parting shot sounded like it was aimed at the prospect of that record. “I didn’t get into rock and roll”, he said, “to play fucking ‘rock and roll’”. That must have smarted.

2004 was also the year, lest we forget, that People Ain’t No Good, from The Boatman’s Call, was featured in Shrek 2. It was a good moment to examine priorities.

Cave was stepping back from brilliance, though, and he knew it. He released a live album of this incarnation of the group, playing these songs. The shows were astonishing, and if you detect the zeal of a convert here, you’d be right. His gig at Alexandra Palace was like nothing I’d ever seen. I could only think of Nick Tosches’ descriptions of Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire. I was 28, no naif, but I felt I’d finally found my guy, a contemporary who’d been here all along: this scarecrow Elvis who wrote like Dylan. This performer and conductor of ghosts, both summoned and exorcised, who forced the sacred and the profane and any genre you wanted into his singular vision; this band at ease with its own brilliance. During Abattoir Blues, Cave instructed them with the word ‘lounge’. He had to repeat it - “I said, ‘looouunge’” - and for a moment he was James Brown. I wondered who was going to get fined for missing the cue. The band shifted style like it was an Instagram filter; a cover version invented in real time.

Cave knew how good the band was then. Yet still he chose to run. 

The aversion lasted. It shaped further changes in personnel and the music’s ongoing abstraction. Mick Harvey, Cave’s long-term multi-instrumental amanuensis, was frozen out of Grinderman then sidelined by the growing influence of Warren Ellis. Ellis led on 2008’s Dig!! Lazarus Dig!! and had equal billing with Cave on their movie soundtracks. The next time I saw them, in 2013, touring Push The Sky Away, Harvey was gone. So, sadly, were the songs from 2004. (By contrast, a song of that era, Jubilee Street, with its slow-build and transcendent freak-out, has since become a live staple.)

These new songs were different - more atmospheric, more organic. On Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, the Bad Seeds were marginalised further, the music a blend of digital washes, celestial synthesisers and tape loops. 2021’s Carnage, recorded during the pandemic, was credited to Cave and Ellis only. You could see the musical changes of the last ten years as the sound of a man painting himself into a corner, a bereaved father pushing the sky away along with everything else. I hear an artist in survival mode, using whatever is to hand, to make what he can make, to let out what must be said. Warren Ellis, his buddy, a violinist who plays piano, flute and guitar and almost anything with strings, is a Swiss army knife of a musician. You can see why he’d be good to have around when the world falls. Just you and the fates and the Rorschach sounds Warren coaxes from his machines. His questing innovations with tape loops gave new life to Cave’s music, and did so before he knew he’d need them. They pre-date 2013, that’s for sure. The first track they appeared on might even be O Children. 

But it’s the album’s lyrics that will leap out most to today’s listener. Thanks to the Red Hand Files, more people have probably read Cave than have listened to him recently, and the preoccupations will be familiar. Writing and inspiration and the belief required in a higher power to create art (There She Goes, My Beautiful World). Beauty and lust and “how it is love that’s gonna save the world” (Nature Boy). He writes about Johnny Cash (Let The Bells Ring), having become secure enough in himself to show deference to those that came before. He writes, directly and disarmingly without irony, about God - of faith and fate as an antidote to the toxicity of the corporeal realm. “The line that God throws down to you and me, makes a pleasing geometry / Shall we leave this place now, dear? Is there some way out of here?” 

And he writes about Susie. A lot. That’s her playfully calling him ‘nature boy’ (“green eyes, black hair” - yeah, Nick, we get it). She’s right to, since nature in all its abundance is how we are made to understand Cave’s love for her. It exists to dramatise their story. “I can see that they’ve hurt you, dear / Here is some moonlight to cloak us / And I will never desert you here / Unpetaled among the crocus.” In Breathless, a joyful quickstep which in a just world could challenge Into My Arms as a first-dance contender, Cave shows us nature’s widespread deference to her: the robin’s throat trembles, the “happy hooded bluebells bow”, the “fishes leap up to take a look” - in fact, “all the earthly things, they stop to play.”

Against all this she stands, her pale skin and dark hair another pair of complementary opposites in an album full of them: quiet and loud, gospel and blues, Eden and the apocalypse. She is this landscape’s Snow White, her beauty a magnet to all God’s creatures. “You are a force of nature, dear / And the breath curls from your lips / As the trees bend down their branches / And touch you with their fingertips”, he sings in Messiah Ward. She is in everything, and nature boy submits. “She moves among the sparrows / And she walks across the sea / She moves among the flowers / And she moves something deep inside of me.” Cave is mostly passive. He sits “like a bird on a fence” with his “heart that is bruised but bleating, and bleeding like a lamb”; he makes “like a little deer, gazing on the flowers”. He is powerless - “defenceless over you”, like the rabbit hiding beneath the ground - and at nature’s mercy: “The wind lifts me to my senses / I rise up with the dew / The snow turns to streams of light / The purple heather grows anew”. 

This is a landscape, like the record itself, fecund and overflowing, full of flora and fauna - though not all of it benign. Note the “butcher bird” with “its brutal nesting habits and its pointless savagery”. And the “windswept coastal trees, where the dead come raging from the sea”. The “war between the water and the bridge” echoes the ongoing battle between God’s Eden and man-made catastrophe. Asked in a letter about the increasing presence of nature and animals in his songs, he wrote back:

“The natural world in my songs is concerned with the biblical notion of paradise, within which I can set my human dramas of suffering and transcendence. My natural world is nature unspoilt, but with a kind of apocalyptic consciousness. The nature in my songs knows what’s ultimately coming. It is a world of metaphor, where nature becomes alive with the promise of God, where the moon is a mute witness and the stars hang in the air like questions.”

In a centrepiece of the album, Cave wills himself to creation by invoking the constraints and achievements of those who came before. Inspiration is all there, waiting, an endless bounty of nature, but hard to reach: 

“The wintergreen, the juniper / the cornflower and the chicory / All the words you said to me / still vibrating in the air / The elm, the ash and the linden tree / The dark and deep, enchanted sea / The trembling moon and the stars unfurled / There she goes, my beautiful world”

The ‘you’ is Susie, but ‘she’ is both Susie and the world, fused I think, each made by and containing everything of the other. God, nature, art, with everything filtered through a portrait of love - this is the Cave we know from the Red Hand Files. For all the couplets and the ideas, it is this one conceit Cave returns to. It shapes the record and his world. Cave’s story is not a movie or a book, but perhaps if it were it could be based on this grand metaphysical cycle - one cycle to rule them all, this Marvell (sic) Cinematic Universe, where inspiration flows invisibly, through everything, but is fleeting. Something sought out and fought for. 

“For me, the imagination is essentially religious as it reaches beyond truth toward meaning. A kind of truth unburdened by proof. The songwriter and the poet move beyond what is known into the unknown world. They spend their time in a kind of dream world – a realm where God and his ghosts dwell, banished there by grim reason and rationality. This is our absurd and deluded dominion in all its feverish wonder. It is the enchanted forest. This is the world from where I draw my songs. If you are an artist, well, I’ll see you there, no doubt.”

Maybe Cave’s stylistic changes aren’t significant. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything that we can hear the gospel fervour and nature-worship of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus in the title of his new album: Wild God. It’s possible the Bad Seeds are only playing O Children again on tour because someone asked him to, or because things come full circle eventually. Like I say, Cave’s story is not a movie or a book, and by definition the real midpoint is not clear yet. Perhaps, like all literature or cinema, we should consider it an ongoing exploration of that ‘feverish wonder’ - a journey through the enchanted forest, which stands for both imagination and the work artists do to bring it to life. Perhaps, in one timeline of this story, there’s a part of this enchanted forest where a version of Cave lives, as a boy wizard, or a poet hero - a protagonist casting spells over his followers. He is at first beguiled by the dark arts, then overpowered by them, but eventually he triumphs - thanks to love, and to beauty. 

In this land of magic, this world beyond meaning, nature itself is enchanted. There are even spirit animals - magical beasts who protect individuals, conjured when needed. The animal is assigned for how well it mirrors the qualities of the person. Which animal, I wonder, might be this boy wizard-poet’s spirit animal? His symbolic patronus charm? The butterfly, maybe, since it stands for ‘freedom, creativity, beauty’? Or the crow, which represents ‘intelligence, adaptability, survival skills’? 

Maybe in the end it should be the snake. A symbol of ‘continuity and personal change’. It feels right for a man (and a group) caught in a cycle of permanent transformation. Who slips skins to suit his environment, and to navigate the moment, yet who feels like he might be around forever.

An artist that is always the same, always different. Like the ocean, or the forest floor, or the skies over mountains.