I just watched Loladamusica's Nick Cave documentary by Lotje Ijzermans. It was a good docu, but not super, but that's probably because Nick is more predictable than he used to be 10 years ago. There was talk about love, his father, Luke, his work. The music in the documentary was recorded at home (H), at rehearsals at Liss Ard (L) (Nick will contribute a song to a Liss Ard benefit album) and at the Belfast (B) gig from 15 November. Throughout the documentary, Nick read parts from The Flesh Made Word. The "live" songs included were: * Still Your Face Comes Shining Through (H) * Black Hair (B) * Birthday Party footage from Amsterdam 1981 * The Flesh Made Word (B) * Into My Arms (B) * "I Got Another Woman Now" (H) new song, title is not sure * Love Letter (L) another new one - TBC style * The Mercy Seat (B) * Dead Joe (B) * People Ain't No Good (L) * Still Your Face Comes Shining Through (with Kylie) (B) =========================================================== Subject: Re: Loladamusica (nick talks abouts cats, teacups, love + god) Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 23:27:12 +0100 From: martin cornelisse To: goodson@geography.leeds.ac.uk And this is what he said: [nick @ home showing his collection of cat-pictures] I guess I’m a collector of Louis Wain’s. He paints really beautiful picures of cats. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and put into Bedlam, the insane asylum, where he continued to paint cats. Cats that are more representative of his state of mind. (q: did louis wain by any chance paint the picture that’s on the cover of tindersticks’ bloomsbury theatre album? The style looks simular) [nick @ home behind the piano, doing "Still Your Face ..."] The song’s called Still Your Face Comes Shining Through, and it’s going to be a duet. I mean I wrote the song for myself but I asked Kylie to come down and sing it with me. We did it at The Jazz Café in London and it was beautiful. She sang the choruses. It deals with the painful aspects of love but the chorus is "Still Your Face Comes Shining Through". Despite the pain your faces comes shining through. Anything’s bearable, anything’s endurable. There’s some great verses. This one is referring to another person. "I look at you, And you look at me too And deep in our hearts we know it I heard it on the news You weren’t much of a muse But then I weren’t (sic) much of a poet" I like this verse. This will stay. There’s was talk of recording it in some way. Live the song stands as something where I sing the verses and she sings the choruses. If we record it, it needs some relief from that. Some kind of middle eight is needed. Something that’s called a middle eight. Whatever a middle eight may be. [later …] I was trying to write some sort of dialogue for the middle eight that I did last night, but I don’t know if this all isn’t too complicated a thought to put into the song which is in a way quite simple. I put across my point of view which is the romantic side: "Remember when I kissed your lips when sleep was upon you And your lips responded deep and divine" She puts forward her point of view: "Then I awoke to the wreck of our age And that veil of sense was drawn between your face and mine" Which I don’t know if it has happened to you but I know it very well. Making love when you’re half asleep is often very rewarding because all of the bullshit and all of the horrendous stuff that keeps us apart as human beings doesn’t exist. Because you’re half asleep, in a kind of twilight. And "the veil of sense" is ‘hang on, this is what it’s really like!’ This is what I wanted to put into it, but I’m not really sure if I can. And I need to make up a melody as well. I only wrote the words last night and I don’t know how to incorporate them. [about kylie] Her voice is absolutely suited for this kind of song. She can lend quite a haunting feel to the chorus. The work that I did with Kylie was certainly the most significant collaboration I have ever done. I learned more from Kylie than from any other, outside, collaboration. [nick on writing] I think my standards have changed. I think things have changed dramatically for me in songwriting. Since the boatsman’s call songs serve a different purpose then they used to do. For a long time the major purpose they served was to show the world that I was able to write, could rhyme, that I could do these sort of things. And I concentrated a lot on that and you can feel it in my book. That’s a prime example of that. It was a kind of juvinele ... It was to show my critics that I could write a book. Fuck you! I can write a book. I know people think that I can’t, but I can and I will show you. And the book suffers ... And that really is a part of the proces of growing up as an artist. It’s the proces of the journey of life. To free myself from youth, from being young. And I think I have. It has taken me 40 years to stop being young and I’m happy about that. Now I can just get on with my work. And my work is to write songs. Ø Throughout the documentary, Nick read parts from The Flesh Made Word. excerpts not included here! Just read king ink ;) > The "live" songs included were: > > * Still Your Face Comes Shining Through (H) > * Black Hair (B) > * Birthday Party footage from Amsterdam 1981 > * The Flesh Made Word (B) > * Into My Arms (B) > * "I Got Another Woman Now" (H) new song, title is not sure after which nick said: "See, some songs you write aren’t even that good!" > * Love Letter (L) another new one - TBC style > * The Mercy Seat (B) > * Dead Joe (B) > * People Ain't No Good (L) > * Still Your Face Comes Shining Through (with Kylie) (B) > [nick on tbc & love] With the boatsman’s call I have a place that I can go back to. I can actually play that record, I actually do play that record to make me feel a particular way. To relive incidents in my life. To bring me closer to people that I’ve loved or lost. Whereas the purpose of Murder Ballads and earlier records is ... I don’t play them anymore. They don’t benefit me in any way. The way I write now is to capture moments in my life and to relive them, to keep them, to externalise them, make them concrete. Or else everything just fades. Love is my major concern to write about. Love, love and love. To be in love is a feeling that I’ve had and that I know and that I yearn for constantly. I yearn to be thrown into that state of love. It just doesn’t happen very often. It’s a state where you are lifted above the mundanity of live into a place of inspiration and imagination. To be in love exempts you from all the details of life. Suddenly nothing means anything. There’s only one thing that means anything. That is the object of your love. When you’re in that particular pure state of mind everything becomes meaningless. It’s great. But it only lasts as long as you’re in love. That’s the problem. I never managed to get too far with it. [nick in his kitchen] These teacups are my pride and joy and they make me very happy, and very sad as well. Because I bought them when I met a girl. She would make me cups of tea in the morning when I had stayed in her house. In beautiful teacups. So I bought a very nice set of teacups to make her tea in, but I never got the chance. You’ll hear all about it on my next record. To me love is a very sacred thing. Something that I long for, yearn for. And occaisionally you feel like you’re there again with somebody. That kind of young love where it is impossible to find fault in anybody. Something that is kind of blind and divine. Sacred. What I want from love is to be comforted. To be looked after and to have someone to look after. And I feel I can get that from God. But it takes the same kind of dedication that you have to put into a human affair. And I find that quite difficult. So despite my beliefs I slip into an attitude of non-belief. As if I’m behaving and acting that I don’t believe. I feel that I believe in God but nothing in my world ... It doesn’t actually make any difference one way or the other. [nick @ liss ard] We’re in a place called Liss Ard. At the moment I’m doing some recording here to go on a kind of benefit cd to get some money together to preserve these gardens. [nick @ liss ard on fathers + sons & his duty as an artist] At some point I started saying things to my father. Look at this! And he would dismiss the things I had brought to him. I guess that’s where the trouble started. And then he died when I was nineteen. He had never seen me amount to anything. At nineteen I was, in his eyes, a parent’s fucking nightmare. I was dressing up in women’s clothing, took enormous amount of drugs and was completely fucked up all the time. I couldn’t communicate with my parents in any way. It’s only quite recently that I’ve discovered that so much of my life has been dictated by the absence of my father. So much of the course of my life and so much that I have done. The writing of a book, the obsessive nature of things that happen in my life, and that I can’t stop working. All this is about my father. It’s absolutely about my father. It was very much brought up by having Luke. Luke has kind of chained me down to earth and I love that. It makes me feel really good. At the end of the day I always have Luke. It’s a great feeling. It doesn’t matter what shit’s going on and what you’ve gone through. At the end of the day he’s always there. And he loves me, he really does. I have no idea what Luke’s going to be like. He really likes sports. He wants to be a sportsman whwen he grows up. I don’t know anything about sports. It has never interested me in any way. He’s perhaps going to come up to me and talk about football scores. And what I can’t afford to do is say "I’m not interested in your fucking football scores. Let’s talk about Jesus or let’s talk about art." As an artist my responsibility is to turn up to the piano or to pick up my pen. That’s really where my responsibility lies. The rest is God’s work. I’m just a faulty vessel He’s chosen to speak through. Just like any other artist or person. I know that what I’m doing is right. What I’m here for. Part of that is to take the baton from my father and my mother as well and to make my family progress in some way. It’s my duty to write and to create and do what I do. If I spend extended periods of time denying this or creating circumstances in my life where it’s difficult to write or to carry out my duty I feel I’m going against God in some way. and on that note i say: that’s all folks! groeten, martin -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- de sterkste aanwijzing dat er intelligent leven bestaat elders in het heelal, is dat het geen pogingen heeft gedaan met ons in contact te komen. (stelling r.l.j. kwint - rijksuniversiteit groningen) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------