"At the end of the 20th century, I ceased to be a human being." "That's not necessarily a bad thing." "It's just a thing." "I awake, I write, I eat." "I write, I watch TV." "This is my 20,000th day on earth." "Mostly I feel like a cannibal, you know, a cartoon one - with the big lips and the funny hair and the bone through its nose, always looking for someone to cook in a pot." "You can ask my wife, Susie, she'll tell you because she's usually the one that's getting cooked, cos there is an understanding between us a pact where every secret, sacred moment that exists between a husband and a wife" "is cannibalised and ground up and spat out the other side in the form of a song, inflated and distorted and monstrous." "Mostly I write, tapping and scratching away, day and night sometimes." "But if I ever stop for long enough to question what I'm actually doing, the why of it, well, I couldn't really tell you." "I don't know." "It's a world I'm creating a world full of monsters and heroes, good guys and bad guys." "It's an absurd, crazy, violent world... where people rage away and God actually exists." "And the more I write, the more detailed and elaborate the world becomes and all the characters that live and die or just fade away, they're just crooked versions of myself." "Anyway, for me, it all begins in here in the most tiniest of ways." "Can you do a beat for that?" " Huh?" " Can you do a beat for..." "Yeah." "Hi, Nick." "Just to remind you, your meeting with Darian's at midday today." "Also, don't forget you need to drop in at the archive at some point this afternoon." "They need to check a few things with you." "I'll text Darian's address, but if you need anything else, let me know." "Fuck." "And when I come out of that world," "I always feel startled by the so-called real world and I eat and I watch TV and I play with the kids and I torment my wife and I gather up experiences and then head back on in." "Can't Get You Outta My Head)" "What were we doing on that yesterday?" "Yeah, you had a..." "you... you played a thing on it." "You sang it and it sounded really good." "Yeah, we had something, didn't we?" " Yeah." " To go with." "Hey, that's cool." "I wonder what it was." "I do this all the time these days." " Ah..." " Cool." "Places choose you." "They can take hold of you whether you wish them to or not." "I used to come down to Brighton years ago, and what I remember most is that it was always cold and it was always raining with a glacial wind that would blow through the streets and freeze you to your bones." "But you gotta drop anchor somewhere and somehow here I am." "Brighton, with all its weather, has become my home and, whatever hold this town has on me, well, it's been forcing its way violently into my songs." "Do you wanna know how to write a song?" "Songwriting is about counterpoint." "Counterpoint is the key." "Putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly." "Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don't know, a Mongolian psychopath or something and just sitting back and seeing what happens." "Sorry, it shouldn't be long." "Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle, and again you wait and you watch and if that doesn't do it... you shoot the clown." "An Americano with a splash of milk in it." "And I want a small, one-shot latte with one sugar." "# I'm gonna go out" "# Today" "# Stray" "# By the river... #" "There's something when you sing that that reminds me of something." " Er..." "Tim Buckley?" " No, it's, um... no." "No, um... um... no." "It's actually, um..." "All Night Long, Lionel Richie." "Does that sound like that to you?" "Just sing what you were singing." "# One day I'm gonna go out... #" "Now I'm singing a Lionel Richie song." " # And baby - # Baby" "# Yeah... #" "Is that just my Lionel Richie kind of..." "Americano with a splash of cold milk." "Maybe I'm singing it like Lionel Richie." "# Oh, Lionel... #" "What's Nick having?" "A latte?" "A latte with... a one-shot latte." "What is it?" "One-shot latte and a..." "# One-shot latte... #" "Half a cup, one-shot latte." "# Lionel Richie... #" " Lionel latte." " # And a one-shot latte. #" "Oh, fuck it." "He's totally blown my mojo over that one." "Darian's ready to see you now." "What's your earliest memory of a female body?" "Huh?" "What's your earliest memory of a female body?" "Um... um... the first major sexual experience that I had..." "Yes." "...was with, er... a girl, um... that I... who had black hair and a very white face." " Mm-hm." " She'd put on make-up, and she put make-up on over her lips as well so it was all just this... sort of almost this kabuki-like kind of thing, and I was..." "I don't know, 15 or something like that." "I'd told my mother I was staying somewhere else, and I slept with this girl." " Hm." " But we didn't have sex." "But there was something about the shifting of her..." " She turned her back on me." " Hm." "But I could see this face in... in the sort of half-light, this white face... and, um... that had quite a big effect on me, that." "The thing about this girl and her friend Janine..." " Julie, her name was." " Mm-hm." "They used to like to dress me up in, er... in kind of... they liked to dress me up in women's clothing." " Hm." " At the time I'd do anything, you know, and..." "I remember sort of having to sort of toddle out of the family home in my high heels and hot pants when..." "Kind of, you know, "Off to..." "Where are you going, darling?"" ""Off to a fancy dress, Mum." And kind of going out the door, and... and eventually my father..." "I remember my father, er... coming upstairs and, obviously, my... my mother had..." " had told him about this..." " Mm." " ...cos it was so out of character..." " Mm." "...and him sitting down, like you're sitting there, and saying," ""Now, son, there's a time when we all become men,"" "and giving me this talk about, um about, er..." "wearing women's clothing, cos they were..." "I think they were worried that I was a transvestite." "Hm." "Um... but I was just sort of in..." "really in the thrall of this... strange, wonderful girl." "What are your earliest memories of him?" " Of my father?" " Mm." "Oh, I don't know." "You know, there must be earlier ones, but he... he did actually take me aside one day and read me the first chapter of Lolita." "Why that?" "Because he said that within that chapter, great writing kind of existed in there" " ...on so many different levels..." " Mm." "...and he kind of went through the alliteration and read it out loud and said, "See what happens here?"" "And... you know, and that was very powerful..." " Mm." " ...thing for him to do for me, because the way that I saw him become around that kind of stuff..." " Mm." " ...that was, urn you know, different, that he changed when he read that." "What did he become?" " You know, a... a greater thing." " And do you ever remember..." "Hey, this is great, having the piano in, er..." " the control room." " Yeah, yeah." "We can, er... tune every piano if you need." "Yeah, and... and the one in the barn." " Yeah." " While Warren is doing something or Tommy's doing something, I could take this piece..." " Yeah." " ...bring it in here and just play it and work it, because a lot of the stuff's not..." " you know, it's very free at the moment." " Yeah, yeah." "That's gonna be really nice." "That's See That Girl." "I mean, it's difficult to tell from some of this stuff what we got." " You've gotta kind of relax and..." " Mm." "...because we got a lot of ideas about these things, which are just fucking nothing here, to be honest." "No, it's not gonna rain." "Hey, he's got the camera rolling." "I reckon we ought to put down a couple of basic tracks." "Here it comes." "# There was a girl called Animal X" "# She was not his type but she's all right" "# She's from the city where there is no... #" "Oh, no, I got that wrong." "All right." "# And there's no more air" "# Just the distant humming of a prejudicial prayer" "# And she arrives at the town" "# And at the gates she meets a boy" "# We'll call him Animal Y... #" "# She said there's nothing to fear" "# Ah, there's nothing to fear but a bad idea... #" "Did your father ever come to see you play?" "He came a couple of times." "Both times, I didn't know that he was there." "He came to the first New Year's Eve show that I did." "It was a show on a street and I was kind of rolling around drunk and singing." "The whole band were off their faces." "He asked me how it had gone and I said, "Oh, it was good,"" "and he went, "Yeah, I know, I was there."" " Hm, hm." " But then he saw me before he died." "It was a paid gig at a club, like a proper band, and, um... he was at that, too, and... and he, er... he saw that and he made this comment." " "You were like an angel," he said." " Hm." "I can't imagine how he could have seen me in that way, quite frankly." "Seen you as an angel?" "Yes, an angel." "All things considered." "In that way in which he'd be present, yet without declaring himself, did that ever happen at home?" "I remember one time my sister being very upset about something, and my father putting her to bed and then leaving the room and turning the light off, and my sister was sort of sobbing in the bed, you know," "and then after a while..." "We were very young." "I kind of went "Pooh", like that, and she started to giggle, you know, and then I went, "Shit", and she started to giggle more, and I went, "Fuck" and so on, and this, er..." " Mm." " ...until she was kind of laughing and then I saw the door open and my father kind of move out..." " Mm." " ...and I'm kind of like, "Oh!" you know." "So, in all those examples, he's there like a kind of silent witness?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "Although he wasn't..." "To say that he wasn't present is not correct." " But in those instances." " Mm, mm." "My memory of my childhood was really a kind of wonderful childhood for a... for a kid." "Does it bring anything to mind, a memory or..." "Well, the Ovens River ran through Wangaratta and that's where I spent my childhood," " just down by that river." " Mm." "All the kind of cool stuff that I got up to as a kid." " What kind of thing?" " Kissing girls." "Jumping off the, er... the railway bridge that went over this river." "I mean, we would put our ear to the tracks and listen for the train and hear it vibrating on the tracks." "Then we would run towards the train, along the tracks into the middle of a bridge and the train would come around like this and we would run and then we would leap off the, er..." " Mm." " ..." "leap off the bridge into the river." "Mm." "All of that kind of daredevil stuff of childhood, which... which was very much about what a lot of my childhood was about..." " Mm." " ...um, and that I really miss, that my own children don't get to experience that sort of stuff." "Mm." "What do you fear the most?" "Er..." "Hm..." "My... biggest fear, I guess, is losing my memory." "It does worry me at times that I'm not gonna be able to continue to do what I do... um... and reach a place that I'm satisfied with." "In the sense?" "Because memory is what we are, you know, and I think that your very soul and your very reason... to be alive is tied up in memory." "I mean, I think for a very long time," "I've been building up a kind of world through narrative songwriting." "It is a kind of world that's created about those precious, um... original memories that define our lives and those memories that we spend for ever chasing after." "Which memories do you think you're chasing after?" "I think exactly what we've been talking about." "Those earlier childhood memories." "Those moments when the gears of the heart really change and that's... that could be being, er... discovering some work of art." "Um... it could be some massive traumatic experience that happens." "Um... it could be some tiny moment, er... a fragment of a moment, and in some way that's really what the process of songwriting is for me." "It's the retelling of these stories and the mythologising of these stories." "To lose the faculty of memory is a massive trauma within that world, obviously." "Yes, is it worth pursuing?" "Will I just come back and..." "OK, I'll do..." "I'll do one more." "# Childhood days" "# Shimmer in a haze" "# Give us a kiss" "# In the blue room you whispered into the music" "# And the brown field under the thorn bush" "# Give us a kiss" "# And then across the overpass and down" "# By the blood factory and into town" "# Give us a kiss" "# Just one little sip, sip, sip" "# Before you slip, slip, slip away" "# Again" "# You are still hanging out in my dreams" "# In your sister's shoes" "# In your blue jeans" "# Ah, give us a kiss" "# One little sip, sip, sip" "# Before I catch, catch, catch on fire" "# Come on" "# And give us" "# A kiss" "# Want me to burn" "# I will" "# Want me to burn" "# I will" "# Yes, I will. #" "If you can enter into the song and enter into the heart of the song, into the present moment, forget everything else, you can be kind of taken away... and then you're sort of godlike for a moment," "and sometimes it doesn't, by the way." "It's not that the moment you walk on, you turn into an angel or something like that." "Sometimes it doesn't happen." " An angel?" " OK." "Let's..." "Yeah, yeah, whatever." "Is this a... a theme in your songs - of responsibility and accountability?" "Um..." "I have a kind of weird relationship with the idea of God, because within my songwriting world, some kind of being like that exists." " Someone watching?" " Yeah." "Someone taking score, let's say." "In the real world, I don't believe in such a thing." "You know, when I had a..." "a real interest in religion was when I was taking a lot of drugs." " Mm." " You know, I was a junkie." "I would wake up and need to score and the first thing I would do is go to church..." "Mm." "...and I would sit through the entire service, listening to the priest rant on up there and shake his hand on the way out, and then head up, er..." "Portobello Road to Golborne Road." "The dealers were just coming out you know, at that time, and I could score and then go back to my..." " Mm." " ...flat, take the drugs and sort of go," " "There," you know?" " Mm." "I'd do a little..." "little bit of good and a little..." "and, "What's the problem" type of thing, and I really felt on some level that I had a kind of workable balance in my life." " Mm." "Mm." " I mean, it was mad." "You know, I mean, when... when I met Susie, Susie was like, you know," ""You're, er... you know, doing something really dangerous here" ""and... and... and life-threatening" ""and, um... you know, I want you to vow to me" ""that you'll never go to church again" kind of thing." "And when you're performing, do you ever have that sense of being an outsider or not?" "No, I don't." "I find performing to be something much more, um... kind of communal and a much more sort of gathering together of people and..." "I mean you get... carried away, right?" " You get taken away, anyway." " Mm." "Something happens on stage." " Once you're on the stage?" " Yeah." "Not even before" "I get near the stage." "In fact, before I'm on the stage, before, in the band room, it's horrendous, because you can't really understand how you can do the show." "But something happens on stage, um... that takes you away from that and it's those kind of concerts, it's the concerts that we're trying to do that are so important, and they're so important for, um... the audience." "To go beyond something?" "Well, not every gig you're gonna go to is gonna make you feel that way, but when... when they do..." "I mean, I put on a concert at the London Meltdown with Nina Simone, and before she went on, she called me to her room, and she was sitting there in this chair, and she was like the nastiest woman." "She had this big, white, blousy thing on and this kind of Cleopatra make-up, and she said..." ""I want you to introduce me!" like that, and I'm like "OK, how do you want me to introduce you?"" ""I am Dr Nina Simone!" like this, and I'm like, "OK, OK."" "and, er..." "I went out and I introduced her, and she walked up to the..." "to the front of the stage." "She... she was not well and it took her a long time to even get onto the stage and she walked up to the front of the stage and held her sort of fists by the sides and stared at the audience with this expression of loathing on her face," "and everyone's just sitting in their seats like, "What is... what's gonna happen?"" "and she sat down at the piano and she took the gum out of her mouth and stuck it onto the piano and just kind of launched into this show, and through the process of this show, um... became this other thing," "and you could see it within the audience," " how they responded to this..." " Mm." "...until the end she was up the front and touching people and dancing on the stage, and it was an absolute transformative performance and it absolutely changed everybody in a... you know, that could pay witness to that..." " Mm." " ...show." "And to me, that's what we should... that's what we should be trying to..." "to do when... when you go on stage." "You know, I don't know how it is for other people, but I think on some level we all want to be somebody else, and we all look for that transformative thing that can happen in... in our lives" "and I think most people find it in some way or another and that's a place that they can forget who they are and become somebody else." " By forgetting who they are?" " Yeah." "By forgetting who they are." "Mm." "And I think maybe that's what I'm talking about with my father reading Lolita." " I noticed that about him..." " Mm." "...you know, that he was doing something." "He was only reading this, but he was engaged in this on a different level and, er... and was thrilled to read this to... his child." "Mm." "How old were you when he died?" "Er..." "I was um... 19." " Hm." " And, er... yeah." "Um... and that... that really just came out of the blue." "That was, um... something that kind of rocked the whole family and..." "Shall we stop there?" "You turn it on." "You turn it off." "But then one day you find you can't, and you've become the thing you wished into existence back when you were a kid up in your room and singing into a broom with the door locked." "You've dreamed yourself to the outside, and nothing can bring you back in, and, anyway, you're not sure you ever wanted to be in there in the first place." "You know... you know, I was just thinking, you know what I mean." "Are you, er..." "Do you worry about getting old or anything like that?" "I think, you know, when you get to our age, you do worry about it." "I think the goalposts change in a way." "I mean..." "Why is it always pissing down with rain when I come to Brighton?" "You know, I don't know about you, Nick, but, um..." "You know, I got to 50 and I was all right, I was pretty cool with it." "But, you know, I'm..." "I'm 56." "How old are you?" "I kind of had to think about..." "reinventing myself, I suppose, within the business that I'm in, you know, and it was..." "I can't reinvent myself." " Do you want to?" " No." "I don't..." "I don't want to, either, but I think that the rock star, you've gotta be able to see from a distance." "It's something that you can draw in one line..." " Mm." " ...and you can't have 'em changing... every second week they're something different, because they've got to be godlike." "But it's all an invention." "But it happened early on for me." "As a child, I think I had a desperate need to change myself into something else." "Mm." "I'd look in the mirror and..." "and not be..." "I wasn't happy." "I used to look at these people on the record covers and aspire to that." "What do you think of the Rolling Stones?" "Must be a time when they actually look at one another and think, you know," ""Boys, haven't we got enough money now?" "Do we wanna retire?"" ""We can always play a banjo on a porch somewhere"" ""and sing a song for our own entertainment."" "I mean, do you love performing still?" "I hear actors say it." "I live for it, I really do." " Really do, yeah?" " And... and it's... it's the... it's really that moment I can get to be that person..." " Yeah." " ...that I always wanted to be." "There's something that happens on stage where you are transported and you are..." "Time has a different feel and you are just this thing" " and you feel you can't do any wrong..." " Yeah." "...and then you look down the front row and somebody yawns something like that, and the whole thing falls away and you're just this..." " schmuck." " Just crucifies you, yeah." "I had it when... when I was... and I loved playing Henry VIII, you know, and, er..." "I..." "I actually become Henry VIII." "I really believed I was the King of England and, er... you know, that I..." " I could have women's heads..." " And offstage?" "Yeah, I was going home at night and thinking, you know, I could actually..." "I could become Henry." "I could do this, you know." "My agent and his mum came down, and she watched the day's shoot, and I was, you know, pretty pleased with myself, what I was doing, and she said, er..." ""Are you gonna play him like that?"" "" " No?" "Yeah." "And it absolutely... it just kettled me for a couple of days, you know." "I'm thinking, "Oh, fuck it!" you know, because I think as an..." "as a performer, you..." " you need that confidence of feeling." " You need to believe, don't you?" "You need someone saying you're doing good." "I can't see a bloody thing here." "Yeah, well, put your steamer on." "I mean, you know, it's science, innit?" "I mean, if it's cold out there and hot in here, you're gonna get steamy windows." "Yeah, I know, but..." " G'day, Nick." " G'day, Warren." " How are you, mate?" " All right." "You all right?" "Yeah, I'm good." "How are you?" " It's the birds." " Wonderful." "Bring 'em in." "I'll put 'em straight in the bin." "So, how have you been, Warren?" "I've been all right." "I've been good." "Lining a few crows up, shooting 'em down." "It's good." "Things are good." "How you been?" "I've been OK." "Are you, er... hungry?" " I'm cooking eels." " You're cooking me eels?" "I'm cooking you eels." " Um... a cup." "We need a cup." " Yeah." "Half a cup, right'?" "Wouldn't like you to have a full bladder on your trip back." "Oh, speaking of trip back, look what I got here." "Terrorise your kids with these." "I got them in France when I was over there." " Some bangers." " Oh, thanks." "Just don't scare any children, though, with them, or..." " or dogs." "But, er..." " Very good." " Machine-gun ones, as well." " Thank you." "My wife will be really..." "Tell 'em, you go in with ten fingers, you gotta come out with ten fingers." "Got it." " Are you hungry?" " Yeah." "Do you remember that gig?" " The Nina Simone gig?" " Oh, yeah." " Fuck, that was good, wasn't it?" " Yeah, it was up there." "Like," "I've seen a bunch of gigs that... that's one that was like one of the greatest things I've ever seen." "Do you remember, before she started playing, she took the chewing gum out of her mouth?" " Mm." " Like, sort of sat down, took the chewing gum out and just stuck it on to the piano," " and then just slammed..." " I have that chewing gum at home." "Yeah, I have that in my..." " What, you got that?" " I took it, yeah." "I..." "I went up and took it off the stage after." " Did you really?" " Yeah." "I have it in a towel that she... the one she wiped her forehead and then went..." " ..." "like that." " Oh, fuck, I'm really jealous." "And, er... it..." "I remember, cos Matt mixed her." "Matt apparently walked past her room, and she was sitting in there like, looking really pissed off and not wanting to be there." "And... and he goes like, um..." ""ls everything OK, um..." "Mrs Simone?" or whatever, you know." " Dr Simone." " Dr Simone, I guess." "He probably wouldn't have..." "Matt wouldn't have said that." "And, "ls there anything I can get you?"" "and, er... she just said," ""I'd like some champagne, some cocaine and some sausages!"" "And, er... and, er..." "Matt..." "Matt goes, "All right, I'll see what I can do."" "So, Matt went off and he got some coke, some champagne and some sausages for her and took 'em back and he said she just had this big grin on her face and she goes, "Thank you!" and just hoovered up the coke and drank some champagne and ate her sausages." "Yeah." "I've never seen an audience like that, that felt like they were about to fall in on top of one another." " Nobody knew what to expect and..." " Well, she... she was... she was genuinely frightening when she came on..." " Terrifying." " ...up the front of the stage." "She literally walked onto the lip of the stage and stared everyone down..." " Yeah." " ..." "like it was..." "Well, I remember..." "I remember seeing..." "I had the same thing happen when I saw "The Killer" play in Paris and my mate was there and he's like... comes up to me, he goes, "Well, good news."" ""The... the T-shirt guy selling the T-shirts."" "And I'm like, "Ooh, what do you mean?"" "and he goes, "Oh, I saw him last week in the South of France"" ""and the T-shirt seller did most of the set" ""and The Killer just sat on the side and came out..." " Oh, really?" " "and did Great Balls Of Fire" ""and then just, like, fucked off."" "And so the band came on and started playing and they just sounded like dog shit, you know." "They were just like playing through the standard stuff and then... then it was like, "Jerry Lee's in the house,"" "like, "Jerry Lee's in the house", and..." "and suddenly you'd look on the side and there's The Killer just standing there looking like a kind of orang-utan, just sort of like this, lurching, and it was like that Nina Simone show, and the guy walked up and hit the piano" "and had this sound like a jackhammer, and it was unbelievable, and it was just two microphones plugged into a Fender Twin wound out, like everything wound out, just this sound that's instantly Jerry Lee," "and he walked onto the stage, and he got to the front of the lip like that, and just went, "Yeah!" like that, and everyone was like, "Whoa!" like this." "And then he sat down and went, "Brrr!" like that, and then suddenly he started playing" " and the band sounded unbelievable..." " Yeah." "...cos they all got in underneath this amazing sound of his, and then he did like a bunch of ballads in the middle, Hank Williams and stuff, and then he did Great Balls Of Fire, and then he tried to get up on the piano and he couldn't," "and it was one of the wildest things I'd ever seen." "He was just trying to get up, and then they ran up behind him and they were trying to get him up there, and he's... going like this." "It was phenomenal, and then he walked off." "The power blew in the place." "The guitar player, who was about 70 or something, picked up his amp, put it under his arm and walked off, like this old amp he must have had since day one, you know, and it was like, that's what it was like about, you know." "You're seeing a show, you know." "Do you want salt and pepper with that?" " No." " Is that enough?" "No, I'm all right." "I might just put that there for a second." "Mm." "I don't know if they're gonna be able to..." "Vous vous taisez, d'accord?" "Oh, il fait chaud, huh?" "# I've got a feeling that just won't go away" "# You've got to just keep on pushing" "# Keep on pushing ii Push the sky away... ii." "OK, let's..." "Yeah." "Um... it sounded really good." " Just we need to join..." " Push, push the sky away." "...the idea of bringing the sky later." "The "away" later." "Push." "They're going..." " # Push the sky away... #" " You've got to just... you've got to..." "It's not good." "It's gotta do it at the same... the way I'm doing it, yeah?" " OK." "It's actually like one word." " D'accord." "# You've got to just... #" " Tell... tell them." " Oui, oui." "Hey... hey, juste... juste un petit truc." "Um... push the sky away." "Ensemble." "Sky away." " Pas sky... away." " Ah, oui, d'accord." "Ensemble." "# Push the sky away..." "# You've got to just keep on pushing" "# Keep on pushing" "# Push the sky away. #" "Bravo!" "C'est fini." "(C'est bon." "Super." "Bravo, tout Le monde." "Well done, mate, yeah." "You've got a future career there." "Well, it was my original career, until I discovered heroin and alcohol and then it kinda all went wrong after that." "Couldn't juggle the three professions." "There's a helicopter." "I've probably had more meals with you than my wife, actually, when I..." " We've had a lot." "We've had a lot." " ...if I do the mathematics." "We have had a lot... a lot of bad ones." " Right, I've gotta go." " Yeah." "I've gotta go to the archive." "You've gotta understand your limitations." "It's your limitations that make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are." "For me, that's where collaboration comes in, to take an idea that is blind and unformed and that has been hatched largely in solitude and allow these strange collaborator creatures that I work with to morph it into something else, something better." "Well, that's really something to see." "I mean, with the last record that I participated in, on Nocturama, it wasn't open like that any more." "You came with basically fixed songs, in the sense of musically as well as lyrically, to the studio, and we were..." "I was just trying with that record to you know, disrupt the process slightly and... maybe that..." "Yeah, I noticed that you wanted to..." "that you wanted to go somewhere different." " It wasn't much..." " So, is that why you left?" "No, no, no, no, no." "I left basically because of our management and because I felt that I can't keep up a marriage and two bands." " Right." " Time was becoming a problem." "I had had no personal conflict with you or anyone else in the band." " No." "No, I..." "I didn't think so." " I had no musical schisma either." "I..." "I sometimes listen to the records we made..." "Yeah." "...and I really wish there was someone in the studio who had have..." " Tell you that this is too much." " ...told me it's too long," ""Edit," you know, and now I'm brutal with editing, and the lovely thing about editing, when you're actually sitting there and doing the take, and you ask, "How long is the song?" and they say, "Six minutes,"" "and then you take out a couple of verses." "And suddenly it's better than before." "Suddenly... well, suddenly, it's a different song." "In fact, you don't even know what the song really is until..." " Yeah." " ...some time later when you kind of..." "Yeah, I know that feeling." "."Because of the ramifications of the edit." "Once you've understood the song, it's no longer of much interest, and some of those..." "some of those great songs that you do, that you kind of become aware of new things over the years," " with songs and..." " Yes." "...the reason why you keep playing them, for me..." " Yes.." " And some of those others..." "Others just alienate their selves" " and go somewhere else and..." " Yeah." "...you don't find the door any longer to be able to... to bring something out of it that's still true." " Yeah, exactly." " Yeah." "I love the feeling of a song before you understand it." "When we're all playing deep inside the moment, the song feels wild and unbroken." "Soon it will become domesticated and we will drag it back to something familiar and compliant and we'll put it in the stable with all the other songs." "But there is a moment when the song is still in charge and you're just clinging on for dear life and you're hoping you don't fall off and break your neck or something." "It is that fleeting moment that we chase in the studio." "How long was that?" "How long is it?" "# Can't remember anything at all" "# Flame trees line the streets" "# Can't remember anything at all" "# But I'm driving my car down to Geneva" "# I been sitting in my basement patio" "# Aye, it was hot" "# Up above, girls walk past" "# The roses all in bloom" "# Have you ever heard about the Higgs boson blues?" "# I'm going down to Geneva, baby" "# Gonna teach it to you" "# Who cares?" "# Who cares what the future brings?" "# Black road long And I drove and drove" "# I came upon a crossroad" "# The night was hot and black" "# I see Robert Johnson" "# With a ten-dollar guitar strapped to his back" "# Looking for a tune" "#Ah" "# Well, here comes Lucifer with his canon law" "# And a hundred black babies running from his genocidal jaw" "# He got the real killer groove" "# Robert Johnson and the devil, man" "# Dunno know who's gonna rip off who" "# Driving my car" "# Flame trees on fire" "# Sitting and singing" "# The Higgs boson blues" "# A shot rings out" "# To a spiritual groove" "# Everybody bleeding" "# To that Higgs boson blues" "# And if I die tonight" "# Bury me in my favourite patent yellow leather shoes" "# And with a mummified cat" "# And a cone-like hat" "# That the caliphate forced on the Jews" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Can you feel my heartbeat... #" "Ssh!" "# Hannah Montana does the African savanna" "# As the simulated rainy season begins" "# She curses the queue at the Zulu" "# Moves on to Amazonia and cries with the dolphins" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Mama ate the pygmy" "# The pygmy ate the monkey" "# The monkey's got a gift, man" "# And he's sending it out to you" "# A little bit of smallpox" "# A little bit of flu Here come the missionary" "# He's saving them savages with the Higgs boson blues" "# Yeah" "# But can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Yeah, can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Yeah, I'm driving my car" "# I wanna feel your heartbeat" "# I kiss your lips" "# I kiss your lips" "# Feel you deep inside" "# Waiting for me in Geneva... #" "Ssh!" "# Waiting in Geneva" "# Waiting for me in Geneva... #" "Ssh!" "# Ah, let the damn day break" "# Rainy days always make me sad... #" "Ssh!" "# Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake" "# And you're the best girl I ever had" "# I can't remember anything at all. #" "Who knows their own story?" "Certainly, it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it." "It's all just clamour and confusion." "It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it." "Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves or to others." "First, creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness." " Hello?" " We're over here." "Hi." "What are we doing?" "Do you mind if we go through some of the photos your mother just sent us?" " Hey, are you in this picture?" " Where are you?" " We... we can't actually identify you." " Well..." " Can you..." " Yeah, I can see me." "See that one with the ears, singing their little heart out?" " What, this kid?" " Yeah." "The one that's got "star" written all over him." "What else has Dawn sent over?" "I'm that guy with the beard and the dog collar." "Is that you there?" "Yeah." "Gloomy, gloomy, gloomy." "Yeah, I think that's from the high school" " where I lived in the country town..." " Right, so Wangaratta." " Wangaratta High School, yeah..." " Northern Caulfield, yeah." "...and we had this barber that my mother used to fucking hate and, er... we all used to have this..." "get the same haircut." "He used to cut everyone in Wangaratta's hair the same." "He used to cut an angled fringe like that, because he thought you'd flick it back." "But everyone just walked around with these things, and my mother... we used to come back and my mother used to rage against this barber." "That's me as a..." "I don't know, a teenager or something." "I was not really into sport and stuff like that, and there was a bunch of us that did art, which basically became The Boys Next Door." "Oh!" "That's, um..." "Mick Harvey." "That's back when he had good hair, and that's, um... that's me in the middle there with them." "That's Tracy Pew." "Tracy was one of those kind of guys that come out fully formed, very much like Rowland Howard as well." "You know, they just sort of appeared, complete." "But he was an amazing bass player, that guy, and really the heart and soul of The Birthday Party." "There he is there." "That's Mick, Rowland." "That's a beautiful photograph, that one." "There's a great photograph of Tracy being urinated on." "Do you have that?" "Yeah, we do have that somewhere, don't we?" "OK, now, that is a concert in Cologne in 1981 and I don't know if you can see, but this guy here is a German person, and he..." "That is Mick Harvey, you can see that classic profile, and he's... actually, we're playing King Ink" " because he's playing, er... the drums." " Snare drum." "He would play the snare drum in that song and this man here is urinating and you can see the stream of urine kind of arcing gracefully down into the, er... right-hand side of that picture." " Can you... can you show the next picture?" " Sure." "And there... there he is urinating." "There is the stream of urine, and Tracy, noticing that the German person is urinating and moving towards the German person." "Can you..." "Now Tracy is, er... deciding to push this person away." "Mick is still playing away over here." "Next." "There you have Mick still playing away there." "Rowland over there oblivious to what's going on." "Tracy's stopped playing the bass altogether and is now punching the guy and the guy's flying backwards off the stage." "Yeah, it says a lot about the kind of gigs that we were doing with The Birthday Party at that stage, because we were billed by some promoter as the most violent live band in the world." "So, what that meant was that every skinhead and biker and general kind of lowlife and, er... psychopath came along to these concerts." "It seemed to us, towards the end of The Birthday Party, that it had very little to do with the music any more, and just people coming along to see what would happen at that particular gig, and, er... we were kind of getting some sort of joy out of disappointing everybody" "by just basically playing with our backs to the audience and hunker down together and do these shows towards... towards the very end." "My last will and testament." "OK, it seems like I wanted all my money, which was nothing, I would say, at that time to go to the Nick Cave Memorial Museum a small but adequate room or rooms" "that will serve as the Nick Cave Memorial Museum." "Yeah, I was always a kind of..." "ostentatious bastard." " Do you remember writing it?" " No." "It was...'87 was a, er..." "it was a difficult year to remember, '87." "Eighty-anything was difficult to remember, to be honest." "You know, I shifted around continuously." "I never really had my own place till quite late in the picture and I would kind of wear out my welcome wherever I was staying." "But I would always have a table or a desk and kind of sweep it off and stick it in a box." "I guess that's why there is actually an archive." "That is my bedroom in Berlin and this room is just a kind of crawl space, actually, cos you have to climb up a little ladder to get into this thing." "You can't actually stand up in here." "So, it was just this wonderful kind of womb-like space, which had a mattress where I could sleep, and this is where I was writing And The Ass Saw The Angel." "I spent quite a lot of time at the Berlin flea market, which happened every Saturday morning, and I got an incredible kind of collection of, um... pornography and religious art and icons in general, and I came across this chocolate box and opened it up, and inside the chocolate box, wrapped in tissue paper," "were these three locks, very long, of hair, and they were, um..." "from different heads, I think, and that's actually it in the... hanging there in the photograph there, right?" "And hair like this has always been something that I come back to all the time in songwriting, actually." "Do you know what this stuff here is?" "Are these torn-out pages or is this your handwriting?" "I think they're ripped out of a book and kind of written into." "I don't know." "Um..." "I don't know." "It's just shit, isn't it?" "But important shit... for me, at the time." "I'll tell you an amazing thing that happened with that room." "I used to leave the door open and... and I was on the second floor, and there was this guy called Chris, he lived on the top floor, and one day I was writing away at the desk" "and... and sort of looked up and he's standing, and I could see he was kind of fascinated by what was on the walls and he said, "Do you wanna come up to my room"" ""and have a look what I've got upstairs?" Right?" "And I said, "Yeah, all right."" "And so we went up to his, um..." "to this little flat he had up the top and he opened it up, we went into the living room, and everywhere there was, er... nativity stuff from Christmas." "He would make a star and he would cut it out of fluorescent cardboard, and then he would cut another little tiny one out of that and then another tiny one out of that." "It must have taken an hour or something to make one of these tiny little..." "these little stars, and there were fucking thousands of them all over the wall, and I'm like, "Fuck, man, this is unbelievable."" ""This is like the most beautiful thing, er..." "I can imagine.""" "And he had all these sort of glass-topped tables and he kind of said, "Check this out," like that, and I'm like, "Mm."" "And he turns off the main lights and then shines these other ones that come up from the floor and they cast light all up through the tables, er... which have these pictures of Jesus" " and baby Jesus and all that." " Yeah." "So, suddenly these pictures of Jesus disappear and then it's all just these kind of page three girls all kind of going..." " Wow, yeah." " Kind of soft porn, kind of Playboy stuff, which had obviously attracted him when he..." " Yeah." " ..." "looked in my room, and suddenly this whole room had changed into this thing, and it was the most incredible kind of moving sort of thing" " that this lonely guy had..." " Yeah." "...had been working on for..." "for years and years, you know..." " Yeah." " ...it must have taken him to do this, and this sort of stuff that I have here" " pales in significance..." " Yeah." "...to the kind of monomania of this incredible room." "It really stayed with me, that kind of power to transform yourself..." "Yeah." "...by what you can do with the imagination." "Yeah." "Anyway, I always remember that guy." " Er..." "Woz?" " Yeah?" "You're starting it off with the, er... backward fourth, right?" " Yeah." " Like am I doing that..." " # I was wrong... #" " Yeah, you are doing that." "When... when do you come in?" "When does Marty come in?" "After your little thing and it goes..." "# I was riding, I was riding" "# Over the hills" "# Yeah" "# The sun, the sun, the sun" "# It was rising up over the hills" "# Yeah" "# I got a feeling I just can't shake" "# I got a feeling" "# It just won't go away" "# You've gotta just" "# Keep on pushing" "# Push the sky away" "# Some people say that it's just rock'n'roll" "# Oh, but it gets you right down to your soul" "# You've gotta just keep on pushing" "# Keep on pushing" "# Push the sky away" "# You've gotta just keep on pushing" "# Keep on pushing ii Push the sky away... ii" "One of the things we wanted to find out more about was the weather diaries." "Well, basically, this is a daily inventory of the weather, and what really happened was that I was an Australian living in England..." " Yeah." " ...and was becoming increasingly upset by the relentless miserable weather that... that, you know..." "that... that England has." "As a way of kind of taking control of that in some way or turning it to my advantage, I decided to write about it, and because bad weather is much more interesting to write about" " than good weather..." " Yeah." "...I was quite happy when I would wake up and it was a miserable, stormy..." " Yeah." " ...cold, windy day." "The entries sort of grew into other things as well, and Susie was heavily pregnant at the time, with the twins." "So, she features in it a lot." "There's a sequence where you see two men in a van very briefly, and you say you forgot to write about them until five days later." "But you think about them all the time and you question yourself in here as to whether it's because you're thinking about twins." "Ah, well, you know, on one level, I'm a very practical kind of person about the way I go about certain things." "But, er... there's another side that's very superstitious, and I can tend towards seeing sort of things in things, especially if the basic day, which... which this is, is starting to be kind of churned in the mill of the imagination," "and that's what's happening with, er... the weather." "The weather is becoming not real, it's becoming fictitious because I'm writing about it." "The weather is becoming a lie and what's going on is..." "My day-to-day life is becoming a lie, because it's... it's becoming an imaginative exercise, and I think on some level I was very frightened about having the twins." "You know, I think that I was, er... scared out of my wits." "And then it stops in June 2000 and restarts in August 2001." " Right." " Do you know why there's..." " No." " ...a gap?" "I don't know." "Maybe because we had the babies." "It's a beautiful last line to end on." ""The sky out of my window has gone real blue now."" "The sky in Brighton is unlike anything I've ever seen." "Living by the sea, looking out my windows," "I feel like I'm part of the weather itself." "Sometimes the sky is so blue and the reflection of the sea so dazzling you can't even look at it, and other times, great black thunderheads roll across the ocean and you feel like you're inside the storm itself." "What I fear most is nature." "Now that it's sent its weather to exact revenge, we're all in for it now." "Soon the weather is gonna put on a real show." "Funnily enough, the more I write about the weather, the worse it seems to get and the more interesting it becomes and the more it moulds itself to the narrative I have set for it." "You know, I can control the weather with my moods." "I just can't control my moods is all." "That's me and Kylie." "I'm wearing shorts there." "What happened with Kylie, Nick?" "I'd just written this song, Where The Wild Roses Grow, and wanted her to sing on it and we were just trying to find out how to get to Kylie and she had management that was very protective of her" "and protective of her image..." " Yeah." " ...and all of that sort of thing." "But she happened to be going out with Michael Hutchence." "So... we managed to get hold of Michael and she was sitting next to him when... when we rang." "We said, "Can you ask Kylie if she'll come in and sing a song for us?"" ""We have this song."" "And we ended up on Top Of The Pops..." "Mm." "...and that whole event, around Kylie, kind of lives in this sort of weird kind of bubble where life for that brief time was kind of different, because we were suddenly thrown into this weird situation of having a hit record," "and then, obviously, people bought the album and listened to it, and realised that, you know, that would be the last time they would... they would, er... have anything to do with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds again." "But for that moment, it was... it was kind of a... for me, a very special moment in time, you know." "Louis Wain." "Look at that." "That's The Fire Of The Mind Agitates The Atmosphere, that." "Do you have my copy of Lolita?" "That's Anita." "Yeah." "That's Susie." "The word "muse" I often feel reluctant to use, because it feels like the muse is something ethereal and out there." "It's not for me." "The songs are very much about people and... and it's these people that kind of prop up the songs." "If I sing a song like Deanna, it's very much three minutes or whatever with the memory of that person." "Not that I have any interest in the way that that person is now, but I have a huge interest in the memory of that person." "The mythologised, edited kind of memory of that person." "There's a slide that I want to show you." "If you just switch the lights off." "That's my absolute favourite photograph of Susie." "It staggers me that, um..." "Susie, who has this kind of innate relationship with the camera..." "Yeah." "...can be so fiercely, er..." "reluctant to be photographed, and... it's really that framing of the face, of the hair, the black hair, and the framing of the white face that's really, er... interesting." "There's an audio clip that I wanted to play through to you as well." "If you just wanna listen to this one." "The first time I saw Susie was at the Victoria  Albert Museum in London and when she came walking in, all the things I had obsessed over for all the years - pictures of movie stars," "Jenny Agutter in the billabong, Anita Ekberg in the fountain," "Ali MacGraw in her black tights, images from the TV when I was a kid," "Barbara Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery and Abigail," "Miss World competitions, Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Jones and Bo Derek and Angie Dickinson as Police Woman," "Maria Falconetti and Suzi Quatro, Bolshoi ballerinas and Russian gymnasts," "Wonder Woman and Barbarella and supermodels and Page 3 girls, all the endless, impossible fantasies, the young girls at the Wangaratta pool lying on the hot concrete," "Courbet's Origin Of The World," "Bataille's bowl of milk, Jean Simmons' nose ring, all the stuff I had heard and seen and read." "Advertising and TV commercials, billboards and fashion spreads and Playmate of the Month," "Caroline Jones dying in Elvis's arms," "Jackie O in mourning, Tinker Bell trapped in the drawer, all the continuing, never-ending drip-feed of erotic data came together at that moment in one great big crash-bang and I was lost to her and that was that." "Sometimes it feels like the ghosts of the past are all about and crowding in, vying for space and recognition." "They are no longer content to be kept down there in the dark." "They have been there too long." "They are angry and gathering strength and calling for attention." "They're clawing their way into the future and will be waiting there." "Have I remembered them enough?" "Have I honoured them sufficiently?" "Have I done my best to keep them alive?" "There's the pier." "You were so important in my life." "You were like this kind of mist that rolled in, cos I knew about you and..." "and I'd heard about... your desire to do this song, and then I saw you perform live with The Bad Seeds and it was like, "Uh!"" "You were walking up this ramp to go on stage." "It was like a scene from a film." "You all just had this kind of swagger and the energy, you know, when you're building up to go on stage, and then the performance was just electrifying, and your body language, you were like this... like a..." "like a tree." "That probably doesn't sound..." " Like a big tree?" " Like a... you know, like from a Hitchcock film, a kind of tree in... in silhouette, like really in a storm or something." "It was... it was amazing." "Cos you didn't know much about what I did, right?" "No, I had to speed-read your biography." " Oh, you read that thing?" " Yeah." "That wasn't the truth, though." "Are you worried about being forgotten?" "Yeah, I worry about being forgotten and about being lonely." " Oh, really?" " Yeah." " You had waxworks made of you." " I had multiple waxworks." "How many?" "I think I had five." " Well, at a certain point..." " I'm really jealous of you." "...the story went that the only person who had more waxworks than me was the Queen." "Is that right?" "I don't know if that's still a fact, but it was at the time." "I remember Michael Hutchence telling me that he was short-sighted and he tried wearing glasses or contacts to see the audience, and it terrified him so much he never did again." " Oh, is that right?" " We spoke about that because the first time I saw INXS play, I thought that he'd looked at me, which an audience member is supposed to do." "Everyone in the audience should feel like you've looked at them, and it became apparent that he probably never saw me, just a blur." "But he had a kind of way of projecting outwards." "I'm envious of that." "I'm very much a front-row kind of guy." "I don't feel I'm that kind of performer that can... reach out that far, you know." "For me, there's a kind of psychodrama that goes on between singular people in the front row that becomes very important in the... in the telling of the..." "the narratives of the songs." "I get a huge amount of energy from..." "From picking out singular..." "People, and terrifying them." "Really?" "Do you make it your mission to terrify them?" "Well, it's that kind of, um..." "mixture of awe and terror that you can get from one person or a small group of people" " that is really, um..." " Mm." "...that gives a huge amount of, er..." "energy to... to kind of transform yourself." "# Ooh" "# Ah, let the damn day break" "# Ooh" "# Rainy days" "# Always make me sad" "# Ooh" "# Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake... #" "# You're the best girl I ever had... #" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# Can you feel my heartbeat?" "# I'm driving my car down to Geneva" "# I'm driving" "# Can you feel my heartbeat... #" "# I'm driving my car" "# Can't remember anything at all... #" "# Can't remember anything at all" "# Sitting here" "# In my basement patio. #" "No." "No?" "You don't want any?" "You wanna fuck with me?" "You fucking with the best!" "You want some?" "You wanna fuck with me?" "OK." "You wanna play games?" "OK." "Come on." "OK." "You wanna play rough?" "OK!" " Say hello to my little friend!" " Say hello to my little friend!" "# Ya, ya, ya, Ya!" "# Ya, ya, ya, Ya!" "# Ya, ya, ya, Ya!" "# Ya, ya, ya, Ya!" "# Ya, ya, ya, ya!" "#" "# Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" "# Oh, no, no, no... #" "# Well, in come the Devil" "# Said, "I've come to take you down Mr Stagger Lee"" "# Well, those were the last words that the Devil said" "# Cos Stag put four holes" "# In his mother... fucking" "# Head" "# Ya, ya, ya, Ya!" "# Ya, ya, ya, Ya!" "# Ya, ya, ya, ya!" "#" "The song is heroic, because the song confronts death." "The song is immortal and bravely stares down our own extinction." "The song emerges from the spirit world with a true message." "One day, I will tell you how to slay the dragon." "All of our days are numbered." "We cannot afford to be idle." "To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it." "Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it." "If you can hold on to that flame, great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world-changing all held up by the tiniest of ideas." "# The problem was" "# She had a little black book" "# And my name" "# It was written" "# On every page" "# Well, a girl's got to make ends meet" "# Especially down on Jubilee Street" "# I ought to practise what I preach" "# These days I go down town" "# In my tie and tails" "# I got a foetus" "# On a leash" "# I am alone now" "# I am beyond recriminations" "# The curtains are shut" "# The furniture has gone" "# I am transforming" "# I am vibrating" "# I am glowing" "# Yeah, look at me now" "# I'm transforming" "# I'm vibrating" "# Look at me now" "# Yes, I am flying" "# I'm vibrating" "# Look at me now" "# Yeah" "# Yeah" "# I'm transforming" "# I'm vibrating" "# Look at me now" "# I am flying" "# I'm vibrating" "# Look at me now" "# I am flying" "# I am glowing" "# Look at me now" "# I'm transforming" "# I'm vibrating" "# Look at me now. #" "In the end, I'm not interested in that which I fully understand." "The words I have written over the years are just a veneer." "There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words... truths that rise up without warning, like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear." "What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt the monster to the surface, to create a space, where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us." "This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect this is where all love and tears and joy exist." "This is the place." "This is where we live."