Nick Cave’s strange journey from vampiric drug-addled iconoclast to something akin to national treasure status in both his native Australia and adopted home in dear old Blighty is as remarkable as it is deserved.
For such an uncompromising artist to deliver work of such consistently high calibre over a 40-year-plus career commands our attention and makes him worthy of serious analysis.
Such talents are rare not just in rock, but in the arts in general and often come hand in hand with a self-destructive bent.
That Cave manages to survive – albeit sometimes barely – is a testament to his powers of re-invention; genuine, some might say obsessive, devotion to his craft; sheer bloody mindedness and a deep faith-driven inner confidence and force of will.
But even the Nick Caves of this world do not spring fully formed into this world and that’s where writers like Adam Steiner come in.
Over the course of 250 meticulously researched pages, on Darker With The Dawn Steiner takes us along Nick’s wracked and crooked path – the formative influences, controversies, collaborations, crises and creative choices that gave burth to his ‘Songs of Love and Death’.
Structured over three books – Dusk, Midnight and Dawn – Steiner’s book follows the singer-songwriter’s origins in Wangaratta through to his emergence onto the Melbourne post-punk scene and travels to London, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Brighton.
Structured thematically, rather than chronologically, Steiner’s work explores Cave’s career through the key songs that form the spine of his body of work.
We’re talking Tupelo, Deanna, From Her To Eternity, The Mercy Seat, Into My Arms, Push The Sky Away, Red Right Hand and more.
From these defining compositions he branches off to examine the veins, muscles, corpuscles, tendons and connective tissue that make up his extraordinary body of work.
Religion looms large of course, along with Elvis as both artist and myth in the mind of the songwriter – the ultimate rock-n-roll messiah.
Steiner delves into Cave’s devotion to the Blues for both its rythmns and melancholy and reveals how artists like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Blind Lemon Jefferson permeated his early works.
This would leave the white middle class Australian prone to accusations of cultural appropriation, one of many charges that would dog the functioning addict over the opening phase of his career.
Steiner outlines how Cave’s preoccupation with death and misery opened him up to censure for misanthropy, while his graphic depictions of violence, murder and extreme sexual acts would see him condemned as a misogynist.
His defence, that his male characters often come off just as badly, or worse, than his female protagonists does not entirely convince.
More in his favour is the sheer audacity and confidence of the music, the courage to stick to his guns and stand apart from the prevailing trends of the day.
Cave, the author notes, initially cultivated and appeared to embrace his bad boy image and certainly many of his cast of twisted ne’er do wells Stagger Lee and Jack The Ripper among them, are not the types you’d bring home to mother.
He taps into the outlaw, larrikin spirit of Ned Kelly – a modern day Wild Colonial Boy, kicking against the pricks and riding roughshod over convention.
Much of Cave’s imagery pushes the boundaries of taste and public decency – like the Penny Dreadfuls of old it exposes you to the horror – the black mirror – you don’t want to look at, but can’t tear your eyes away from.
Steiner sums it up well in his assessment of another seminal early period work, The Carny.
“Finding imperfect beauty in the fucked up, the flawed and the freak would inspire Cave in his musical efforts to bring the circus to town and make it his creative home.”
Behind the shock value and pulp novel characterisations, the young Cave does display a fierce intelligence, with profound things to say about love, faith and man’s struggle against a vengeful god and cruel unforgiving world.
As his songwriting matures, according to Steiner, the avid Bible reader’s tone shifts around the time of the lovelorn Boatman’s Call album from the tooth and claw of the Old Testament to signs of something more hopeful and expansive in the New.
While tragedy – most affectingly the death of his son Arthur – continues to bleed into his work, Cave widens his palette, battling cynicism with an insatiable curiosity about the world and our place within it.
“Cave’s recent lyrics have become more fragmented and impressionistic reflecting an increasingly complex view of the world.“
Throughout his career, this book shows, that Cave is not only a prolific contributor to culture, but also a voracious consumer of it.
He devours books, works of art, architecture and film and then expurgates what he’s learned through the filter of his own wild, surreal and captivating imagination.
Never shy of overreaching, Steiner unveils the broad sweep of Cave’s ambition – his attempts to portray the full compass of human experience.
“Cave’s songs merge the cycle of love, death and birth into a single pulse, a relentless, unstoppable wave.”
Steiner’s scholarly, but engagingly written, tome provides a vivid insight into a performer skilled in creating and fomenting his own mystique.
It shows his wayward journey from contemptuous, junkie, post-punk doom merchant, to cleaned up esteemed, respected, if not entirely respectable, musician and man of letters.
It’s a book for those of us who enjoy scanning printed lyrics on albums and finding out the guiding lights and influences that shaped our favourite artists.
And if as a bi-product this book turns people on to the poetry of Larkin and Donne, or the novels of Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje – to name but a few of Cave’s inspirations – well, that’s no bad thing either.
