Good Or Shit: Nick Cave

When I grow up, I want to be Nick Cave. Maybe not with all the drug problems and rehab and then later-life teetotalling, but the intelligence, the dark brooding thoughtful analysis and exploration of the world and its history, to have the ability to write such rich, haunting, mysterious and borderline creepy material. Even to look like a mixture between a highwayman and the vampire Lestat. I am always taken by him. By his music, by his films, by his writing. When I'm with him, in the audio-visual realms of his mind's creation, I find myself aroused, slightly exhilarated, and mildly disturbed by the sense of danger he exudes.

And I am always immensely respectful of his 'this is who I am, get fucked' attitude.

As has been widely reported in recent weeks, the latest Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Push the Sky Away, has been getting mostly great reviews, locally and internationally. In Australia, for the first time in decades of excessive output, a Bad Seeds album has taken out a number one spot on the charts. Not for the first time, in several European countries this has also been the case, and in the UK, it came very close to number one just stopping at number three. Someone recently commented to me that this surge in commercial popularity may have something to do with the rise of the hipster, in that it is now cool to be uncool. And Cave has always been cool in his seemingly very cool un-coolness.

I read several interviews with Cave when Push the Sky Away came out, each one causing more and more inflammation in my admiration glands. Anyone who describes their band (as Cave described Grinderman) akin to a “big sloppy whore who can do anything” and that as being “liberating”, has my respect because, I have a thing for the ugliness of honesty in the unrefined. For example, doing a little stint in London recently I went on a date with a middle class southern English guy (it's important to state he was southern, there's a reason everybody loves the Starks and nobody likes the Lannisters) who spent the majority of the evening putting down my Australian accent and lax social attitude in a way that, without saying it directly, likened me to some kind of uncouth, uneducated idiot. In reality I'm actually quite well educated and can be refined if I choose, I just prefer to keep my upper lip soft and think poles are for streets and building structures - not for getting stuck up my arse.

Like Cave I have a thing for myth and legend, for Biblical narrative, for the analysis and deconstruction of the world around me, for the exploration of human emotion and behaviour, from the most heady and romantic to the distressing and disheartening. The older I get the more the good I see and do and the more fucked up shit I see and do and the only thing I know for sure is that you never really know. That we are all capable of anything under circumstances and circumstances are often beyond our control.

Push the Sky Away is incredibly moody, less dirty garage rock and murder ballads, more sonically and lyrically ethereal reflections of our times through the eyes of aging rockers. And we're living in very moody times. Of course great social change and upheaval is cyclical and we're doing a round of it now with huge changes in language, media, politics, and social conventions. I almost can't be bothered raging against the machine every time Facebook buys more rights to my private life, when men continue to abuse women in Egypt, India, or Melbourne, when another kind of food I love is added to the list of things that are bad for me, when the labour party betrays more of my compassion-based principles. It's just one shitty thing after another on a long list of stuff that is out of my control. So, when I hear the string section on Jubilee St, I just want to lie down with my eyes closed and hear Cave's gravelly voice, irrespective of what the song is about, almost speaking the words I am alone now, I am beyond recriminations, Curtains are shut, the furniture is gone, I'm transforming, I'm vibrating, I'm glowing, I'm flying, look at me, I'm flying, look at me now – and transform, and vibrate, and glow, and fly, into a state of submission to the lack of control.

And I really like the title track Push the Sky Away which most reviewers have interpreted in terms of the middle-aged rocker who, having accomplished everything he possibly can, is at an age where retirement is seen by many as being the only next option, is pushing that inevitable end-of-the-story away. But what I like about this song – and basically Nick Cave in general – is how, despite the wistful slow-moving melancholia of the music, it's still a bold and brazen mustering of courage. Like sitting at a bar with an older, wiser person, knocking back a whiskey while he tells you that 'if your friends think, That you should do it different, And if they think, That you should do it the same, You've got to just, Keep on pushing, Keep on pushing, Push the sky away'. Or, in other words, be yourself, do what you gotta' do, be a big sloppy whore who's capable of anything, tell them all to get fucked, and keep pushing the sky away.