The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays

Part I

Cave, the Songwriter

Chapter 1

‘Into My Arms’: Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman’s Call

Peter Billingham

In his 1999 lecture ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’, Nick Cave observed that [w]e all experience within us what the Portuguese call ‘saudade’, which translates as an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of the imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love Song […] The Love Song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up through our wounds.

(2007: 7)

In this chapter I shall explore the ways in which this profound sense of ‘inexplicable longing’ informs Cave’s love songs. I shall frame my discussion and analysis initially in terms of Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (hereafter Wings of Desire) in which Cave featured in a cameo role (Wenders 1987). The principal themes in that film offer an interesting, comparative commentary upon some of the central concerns of Cave’s album The Boatman’s Call (1997) that this chapter focuses on. The album’s opening track, ‘Into My Arms’, has become an evocative signifier of Cave’s wider back catalogue of love songs. They are characterized by a deep, poetic, melancholic introspection. Secondly, I will be discussing the extent to which The Boatman’s Call explores and conveys Cave’s search for a radical Christian theology that might offer the possibility of an existential, spiritual redemption.

Wings of Desire

I first encountered Nick Cave’s music through his cameo appearance with his band the Bad Seeds in Wim Wenders’ award-winning film Wings of Desire. Wenders won ‘Best Director’ for this film at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. The film is haunted by an almost overwhelming sense of loss and alienation. In it, Wenders explores flight, both as desire and as a metaphor for transcending the limitations of our human existence. In Wings of Desire strange angel-figures watch over the lives of the citizens of a pre-1989, Cold War Berlin. The angels are seen standing behind readers in libraries and on Berlin’s rooftops watching the crowds passing below. The citizens’ lives and their relationships are enmeshed in the complex and poetic web of a fractured city. This evokes themes of mortality, loss and rebirth throughout the film. Cave’s appearance as a post-punk, anarchic prophet burns with brief, savage intensity into the film’s narrative like a cigarette stubbed out on its celluloid. Cave was living in Berlin at this time.

There is an interesting synchronicity in the decade or so that separates Wings of Desire from The Boatman’s Call, reflected in Cave’s own musical and spiritual journey in this period and its resonance for the many admirers of his music. This journey is expressed in his ongoing struggle to discover a non-reductive, radically redemptive spirituality. In the 1980s Cave continued to battle with fracturing life-events from much earlier in his life. For Cave, the earliest and most formative of these traumatic experiences was the premature death of his father in a road accident when Cave was still a teenager. This tragedy occurred when Cave was embroiled in a rebellious adolescence. The traumatic experience of loss remained a dark star that hovered over much of the rest of his life. Simultaneously the album revisits another crippling metaphorical bereavement in Cave’s life immediately prior to the writing and release of The Boatman’s Call, the traumatic ending of his tortured love affair with the singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. Lines from the song ‘Brompton Oratory’ convey with razor-sharp poetics Cave’s devastation at the unsought ending of this relationship: ‘[n]o god up in the sky/No devil beneath the sea/Could do the job that you did/Of bringing me to my knees’ (2007: 278). This dichotomy of desire and its emotional, psychological and existential cost in human existence is central to the characters in Wings of Desire, in which Kantian, trench-coated angels silently witness the existential angst of the troubled human lives they watch over. As well as watching Berlin’s citizens the angels are able to listen to the internal thoughts of those they observe. The film is shot in such a way that the angels’ perspective on human existence is presented monochromatically; by contrast, the human beings’ viewing perspective is filmed in colour. However, these angels, whilst possessing the power to hear the inner desires and anxieties of humans, cannot becalm them or, more crucially, ‘be-come’ them. They cannot intervene in the human condition, forced as they are to be mere witnesses of history. This unique role bestows upon them a metaphorical otherness or transcendence of the limitations of human mortality. One of the central characters of the film, an angel called Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz), experiences an overwhelming attraction towards Maria, a young female trapeze artist in a travelling circus (played by Solveig Donmartin). Damiel simultaneously experiences a transformative, disruptive and overpowering phenomenon: human desire. He recognizes that the only way in which this desire can be fulfilled is through a kind of radical reincarnation: his transformation from angel into human. In that sense he risks, like Lucifer, a form of fall from the spiritual into the material world.

The songwriter as fallen angel

In The Boatman’s Call I propose that Cave uses his narrator voice as a kind of quasi-‘Damiel’, which enables Cave to observe and explore his own and our human experience in an equivalent way to that of the angel in Wenders’ film. Therein lies the potential for empathy and catharsis for Cave, through that character’s emotional, psychological and spiritual journey. There is simultaneously an equivalent and therapeutic function for the listener. In that sense, both songwriter and listener(s) are afforded insight and release through an observational role similar to Wenders’ fictional angel. As with Damiel, our sense of detached, dispassionate witnessing is challenged by the power of desire explored in the album. Is this the ‘secret life’ of the love song to which Cave refers, one that can activate a powerful and destabilizing empathy? This metaphor of emotional and spiritual falling has, of course, powerful resonances in the mythic narrative of Lucifer’s descent from the sublime otherness of heaven: a fallen angel. There is also, of course, the myth of Icarus: an embodiment of transgressive desire being punished by death. It becomes even more thematically layered and enriched if Cave’s traveller-narrator is viewed as a form of radicalized Christ overwhelmed by transformative suffering. His journey takes him across the 12 tracks that make up the album. It is hauntingly resonant that ‘tracks’ is also the colloquialism used by heroin addicts for the marks made by a syringe on their body. Like some doomed Romantic, Gothic journeyers of Schubert and Schumann lieder, Cave’s imagined soul searcher seeks a kind of salvation: one that can only be realized through a provocative and dangerous entry into his particular kind of Gethsemane. It is only through a courageous embracing of a cross of emotional and spiritual brokenness that the fallen angel might ultimately find a radically alternative salvation. The singer-songwriter invites his listener(s) to make a profound choice to ‘fall’ and be embraced by desire: into its arms. This coming together of songwriter and listener through the medium of the fictionalized alter ego resonates with the act and function of the Mass, as Cave stated in his radio talk ‘The Flesh Made Word’, originally broadcast in 1996: ‘[t]here is a communion, there is language, there is imagination. There is God. God is a product of the creative imagination and God is that imagination taken flight’ (1997: 137).

For those like this author who recognize Cave as a fellow traveller, these love songs serve as signifiers of the sublime. Cave’s fallen angel faces some final existential reckoning in the bleakly humoured title of the penultimate track ‘Idiot Prayer’. In it he is able to challenge the binary moral certainties of conventional Christian theology:

Is Heaven just for victims, dear?

Where only those in pain go?

Well, it takes two to tango

[…]

If you’re in Heaven then you’ll forgive me, dear

Because that’s what they do up there

But if you’re in Hell, then what can I say

You probably deserved it anyway

For we will meet again

And there’ll be Hell to pay

(2007: 285)

Songs for Charon

Charon was the ancient boatman who, for a fee, ferried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to Hades in Greek mythology. Employing this as a framing device for this section of the chapter I want to propose that the songs on The Boatman’s Call might be viewed as landing stages on a river journey to a destination of the death of desire. Whilst there is seemingly no alternative destination possible, Cave’s traveller is on a redemptive journey. This journey of love and loss carries its own possibility of an inherent transformative power. It is also one of immeasurable cost, far beyond the coin traditionally paid to Charon.

‘Into My Arms’

This song is characterized by a dialectics of faith and doubt and certainty and unknowing. Its synthesis is the centrality of love. This is a love that is located primarily and experientially in the one that is loved: the object of desire. The primacy of the beloved allows the possibility of a faith in the power of love to endure and also offer emotional liberation. With subtly melancholic harmonies on a nuanced dying fall, the gentle rhythm and tempo of the song communicates a subtext and subcurrents of desire. For Cave, faith is not predicated on a belief in an externalized other, but, much more powerfully, in the experiential reality of the lover. It is her presence in his world that reinforces and validates his spirituality. This is a ‘God’ embodied in female form and presence, and a love whose divine dimension is incarnated in and as mutual, reciprocal desire. This enables the narrative speaker to affirm that he ‘believe[s] in Love’ and in ‘some kind of path/That we can walk down, me and you’ (2007: 273). This path is travelled upon with its direction and destination perfected in the lovers’ destination: a shared embrace, which in Cave’s terms embodies a communion. Thus, whilst the beloved believes in an ‘interventionist God’, who is simultaneously external to perceived reality and able to enter it to affect change in human existence, her lover-narrator experiences the divine in and through her presence (2007: 273).

‘Lime-Tree Arbour’

Track two opens with the line that gives its name to the album: ‘[t]he boatman calls from the lake/A lone loon dives upon the water/I put my hand over hers/Down in the lime-tree arbour’ (2007: 275). The ‘loon’ is both a diving sea bird and also a common (if insensitive) colloquialism for someone who hovers perilously on the edge of sanity. This ‘lone’ loon is a solitary bird swooping in and out of the water. It also serves as a metaphor for the narrator’s lonely immersion within the desire he feels for the woman. It suggests that desire itself may be a form of madness. These thoughts hover over the lovers in the secluded shade of the lime-tree arbour. Tactile experience reaffirms itself again, as in the opening track’s potent image of being held in the beloved’s arms. This time it is in the repeated image of the hand that is protectively ‘over’ that of the beloved as if it affords protection to the fragile nature of their mutual desire. ‘There will always be suffering/It flows through life like water’: this sense of water as a kind of transmutable phenomenon through which the speaker travels, and also as a metaphor for his existential angst, is powerful (2007: 275). As the narrator plunges desperately, loon-like, in and out of ‘life like water’, it is as if he too might drown in his own desire (2007: 275).

‘People Ain’t No Good’

By track three the quiet (if problematic) optimism and sense of a love known experientially begins to be questioned. This is conveyed and interrogated by a song whose title expresses its moral perspective. It also subliminally suggests the early-hours anguish of a Hank Williams or Johnny Cash lament: ‘[p]eople just ain’t no good/I think that’s well understood/You can see it everywhere you look/People just ain’t no good’ (2007: 276). The song opens with plaintive discordance and pain communicated through the sharply amplified strings of the piano, embodying a sense of emotional exhaustion. The intrinsic, irredeemable failure of people is mournfully rearticulated throughout the song. Cave places it into a beautifully haunting context of almost predestined doomed love affairs and marriage: ‘[w]e were married under cherry trees/Under blossom we made our vows/All the blossoms come sailing down/Through the streets and through the playgrounds’ (2007: 276). This is suggested by an image of lustrous poetic economy and searing emotional pain: ‘[t]he windows rattling in the gales/To which she drew the curtains/Made out of her wedding veils’ (2007: 276). This is a world in which people’s destructive incapacity for love is signalled with razor-sharp specificity in images of ‘jilted lovers’, ‘pink-eyed pigeons’ and ‘coffins of wood’ (2007: 277). The hope of a transforming love that was immanent in embrace (‘Into My Arms’) and protective hands (‘Lime-Tree Arbour’) has now become an emotional disaster area, hauntingly evoked by an agonized violin and single, discordant chimes from the vibes. The attempt at a conditional consolation – ‘[i]t ain’t that in their hearts they’re bad’ – is ultimately and bitterly condemned: ‘[t]hey’d stick by you if they could/But that’s just bullshit, baby/People just ain’t no good’ (2007: 277).

If the two opening songs provided the possibility of a heaven on earth embodied experientially as God-as-desire, this third track summons up a desolate vision of the impossibility of love and desire being sustained. In its absence is an unremitting purgatory of lost love and future anguish: ‘[t]o our love send back all the letters/To our love a valentine of blood/To our love let all the jilted lovers cry/That people they just ain’t no good’ (2007: 277).

‘Brompton Oratory’

The mood changes again in the following track, whose title refers to a famous London Roman Catholic church. Something of the solidity of architectural materiality seems to inform a sense of recovered perspective on behalf of the narrator. The word ‘Oratory’ comes from medieval Latin and means ‘place of prayer’; Brompton Oratory was founded by John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman. It is in this song that there is, apart from ‘Into my Arms’, the only formal, explicit reference to Christ and the Bible on this album. This is when the narrator tells us that the Bible reading for the day is from Luke, Chapter 24, ‘[w]here Christ returns to his loved ones’ (2007: 278). In this final chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, Christ reappears after his death in a resurrected form, one that is material and somatic: ‘[b]ehold my hands and feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have’ (Luke 24: 39). Once again, and central to my analysis and discussion, we have a God who is located in the human. This is also a God who, in showing his disciples and friends his ‘hands and feet’, embodies a love that may be encountered and sensuously embraced. There is also a subtly evocative reference to a major event in the Christian calendar, Pentecost: ‘[u]p those stone steps I climb/Hail this joyful day’s return/Into its great shadowed vault I go/Hail the Pentecostal morn’ (2007: 278). Within Christian teaching and its calendar of major events and festivals, Pentecost describes the time after the ascension of Christ when the Holy Spirit appeared as ‘cloven tongues as of fire’ and anointed his followers (Acts 2: 3). Central to this narrative is the way in which, as the fire fell upon them, the believers were able both to understand languages not their own and also to speak ‘in tongues’: a spiritual language of prophecy and spiritual vision.

Even as the architectural and spiritual dynamics of the church’s interior offer some small comfort and reassurance, they are located within a cruel paradox. This is that the very certainty that the church and the Pentecostal service seem to convey is viewed by the narrator from his condition of alienation and doubt: ‘[a] beauty impossible to define/A beauty impossible to believe’ (2007: 278). Whilst a fragile sense of hope faintly glows, the death of the relationship extinguishes that light. This is perfectly expressed in the image of ‘[t]he blood imparted in little sips/The smell of you still on my hands/As I bring the cup up to my lips’ (2007: 278). The lyrics place the lost love affair in the context of suffering and sacrifice (the crucifixion of Christ re-visited through the Communion wine) with the fragrance of the departed lover. The song has a sacramental and redemptive function. If there is no ‘interventionist God’, then the cultural accoutrements of religion are no more than crumbs of bitter bread in a time of emotional famine: ‘[a]nd I wish that I was made of stone/So that I would not have to see/A beauty impossible to define/A beauty impossible to believe’ (2007: 278).

‘There is a Kingdom’

This song seems to serve as a kind of bridge between the resigned stoicism of the previous track and the ultimately misplaced hope of the song that will follow it, ‘(Are You) the One that I’ve Been Waiting For?’. The song opens with an evocative image of a bird that begins to sing in celebration of the day and light even whilst in the darkness prior to dawn:

Just like a bird that sings up the sun

In a dawn so very dark

Such is my faith for you

[…]

And all the world’s darkness can’t swallow up

A single spark

Such is my love for you

Such is my love

(2007: 279)

This opening reference to a light that darkness cannot overcome carries a clear association to an iconic image from the opening chapter of the Gospel of St John, in which Christ is referred to as the ‘Logos’ or ‘Word’ that originates all creation (and creativity) (John 1). Christ is also described as the ‘Light’ that enlightens all human beings born into the world (John 1: 4). In the Authorized Version, it is expressed poetically as the darkness being unable to ‘comprehend’ the light (John 1: 5). The love and the faith that Cave seeks to affirm are in a ‘Light’ that not only cannot be overcome by the darkness of despair and life’s sufferings but also cannot be ‘comprehended’ through rationality alone. However, that understanding is a priori experiential and empirical in the transcendent sense. Rational deduction cannot, in its own framework of knowledge, ‘comprehend’ or ‘know’ that ontological reality.

This is confirmed and developed when the voice, in a Kantian manner, identifies and affirms ‘[t]he starry heavens above me/The moral law within/So the world appears/So the world appears’ (2007: 279). It is as if, for Cave, the ‘starry heavens’ above carry with them a clear association of a transcendent reality. In their breath-taking scale and presence they evoke, however imperfectly, a hope that ‘[t]here is a kingdom/There is a king/And He lives without/And He lives within/And He is everything’ (2007: 279). This is no empty triumphalism or shallow, uncritical certainty on Cave’s part. Cave can only sense the anticipated experience and consequent knowledge of light because of his own intimate acquaintance with darkness.

‘(Are You) the One that I’ve Been Waiting For?’

The placing of this song immediately prior to the emotional and spiritual desolation of ‘Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?’ signifies the last dying breath of hope in terms of a love affair that is destined to failure. The song opens with its poet-narrator articulating once again what might be known and anticipated experientially: ‘I’ve felt you coming, girl, as you drew near/I knew you’d find me, ‘cause I longed you here/Are you my destiny? Is this how/you’ll appear? […] Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?’ (2007: 280). The song exists musically within a deliberately restrained melodic range and has a gentle rhythmic intensity, like a small boat ebbing through the pessimistic countercurrents of experience. His beloved is ‘longed’ into presence, almost as an occult act of will. With this summoning up of a lover, who might yet prove to be a form of psycho-emotional salvation, the lover-narrator allows himself a moment of ultimately misconceived certainty:

As you’ve been moving surely toward me

My soul has comforted and assured me

That in time my heart it will reward me

And that all will be revealed

So I’ve sat and I’ve watched an ice-age thaw

Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?

(2007: 280)

However, even as he dares to anticipate the possibility of a restorative and transformative desire and relationship, the image of Kant’s ‘starry skies’ is re-invoked. This is not as evidence of a deeper, spiritual reality but as a harbinger of destiny and death: ‘[o] we will know, won’t we?/The stars will explode in the sky/O but they don’t, do they?/Stars have their moment and then they die’ (2007: 280). The reassurance of knowing – and, with it, the possibility of some kind of fragile emotional certainty – is ransacked by the knowledge that many of the stars visible to us on earth have, in fact, died, even as we witness the ‘proof’ of their existence through their seemingly ‘eternal’ light.

‘Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?’

The title of this song powerfully evokes its emotional territory: a desert of unbearable loss that crackles in a heat of bitter despair. The opening lines of the song delineate the signifiers of this purgatory: ‘I remember a girl so very well/The carnival drums all mad in the air/Grim reapers and skeletons and a missionary bell/O where do we go now but nowhere’ (2007: 281). The woman he loved is now perpetually remembered as ‘a girl’ – anonymous and barely recollected. She is now no more than a ghost: a ‘ravaged avenger’ (2007: 281). ‘I remember a girl so bold and so bright/Loose-limbed and laughing and brazen and bare/Sits gnawing her knuckles in the chemical light/O where do we go now but nowhere’ (2007: 281). A funereal tempo requires the listener to meditate upon a litany of images of death, destruction and bitter retribution. A desire that had liberated is now reduced to a mechanical, penetrative sexual act: ‘[i]n a colonial hotel we fucked up the sun/And then we fucked it down again’ (2007: 281). The possibility of offering or receiving a transformative forgiveness is rendered impotent: ‘I turn the other cheek and you lay into that’ (2007: 281). A haunting one-line refrain punctuates the journey both of the song and of the album overall: ‘[o] wake up, my love, my lover, wake up’ (2007: 281). What possible meaning or future can be resurrected? The desolate female lover has contrived to create a perverse cake to ‘celebrate’ the spiritual death that now threatens to yoke them to a hellish infinity: ‘[y]ou come for me now with a cake that you’ve made/Ravaged avenger with a clip in your hair/Full of glass and bleach and my old razor blades/O where do we go now but nowhere’ (2007: 281). For the poet-narrator there can be no consolation, no imagined future. Like Coleridge’s mariner, whose transgressive act results in his eternal suffering, Cave’s anti-hero carries around his neck a memento mori of endless regret and guilt:

If I could relive one day of my life

If I could relive just a single one

You on the balcony, my future wife

O who could have known, but no one

O wake up, my love, my lover, wake up

O wake up, my love, my lover, wake up

(Cave 2007: 282)

‘West Country Girl’ and ‘Black Hair’

I am grouping these two songs together as their placement in the album’s narrative has a shared significance and is principally one of a kind of remembered invocation of the female lover. With ‘West Country Girl’ Cave offers not only a geographical context and past for the woman, but also a geography of desire and its encounter. With its imagery of ‘black cats’ and a ‘widow’s peak’ there are traditional associations with witches, witchcraft and the occult power of desire (2007: 283). Significantly, this is a desire that has filled him

[w]ith love, up to the brim, and killed me

And rebuilt me back anew

With something to look forward to

Well, who could ask much more than that?

(2007: 283)

This sense of a sensual and dangerously disruptive desire is echoed in the title and content of ‘Black Hair’, in which we discover that

[h]er hair was midnight black

And all her mystery dwelled within her black hair

[…]

All my tears cried against her milk-white throat

Hidden behind the curtain of her beautiful black hair

As deep as ink and black, black as the deepest sea

(2007: 284)

The powerful sensual imagery of the blackness of hair and the depths of the sea serve as potent reminders of the power implicit within both the female beloved and the desire she has invoked in him. This is a desire that threatens to ‘smother’ and drown our love-wrecked mariner.

In some ways these two songs, though clearly linked as a pair that speak to each other, are strangely and awkwardly positioned within the overall narrative of The Boatman’s Call. They have the function, perhaps, of the lover needing and taking one last, lingering look at the former object of his desire before consigning her and their relationship to the one-way journey of a ‘train to the West’, from which she (and they) can never return (2007: 284).

‘Idiot Prayer’

In this powerful song of utter alienation, Cave adopts another parallel persona for his journeying narrator. The opening verse of this song is characterized musically by the disruptive rhythm of a nightmarish fairground. A discordant violin wheezes malice and invites us into a world where the narrator faces imminent execution:

They’re taking me down, my friend

And as they usher me off to my end

Will I bid you adieu?

Or will I be seeing you soon?

If what they say around here is true

Then we’ll meet again

Me and you

My time is at hand, my dove

They’re gunna pass me to that house above

Is Heaven just for victims, dear?

Where only those in pain go?

Well it takes two to tango

We will meet again, my love

I know

(2007: 285)

The savagely interrogative irony of ‘[i]s Heaven just for victims, dear?’ communicates a conviction that it is his former lover who defines herself as the ‘victim’ of their doomed relationship (2007: 285). However, the speaker is equally sure that they ‘will meet again’ (2007: 285). This is a dark article of faith: a malevolent prophecy of their shared destiny and acknowledgement of their responsibility and guilt.

The song ends with a dedication of the song to the former beloved, albeit expressed with images of doves (traditionally associated with peace and, in Christian theology, the Holy Spirit), idiocy (madness) and damnation:

This prayer is for you, my love

Sent on the wings of a dove

An idiot prayer of empty words

Love, dear, is strictly for the birds

We each get what we deserve

My little snow white dove

Rest assured

(2007: 286)

As we approach the final two songs of the album and the last stages of its emotional, psychological and spiritual journey, it is as if a song such as ‘Idiot Prayer’ offers the distorting mirror image from a fairground hall of mirrors. This is a world of desire translated into death. Charon has brought us to another shore in which desire seems destined to carry, within its fragrant blossoms, the cankerous seeds of its own self-destruction and self-loathing.

‘Far From Me’

For you dear I was born

For you I was raised up

For you I have lived and for you I will die

For you I am dying now

You were my mad little lover

In a world where everybody fucks everybody else over

You are so

Far from me

So far from me

Way across some cold neurotic sea

Far from me

(2007: 287)

These are the opening lines of the album’s penultimate song. There is a violin accompaniment, which is conveyed by a desolate punctuating of anguished vibrato. In one sense the song might have made a perfect ‘bookend’ track to the album’s opening song. From the liberating experience of the sublime expressed in the spiritual sexuality of ‘Into My Arms’, like some postmodern Adam and Eve, the lovers are now cast out of that paradise. The haunting chords of a Hammond organ, resonant of both Gospel music and its secular cousin soul, bring contemporary neo-Gothic darkness to ‘light’ their path to – where? Nowhere.

The sole, bitterly earned, knowledge of love and life that has been secured through the album’s journey is a kind of anti-knowledge, that which might be encountered or experienced in a psycho-spiritual black hole:

There is no knowledge but I know it

There’s nothing to learn from that vacant voice

That sails to me across the line

From the ridiculous to the sublime

It’s good to hear you’re doing so well

But really can’t you find somebody else that you can ring and tell?

(2007: 287)

By the end of this song the two former lovers are as distant from each other as one horizon from another, as alienated from the album’s opening embrace as it is possible to be. Heaven has become hell and the space between the two is measured in the endless waves of recrimination, regret and loss in a ‘bleak and fishless sea’: ‘[f]ar from me’ (2007: 287).

A matter of faith: a postscript

In the final song of The Boatman’s Call there is a postscript to a journey that led from the banks of a river named desire to a distant shore of alienation and despair.

The song ‘Green Eyes’ (a term traditionally associated with jealousy) opens with a repeated image of physical desire: ‘[k]iss me again, re-kiss me and kiss me’, before immediately plunging into ‘[s]lip your frigid hands beneath my shirt’ (2007: 289). This is an experiential reality that is no longer characterized by mutual sexual desire and fulfilment. This is more of a bargain-basement soft-porn sex show: ‘[t]his useless old fucker with his twinkling cunt/Doesn’t care if he gets hurt’ (2007: 289). All hope of a love sublime lies tattered and discarded. We are left with a shaman’s relics of desire-as-death: ‘[i]f it were but a matter of faith/If it were measured in petitions and prayer/She would materialise, all fleshed out/But it is not, nor do I care’ (2007: 289). Whatever occult spirit of sexual gratification has been summoned up cannot atone for the death of a purer desire. ‘This morning will be wiser than this evening is’: however, it is wisdom purchased at the chilling and overwhelmingly destructive price of his soul (2007: 289). He asks only to be left to his ‘enemied dreams’ and that this fabricated occult-marionette of his former beloved should leave quietly (2007: 289). He will be left like a lonely, impotent Prospero on an island filled with the dark magic of remorse, regret and death.

Nick Cave’s album The Boatman’s Call is, I believe, one of the major achievements of his long and distinguished career as a singer-songwriter. The emotional and psycho-spiritual depth and expanse of its journey through an inner landscape of desire and its ultimate death is moving and darkly visionary. As the shadows of a real-life love affair haunt the cityscape of a pre-1989 Berlin, Cave shares his stigmata with a reckless but breath-taking courage and, in so doing, invokes a fragment of light that might, just might, survive. Can the trapeze hold the weight of such expectation?

References

Cave, Nick (1997), King Ink II, London: Black Spring.

———(2007), The Complete Lyrics 1978–2007, London: Penguin.

Wenders, Wim (1987), Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire, Berlin: Orion Classics.

Chapter 2

The Performance of Voice: Nick Cave and the Dialectic of Abandonment

Carl Lavery

[F]or all the serious discussion that Nick Cave’s music inspires these days, what tends to get a little overlooked, I reckon, is music itself.

(Walker 2009: 32)

The set-up

By concentrating on the two meanings inherent in the sense of sound – the fact that songs are material artefacts that simultaneously invite (and resist) linguistic interpretation – I want to use the ideas of Roland Barthes, Simon Frith and Jean-Luc Nancy to explore the duplicitous performance of voice in Nick Cave’s song ‘When I First Came to Town’ from the album Henry’s Dream (1992). In specific terms, I am concerned to show how Cave’s voice in that song stages a religious theme or trope that runs throughout much of his work, and which I refer to in this essay as the ‘dialectic of abandonment’. My argument is that Cave’s performance, and ultimately, of course, its significance, does not just remain at the level of the lyrics, but insinuates itself into the ear of the listener via the affect generated by the sounds themselves. By ‘touching’ our senses with his voice, Cave manages to put the listener in the same anxious and wretched position as the narrator of the song. We are ‘parachuted’ into the place