Nick Cave: Sinner Saint: the True Confessions by Mat Snow

Author:Mat Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780859658805
Publisher: Plexus Publishing Ltd.

Nick Cave on the road from Rio to São Paulo, 16 February 1994.

After he fled Berlin and returned to London in 1988, he touched bottom.

Even Mick Harvey, his oldest friend and the only member of the Birthday Party to join the Bad Seeds, said that Cave’s drug abuse was finally taking its toll on his work: ‘And that’s when it had to stop, because up until then it hadn’t.’ Convicted of possessing a gram of heroin he finally went into rehab in Somerset and emerged claiming, incorrectly as it turned out, that he had kicked the habit.

Rehabilitation of a different kind followed. Critics across the board began to praise not just his music but his writing, sometimes even his ‘vision’. Culled from his interest in the Old Testament, the Delta landscape of the old blues musicians (which to this day he has never visited) his love of melodrama and his painstakingly acquired grasp of arcane vocabulary, Cave’s lyrics and prose were nothing if not different. A collection of his writings, named after the Birthday Party’s song ‘King Ink’, played well mainly with rock cognoscenti. But the novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, which came out in hardback in 1989, won acclaim from reviewers unaccustomed to lauding the literary pretensions of rock star junkies. The Daily Telegraph, no less, declared: ‘it is as if a Faulkner novel had been crossed with Whistle Down the Wind and narrated by a stoned blues musician.’ The Daily Mail, mouthpiece of middle England, conceded that the reader would ‘be startled by the scale of its originality’. The Scotsman observed that ‘it reads aloud beautifully’ and concluded that Cave had written ‘a genuinely nasty book’. The tale of Euchrid Eucrow, a bastard mute slowly sinking into a swamp somewhere in the Deep South, recounting his woes in passionately archaic idioms, seemed an unlikely candidate for the bestseller lists. But, helped by numerous public readings from its author, it went on to sell over 100,000 copies worldwide.

While Cave’s career at last moved steadily forward, his life careered less steadily to and fro. In 1989 when the Bad Seeds played São Paulo, he met a fashion stylist, Viviane Carneiro, and fell more or less instantly in love. Two years later he was living in a suburb of the city, unable or unwilling to learn Portuguese, and about to become a father. So far as the world knew, the child Luke, born to Nick and Viviane in May 1991, was his first. In reality, Cave already had by another Australian woman, a son, Jethro, who had arrived just ten days previously at the end of April. How Cave juggled these affairs he prefers not to say but by the mid-1990s he was living back in London with the two boys, (‘both of them are wonderful kids’) and, somewhere in the vicinity, the two mothers. Cave’s talent for reconciling opposites in his work evidently held him in good stead when it came to managing this awkward situation. Jethro now

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