Music Arcades: Nick Cave: The Secret Life of the Love Song

In which our Nick takes the opportunity to add to his own mythology with some carefully selected and crafted citations. Don't get me wrong, I do absolutely believe that NC has ingested the King James Version of the Bible every bit as closely as he makes out: his vocabulary and turn of phrase bear this out. But the close-mic'ed recording of him lighting a cigarette at the beginning of the first of these two lectures is as clear a signal as you could ask for that this is another performance for him.

One of the people Nick fails to cite is Stephin Merritt. In his defence, he was speaking before the release of 69 Love Songs. And Stephin does cite Nick — indeed this very lecture — in an interview with the Love Song. It was a few weeks after that interview was published that I got my hands on a copy of this CD. Coincidence? I think not.

So Nick gives us some exotic literary history with an account of Portuguese saudade and Lorca's lecture on duende, before deftly observing that little contemporary rock music has what it takes to deal in duende. But the holy trinity of Bob, Neil and Van, they have plenty of duende. So do Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. No prizes for guessing the songwriters in whose company Nick would like to be considered, then. But lest we leave it at that and just write him off as another wrinkly old past-his-potent-prime white dude, Nick paves the same path that Paul Morley would later follow in Words and Music and puts Kylie on a pedestal. For Morley it was Can't Get You Out of my Head that captured authentic essence of pop (with extra Kraftwerk bits), but Cave opts for Better the Devil You Know, which he says embodies raw spirit of desperate, quasi-masochistic longing inside its sugar coating. Or something like that. It's a single 45-minute track on the CD, and I'm not going hunting for the exact quote.

Along the way, in the first lecture, Nick weaves in 'unplugged' versions of five of his love songs. I was just thinking how perfectly the whole thing comes across like a press pack for a Sunday newspaper profile of Dr Cave (yes, I thought so) when the significance of one slight change in the lyrics of People Ain't No Good struck me. On the Boatman's Call version, Nick sings "We'd buy the Sunday newspapers / and never read a single word." On this version, it's the more respectful "We'd buy the Sunday newspapers / and never breathe a single word." Coincidence? I think not.

The second lecture has slightly less performance about it, and a more direct focus. It was recorded for Radio 3 Religious Services. I've noticed people don't dick about when they're on Radio 3: they anticipate that the audience will include people who really know about the issue at stake. So tread very carefully if you're going to strike a pose, because the audience will see through it. Better to play it straight. Nick talks about his father's love of literature, of the Psalms and the Book of Job. One of the first apps I put on my iPhone eleven months ago was the King James Version of the Bible. I set about reading the Book of Job, one or two chapters a week, during Quaker meetings. I got to about Chapter 7 and ground to a halt. So I don't really know about the issue at stake.