From Nick Cave to David Bowie

An Interview with Adam Steiner

Fabricated by the rabbi of Prague in the 16th century in defense of his persecuted community, in the realm of legends the Golem embodies the Faustian myth of the superhero forged by human sapience. It precedes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jack Parson’s Moonchild and science-fiction modern robots — artificial creatures that supersede their demiurge by spinning out of control. They rebel and lose trust in their superiors. Is this friction due to a lack of human empathy towards the new creature? According to one version of the Golem legend, men and women were upset and disturbed by his presence, unsensitive to his calls for love, unaware that he might be feeling emotions just like any other person. Wasn’t he made of soul and clay, after all? But the human beings chose to believe that he was just a thing, as is always the case when they’re dealing with something totally different and inexplicable. He had defended them from their persecutors but wasn’t welcomed anymore. Although this cruel reception hurt him badly, the Golem had no mouth to voice his opinions and no one could hear his anguished cry of pain and humiliation. He silently begged for help but they treated him as if he had been nothing more than a hunk of mud. This typical diffidence and lack of understanding of our species vis-à-vis what may seem odd at first glance underpins David Lynch’s film “The Elephant Man” as well as its stage versions in the Denver, Chicago and Broadway theatres interpreted by David Bowie in the role of Joseph Merrick — the real story of an extremely decent and vulnerable Englishman affected by neurofibromatosis in the second half of the nineteenth century, who was persecuted because of his diversity and external deformities.

In Silhouettes and Shadows, an analysis of David Bowie’s album “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”, author Adam Steiner emphasizes the painstaking research that went into Bowie’s reenactment on stage of Merrick’s physicality that had made him an outcast of society. The actor’s body and voice intonation had to be transformed in order to convey the gentleness of a delicate person who was nonetheless held at arm’s length from his so-called benefactors because of his disability and aesthetic deformities. Joseph Merrick was a man full of dignity thirsting for love and knowledge. However, just like the Golem, he got repaid with scorn.

Language doesn’t help either in situations of loss. In a collection of conversations with Irish writer Seán O’Hagan called “Faith, Hope and Carnage”, Nick Cave has no qualms about exposing the failure of language in the face of catastrophe. In his opinion there is a great deficit in the power of words around grief. As a consequence grieving people tend to remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts. In Darker with the Dawn, a book exploring Nick Cave’s life in music, Adam Steiner convincingly explains that with the album “Ghosteen” (published in the wake of his son’s passing) Cave succeeds in moving beyond the factuality of mourning and loss. Is “Ghosteen” music suited for a healing process leading to some kind of awareness that death may not be the end, after all?

This last one is just one of many questions I’ve been meaning to ask Steiner regarding his fascinating work on the artistic accomplishments achieved by David Bowie and Nick Cave during their extraordinary careers.

Adam, let us start with some references to John Lennon’s legacy and unfortunate assassination. In “The Day John Kennedy Died”, a track from his album The Blue Mask, Lou Reed sings that he remembers he was upstate in a bar, as events concerning the JFK assassination were unfolding. The team from the local university was playing football on TV. The screen went dead, and the announcer reported that the president had been shot. In real life, however, there had been no live coverage of any football match on 11/22/63. The song was written in 1982, two years after the murder of John Lennon in New York City, and Lou Reed was probably blending in a single narrative recollections of the Dallas presidential assassination with recollections of the crime perpetrated by Mark Chapman against the former Beatle in New York: the day John Lennon died news about the shooting was indeed broken to the American public while everyone was watching Monday Night Football. In your book Silhouettes and Shadows you point out how Bowie’s September 1980 lyrics “put a bullet in my brain/and it makes all the papers” from “It’s No Game (№1)” seemed eerily prophetic as to the crime that would unfold two months later, on 8 December 1980, when Lennon was killed. At the time Bowie was performing The Elephant Man in New York. Despite its enormous success further reruns of the show had to be cancelled because Lennon’s murderer Mark Chapman may have attended one of the performances and may even have included David Bowie in a list of subsequent targets. These two artists have shared very creepy stuff indeed, hinting at each other’s work in their music. Bowie and Lennon joined forces on their №1 hit “Fame”. There’s an obvious nod to Lennon’s “A Day in the Life” in Bowie’s “Young Americans”, and Bowie covered “Across the Universe” as well as “Mother” in his repertoire, just to make a few examples.

“Scream Like A Baby” is probably Scary Monsters’ creepiest track. What’s going on in there? What are they doing to Sam, the song’s protagonist? He’s insulted, his sense of dignity is debased by a dehumanizing totalitarian regime resorting to lobotomy, concentration camps and MKUltra-style chemical therapies. In your analysis are you perhaps implying that the singer at a certain point admits to be surrendering Sam to the thought police in an act of treason? Or am I getting it wrong?

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with your question! At first listen it’s a straight song that plunges the listener headlong into fractured visions of an authoritarian crackdown. Bowie’s imagery speaks to torture, incarceration and persecution — all themes that remain as relevant now as they were in 1980 when he wrote the song. Bowie is somewhat oblique in the situation he describes, it’s never entirely clear who, or rather what people, are being targeted and singled-out. I think there is a strong allusion to an attack on homosexual people, and it is here that Bowie indulges his reading from George Orwell’s novel 1984 but also Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. In contrast to Orwell, who was a veteran of The Spanish Civil War and after being shot in the throat on the front line fled the country when Russian agents (former allies) turned against the Spanish rebels, Koestler lived within the communist state of Hungary. He was interred in prison and endured extended periods of interrogation. So while it’s not to say that Koestler has more skin in the game, he certainly had a deeper understanding of the psychology and situation of watching one’s own country succumb to capital-C Communist takeover, a further definition of the revolution betrayed.

Consider also the chorus line from “Up The Hill Backwards” quoting the memoirs of DaDa artist, Hans Richter, which refers to the “vacuum of freedom” left in the wake of collapsed regimes. Combined with an overarching sense of fear and dread across the Scary Monsters album Bowie sees his protagonists trapped in ever decreasing circles, their fates embedded in another nightmare vision of state terrorism enacted upon the citizen, and the constant tension expressed through a downward spiral of individual corruption.

Going deeper inside the themes of that Bowie looks back again to Orwell and past resonances with songs such as “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)”, he touches on the idea of forbidden love — thwarted. This in itself is romantic and is almost indulgent and nostalgia when it becomes a song about a couple who are separated and become further distant and fragmented when betrayal is introduced. As in 1984 it is suggested that this might be mutual exploitation, but either way, Bowie revels in the confusion of who is Sam, what exactly happened between the couple, and where did they end up? We are left with the same confusion and lingering doubt as his characters — is the voice of the song the victim more deceived, or the traitor who is alive but left dead and vacant inside?

Each episode in the second season of the 1997 TV series The Hunger, an erotic horror anthology, was introduced by host David Bowie who commented on topics related to power, sex and lust from a very personal point of view. His musings may have constituted a recipe for fame and success. The first rule is that if you wish to rise above the masses, you must separate yourself from them. Forget about the truth. “We must protect ourselves from the truth to be blind to it, if you see what I mean”, says Bowie in The Hunger. His character is obsessed by the need to create. This is why an artist will always be fascinated by the artificial, he concludes, but artists must find someone to show their creation to. Without an audience art remains a self-gratifying but ultimately unfulfilling act. Art is an act of self-creation that ultimately exists only in the eye of the beholder. Without a public it is sterile. Bowie’s comments in The Hunger, in my opinion, resonate with Nick Cave’s belief articulated in Faith, Hope and Carnage that live concerts are something that unites and raises the collective soul in a communal sense of awe. Both artists believe in the power of performance, but I somehow detect more optimism in Cave than there is in Bowie when it comes to acknowledging the transformative power of music. Who, among these two immense artists, would you say has a more positive approach?

I found the intro skits slightly shy-making, but they are of the time and it’s shows like that which bleed into the hack-philosophy of True Detective (season 1!) which we all know and love. The idea of being ‘blinded by the truth’ sounds potent but is, for me, also naively aphoristic. Certainly, it fits with Bowie’s aesthetic of 1. Outside with body horror and art-crime brought front and centre chiming with the death of the old Millennium and the rise of the YBA (Young British Artists) and their nihilistic streak, die schöne Leiche (a beautiful corpse) ironic detachment which elevated serial killers to celebrity status.

Bowie was (is!) an entertainer, first and foremost, albeit one who sought to push the boundaries of music, while drawing on a universe of ideas — he was totally unique and individual in how that was realised. The great power of that was encouraging other people to realise their own individual path to creativity — don’t ‘be more Bowie’ as some self-help schmucks state — the implicit message — is ‘discover what it means to be more you.’ That’s a great truth that can only embolden/embiggen everyone. So, with Bowie, there is a lot of negativity and doubt in his visions of apocalypse, but as an influential artist he has left his mark on almost every area of pop culture, where until very recently, Cave has always been relegated to a controversial gothy, heroin-addict fringe figure (that’s not a criticism; in fact I think it’s more of a comment on how his persona trapped and pigeonholed him).

By contrast I think Cave’s mission is more singular — certainly at the moment with sky-high ticket prices and Cave Things merchandise (ironically iconic tat) there is more of a hype machine industry behind some of his actions and pronouncements. Cave wants the rock show revival thing but I don’t think people are necessarily having a ‘deeper’ time at a Cave show (though the Bad Seeds are excellent live) than they are at a rave or one of many other collective group experiences. There is no great conversion except to the cause of Cave. However, I should stipulate that I think Cave’s saddest most sincere songs relating to loss from Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen carry a different weight within the setlist. It’s not just more profound because there is autobiography in there; all songwriters carry that weight simply by putting an idea down to tape/paper. When it comes to songs like “I Need You” and “Waiting For You” there is a further kind of resonance for people reflecting on their own experiences of loss –that’s a fantastic thing, which I felt myself.

Ultimately, no-one is going to the Cave shows to “be redeemed” as Hazel Motes says, and I’m not sure that’s even what Cave wants. Where I feel he excels, at this time, is in making everyone feel welcome, not having to play that alt-rock junkie god (he has spoken of his previous ‘contempt for life’); people lay hands on him, and he doesn’t turn away from that humanity; he seems to embrace it, one could say that is either mellowing or simply growing into a more mature view of the world, but it’s a great, fun spectacle all the same.

While Bowie’s repertoire is more concerned with space travel and science fiction, Cave’s originality as a rock musician consists in his willingness to absorb the challenge of physics — as you deftly put it in Darker with the Dawn. In “Higgs Boson Blues” we find Cave driving to the CERN research laboratory based in Geneva, a particle accelerator that could revolutionize the world of science in the years to come. How does it make you feel to think that everything we know today, tomorrow will be obsolete? From “Anthrocene” to his nod to Robert Johnson’s pact with the devil contained in “Higgs Boson Blues”’, what do you make of Nick Cave’s interest in the laws of physics?

I think it’s an interesting angle that so many people consider Cave a stark and severe traditionalist. Where so many of his themes gravitate around earthly concerns of love, murder and death he makes a lot of space in his recent albums to talk about the relationships between astral ‘bodies’, stars and the universe at large. These are familiar romanticized tropes, like the moon and sun, but where someone like Bowie is keener to embrace sci-fi ideas of space travel and alien life, Cave is an artist who acknowledges the challenge of space as the next frontier of beauty, wonder and uncertainty. In his songs, space imagery presents a new kind of mysticism, a familiar place of unknowing.

Would you agree with me that Nick Cave is attracted to microcosms? One song in particular — “God Is in the House” — tells the story of a Twinpeakish town where everything on the surface appears to be running smoothly and cozily, while you can feel the monsters lurking in the dark. In his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, Nick Cave reaches Faulknerian levels in his description of an isolated community’s fanaticism and narrowmindedness. And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave’s second novel, are two different “creatures” altogether. Stylistically and content wise there exists between them the same gulf separating The Boatman’s Call ballads from the guitar solo in “No Pussy Blues” at the height of the Grinderman period. There is no Faulknerian profligacy of words in The Death of Bunny Munro because here reality is portrayed as it actually is. Bunny is an abhorrent womanizer totally dominated by his sexual impulses. He and his son roam far and wide through the streets of Brighton in a beat-up Punto because Bunny is a beauty cosmetics salesman, the ideal job for a man who is constantly drunk, horny and hallucinating. On the road they embark on all sorts of picaresque adventures where the father’s alleged magnetism and his improbable seduction techniques are increasingly put through the wringer. As he becomes increasingly disgusting, we as male readers embarrassingly begin to recognize ourselves and our own shortcomings in the protagonist’s delusions of grandeur. Deep down inside aren’t we all a bunch of pathetic Bunny Munros? But the good news is that Benny’s son learns from his far from irreprehensible father how to handle life’s blows with an invincible optimism. Eventually, whether we like it or not, we may even end up having a soft spot for Bunny Munro. The book written by Nick Cave about this impenitent sinner is not something you just read; you devour it like there’s no tomorrow. Such is its beauty. Brighton, in The Death of Bunny Munro, represents yet another microcosm in my opinion.

I think like a lot of storytelling musicians, Cave allows for these microcosms to encapsulate broader concerns. As you say, “God Is in The House” is a stab at small town (and small-minded) America, of which there exist thousands of other similar towns in huge broad swathes the length and breadth of the land, such that they become almost interchangeable. But through this singular example he hits out at broader pejorative morality and the crunch point where organized religion meets with social constructs of the wider community; from this Cave offers us both the bigger picture but also the fate of lone individuals.

Bunny is a tragi-comic character and he speaks to a certain kind of male truth. Back in 2009 Cave called this lustful, objectifying gaze and sometimes narrow thinking around sex the reptilian side of our natures; what others would nowadays define as a toxic aspect of the male character. This allows Cave to indulge in extreme attitudes and more purple prose akin to his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel. Neither book is a measured and taut (edited) novel, but a pile-on of words at play. I’m happy to call this a prose style, it’s something that appeals to me in a vein similar to Finnegan’s Wake, excess and obsession carrying one another. Cave gives vent to his character’s deep troubles, and in doing so vents some of his own concerns. I find it very readable, but nowhere near as shocking or stylistically deft as a book like Nabokov’s Lolita. In that sense Cave finds and creates easy targets among the strictures of small town malaise but doesn’t necessarily penetrate the psyche of what makes little people in little places endure such quiet desperation, like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.

I think where someone like Cave who is a definite loner, in my view, generates great creative friction is in making himself the eternal alien. Always set out side and away from the mainstream, his artistic tastes can be conservative but often range into the extreme, so when it comes to the Australian witnessing America and casting himself into the perpetual weirdness of British life on a small island, things jump out at him that others would miss and his jilted but ultimately sympathetic status among us gives him some unique insight.

“I stepped gently from my trailer into a ferocious storm. / It was 1998 at Glastonbury on muddy Worthy Farm. / The artists’ trailers were arranged in a neat square, / That boxed in a vast flooded slough. Thunder crashed. / It was pure mythic Greek. You could drown a cow.” Though it may sound like an excerpt taken from a Bram Stoker or a Stephen King novel, this is actually the beginning of a poem — published in his third book The Sick Bag Song — written by Nick Cave about his encounter with Bob Dylan. The poem continues with a depiction of Nick Cave dreaming each night “of that slow vampiric hand / extending from its awful cuff.” Note the emphasis on the ghastly weather in the stanza as if Nick Cave had deliberately borrowed the typical atmosphere of a Nosferatu novel, with the breath of a storm approaching while temperatures drop and zombies come alive. In his third literary endeavor Cave reminisces with heavy theological undertones about the time he met Bob Dylan in person, and how it took him three years to recover from that momentous experience. Both artists — in their lyrics — infuse biblical imagery with religious doubts. One small example: in “Brompton Oratory” Cave sings about “stone apostles”. Is it because they were numb to Christ’s message and had failed to recognize Him? In Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat” from the Oh Mercy album the song’s protagonist is a menacing figure who swears on the Bible but then disappears taking with him the singer’s sweetheart without a parting word, because “every man’s conscience is vile and depraved” and “you cannot depend on it to be your guide.” “Brompton Oratory” and “Man in the Long Black Coat” represent to me two symmetrical inquiries as to whether the Church still has a meaning today or whether things went wrong somewhere along the way. Has it ever occurred to you that Nick Cave might be tempted to transform himself into a religious proselytizer following in the footsteps of Dylan’s immersion in Christianity in the late Seventies?

I think Cave has always entertained a profound curiosity with Christian religion, particularly the human conception of God and how we engage with him/her/it. From his childhood in the choir at the local cathedral, Cave went on to wrestle with the question of faith, something never settled or fully defined. This vagueness make sense for the individual especially when it is expressed through art, the open-ended lyricism of songs, but it is less approachable for the outsider trying to understand exactly what Cave believes.

I think the stone apostles could represent both an affirmation on the endurance of faith — there is always a church to visit, Christians to meet with or even just the opportunity for prayer — all of this entertains the notion of a God. But equally, the stone apostles and the building of Brompton Oratory could be a calcified, ‘stuck’ image of religion as existing solely within a building or an organised, systematic religion with strict attendances and entrance policies. Cave embraces the idea of highly subjective faith.

So coming back to Dylan, I don’t see much to compare their religious paths, except that Dylan went full ‘strict’ Christian with albums like Slow Train Coming which Cave referenced as an influence. But for Cave, it’s always been an affirming flame, and I do admire his very personal, quite private approach to religious belief. Even if it does sometimes seem cobbled out of Flannery O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood. The protagonist Hazel Motes is a returning war veteran and proto-punk, stating his nihilistic belief in a “Church of Christ without Christ”, faith without orthodoxy; as well as defying the idea of final grace and forgiveness by God: “you think you been redeemed!” It’s a fantastic book; I can see why it has inspired some of Cave’s own ‘alt-preacher’ status.

Bowie and Cave share a deep involvement with the former city of West Berlin as well as with the biblical episode of Lazarus’ resurrection. “Lazarus” is Bowie’s haunted farewell song or self-epitaph. More affectionately, in “DIG! LAZARUS, DIG!!!” Cave’s Lazarus is dubbed “Larry” as Larry/Lazarus aimlessly wanders from one city to another without finding solace or peace of mind. Please forgive my bluntness: may I say once and for all that there’s no comparison in terms of artistic accomplishment between Cave’s production in West Berlin and Bowie’s so-called Berlin Trilogy? Lodger is something different, but Low and Heroes belong in my appreciation to some of the highest pinnacles ever achieved in popular music.

Yes. I think the question here is that both artists used Lazarus as the man risen from the dead, not without disruption and even regret; to be torn away from peace at last and a few more steps apart from reaching heaven. But for Cave it has religious connotations, for Bowie it’s more existential — death deferred as overlong life is eked out, a thinning of the thread.

I think Berlin was huge for Cave and the Bad Seeds as compared to London they stumbled into a genuine avant-garde scene and it emboldened them to know they are not alone and gave them a renewed sense of freedom to make these darkly romantic records that also rub against the grain of popular music. Bowie found Berlin a step away from the intense glare of stardom, it was a huge reset and clearing his head of the cosmic junk fantasy of Ziggy Stardust he could see a more forward-looking and contemporary musical direction that played with electronica and experimentation, where before he was simply playing at rock and roll through a similarly romantic lens as Cave but this time warped through the prism of dystopia.

One last question, Adam. Do you believe in signs and coincidences? In the last page of Darker with the Dawn you mention the serendipitous appearance of ladybirds out of nowhere in both your daily routine as well as in Cave’s chronicle of how the album Ghosteen came about. Could you explain this sort of Jungian synchronicity that happened to you in your personal life while you were writing your book about Nick Cave?

I do now — Nick Cave converted me, of course! The ladybirds thing is a strange and idiosyncratic coincidence. Though it leaves me with no faith in fate or willed incidents; it was a unique thing, and I chose to enshrine it in the book, sharing something of myself. I would understand if people thought it was forced, or contrived; I almost left it out for fear of this perception. But it occurred to me, creativity is about taking some risk, saying the unsayable and putting your thoughts/expressions into the hands of others, after which they’re no longer yours, per se. So while it was natural to be protective, guarded even, I realized it was a mistake, and an act of sincerity against myself, that something that did happen to me should be left out. I don’t need people to buy into the event for it to carry weight and meaning. Without trying to sound Cave-ean, there was some mild joy in grappling and embracing this weird moment and putting it into the book for that very reason. There’s a human being behind all of this stuff, and while it is the work that must face forward, I as a reader love to see something, even just a glimpse, of the person behind the divine work, to shake the illusions but also to share in the ‘magic’ of creating things.

Adam Steiner writes books, poetry, and journalism based in London and Coventry (see https://adamsteiner.uk/)