Nick Cave‘s crooked journey from vampiric drug-addled iconoclast to something akin to national treasure in both his native Australia and adopted home in dear old Blighty is as remarkable as it is unlikely.
An uncompromising force of nature, his ability to deliver work of consistently high calibre over a 40-year-plus career makes him an artist worthy of serious analysis.
Such talents are rare not just in rock music, but in the arts in general and often come hand in hand with a self-destructive bent.
That Cave not only survives, but thrives, is a testament to his powers of re-invention and genuine, some might say obsessive, devotion to his craft.
But even the Nick Caves of this world do not spring fully formed onto an unsuspecting public and that’s where Adam Steiner comes in.
Over the course of 250 meticulously researched pages, on Darker With The Dawn Steiner takes us down Nick’s cracked and jagged path.
He explores the formative influences, controversies, collaborations, crises and creative inspirations that shaped the man and his ‘Songs of Love and Death‘.
Told over three books – Dusk, Midnight and Dawn – Steiner’s book follows the singer-songwriter’s origins in Wangaratta through to his emergence onto the Melbourne post-punk scene and travels to London, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Brighton.
Structured thematically, rather than chronologically, Steiner’s work explores Cave’s career through the key songs that form the spine of his back catalogue.
We’re talking Tupelo, Deanna, From Her To Eternity, The Mercy Seat, Into My Arms, Push The Sky Away, Red Right Hand and more.
From these defining compositions he branches off to examine the veins, bones, blood – there’s a lot of blood – and connective tissue that make up his extraordinary body of work.
Religion looms large of course, along with Elvis as both artist and myth in the mind of the songwriter – the ultimate rock-n-roll messiah.
Like Presley, Steiner shows how Cave was drawn to Black music, spirituals and The Blues.
Cave would mine The Blues for both its rhythm and melancholy and drawing from artists like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.
This would leave the white middle class Australian prone to accusations of cultural appropriation, one of many charges that would dog the functioning addict over the opening phase of his career.
Steiner outlines how Cave’s preoccupation with death and misery opened him up to censure for misanthropy.
Worse still his graphic depictions of murder and extreme sexual violence towards women would lead some to label him a misogynist.
His defence, that his male characters often come off just as badly, or worse, than his female protagonists does not entirely convince.
More in his favour is the sheer audacity and vitality of the music, its fierce intelligence and refusal to bow to the prevailing trends of the day.
Cave, the author notes, initially cultivated and embraced his bad boy image.
He tapped into the outlaw, larrikin spirit of Ned Kelly – a modern day Wild Colonial Boy rebel, kicking against the pricks.
Much of Cave’s imagery pushes the boundaries of taste and public decency.
Certainly his motley cast of twisted ne’er do wells, Stagger Lee and Jack The Ripper among them, are not the types you’d bring home to mother.
Like the Penny Dreadfuls of old it exposes you to the horror – the black mirror – you don’t want to look at, but can’t tear your eyes away from.
Steiner sums it up well in his assessment of another seminal early period work, The Carny.
“Finding imperfect beauty in the fucked up, the flawed and the freak would inspire Cave in his musical efforts to bring the circus to town and make it his creative home.”
Behind the shock value and pulp novel characterisations, the young Cave does have profound things to say about love, faith and man’s struggle against a vengeful god and cruel unforgiving world.
As his songwriting matures, according to Steiner, the avid Bible reader’s tone shifts around the time of the lovelorn Boatman’s Call album from the tooth and claw of the Old Testament to signs of something lighter more hopeful and expansive in the New.
While tragedy – most affectingly the death of his son Arthur – continues to bleed into his work, Cave widens his palette, battling cynicism with an insatiable curiosity about the world and our place within it.
“Cave’s recent lyrics have become more fragmented and impressionistic reflecting an increasingly complex view of the world.“
Throughout his career, this book shows, that Cave is not only a prolific contributor to culture, but also a voracious consumer of it.
He devours books, works of art, architecture and film and then expurgates what he’s learned through the filter of his own wild, surreal and captivating imagination.
Never shy of overreaching, Steiner unveils the broad sweep of Cave’s ambition – his attempts to portray the full compass of human experience.
“Cave’s songs merge the cycle of love, death and birth into a single pulse, a relentless, unstoppable wave.”
Steiner’s scholarly, but engagingly written, tome provides a vivid insight into a performer skilled in creating and fomenting his own mystique.
It shows how he develops from contemptuous, junkie, railing and sneering at the world, to a cleaned up, respected – if not entirely respectable – musician and man of letters.
It’s a book for those of us who enjoy scanning printed lyrics on albums and finding out the guiding lights and influences that formed our most treasured artists.
And if along the way we’re inspired to try the poetry of Larkin and Donne, or the novels of Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje – to name but a few of Cave’s faves – well, that’s no bad thing either.
