During recording sessions for Skeleton Tree, the 16th album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave’s wife, Susie Bick, and their 16-year-old son, Earl, enter the studio space. We accompany them through a series of vaulted doors, a nervous step behind. As a final door swings open, Bick passes through. Earl reaches out and touches her long dark hair, letting his hand slide down her back before releasing her safely.
Only last year Earl’s twin brother, Arthur, fell to his death from a cliff in Brighton, after taking LSD for the first time. Cave and his family were pulled into a vortex, the dread of parents everywhere. Six months later the singer did what all people have to do: carry on as normal and go back to work. But there was added weight: whatever he did as a recording artist would become a performance for the whole world.
Cave commissioned an old friend from his Melbourne hometown, the director Andrew Dominik, to film the making of Skeleton Tree in what has become the black-and-white documentary One More Time With Feeling. If he had paid a million dollars, that money would be nothing for that one moment capturing his son’s loving and protective gesture. Earl Cave, brief as his appearance in the film may be, is quite a boy; no doubt his brother Arthur was too.
When it comes to the death of a child, no language is enough. We ache when we see it happen to other people, unable to soothe a friend let alone a stranger, shamed by inadequate condolences – perhaps even frightened the event could contaminate our own lives with some terrible form of radioactivity.
In One More Time With Feeling, Cave tells a distantly intense, fable-like set of stories in the third person about a man dealing with grief, before asking – with just a hint of anger as well as devastation – “When did I become an object of pity?”
As he observes, riffing on black holes that can swallow our universe entire: “It’s the invisible things that have so much mass.”
The world witnessed this tragedy, at first through news reports and then during the inquest into Arthur’s death. But public and private have been welded nowhere more so than in Australia, where screenings of the film have assumed the form of a communal ritual, as we absorbed Cave’s personal and creative response.
Skeleton Tree, the album, is more than a song cycle; it’s a requiem mass winging its way out of Cave’s unconscious. The opening and closing tracks, Jesus Alone and Skeleton Tree, centre on variations of the vocal exhortation “I am calling you”. The former offers stream-of-consciousness imagery and self-recrimination – “You’re an old man sitting by the fire, you’re the mist rolling off the sea, you’re a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don’t you see?” The final call in Skeleton Tree goes out over the ocean on a Sunday morning, resolving itself with a reluctant goodbye that puts one in mind of a farewell song like Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: “I call out, I call out, right across the sea, but the echo comes back empty, yeah nothing is for free.”
There’s a long camera shot towards the end of One More Time With Feeling that leaves the studio as the penultimate song, Distant Sky, continues like a lullaby. The Danish soprano Else Torp duets with Cave, singing that “soon the children will be rising” though “this is not for our eyes”. The camera ascends over the streets of London aglitter at night, then further up and out into the stratosphere as we see the planet and the sun, as distant and cool as a star. It’s a vision – and a gift from Dominik to Cave – that evokes the transmigration of a soul into eternity.
Cave’s music has always been not for everyone: too dark, too alternately demonic or densely romantic; too literate, strange and grandiose. But he has continued to move forward, to stake a place beside his heroes Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. The connection between Skeleton Tree and Bowie’s stunning pagan adieu, Blackstar, is impossible to avoid; though one might just as easily refer to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs of the Death of Children) and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks to begin to understand where Skeleton Tree sits as a masterpiece of grief and beauty.
Yes, the subject matter is heavy but the results are divine. There’s amusic-of-the-spheres quality to the songs on Skeleton Tree, a feeling it is all happening in a very big room indeed. Rumours that Brian Eno might have produced this album, had not the circumstances around it changed so dramatically, make sense in terms of the ambience and experimentation we hear. 2013’s Push the Sky Away – previously the fastest-selling album of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ career – already benchmarked this new sonic direction. Skeleton Tree outlines it in bold, deepening the same mood of cosmic space.
Cave’s songwriting partner, the violinist and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, is critical to this atmosphere, and their collaborative work on a plethora of film soundtracks – including Lawless, and Dominik’s study of fame and death, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – has sharpened their textural palette. The songs on Skeleton Tree sound like art-house films in themselves; magnificent pained eerie texts the likes of which only a symbolist mystic such as the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky might have fully imagined for the cinema.
Tape loops, synthesiser, Wurlitzer, sound treatments: Ellis is all over this album, from a fleeting and destabilising hint of static buzzing on Magneto (did you hear that?), to what sound like delicate, vaguely oriental wind chimes, sparse as a sun shower, across the gorgeous Rings of Saturn. You wanted cold and scary, Ellis can provide a pulse; you need heart-rending and tender, he has an arrangement for a string quartet that he can just as easily turn to an icy throb. Patches and colours, subtextural shifts, surface ruptures, his weeping and warm violin … Ellis is here, there, everywhere.
With his wild beard and bug-black sunglasses, he emerges in One More Time With Feeling as some kind of rock’n’roll warlock, though his broad Australian accent and humour are as down to earth as fish and chips. Cave hangs on to him as he would a lifeboat at sea, acknowledging it is Ellis who is “holding everything together” in the studio. It’s a sweet thing to see him him make Cave laugh. A later glimpse of the same bantering warmth between Cave, Bick and Earl holds up the encouraging promise that mighty works of art might not be the only bridge out of grief, and that a few intimate words and a joke shared can change lives too.
Dominik’s film tips its hat to the classic Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, its noir sheen filmed in deep 3D and 2D black-and-white by the Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie. Like Cave, Dominik is the product of a Crystal Ballroom art scene where the likes of Tarkovsky, early Terrence Malick and Sam Peckinpah provided an accompaniment to a culture of heroin, transcendence and psychological violence that flourished in Melbourne in the late 1970s and 80s.
Like Cave, Dominik left that scene behind and evolved beyond all expectation. Both remain, however, archetypal Orphic creatures born from that era: death-fascinated, savage, elegant in their aesthetic tastes, engaged in bringing their underworld journeys to the surface, and drawn, repeatedly, to the mutable nature of identity under pressure. They make a perfect combination here.
Naturally enough, One More Time With Feeling shows Cave in a wounded state. Along with Ellis, the rest of the Bad Seeds bring their A game to the table in support. There has always been something redolent of the great American westerns inside the European image of the Bad Seeds; charming, dandyish villains and rock’n’roll gunslingers upon whom fate has forced a noble mission.
With nary a word said by them, the band’s heroism is self-evident in their concentration and their playing. As on Push the Sky Away, the drummer, Thomas Wydler, is outstanding, a tense and cat-agile player with a jazzy style that speaks back to Cave’s words. George Vjestica, formerly of Groove Armada, brings light and melody where other guitarists may have tried to lock in on the Bad Seeds’ darkness and taste for turmoil. Jim Sclavunos, a foot-pedal-snapping powerhouse drummer trained in the New York “No Wave” school of avant-rock, restricts himself to vibes, some haunting backing vocals and minimal percussion, transforming an apocalyptic song like Anthrocene with little more than urgent wooden tapping across a metal drum rim. The bassist, Martyn Casey, once upon a time the rhythmic flight inside The Triffids’ Wide Open Road and the evil heat driving Bad Seeds songs like Stagger Lee, stands here as the band’s aching heartbeat.
In short, the members of the Bad Seeds play with tremendous intuition and innovation around Cave’s often dense and dreamlike spiels. Much has been made of Cave’s abandonment of conventional narrative in his approach to lyrics over the past decade, a notion he discusses again in One More Time With Feeling: “I don’t actually believe that is what life is like, that there is a pleasing narrative.” But Skeleton Tree is an album saturated in words and phrases that startle the imagination as Cave leans evermore towards the improvised and the unedited to open up his writing and tap the unconscious.
The general understanding is that Cave wrote these songs before Arthur’s death, and had already been working on demos with Ellis to give them shape. Cave is nonetheless open that “something about Arthur” infuses everything that occurs on Skeleton Tree.
When he says, “I think I’m losing my voice,” the confession comes across as an existential trauma rather than concern about his technical ability. There is a feeling that the death of his son has near-destroyed him, yet the collective achievement of the work shows he has never shone stronger. On the love song I Need You, the lyrical focus barely gives pause for a breath to be taken. Yet Cave’s dry, thinned-out voice gives the song the quality of a bluegrass spiritual, a lesson he may have absorbed from working with the great Ralph Stanley on the Lawless soundtrack.
Elsewhere his distinctive baritone trembles with another quality visibly apparent in the film: he is growing older. “What happened to my face?” Cave laments a little comically as he stares into a mirror in One More Time With Feeling. He also speaks of diminishing, decaying, of everything he does becoming harder to achieve, as if maybe he just can’t do this any more. Yet that only brings us closer to his art and his performance.
There’s much talk of Bick’s superstitious concerns about Cave’s artistry and the premonitions that underlie his lyrics; a “foretelling” in the music of what was to come. You can actually take this as far back as albums such as The Firstborn Is Dead and his later, greatly undervalued US tour-diary-come-“epic poem”, The Sick Bag Song. The latter was driven by an absurdist and urgent need to communicate with Bick as Cave obsessed about episodes on the road that echoed his childhood jump off a railway bridge in Wangaratta, Victoria – an act that gave mythical birth to his artistic nature.
It’s not simply a spooky matter of the latest album containing portents; it’s a sense that Cave’s whole career has reached for – and received – a level of greatness on the scale of Greek tragedy. Hence the wisdom and weight in I Need You: “Nothing really matters when the one you love is gone.”
During One More Time With Feeling, Cave says, “I lost belief in myself … me and Susie looked away for a terrible second and fucked up.” He forms a fist and moves his other hand slowly outwards, then slaps back against it. “Time is elastic. We can go away from the event but at some point the elastic snaps and we always come back to it.”
Jesus Alone, most definitely written before Arthur’s death, opens proceedings on Skeleton Tree with these lines: “You fell from the sky and crash landed near the river Adur.” The music of Cave and Ellis does not back away from the prophetic darkness of the verses, which are drenched in fatal, apocalyptic imagery – “You cried beneath the dripping trees, a ghost song lodged in the throat of a mermaid.”
If one were to accept Cave’s image of an elastic agony that always pulls him back, and take it as a map for the album, it certainly begins in a cold place and moves out. But we don’t get pulled back, exactly. Nor do we get pulled down, although down we go, quite often. “I had such hard blues down there in the supermarket queues,” Cave declares in Magneto, one of the Skeleton Tree’s supreme achievements. He goes on to echo Van Morrison’s Madame George – “In love I love you love I love you love … ” – in a Sufi-like mantra that ends, beautifully, agonisingly, with lovers who “saw each other in half – and all the stars are splashed and splattered across the ceiling”. It’s a vision of a couple in an empty children’s room where love and pain must live forever together, “while all through the house we hear the hyena’s hymns”.
A great struggle is documented in Skeleton Tree. By the time the final title track releases us to something like spiritual glory, it would be a hard heart indeed that did not feel like shedding a tear – and yet also feel enriched and even enlarged by what it had experienced. Nick Cave is a man standing in a doorway between two worlds, this one and the next, whatever that may be. He stands there reaching back to reassure his wife and son, while reaching out to another son beyond him.
This album is not, as Cave might fear, the realisation of a prophetic curse or artistic hubris that he’d gladly forsake to bring his son back. It’s the expression of a love that even in pain is not vanquished, and that is defined here over and again, in darkness and light, in its very essence, by the most powerful of caresses goodbye.
