Episode 403 - Nick Cave
Guest:Lock the gates!
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Mark Maron.
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is the 4th of July.
Marc:And I, of course, thought what better way to celebrate the 4th of July than to have an Australian on.
Marc:Actually, I put no thought into that whatsoever.
Marc:It's just the way the cards fell.
Marc:Nick Cave is on the show today.
Marc:And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my interaction with Nick Cave in just a second.
Marc:I do know it is the 4th of July.
Marc:I do know that I never talk to Dane Cook.
Marc:But every year, starting last year, he invited me to his 4th of July party.
Marc:And I'm not dropping names.
Marc:It's just, you know, I wouldn't see me and Dane hanging out together.
Marc:And if you've listened to my interview with him, that was an interesting interview, that one, actually.
Marc:I think you can get that.
Marc:Well, you can get it if you get the app, obviously, but I think that one's available over at WTF Premium on iTunes, where I was cranky, I just quit nicotine lozenges, and I was a dick to Dane Cook.
Marc:I got emails for that thing, man.
Marc:Fuck, for months.
Marc:Why were you such a dick?
Marc:I didn't even like the guy and you were a dick to him.
Marc:You were a dick.
Marc:So if you want to hear some classical dickishness from me today, well, you know, sometimes, man,
Marc:Sometimes having a conversation is not the easiest thing in the world.
Marc:I mean, today's episode is a good example.
Marc:I had Nick Cave in here and look, I'm willing to go where anybody wants to go.
Marc:Quite honestly, I'm not looking for controversy.
Marc:I'm not looking to sandbag anybody.
Marc:I just like it to be a conversation.
Marc:And sometimes rarely, you know, getting by somebody's, you know, thing and getting into just organic conversation can be tricky.
Marc:It can be tricky.
Marc:And this interview with Nick, it was I don't have any experience of Nick Cave.
Marc:I don't know him personally.
Marc:I've never listened to other interviews of him.
Marc:But but I was getting frustrated.
Marc:And I tell you, man, when I tell the story about talking to him, the Russell Crowe story is worth every minute of whatever I was experiencing.
Marc:And I don't usually talk about this.
Marc:Because people are going to have their own experience.
Marc:I don't really share my experience or what I felt about an interview.
Marc:But I do remember kind of like thinking like, oh my God, please talk to me.
Marc:Please.
Marc:I was needy with Nick Cave.
Marc:I don't know if you can hear it.
Marc:But let me know.
Marc:Let me know.
Marc:So today is the 4th of July.
Marc:And as some of you know, who listen to my show regularly know that I live in a primarily a Latino neighborhood.
Marc:So the 4th of July started about a month ago.
Marc:Leading up, just you get the the random clusters of fireworks and gunfire as sort of a palate cleanser for what's about to happen.
Marc:i don't know how connected i feel do you ever think about that how connected are you do you actually sit down and reflect on uh on how great it is to be an american and how fortunate it was that we won our independence and what a struggle that must have been and and you know really i don't know if i have the mind i don't know if it's a uh an empathy or an imagination to really picture you know what happened for us to get
Marc:Our independence.
Marc:And I'm not sure I know the history as clearly as I should.
Marc:I know there were redcoats involved in Britain and there was a tea party and, you know, we had to fight the crown to get our own place.
Marc:And then there were some colonies and then and there was battles that, you know, gunfire and a lot of people died.
Marc:And then we got we got free of it and we built some states.
Marc:and then then the states the states sort of spread like cancer throughout and then we all got our own autonomy kind of under a system of uh you know they're a federal government and then there's the uh the three branches and then you know we all we have a constitution and and then occasionally throughout the years have been fights over this and that and and now we are are sort of a conglomerate of sorts uh you know all living under a government that seems to be um
Marc:basically a money laundering operation for corporate interest and we all just struggle to be okay with that and hope nothing goes so horribly wrong and also like you know whatever's going on in the name of america is not you know completely out of control and obviously it's all gotten out of control and we don't know what the fuck is going on and we just sort of mind our own business and sort of plow through our lives hoping to get by hoping to to make a few bucks and you know and hoping we get lucky and just keeping the focus on ourselves
Marc:Happy 4th of July, America.
Marc:You, you, the guy listening who's just minding his own business and putting the blinders on and just saying, you know, fuck it.
Marc:I do what I can.
Marc:Look, I'm just trying to get to lunch.
Marc:This is for you this day.
Marc:You deserve that.
Marc:America, you deserve it.
Marc:You, not the states, not the collection of states, not the sense of community and country, but you, you, little man, little woman who is struggling just to kind of maintain and insulate your own narcissism.
Marc:That's what freedom is now.
Marc:Come on, you've got choices.
Marc:Just go online.
Marc:You've got a million choices, a million things you can distract yourself with, a million things to say like, wow, I wonder if anyone else has seen this, or my God, is it wrong for me to jerk off to this, or...
Marc:Hey, did that really happen?
Marc:Is this a legitimate news site?
Marc:Oh my God, I'm gonna buy some stuff.
Marc:Wow, I did all that and I didn't even leave this chair.
Marc:What an amazing country we live in.
Marc:God bless America, or just bless America, and your right to sit at home alone in front of your computer and have the experience of complete and utter freedom without leaving your chair and by being completely distracted by bullshit,
Marc:To make you not feel everything else that is going on in the world, which is mostly horrific.
Marc:Look, all I know, folks, is I'm going to go up on my roof tonight.
Marc:I'm going to climb the ladder and hopefully neither me nor Jessica will fall down the ladder and make this holiday a negative memory or perhaps some sort of tragic thing.
Marc:We'll stand up there and just wait.
Marc:We'll have the panoramic view of my neighborhood.
Marc:There's some organized fireworks in the distance usually, but they're usually just spontaneous blasts.
Marc:You never know where they're going to come from, but you do know that whatever those productions are, wherever they got those fireworks, it was probably not legal and they probably should be monitored somehow.
Marc:But you're grateful for that on this day.
Marc:You're grateful for people breaking the law.
Marc:and importing fireworks that are probably beyond what they can even handle.
Marc:God knows if anyone's injured during them, but just from my roof, just from my roof, after I've spent the day online poking around, if I spend the day on Twitter with my amazing freedom of speech to cause as much shit or...
Marc:divulge as much as I want to, you know, thousands of strangers indulging in that freedom.
Marc:I go up and I enjoy the freedom to watch illegal firework displays blocks away.
Marc:And I just hope I just hope that, you know, perhaps I'll have some good food.
Marc:Perhaps I'll I'll not get hit by a stray bullet.
Marc:That's another concern in my neighborhood.
Marc:People shooting guns into the air.
Marc:Straight up thinking like, well, it's not pointed at anybody without really considering the arc of that bullet.
Marc:It's going to go up.
Marc:It's got to come down.
Marc:Hopefully one of those won't plow into my brains as I stand on my roof thinking like, wow, this is pretty great.
Marc:We didn't even have to drive for this.
Marc:yeah negative memory yeah I don't want to lose one side of my brain because I was watching illegal fireworks and just a stray bullet wasn't even fired at me it fell out of the sky maybe I'm being negative look folks we have a lot to be thankful for we do live in a great country we do do what we can kinda most of us do what we can not really some of us do a little more than others some of us do a lot more than others
Marc:Some of us do nothing at all and somehow rationalize that and actually think we are doing something just by thinking the thoughts.
Marc:Happy Fourth of July.
Marc:Now let's talk to an Australian.
Marc:I got Nick Cave in the studio.
Marc:Hang in.
Marc:You need a knife?
Marc:Nice knife.
Marc:Nick Cave's undoing the knife.
Marc:Opening the knife, which is a fine way to open an interview.
Guest:Well, it's a beautiful knife.
Marc:You know, I don't... It's got a grip.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a good knife.
Marc:It was given to me by a German girl whose boyfriend left it behind, and I'm just glad he didn't have it when I was with her.
LAUGHTER
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's how that goes.
Guest:Okay, this is not live or anything like that.
Marc:No, it's not live.
Marc:It's a podcast.
Marc:It'll go up in a bit.
Marc:This is the future, Nick.
Guest:I don't understand the future.
Marc:You don't?
Marc:It's where you go to people's houses and you walk in and go, what the fuck am I doing here?
Guest:What am I?
Marc:Where am I?
Marc:I'm at some guy's house.
Marc:Well, this is not the way show business used to be.
Guest:No, actually, this is kind of old school, right?
Marc:Yeah, I guess so.
Marc:This is old school.
Marc:Well, thanks for coming, man.
Guest:So you're a script writer, eh?
Marc:No, I'm a comedian, and I do this now.
Marc:I primarily did comedy for the last 25 years and ended up in the garage.
Marc:I've written some stuff.
Guest:I just noticed you have final draft over there.
Marc:Well, yeah, I wrote a TV.
Marc:I got a TV thing for like 10 episodes of a single camera half hour business.
Marc:You're a screenwriter.
Marc:I do.
Guest:Are we on now?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yes, I am a screenwriter.
Guest:I was...
Guest:dragged into the business somewhat i have to say yeah how did it go well i i was i was asked to do a script by john hillcote a very good friend of mine who i've been watching you know he's been friends since school days yeah
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he'd been struggling with a script to do an Australian Western.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And he kept getting people to write them, and they were American Westerns, so they were sort of arbitrarily dumped in Australia, and people didn't really have any idea about Australia.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was my complaint when he would show, as a friend, he would show these scripts to me.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And in the end, he said, look, you write this.
Guest:thing yeah and so i went oh i could better go so you were so we wrote the proposition um and uh and i thoroughly enjoyed doing that you know because i guess australia really does have a its own wild west doesn't it it does yeah i mean there's a whole history there that can grow you know it's it's not dissimilar right um
Guest:It's equally brutal.
Guest:It's to do with genocide and bad weather.
Marc:A lot of heat and genocide of an indigenous people.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:That's a Western.
Marc:Then you build on top of it.
Marc:Someone makes money and they try to forget about it.
Marc:And deny it.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:How often do you go to Australia?
Marc:Do you live there?
Marc:You don't live there anymore.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:I live in the UK.
Marc:And you grew up there for most of your life, all your life.
Guest:I left when I was about 20.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I went to art school.
Marc:In Australia?
Guest:In Australia.
Guest:Did two years, failed art school.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:This sort of band, which was a kind of side project.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Got us into, you know, free drinks and got us into clubs and stuff, you know, that kind of thing.
Marc:What year were you looking at?
Marc:I mean, like, who was, because, like, I just read this book on ACDC.
Yeah.
Marc:And they were huge, right?
Marc:Oh, massive, yeah.
Marc:Did you go see them when you were a kid?
Marc:No.
Marc:Never?
Marc:No.
Marc:Not your bag?
Guest:I always liked them.
Guest:We had this TV show called Countdown.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they were off and on.
Guest:And they always were a riot and absolutely unique.
Marc:What kind of world is it?
Guest:I mean, they were kind of heavy.
Guest:They were a heavy rock band.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:But Bon Scott would go on Countdown dressed as a schoolgirl and stuff like that.
Guest:I mean, they were always very anarchic and never took the thing too seriously.
Marc:Yeah, good sense of humor.
Guest:What part did you grow up in?
Guest:Well, I grew up in the country, like in Victoria, rural Victoria, till I was...
Guest:the school that I went to when you were at a high school, they all had a little bit... They had enough of me.
Guest:Were you a problem?
Guest:Cast me out into the world.
Guest:Yeah, you were... Were you a problem?
Guest:Well...
Guest:I had my problems, but both my parents worked at this school, and I think they kind of got exhausted by walking to the staff room and having... Their kid.
Guest:You know what he did today.
Guest:They were both teachers?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My father was the English teacher there, and my mother the librarian, so...
Marc:So you were brought up around books?
Marc:Totally, yeah.
Marc:Because when I listen to the new album, and there's about three or four of your records I've listened to a lot in my life, and it looks like you've done about a record a year for the last, what, 20 years?
Marc:Almost.
Marc:Well, it's not really like that, but we made a lot.
Marc:We made a lot, yeah.
Marc:And it just seems like you draw from a lot of... It's hard to identify, you know, you're your own thing, and that's a hard thing to do.
Marc:But you seem to be influenced by ballads, westerns, you know, even tiki music.
Marc:You know, there's like a lot of textures going on, man.
Guest:Well, we've been doing it for a long time, and...
Guest:You know, I mean, the thing that I admire most about the Bad Seeds is really their facility to change and to grow, and that's really what we've done, and that's why we still make records, I guess.
Marc:What was the original band when you started after art school?
Marc:Who was in it?
Marc:I mean, what kind of music were you playing then?
Guest:We were in a band called The Birthday Party.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that was very confrontational.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there was a kind of strange, fucked up kind of jazz element, but violent, very violent.
Guest:Violent jazz?
Guest:Violent jazz, yeah, that was the genre.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:And how long were you playing?
Marc:Physically violent.
Marc:Because I don't have those records.
Marc:Like, you know, I know, like, what I know about you is that, like, I think the Tender Prey album was the first one that kind of blew my mind, and I listened to a lot.
Marc:But I didn't end up going back to all of the stuff.
Marc:But then, like, as records would come out, every couple records, they seemed to lock back into what you were doing.
Marc:And it seems like all the women that I was with were, you know, Nick Cave freaks, which is, you have a profound effect on certain types of troubled women.
Guest:Yeah, I've noticed that.
Guest:I've been surrounded by them all my life.
Guest:I understand them.
Guest:Is that what it is?
Guest:Yeah, I think I have a deep understanding of troubled women.
Marc:Do you have sisters or was your mom troubled?
Guest:No, but no, I do have a sister.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:And the only trouble that she had was the fact that I was her elder brother, I think.
Guest:That guy.
Guest:That guy is my older brother.
Guest:Yeah, I have a very strange relationship with...
Guest:women in general around my music i mean there's some that that that very much understand it and some that that think that it's an anathema and that you're that it should be stopped yeah yeah that guy should be a law against he's he's a demon in fact i think there is a law against in some places with some women with some men who say you can't listen to that record anymore um
Guest:It's managed to get itself a reputation, and unfairly, I think.
Guest:I tend to look at particular issues around the relationship between men and women and address some of those issues.
Guest:And because I write about those sorts of things, people assume that I am like that as a person.
Guest:I'm sure you get it, too.
Marc:Well, I mean, I get it with songwriters.
Marc:I mean, I've talked to guys in here before.
Marc:You know, I talked to Niccolo in here before.
Marc:And in my naivete, I mean, I always assume when somebody's writing, because that's what I do.
Marc:I write about myself, but I always, like in my mind, you know, you're this, you know, tormented cowboy of sorts that takes on the big existential problems and milks the poetry out of them.
Guest:All of that is true, apart from the cowboy bit.
Guest:I'm not a fucking cowboy.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Not that I have anything against cowboys.
Marc:I mean that in the best of ways.
Marc:A loner, a guy out there against the elements.
Marc:I thought you were talking about Brokeback Mountain or something.
Marc:No, sir.
Marc:No, sir.
Guest:The other kind of cowboys.
Marc:Yeah, I'm talking about the real deal, like Road Warrior.
Marc:I mean, any sort of loner out there on the great frontier fighting the good fight.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you struggle with this stuff?
Marc:I mean, like, you know, how are you with the devil these days?
Marc:You all right?
Guest:I'm not so concerned with the devil.
Guest:No.
Guest:Have you been?
Guest:I think I took a lot of drugs.
Guest:Yeah, which one?
Guest:What was your stuff?
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:Mix it up?
Guest:Yeah, more or less.
Guest:Back in the day?
Guest:I didn't smoke a lot of pot.
Guest:Did you get strung out?
Guest:Yeah, a lot.
Guest:Yeah, it went back and forth, all that sort of thing.
Guest:And through that period, I became quite interested in religion.
Guest:And I even went to church and stuff like that.
Marc:You went to church high or on a break?
Guest:No, actually, I had a kind of weird... I mean, I was insane at this time, you have to understand.
Guest:And I had this idea that...
Guest:If I went to church in the morning, drug sick, and then I went and scored in the afternoon, I was leading a well-balanced kind of existence.
Guest:Sure, the yin and the yang.
Guest:The yin and the yang.
Guest:Obviously, yeah.
Guest:But eventually I got those sort of demons under control and I haven't been into church again.
Marc:The drug thing took longer, of course.
Marc:Yeah, so the church thing was just a reaction.
Guest:Well, the church thing, looking back on it now, is probably the more destructive of the two, I would say.
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:It's hard to figure out.
Marc:You know, you've got to hang your hope on something sometimes, don't you?
Marc:I mean, yeah, I did my time with drugs.
Marc:I don't really have a God in place.
Marc:But, you know, if you're out there in the wilderness of your mind without anything to hang your hope on.
Guest:No, no, I'm not so sure about hanging your hopes on things.
Guest:But I do find that...
Guest:Our capacity to want to believe in things outside of ourselves is something that's really endearing of the human species.
Marc:It's in there, too.
Guest:I don't ridicule it.
Guest:In fact, it doesn't matter how corrupt and destructive some of these belief systems are, I still think we need to be able to believe in things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:outside of ourselves.
Guest:No, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, religion, the idea of the divine and stuff like that, to me, is very much connected with the creative process anyway.
Guest:So I find it very difficult to distinguish the two.
Guest:And for me, I've spent the last, I don't know, 30 years or stuff kind of building an imaginative world that is
Guest:is different than our own and that it is to do with magic and the absurd and and in that world um you know there are kind of some kind of god exists and all of that sort of stuff um it's just but it but it is within a particular imaginative world you know
Marc:Were you conscious of that?
Marc:When did you become conscious of that?
Marc:I mean, is that a retroactive, like a retrospective thing?
Guest:No, I think there was actually a moment for me back around a particular record that I did.
Guest:It was a birthday party record.
Guest:I remember writing this song called King Ink, actually, which wasn't the first record.
Guest:Maybe it was off the second record.
Guest:And I remember sitting there listening to that and thinking that there was something in there that after making several records before that, which were heavily influenced by everybody else and didn't have their identity, there was something in this song that was mine and that was new in some kind of way.
Guest:It was a kind of character-driven narrative song and it sort of set the path really for songs right up to now really that are about developing a kind of world that is a different world than the one that I actually live in.
Marc:So you saw yourself as sort of a protagonist in this world.
Guest:No, I just found that it was a kind of... There was something there that I could go inside and sort of lose myself and, you know, that it kind of saved me from myself in some kind of way.
Marc:You can't... Couldn't you say what it was specifically or was it a tone or was it an angle?
Guest:Um...
Marc:there was a kind of uh yeah it was it was tonally yeah the tone is a nice is a nice way of putting it because i mean you do have this amazing consistent tone you know when i listen to the records you know lyrically they're all different but no matter you know what the the rhythm or the or the structure of the song is there there's something that happens you know you definitely fill a space so i i did does that make sense to you yeah it does
Marc:And so I guess occupying that space is sort of what you're talking about.
Marc:There was a moment where you realize that this is where I live now, kind of.
Guest:Look, you know, I mean, I write in an office.
Guest:It's not like this that we're sitting in here, but it is in the sense that it's chaotic.
Guest:And it is a place that I go every morning.
Guest:So I get up in the morning, get dressed, kiss the wife goodbye, and walk down into the basement and stay there all day and write.
Guest:That's what I've done now for many, many years in different offices, on different desks, in different countries.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's always been that same work-like process.
Guest:But part of that appeal of that is that I feel that I'm entering into a world that is of my own making and it's different than the so-called real world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sometimes I'm spending so much in that other alternate world, the idea of which is the real one and which is not the real one becomes slightly confused maybe.
Guest:But definitely there is something about losing myself and the creative work starts in this place on my own in this particular room.
Guest:Do you get that?
Guest:And it is transformative.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I feel that I become at one with the things that I'm writing about.
Marc:So it's almost like a ritual space in a way.
Marc:Yeah, very much so, yeah.
Marc:And do you get up at the same time every day or do you just kind of roll into it?
Marc:I get up very early.
Marc:I've always got up really early.
Marc:Just naturally?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In those moments where the two spaces sort of become indistinguishable, what happens in that moment?
Marc:You get lost in your head or you get lost in the narrative of a piece?
Guest:I've found that I've been able to separate the two.
Guest:I've found that it's essential to do it, but I don't like...
Guest:to work creatively around other people and unless i'm unless i'm going into the studio with my band um and even in the studio really for me that kind of private work has been done in the office i've sat down and i've written the songs and i've written the words and and and it feels like that's been done right um and to go actually into the studio it's a different process to sit and work with other people but
Guest:Largely, I don't feel it's fair to inflict the creative process on my children or my wife because it's a bloody business, right?
Guest:It's a bloody business and it's not something that people should be witness to unless, you know, yeah.
Marc:When you say inflict, I mean, because I'm curious, just as a creative person myself, I know it's a clever joke on some level, but there is some part of the creative personality that is a little unruly.
Guest:Unruly, selfish, self-interested.
Guest:willing to inflict all manner of horrors onto our loved ones.
Guest:God knows what we do to our loved ones in the pursuit of our particular creative dreams.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:You know, I think being creative and artistic, you by nature...
Guest:cast a long dark shadow over over over the people in your life and i try and do that i try and separate that process from from uh you know my kids don't know what i do i mean they know i'm like a rock star and stuff like that because they can go on and and google me and stuff like that yeah look at watch youtube and stuff not that they do but um
Guest:They don't see the work process that's involved in doing that sort of stuff.
Marc:And when you get out of the ritual space, when you get out of the work mind, you behave like a decent person as opposed to a lunatic.
Marc:No.
Guest:So you're still doing your homework.
Guest:Well, no, I'm just a different sort of lunatic.
Yeah.
Marc:When you started out, when you say that moment you had when you realized that you had your own groove there, that you could figure out there was this imaginative space that you lived in, when you look back at the records before that, who were your primary guys?
Marc:Who were your influences?
Marc:What was rocking your head?
Guest:Um, you know, I mean, mostly American influences because I grew up in Australia and the influences that we had in Australia were largely through TV.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was American TV that we watched in Australia pretty much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the things that really molded me
Guest:And apart from certain, I mean, for example, when I was 11, I'd watch the Johnny Cash show on TV.
Guest:Yeah, I remember that, yeah.
Guest:In this little country town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We'd sit there and I'd watch the Johnny Cash show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or I would watch, come home from school and watch I Dream of Jeannie and F Troop and The Addams Family and...
Guest:All of these, you know, bewitched and all of this sort of stuff.
Guest:This was the stuff that we grew up on.
Guest:And all of those American influences, I didn't even see them as American.
Guest:They were just like the stuff we watched on TV.
Guest:So it was actually quite strange for me to come to America and people say, why do you keep writing about all of our cultural heroes and stuff like that?
Guest:And you're an Australian.
Guest:And I'm like, oh, right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You own those people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's very funny, though.
Marc:I don't know if you've said that specific list before in another interview.
Marc:Maybe you have.
Marc:But just that list in and of itself explains a lot.
Guest:Well, you know, those three women, I have to say, Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched, Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie, and Caroline Jones from The Addams Family were the kind of...
Guest:triumvirate, you know, of my sexual awakening as a child.
Marc:And Johnny Cash was a way that you could walk through the world.
Guest:Johnny Cash, I used to watch with my mum and dad.
Guest:We would sit and watch TV.
Guest:We would watch the Johnny Cash show.
Guest:There was something I picked up on, I think, as a child, that my parents were ambivalent about this guy.
Guest:you know that he was kind of like he was like he was bad yeah he was an outlaw right um he was the man in black and all of that sort of stuff and maybe from an early age i kind of you got that i got that well he's a heavy presence man i mean like i remember seeing that when i was i'm a little younger than you but i mean he was like that voice and just he was a big dude in those songs i mean i love that stuff
Guest:yeah and he uh he covered one of your songs he covered what mercy seat yeah yeah in the end yeah he covered he covered the mercy seat exactly and and i sang with him in in uh on the next record i went into the studio with him and on the rick rubin record yeah one of those yeah and how was that for you to meet that guy it was amazing um he was not well at all right uh
Guest:But we were talking about the transformative process that I was talking about, going into the office and losing yourself in your work.
Guest:When I met him in the studio, he was very sick.
Guest:He was very frail.
Guest:He needed to be helped down the stairs.
Guest:He had a...
Guest:Some kind of diabetes thing where when it went into the light, it went from light into dark, he couldn't see.
Guest:So when I first saw him, he was blind and coming down the stairs, being helped down the steps to sing this song together, this Hank Williams song that we decided to sing together.
Guest:and i was uh wondering how he was going to do that you know and then he just sat down with his guitar and that he just became he just became johnny cash empowered and johnny cash and just started singing and it's like okay you know it was an incredible thing to see
Marc:It's a trip, though, when you meet somebody that you've held in a certain presence for your whole life, and they're now old and fragile, and there's a humanity to that.
Guest:I can't begin to tell you what that meant to me, really.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was there a sadness to it?
Guest:No, I didn't find it sad.
Guest:I found it hugely inspiring.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:You know, he was an old man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't find it.
Guest:You know, he was an old man still knocking it out.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And people have differing opinions about those Rick Rubin records.
Marc:What's your opinion of them?
Guest:Well, you know, I think there's some beautiful stuff on them, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:I had Jacob Dillon in here, and he felt like that cash was too fragile, that perhaps he may have done too many of those.
Guest:Yeah, but to be the way I saw it, I don't think he would have.
Guest:I think rather than it kind of weigh heavily on it, heavily on it, I think it kept things going for him.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But I like that.
Guest:I thought he did some beautiful stuff on those.
Guest:But I have heard that argument.
Guest:But I didn't witness that myself.
Guest:I witnessed a man rejuvenated in the studio by what he was doing, not depleted by what he was doing.
Guest:Or that feeling of him being used up or something.
Marc:I feel for better or for worse that when artists continue going on, it's usually what keeps them alive and focused.
Marc:What else are you going to do?
Marc:Just sit around?
Marc:With Johnny Cash, it seems to me that part of what you were talking about in terms of what you do with your music, he was able to tell stories.
Marc:There seems to be some ballad or element to what you do a little bit.
Marc:Do you find that?
Guest:Yeah, he's a great...
Guest:storyteller in that way, and he takes command of a song and command of a story, and you're, you know, you've got to, if you hear it, you've got to follow the story.
Guest:Now, I personally, you know, I love that when Johnny Cash does it, but it's just for me to write a song, I write narratively.
Guest:There's no, I've tried it other ways, and it's just,
Guest:Unless a song has some kind of narrative element to it or visual element to it, I can't get my head around it.
Guest:And it's something that, unfortunately, is not something that I like about what I do in the sense that I don't think people should have to listen to a song and listen to the fucking story.
Guest:You just want to put on a song and...
Guest:And it gets you in the heart and changes your mood and all of that.
Guest:So you don't have to kind of listen to six verses of a narrative story that's going on type of thing.
Guest:But that's probably the oldest form of song there is, though.
Guest:I mean, people are capable.
Guest:It might be.
Guest:But for me, the songs that I really love are those kind of fractured things that I don't really understand and just affect me in a particular kind of way.
Guest:So, I mean, I have been over the years trying to develop a different way of writing narratively or visually that doesn't require that you hear the first verse and stick it out till the end.
Marc:Started over, I was spacing out.
Marc:I need to get back into the story.
Guest:Well, you know, and I think that the new record or the last couple of records I've done, especially this new record, it draws you in narratively, but you're not required to...
Guest:to follow the story.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:You can, you can check in and out and grab little pieces.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's, but it is, it is, and you enter a world when you listen to this particular record.
Guest:And, and in that respect, I'm really proud of that.
Marc:And when, with this record, the cover is stunning.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Cool.
Marc:Yeah, dude.
Marc:That's my wife.
Guest:I was going to ask you.
Yeah.
Guest:I feel blessed every time I look at it.
Guest:Yeah, I would feel blessed if I were you.
Guest:Yeah, I was steady on there.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, all right, buddy.
Guest:I'm not going to push it.
Guest:No, no, but that has come under a certain amount of criticism, that cover, by a certain...
Guest:We were talking about these women before.
Guest:Just certain people have thought that there was an... There he goes again, exploiting women and objectifying women and all of that sort of stuff.
Guest:And I just want people out there who may... That it is my wife.
Guest:It was a photograph taken by our dear friend, Dominique Isamon, the French female photographer.
Guest:who was actually doing a photo session about another thing with Susie, who was in between costumes in my bedroom.
Guest:She took off the one costume, was naked.
Guest:I happened to walk in and Dominic said, go and open the window over there.
Guest:And I went over and opened up the window.
Guest:She took the photo and told me to leave, that they were working.
Guest:And this photo, we just saw this photo and thought it was a beautiful thing.
Guest:So it was very much a photo of a woman by a woman and not set up by some kind of misogynistic, you know, sexist.
Marc:That's sort of ridiculous criticism.
Marc:You get flack like that about other things?
Guest:I get it all the time.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Oh, totally.
Marc:I mean, but I don't know what the argument is.
Marc:I mean, what does your wife do for a living?
Guest:She's a model.
Marc:Oh, so, okay.
Marc:So she's a professional.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Objectifying is part of the gig.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But anyway, it wasn't something that the beauty for me of that cover is it wasn't set up that picture.
Guest:It was very much just a natural sort of thing that happened.
Guest:And it was a moment in time.
Guest:And I'm really, I really love that.
Marc:Yeah, it's a great cover.
Marc:Now, this record, in terms of how you look at your records, what was I listening to today in preparation?
Marc:I listened to No More Shall We Part.
Marc:I listened to Let Love In.
Marc:I listened to Part of Tender Pray.
Marc:Now, this...
Marc:this record you definitely seem mature more mature less uh raw and i and i'm going to listen again to for what you're telling me that you're sort of switching up your style a bit in terms of the poetics of the thing but when you when in terms of like not relying on narrative yeah
Marc:When you go into making a record, is it one process where you're like, I'm writing a new record, or do you take a bunch of songs from a period?
Guest:No, it's very much I start on a particular day.
Guest:It's in my calendar.
Guest:Today is the day I start writing the new record.
Guest:So I'm not that kind of songwriter that's just always picking up a guitar and kind of gets another one and sticks it over there.
Guest:Eventually they have 13 and they go into the studio and record it.
Guest:Mine is very much a project that starts at the beginning.
Guest:I haven't written anything for a year or something like that.
Guest:and sit down without any idea about what I'm doing whatsoever.
Guest:I go into that space feeling empty, depleted, uninspired, the whole thing.
Guest:And for the next three or four months in the office, I just work and work away and start piecing together little ideas and eventually getting myself a record.
Guest:So it's all words at first, not melody.
Guest:There's a certain amount of songwriting, music that goes into it, but more I'm concerned with finding the lyrical tone, as you say, for the record.
Marc:So when you, earlier on in the career, I mean, you lived in a lot of different places.
Marc:Now, were these creative decisions?
Marc:Oh, to live in different places?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No.
Marc:There's women.
Guest:There's always women.
Guest:berlin berlin was lots of women what years were you there was that the peak of it um just i was there for three years and left just as the wall came down so what record came out of those what record came out of berlin i don't know oh well i will attend to pray yeah right
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Mercy Seat, that was written in Berlin.
Marc:That record is fucking intense, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, in a way that's like raw as fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I haven't listened to it for about 25 years or whenever I made it.
Guest:But it is...
Guest:There's some really good stuff on that.
Marc:What was it about Berlin?
Marc:Because I have no point of reference about it, but it must have had some impact on you.
Marc:I mean, people have gone to Berlin.
Marc:There was a sort of dark romantic sort of appeal to the place.
Guest:Well, you know, I'd come from Australia where in Australia I...
Guest:was under the impression, because we used to get these English magazines, the NME and Sounds and all of that sort of stuff, that London was this kind of incredibly interesting musical place.
Guest:And if we lived in London every night, we could go to this gig and that gig, and we'd look at the back page of the NME.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:And dream of what could happen.
Guest:And we went over to London and it was the most deadly kind of dark, miserable place where whatever was happening, whatever had happened in London in the punk era was well and truly over.
Guest:And it was just, it was washed up.
Guest:Was it early 80s?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and we went there in the winter, and we had no money, and we were just a bunch of kids from Australia.
Guest:Trying to have a good time.
Guest:The big trip.
Guest:We're going to London.
Guest:We're going overseas, as we call it in Australia.
Guest:We're going overseas.
Guest:And then we managed to get
Guest:Our act together enough to do a small European tour and we hit Berlin and we were suddenly kind of dragged into a artistic community that lived in, you know, within the walls in that little island that was West Berlin.
Guest:That was unbelievable.
Marc:And who was in that community?
Guest:Well, uh, the, the, the, the German band Einstein to know about, Oh yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Who were, who were incredible.
Guest:Um, there was a, there was a bunch of filmmakers, Vim vendors.
Guest:Is that where you met Vim vendors?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was just this kind of hot pot of kind of cross referencing creativity.
Guest:That was amazing.
Guest:Um,
Guest:And we were kind of welcomed into that world.
Marc:That must have been mind blowing because, I mean, you guys were doing interesting music and you were pushing the envelope.
Marc:But those guys seemed like Einzestadt and Newbarten.
Marc:I mean, how did you even take that in?
Marc:Had you known about them before?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:We just went there.
Guest:In the end, Blixer Bargeld, who was the singer and guitarist of Neubarten, came and joined the Bad Seeds.
Guest:But they were extraordinary.
Guest:Were you able to... I mean, I've never heard... I went into the studio a lot with them just to witness what was going on in those sessions.
Marc:Because that had some momentum.
Marc:It was like there was a lot of... It was industrial.
Yeah.
Guest:It was industrial, but they were trying everything.
Guest:I remember going into the studio, just passing the studio, and Blix said, come down to the studio.
Guest:And I went in there, and they were all sitting in the booth, and not in the actual studio, in the booth.
Guest:And you could hear this...
Guest:and they're all kind of listening to it really intensely like that and i kind of looked in the room and in the middle of the room there's this bad there's this pile of awful of of kind of guts yeah and this dog that was mic'd up that was kind of eating away and they're all kind of listening to it going
Guest:yeah this could be it too so so they they um they they uh yeah and another time i went in there they had there was one of the guys mufti was a big big guy yeah and uh there's andrew who who was a little guy the the andrew was mic'd up and uh there was i came in i was hearing this
Guest:And I kind of went in the studio and Andrew was up against a wall and Mufti's punching him in the chest with this little mic kind of attached to him.
Guest:And they're getting this incredible kind of bass drum sort of sound.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:So they were doing really kind of...
Marc:interesting sorts of things and they made these extraordinary records as a guy that's coming out of australia and you walk into this environment where this type of creativity is happening which i think is uniquely uh berlin it's a berlin thing but i mean how did that blow your mind was there a moment where you're like holy fuck there you know there's no limit to what i can do or
Guest:There was that.
Guest:But I mean, we were already, the birthday party were already doing stuff that was, that had alienated us from what was going on in London.
Marc:From like contemporary pop music.
Guest:Yeah, because it had all become that kind of pretty safe sort of toe-gazing, shoe-gazing kind of thing.
Guest:music who were those bands then well i mean i can't remember echo i don't know echo and the bunny man so it was like whatever the dark part of new wave became in some weird way i mean it was it was kind of lame to be honest yeah yeah sure sure and um um i thought so i mean i'll probably run into that guy the next time i'm doing in the festival but i mean it was it was just that kind of period where the the air had gone out of the balloon right and and there was there was a lot of kind of
Guest:Very uninspired stuff in the wake of punk rock.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:But not in Berlin.
Guest:Well, not in Berlin.
Guest:They were pushing things.
Guest:And that's what the birthday party were doing as well.
Guest:We were doing very violent...
Guest:confrontational kind of concerts, and they weren't translating in London.
Guest:People didn't know what to make of us, mostly because we were from Australia.
Guest:So they didn't have a kind of cultural reference for us.
Guest:They thought we were playing indigenous music.
Guest:They didn't kind of...
Guest:they didn't, I mean, that's not to say everyone felt that way, but a lot of, we weren't, we were kind of misunderstood, we felt, and in Berlin, we weren't, you know.
Marc:And you guys would do a pretty big show, right?
Marc:I mean, you're almost like, I mean, you're a big dude, and at that time, I mean, was it more, like, I feel bad that I'm not as familiar as I could be with those records, but was it leaning on the macabre a little bit?
Marc:I mean, were you...
Guest:No, the thing about the birthday party shows were that they were quite physically violent between what was going on on stage and what was going on with the audience.
Guest:They were kind of battlefields on some level.
Guest:Did you draw blood?
Guest:Yeah, that kind of thing.
Guest:Were you compelled by Iggy at all?
Guest:um he was always a hero yeah you know he was always so they weren't they weren't uh you know i mean if it wasn't for iggy i don't think anyone anyone would be doing that kind of stuff right so did you ever see iggy did he ever come over to australia i've seen him many times but when you're younger no no no back then you just kind of knew about it we uh yeah we we we just uh we
Guest:yeah yeah we we knew about him and there was a small group of us that knew about him and knew about the mc5 and all of that kind of stuff you know like let's talk about the inventors for a minute because you know he's not a violent filmmaker no not at all
Marc:And when you first met him, about what point in his career was he at?
Marc:Because I know you appeared in some of his movies, and you did some music in a couple of ways.
Guest:Yeah, I've done music to a lot of Vim's films.
Guest:Was it Wings of Desire?
Guest:Did you do that?
Guest:But Wings of Desire was the big one.
Guest:It was his big film, his big dramatic film, at least.
Guest:I mean, he's done very big documentaries and music documentaries and stuff like that.
Marc:He did Paris, Texas, too, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He did Paris, Texas.
Guest:That thing's amazing.
Guest:That was before that.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Before Wings?
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:And then he did Wings of Desire.
Marc:We were in that.
Marc:Yeah, it was a black and white movie.
Marc:Wasn't Peter Falk?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:Peter Falk.
Marc:Peter Falk and Bruno Gantz.
Marc:Bruno Gantz, right.
Marc:Did Wim Wenders do The American Friend?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, that's a great film.
Marc:That's a great fucking movie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was an older one.
Guest:That was before.
Guest:He'd made that before we went to Berlin.
Marc:70s, probably.
Marc:Yeah, it was great, that film.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:And what was your relationship with him like?
Marc:You just kind of hung out?
Marc:How does it work with a director?
Guest:I didn't know him that well.
Guest:And then he kept wanting to have dinner.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which was a weird thing back then for me to contemplate anyway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That anyone could even eat anything back then.
Guest:But we would have these dinners and he would remain virtually silent throughout them and kind of... And then we had the third dinner.
Guest:I'm like, listen, Vim, do you want to ask me something?
Guest:And he goes, yeah, would you do some music for my next film?
Guest:I'm like, yeah, well, sure.
Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I know him really well these days.
Marc:When did you become, like, because it seems to me that at some point you shifted into a different kind of space.
Marc:Because when you talked about changing your style or looking at just phrases that could mean whatever they mean to a person, I mean, that sounds like Leonard Cohen to me.
Marc:Like, that's sort of what he did in a lot of his songs.
Marc:What's that?
Marc:which is create a poetry that is not necessarily a specific story, but can have its own life.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And were you influenced by him a lot?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, I was very much so, especially early on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's the record Songs of Love and Hate, which...
Guest:I was just a kid in Wangaratta in this country town.
Guest:And this girl I knew, the sister of a friend of mine, had this record.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And she had a little kind of bungalow out the back where we would kind of go and smoke cigarettes and pot and stuff like that or whatever.
Guest:And she just had this record by Songs of Love and Hate.
Guest:And we used to play it.
Guest:And I couldn't believe this record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I couldn't believe in how the stories and how sort of angry it was.
Guest:And it is an absolute... I mean, I go back and listen to that record sometimes and it's just this remarkable thing.
Guest:It's so angry and kind of up-wounded sort of record.
Guest:And...
Guest:And there was something about that that really, that had a huge impact and opened up all sorts of doors for me.
Guest:In your, like, the way it made you feel?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, just, you know, even though I was just a kid, really.
Guest:How old do you think?
Marc:Well, I don't know, like... 14, 15?
Guest:No, maybe 15 or 16.
Guest:I can't remember, but it, maybe, yeah, maybe 14 or 15.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It, um...
Guest:it just spoke in a way that a lot of other stuff didn't speak to me.
Marc:Have you had a chance to meet him now?
Marc:No.
Marc:Never have?
Guest:No, never met him.
Marc:That's bizarre.
Guest:I know.
Guest:We have a lot of mutual friends and stuff like that.
Guest:He just lives down.
Marc:He lives over here.
Guest:i think he's got a little house right over there um off olympic well the the the girl who dominique isman who took the photograph yeah for my cover is has done photos for his covers and she's a dear friend of both of ours actually so she's always the same yeah leonard says hello and i'll say hello back i can't believe that you guys haven't been on a thing together done have you done any covers of his songs before
Guest:yeah i mean the first the first uh song off the first record i think that the bad seeds did was it was a it was a cover version of avalanche oh yeah um off that record yeah and the guys that you're in your band now those are the guys you've been with the whole time um no the the the the last original member left yeah for this new record mick harvey
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that's not to say I haven't been working with these guys for a really long time.
Marc:And you have kids?
Marc:Yeah, I do.
Marc:How many you got?
Marc:Four.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Boys.
Marc:All boys?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And from different women?
Guest:Um, I have twins.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're from the same one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My current wife.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or my wife, not my current wife.
Guest:Sounds like a John Lee Hooker song or something like that.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Um, when my second wife, when my first wife left me, you know that song?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:A John Lee Hooker song.
Guest:Beautiful song.
Guest:Um, but, uh, and, and the other, the, the older boys are from different, different,
Marc:And they're 21.
Marc:So you've got grown kids.
Marc:They know who you are.
Marc:They know who I am.
Marc:Do you get along with them all?
Guest:Yeah, very much.
Marc:And how old are the twins?
Marc:They're younger?
Marc:They're 12.
Marc:How does that, did that do anything?
Marc:Did that change you?
Marc:You know, when you were, because it seems like the first ones you were probably still a little out of your mind, but the second, the twins must have come when you were a little older, obviously.
Marc:Did that change the way you looked at things in any way?
Guest:I don't know about that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I mean, I think it changes things in the sense that... But, you know, like I have 21-year-old kids, so it's not like the first time I've experienced this sort of thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It does...
Guest:ultimately show you that there is something that exists outside yourself that is kind of important.
Guest:What I mean outside of the kind of the work that you do and all of that sort of stuff, not so much obviously that are important, but that can bring you joy and that sort of thing.
Sure.
Marc:Well, that's good.
Marc:Joy is good, right?
Marc:Joy is good.
Marc:Joy is very good.
Marc:Does it not come easy for you, the joy?
Guest:No, much of what I do is joyful.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:It doesn't appear that way.
Guest:But, you know, really, the working process with the band, to me, to play a gig, not always, but if things are going well on stage, it's a joyful thing for me.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:And going in the studio, it's a joyful thing.
Guest:Being with my children, being with my wife, these bring me joy.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:So I have this weird idea that everyone who comes from Australia at a certain level of celebrity has to know each other.
Marc:Do you know Russell Crowe?
Guest:I do know Russell, yeah.
Guest:I know Russell really well.
Marc:You do?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:How'd that come about?
Guest:He read the script of The Proposition, which is a film I wrote with John Hillcote, which is Australian Western, which he championed and was almost in, but that didn't work out.
Guest:Eventually, he rang me up at home and asked me if I wanted to write Gladiator 2.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Of course, you know, if you want that movie, who are you going to go to?
Marc:Nick Cave is the guy.
Guest:And which for someone who had only written one film script was quite an ask.
Marc:Did you do it?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:And what happened with that script?
Guest:It ended up, you know, in everyone's... Yeah, it didn't make it.
Guest:It didn't sit like that.
Marc:When you did something like that, what did you bring to that?
Marc:I mean, what was the story for the second Gladiator?
Guest:Well, that's where it all went wrong.
Guest:You know, very briefly, it was Russell Crowe Wake, because I'm like, hey, Russell, didn't you die in Gladiator 1?
Guest:He's going, yeah, you sort that out.
Guest:All right, so he goes to purgatory and is sent down by the gods who are dying in heaven because there's this one god, there's this Christ character down on earth.
Yeah.
Guest:who is gaining popularity, and so the many gods are dying, and so they send Gladiator back to kill Christ and all his followers.
Guest:And so this was already getting... I wanted to call it Christkiller.
Guest:And...
Guest:And in the end, you find out that the main guy was his son.
Guest:So he has to kill his son and he's tricked by the gods and all of this sort of stuff.
Guest:So it ends with this.
Guest:He becomes this eternal warrior and it ends with this 20 minute war sequence that follows all the wars of history right up to Vietnam and that sort of stuff.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And it was wild.
Guest:That is wild.
Guest:Russian tanks.
Marc:So that was the last third of the movie?
Guest:That was the last thing.
Marc:Wow, that sounds amazing.
Guest:Yeah, it was a stone-cold masterpiece.
Marc:And how did Russell Crowe react to that when he read that track?
Marc:I said, what did you think?
Guest:Don't like it, mate.
LAUGHTER
Guest:What about the end?
Guest:Don't like it, mate.
Marc:Oh, man.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Do you like that script?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed writing it very much.
Guest:And I enjoyed writing it because I knew on every level it was never going to get made.
Marc:Christkiller, the second gladiator.
Marc:What's called a popcorn dropper.
Marc:What about, do you know Nicole Kidman?
Marc:I met her, yeah.
Marc:Briefly.
Marc:Isn't her family like a huge family in Australia?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I thought they were big cattle ranchers.
Marc:I know you don't all know each other.
Marc:We don't all know each other.
I know.
Marc:So what about books?
Marc:Are you writing any more books?
Marc:You've written a couple.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And do you set down?
Marc:Is that a different process?
Marc:Do you do that with the calendar again?
Marc:Say, I'm going to write a book?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you've got to do that in some way.
Guest:You've got to sit down and you can't do a bit here and there if you're going to write a book.
Guest:You've got to get on a roll and write the thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wrote one a couple of years ago called The Death of Bunny Monroe, which we're hoping to make into a movie.
Marc:Are you going to write the script?
Marc:It's written.
Marc:The script is written.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And how are you going to get that done?
Marc:In Australia or here?
Marc:It's set in England, so it's going to be.
Marc:Is that where you're living now?
Marc:By London or?
Marc:In Brighton.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Do you know that?
Guest:It's down underneath London on the sea.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You live right on the water?
Guest:I do, yeah.
Guest:That must be great.
Guest:Yeah, it took me a while to get into it, to be honest.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, I was never a sea person.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I mean, I grew up in the country, and everything that happened that was of any interest or importance to me through my childhood happened down by the river.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was like a river guy, and we would go on holidays with the family to the seaside, which I never really liked, the Australian beach experience, which was just, it was too hot, and there was all that sand, and there was that kind of way the waves just sort of lapped back and forth like that.
Marc:No drama to it.
Guest:I mean, it was a family thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And everything that happened down the river was much more secretive and illicit and forbidden and all of that sort of stuff.
Guest:So the river experience was always much more interesting.
Marc:Is that where kids went to do their thing?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, not just the dirty thing, but anything that involved...
Guest:sort of daredevil life-threatening yeah uh kind of stuff jumping off railway bridges and yeah yeah all that sort of stuff um and um but now i live by the sea and i've gotten to sort of accept the the knotty of it yeah do you just go out there and you look at the ocean and
Guest:I look at it from a window.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:This is England we're talking about.
Guest:It's gray and there's pebbles.
Guest:That seems fitting.
Guest:No, but it's actually very beautiful.
Guest:It's very beautiful.
Marc:Did you live in South America as well?
Guest:Yeah, I lived in... Because I did some research.
Guest:Sao Paulo.
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Yeah, a little bit.
Guest:Doesn't seem like it.
Guest:No, you're doing a good job.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I lived there for three years in Sao Paulo.
Marc:I can't even imagine what that, that was a woman thing too?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Did that have any effect on the... That was a woman thing and a real sort of, I was tired of living in England and I lived in a particular part of London that was particularly grim.
Marc:What part was that?
Guest:Clapham.
Guest:Sounds grim, doesn't it?
Marc:Why were you living in a grim place?
Guest:I just ended up there.
Guest:And I went on tour and walked out of the...
Guest:the airport at rio and the sun was shining and the architecture was relatively modern and the streets were swarming with beautiful women and um and i didn't go home for three years was there did it was there something creatively that was sparked there at all i mean like you know when you talk about berlin i can see berlin in you i it was a was a was south america
Guest:yeah uh it was compelling for different reasons you know i mean i made a i made a record or or two that i i made some i did some good stuff there but which ones um i think the good son was done there and and whatever that one is let love him or i don't know henry's dream i don't know yeah all right yeah maybe maybe some of that too yeah yeah
Guest:But anyway, I was there for a few years.
Guest:And I had a kid and went back to England.
Marc:But musically, you're not one of those people that's like, the Latin field.
Guest:To be honest, between you and me, I couldn't bear it.
Guest:I was sort of, you know, kind of hauled along to every goddamn samba club you could imagine.
Guest:And to be honest, it was... The rhythm is...
Guest:It's complicated.
Marc:Well, let's keep it simple.
Guest:I'm a very kind of one, two, three, four.
Guest:Johnny Cash is about as complicated as I get.
Marc:Well, Nick Cave, thank you for talking.
Marc:I hope we did all right here.
Guest:Yeah, you did great, man.
Guest:Thanks, man.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:That's it, America.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:Happy Fourth of July.
Marc:Don't hurt yourself.
Marc:Don't lose any fingers.
Marc:Don't blow up any things.
Marc:Be careful out there.
Marc:Nick Cave was interesting.
Marc:I told you that Russell Crowe story was worth it.
Marc:Am I right?
Marc:I am right.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Get some merch.
Marc:You know, get the Lipson deal if you want to start your own podcast.
Marc:What else?
Marc:Leave some comments.
Marc:Enjoy yourselves with what there is to enjoy there.
Marc:What have I got coming up?
Marc:I'm going to be in Seattle next week at the Sub Pop Benefit thingy.
Marc:I don't know what that is.
Marc:i know it's for a good cause though i'm sorry i just burped oh my god pull it together pull it together man pull it together dude dude go up to the roof man be careful be careful on the ladder let her go up first then who's gonna hold the ladder for you i gotta have a guy come over and hold the ladder
Marc:I'm just, maybe I'm just not going to go out.
Marc:Maybe we should just watch TV.
Marc:Because we have the freedom to do that here.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!