The Ten Best Nick Cave Lyrics

The words are artfully phrased to create a crazy, conspiratorial black comedy, driven by a pulsing rhythm and a compelling narrative question: just who or what is this creepy bastard? The lyric tempts us with revelation, but discloses no secrets save in the enigmatic refrain of his ‘red right hand’. Here, the ‘red right hand’ embodies the secret life of other people, as imagined by a paranoid sensibility – the man in the black coat is everywhere, a blank signifier on which fears and desires can be projected. Is the hand red with blood, or wearing a cheeky festive mitten? The answer comes in The Bad Seeds’ next album, Murder Ballads. ‘Song of Joy’ recounts the harrowing and senseless killing of a family in the uncomprehending tones of the husband who discovers the atrocity. The murderer, a serial killer, writes ‘Red right hand’ on the walls in his victims’ blood. The phrase is drawn from John Milton’s Biblical epic of the Fall, Paradise Lost. It is the avenging hand of God that incites civil strife: the creation of an anti-Eden.

Fifteen minutes of weirdo-mondo lists: the maniacal clutter of a junkie-poet’s intemperate and lovesick mind. Nursery Gothicism cut with bravura middle-class rap generates an almost endless succession of headlong verses with outrageous rhymes – ‘hernia’ / ‘Guernica’ / ‘furniture’. Cave slyly mocks Goths (his own past), his own band (the present), and adds a daft lustre to love through the lounge-music chorus (the future) – making the whole gumbo a wild celebration of the unstoppable fecundity of life, love, and language, even in the face of death (specifically the threat of HIV). Such impetuous lists are characteristic: in ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’, for example, he offers up his personal canon of great artists, writers from the seventeenth-century libertine Rochester to the New York Dolls, from political theorist Karl Marx to the poet Philip Larkin, spiked with similarly audacious and hilarious rhymes – ‘blow it’ / ‘hoe it’ / ‘know it’ / ‘poet’.

Based on an Appalachian murder ballad, ‘Down in the Willow Garden’, itself a traditional Anglo-Irish ballad narrative. The dialogue between the two voices, who each report their experiences from their own perspective, creates the dramatic tension through cryptic questions and comments that seem barely to be understood by the protagonists: “Will you give me your loss and your sorrow?” The unravelling of the plot becomes uncomfortably chilling when it becomes evident that Elisa Day, although forgotten and metamorphosed into the wild rose, can still speak from beyond the grave. The rose is of course an over-determined image – the rose is too obvious a symbol: red and thorny, ‘all bloody and wild’. But cliché or not, roses do grow down by the river, and Cave is refreshing this tired image through a delayed decoding: in other words, the roses are a flash-forward, a hint of the blood to come. It is unclear early in the lyric whether this blood is the result of the loss of virginity, or something more ominous – but at the climax, the daring rhyme of ‘kissed’ with ‘fist’ lays bare the latent violence of love and sex. Despite Kylie Minogue’s affecting innocence in her duet with Nick Cave, I prefer the demo version (B-Sides & Rarities) with the girl’s vocal taken by Blixa Bargeld. It is a reminder that most traditional ballad singers are blind to gender, and that men will sing in a woman’s voice, and vice versa; as such, it has an added poignancy.

A heart-rending meditation on memory, the past, and children, the lyric reaches out more widely to wonder whether the child is father to the man, and the mystery of the Trinity: how God the Father comprehends God the Son. Cave contemplates the parent-child relationship (overshadowed by the early death of his own father and his own juvenile delinquency) as if he is talking to a mulish teenager, before he channels the same questions being asked of him by some higher authority – family, or theology, or the power of language. In a bold change of perspective he goes extra-terrestrial, then into the virtual universe of the internet and the infinity of Wikipedia, which like Jorge-Luis Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’ has the potential to contain all knowledge, but in which it is impossible to distinguish truth from illusion. The lyric reaches out: ‘On the far side of the morning’ is a lovely line to describe the fragility of future plans.

A lyric that commences with the admission ‘I can’t remember anything at all’ may not sound particularly promising, but in ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ it is the starting point for existential deliberation and the prospect of the ‘God particle’ – the perplexing ambition of the Large Hadron Collider effectively to replace celestial creation with theoretical physics. Cave is in Brighton, or driving in his car to Geneva, or perhaps just thinking. He is living at least half in another, overheated world – catching sight of the blues guitarist Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads, pondering Martin Luther King’s assassination at the Lorraine Hotel – these are hot spots or tipping points of history, when everything shifts. Is there a design? Like a preacher, he then goes among the poor and dispossessed, the underside of history, and subsequently encounters ancient Egypt and early Islam. These wanderings, like those of the Wandering Jew cursed with immortality for striking Christ, offer a snapshot of human attempts to commune with holy and unholy powers, of which the Higgs boson is merely the latest example. But like the Christian missionaries to the New World, salvation comes at a terrible price: of smallpox and influenza, genocide and AIDS. Fears of mortality and of the future pervade the lines, fears that Cave is already dead (‘Can you feel my heart beat?’), fears that the future will evaporate as time dissolves in relativity. Human culture collapses into the idiocy of popular culture, and like an eternal and unrelenting cycle at the very end we return to our beginning: ‘I can’t remember anything at all’.