I first got Murder Ballads by a coincidence. And I was stuck. Completely stuck. In a few months I collected all the Nick Cave albums (this was in a small town in the south of Sweden without proper recordshops for "alternative" music and in 1996 of course without the possibility to download) and I listened to them on repeat. I got absorbed by his visions, his weird sometimes Goya-like worlds and dirty aesthetics from his sketches. His music followed me through hot summers in France, rainy black-and-white Prague falls, crispy & neverending swedish winters and soft lifegiving Italian springs. He was always with me.
Then in 2001 i waited outside the record shop at the central station in Florence, "And no more shall we part" was released; then we parted. I loved that album but after that I don't know what happened. Maybe he got older, maybe he finally quit drugs. Sometimes I saw his super-directed videos on MTV and i didn't even recognized his song. I felt a little bit betrayed and I thought that Me & Nick was over and done.
I really tried to appreciate the Grinderman project but I couldn't. It was noisy and dirty but something was missing. I sat in the park behind Castel S. Angelo in Rome with my I-pod a whole day and listened to it but nothing got stuck in my head.
So of course when I saw that Mr. Cave wrote a new book I thought it was a little bit pathetic, with a David Lynch-like rabbit on the front it felt old and predictible. And the tickets for the reading of his book at the China Theatre were extremely expensive and I tried not to think about it. I've just seen him 2 times before and that was NICE but nothing more because it was in festivals and the frame of a huge festival-scene is always ugly (but in 96 in one of those festivals I lost my shoe during the concert and it ended up on the stage in the hand of Nick and he said "But how can you wear this kind of shoes?" before he threw it out in the audience- it was an Airwalk Tony Hawk sneeker that was quite fashionable at the time but now I completely understand him) but anyway the other day I just got the tickets anyway and thank's LORD for that!
It was torturelike. I was nailed to the red velvet theatre chair with Cave in front of me (in a really good mood) playing song after song I listened to while growing up. And I was patheticly crying like a little girl because it brought back feelings and memories and I think I should stop here otherwise this will be pathetic too. He read from his book, chatted with the audience and was really amusing, played the piano, played the guitar, drank water & coffe and it was so COSY.
The Ship Song, Lucy, God is in the house, Tupelo, The Mercy Seat (as usual), The Weeping Song (without Blixa), Into My Arms, Red Right Hand, Do you love me? and more.
It was one of the best shows I've ever seen. It doesn't happen so often anymore that you see something really GOOD.
