Blood, Tooth and Claw – A Nick Cave Bestiary

The book of Genesis states in the beginning there was God and the power of creation from which all life flowed. Cave has long used classical imagery of plants as metaphors in his songs, from flowers and trees to a bestiary of birds, bees, and hounds from hell. So much of Cave’s work feeds on the inspiration of the natural world as totemic symbols of beauty and threat.

Celebrating bucolic scenes as hymns to wonder and godly design is also to admit to the cyclical forces of growth and erosion, decay and regeneration. Grounded in the brute facts of life, Cave’s songs are still mired in the blood and dirt of a pagan realism, where the earthly beauty that is praised through art and love must also be bound over to new life emerging from fresh death. Artists sometimes speak of the mother of invention as a generic term for the “source” of ideas, a naturally occurring appearance, or awakening, but even in Milton’s Paradise Lost this high-minded concept of creation is brought to ground. With the “mortal taste” of the forbidden fruit eaten by Eve the fruit itself bears all the metaphor of bloom, fade, and seasonal change, returning to the earthy message of the flowers: “For now we are beautiful, tomorrow we will be wormfood.”

This post is extracted from my book – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Song of Love and Loss

Cave’s 2004 song “Breathless” embodies the lightness of nature realised as the spirit of love in full flight: birds tweet, tunes spring into full bloom, and the sun burns through the haze—everything the eye alights upon is spurred on into life. The whole thing rides a breezy, carefree bossanova rhythm of acoustic guitars and brush-beaten drums, all twirling about Warren Ellis’ flute, like centaurs set loose in a holy garden drunk on nectar of the gods. Rich with the largesse of spring the song is an ode to love delivered through the infinite and returning force of nature, bringing a sunshine blush to the heart. It suggests the image of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, who is often represented as being surrounded by animals and garlanded by birds. In St. Francis’ song Laudes Creaturarum (Praise of the Creatures) we see his vision of “varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs” as a gift from God on “Sister Mother Earth,” perceiving a new unity between animals and man as fellow creatures (great and small).

gustav dore - adam and eve and the serpent — Adam and Eve and The Snake – Gustav Dore (1902)

Birds appear in many of Cave’s songs; their ability to fly hints at some kind of transcendence, but they are often depicted as darkly symbolic, watching patiently, or circling high above. He returns to the carrion birds of the crow, the vulture, and the raven, the beat of their dark wings. A crooked bird shadow passes over the voice of “Your Funeral, My Trial,” a harbinger of doom suggesting metaphorical power of clashing shadows as the expression of souls meeting at their overlapping fates.

On “Breathless” the spiralling birds are heralds to the dawn and its omen of love. Cave presents himself as the earnest robin, full with the gift of song but standing trembling and humbled before his beloved, so in awe of her he suddenly fears he has lost his voice. Cave would explore further images of birds as creatures of seeming innocence: on “Henry Lee” the bird that “lit down” upon the edge of the well stands as a mark of guilt for the girl who has slain her lover. Later, on “Idiot Prayer” Cave would deliver the throwaway comment that love is “strictly for the birds.” He rejects it as a hopelessly naive but worthwhile enterprise.

Butcher Bird - Lepidlizard — Butcher Bird – Lepidlizard

Elsewhere birds become less-ominous symbols of unrest. On “People Ain’t No Good” blank-eyed pigeons stand in for cooing doves; flying rats that divebomb their corrosive shit onto cars and monuments are the grey tombstone bullets to their brighter brother, the dove, landing as heavenly darts of passion. The comparison presents romance defused by normality—exposing the twisted bittersweet heart of the song. On “Babe, You Turn Me On” Cave observes the butcher-bird following its namesake with “pointless savagery,” a plain-eyed pessimism from which love rescues us. Through Cave’s reflections on different birds we realize that in flying they each express an everyday miracle of escapism and necessary release from our pedestrian, grounded lives. There is a poetic through-line in “The Spinning Song” where Cave’s lyrics wrap around the melody as a string of cadences that tie together visions of home, family, flight, and transcendence caught in the same breeze: “Spin the feather and sing the wind.”

Cave presents a lasting image of animals as creatures hardwired into wild nature, their instincts coming to the fore when our worlds overlap. In “Where Do We Go Now (From Nowhere)” (1997) the kitten in his lap swipes at his cheek with the power of a bear, the lovely creature he entertained still harbors its private, primal aggression against him. He returns to this image on “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side” (2001): the kitten is totemic, passed back and forth, and ignorant to the storm of emotions passing overhead in the debate above. She is the vulnerable body to be protected, but equally threatened by the godlike indecision of the humans caring for her, clinging to the anchor of her body as they become lost in their own musings about life and the universe.

The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere – Louis Wain

At first glance the flowers in Cave’s songs are simply pretty things, but in their shifting forms of symmetry and variation they become a representation of pure beauty, a further expression of godly design. Cave exploits the suggestion of delicacy and sensuality as metaphor for erotic desire. In And the Ass Saw the Angel he again merges the sacred and profane in the vision of lilies like nuns’ hats; the blooming of a flower becomes a mixed symbol that questions sexual maturity. In “Nobody’s Baby Now” Cave notes the blue violets embroidered on his lover’s dress, “the one that I like best.” Undeserving of their beauty, he is almost afraid to touch for fear of destroying the fragility of her seeming innocence. Beyond this plant imagery remains suggestive of human genitalia and outright sexual pleasure, particularly the confluence of female labia in the petals of lilies, with physical love merging toward the figure of motherhood and the healthy blooming of new life.

In the bittersweet song “The Sorrowful Wife” (2001) Cave marks his marriage to Susie Bick on August 11, 1999, the day of a solar eclipse. Returning to the loaded melancholy of “Sorrow’s Child” he reflects that his wife had always carried a certain sadness about her that he found deeply attractive from the start. Cave would draw upon the memory that inspired the song’s third verse of a visit to Kew Gardens with his wife Susie in the spring of 2000, lying under a yew tree and noticing the fecundity of the gardens. Cave contrasts the emergent life of babies waiting to be born and the deep age of the ancient tree, while pointing to the pervasive melancholy of the “momentary bluebells.” At the end of each verse Cave finds his wife is pushing back against time, counting off days on her fingers like petals from the flowers that surround them before a great surge of guitar hammers into the wistful melody. Cave cries out to his beloved for help and all hell breaks loose. The happy moment is, like the flowers, to be admired and enjoyed today, for tomorrow it may be gone.

The songs of No More Shall We Part (2001) are full of yearning love and aching melancholy. Its album cover shows a dense oil painting of funereal flowers, even more beautiful when placed alongside death they too will inevitably fade. In contrast the flower and bird artwork of the 2004 album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and its singles would evoke its bright blue sky feeling of openness toward nature, away from darkness and dirge. It would represent The Bad Seeds’ renewed way of working—full of immediacy, freshness, and vitality.

Cave would keep returning to the framing device of gardens: “The Willow Garden,” “Lime Tree Arbor,” and “Gates to the Garden,” formalized spaces cut-off from the wild—a perfect world in miniature. On “Darker with the Day” Cave passes by flowers in a garden— camellias, magnolias, and azaleas— he loses himself in the sudden harmony of colors amid the chaos of the world, the way we might be stopped in our tracks by a sunset, then he walks on, back towards the darkness. Employing various species of tree and flower on “There She Goes My Beautiful World,” mentioning wintergreen, juniper, cornflower, chicory, elm, ash, and the linden tree, as if reciting their names would preserve them in his mind beyond the blank slate of natural devastation.

These touchstones of color and shape garland the exultant mood of the song’s music, while standing tall against its mood of inspiration slipping away. The trees announce themselves as temporal things still worth saving, rooting memory to place and time, the names of trees and plants that Nick Cave admires, hum alive with meaning. Providing the great escape and reset from more formal concerns of life, in his notebooks Walt Whitman provides the perfect reflection on the enervating force of plants: “Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

One of The Bad Seeds’ biggest hits, Cave’s 1996 duet with Kylie Minogue “Where the Wild Roses Grow” would make the album Murder Ballads an unlikely bestseller. Where the rose is the classical flower of love, its thorns and petals combine to express the dual nature of romance and violence that Cave had begun to explore on the 1994 album Let Love In and would further lament on The Boatman’s Call in 1997. The song tells the story of a doomed romance, where a young woman Elisa Day recounts her own murder, reaffirming her true identity behind the nickname of the “Wild Rose” given to her by her lover/murderer. As with “Henry Lee,” also from Murder Ballads, we see her side of the world through female eyes, while Cave’s male voice of the duet lends itself to her testimony, which slowly twists into a confession after he smashes her head in with a rock.

Ego Schiele — Self-portrait with Physalis – Egon Schiele (1915)

In the video for “Where the Wild Roses Grow” we see Kylie, a singing corpse looking more like a lip-syncing sex doll, set adrift into the river by the sorrowful Nick Cave, crowned by scattered roses floating on the water, a conscious echo of John Everett Millais’ famous painting of Ophelia from Hamlet. Kneeling down, Cave plants a rose between her teeth marking the mouth as an open wound of pleasure and violence. He anoints her blood red lips with a final kiss goodbye and whispers, “All beauty must die,” a hymn to the vitality of love that must inevitably come to an end. Perhaps a more selfless romantic gesture would be for the young man to end his own life by suicide as an act of love, but this is consistent with the casual chauvanism in so many of Cave’s songs and the self-serving life of the murderer. Like the bloody stain dripping from the murder’s rock the flowers of her namesake have shed their petals to become the deathbed of Elisa Day; in their red tears they are weeping for her.

The more benign images of flowers are often set against the heavier, austere symbolism of trees. In Cave’s songs, they present the unimpeachable security of age, counting down the rings toward deep time. Where in Robert Frost’s famous poem the woods offer mystery, perhaps even the release of a melancholy comfort, in many of Cave’s songs they are the anonymous, isolated place where bad things happen, a scenario first coined by Cave in the ritual murder of The Birthday Party’s “Deep in the Woods”

Christ At The Garden Of Gethsemane – Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1901)

Taking the idea further, Cave would present trees as symbols of sadness on 1986’s “Sad Waters.” Cave shows the willow tree bent like the body of a elderly woman, grown into the posture of sorrow; it sheds leaves as tears returned to the water. Trees would also become silent sentinels marking the aftermath of disaster on Push the Sky Away (2013). From “We No Who U R” to album closer “Higgs Boson Blues”, Cave wanders past the Brighton palm trees that in his dreams are ignited in flame to fade off into smoke, a vision that reaches forward to the flame trees laid down to die then rising up again as ghosts. Cave flips the cliché of ink-black night into the jagged shadow that follows the crooked man grown wrong. With blood rising high into the sky there is the sense of the order of the world being turned upside down.

An unlikely first single from Push the Sky Away “We No Who U R” is a moody song that speaks to nature as a shadowy place of emergence and concealment. An official one-take music video, directed by Gaspar Noé (the director of Irreversible [2002]) follows “the silhouette of a human form through a wood at night.” Like “Anthrocene” it returns as a song of conflict, a transmutation between air, breath and life. Within the scheme of the forest the flaming trees reach skyward with pleading hands burned black, leaving nowhere safe for the birds to land. When asked if the track was meant as an “environmental hymn” Cave said, “to me it is a huge song. It was not actually supposed to be an environmental song, but I’m quite happy for it to just be what it wants to be. It is a concern of mine. We’ve treated nature abominably and it’s getting back at us with a vengeance.” With no forgiveness offered, it could be an attack upon people destroying nature who deserve no pity or absolution or as for the huddle of trees as a massed humanity standing against the voice of a lone bird. Either way, it presents a forbidding and haunting vision of threat and disquiet; the lyric video ends with the spare lines “And we want you to burn / And we want you to burn.”

Salix babylonica trees - Weeping Willow — Salix babylonica – Weeping Willow

Where before the willow reaching over the water would become the shadow of a memory, in “Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree” Cave calls out to the “gallows tree”, a deathly symbol casting its presence before the event of execution. The song trades in surreal imagery of the tree reaching its eye beyond the spread of its limbs, standing-in for a young girl’s body. As he considers strangling her, the would-be murderer imagines his body moving over hers, slipping through her boughs as a tangle of limbs, and the nascent, pubescent “bumps” of the female form; their bodies entangled in forced intimacy. This is Leonard Cohen’s fevered imagination of the song “Suzanne” where the eyes become synonymous with touch, tracing the contours of her body in the mind. “Sad Waters” uses the same musculature of naked root and creeping ivy, hinting at tenderness of clinging and being clung to, along with the further bondage of roots tied to the earth. Cave exposes the girl’s naievete with her plaiting of willow fronds as a childish game, an act of folk reverence and communion with nature.

“The Little Girl Tree” becomes a highly sexualized place as object, to be bound about the mainstem of her body with silver wire, that presents an insidious blinking glimmer. Like a chastity belt or the wrapping of feet, this is the man’s older voice expressing his desire to trap, shape, and control her body; keeping her young and small, though he knows one day the little girl must outgrow him. The belt image suggests entrapment of the girl in the burgeoning growth of her youth but also the inevitable noose looming from the shadowy gallows by which the man might eventually hang himself. Cave borrows some of the macabre atmosphere of the protest song “Strange Fruit.” Well-known for the versions sung by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, it highlights the death of black people murdered by white lynch mobs, swaying in the hollow breath of the passing breeze. Cave presents a similar echo of death with his line on the “rhythm of the orchard,” which becomes the passage of young lives, flowering into bloom’s promise only to swing back into a descent of death and decay. Cave leans heavily on the arboreal imagery to find a way through the song, a maybe-murder ballad that reveals itself an obsessive hymn to forbidden passion and suppressed lust—perhaps the even forbidden temptation of incest—the almost ruin of the beautiful young thing the man cares for, but also desires in the most unseemly and cruel way.

On “Do You Love Me (Part Two)” Cave’s reprise of the album opener draws from a short story “The Juniper Tree” by Peter Straub, concerned with a young boy repeatedly sexually abused in a cinema by an unnamed man. The child later becomes an author, writing about his experiences in a meta-fictional tangle. Cave teases out a finely wrought line using the vernacular of the original fiction: “The clock of my boyhood was wound down and stopped.” The boy is preoccupied with the image of being dead, buried under a juniper tree, inspired by an old folk story, where the dismembered corpse of a child calls out for the parts of his body to be reunited and made whole again.

Cave would refuse to be drawn on the exact meaning of the song, but in his lyrics he tries to evoke the subtlety of the story’s play with words. It soon becomes clear that in keeping with the tenor of the album’s discussions of love as an expression of abusive control and victimhood, the story contains sections where the thoughts are presented verbatim, as isolated lines on the page suggesting internal monologue of the adult abuser, or being heard as memory echoing in the child victim’s mind—also projected out from radios, comic books, and in nightmares—a blurred reality offering intimations of love. From isolated lines tumbling across the page we find the abuser mired in the throes of self-doubt: “Don’t I love you? . . . And you love me too, don’t you? . . . Don’t I show you, can’t I tell you that I love you?”

Nick Cave borrows from the vernacular of Peter Straub’s story to express the conflicted nature of love and lust in all its complexities, where love is not always reciprocated, mutually understood, or even consensual. Straub would argue that he aimed for a clarity of hard prose meant to transparently show the painful events at hand, unmediated and without decoration: “I was caught by the odd ambiguous, ambivalent ratio of power between the abuser and the abused.” Of course in drawing upon a short story about pedophilia, the song alludes to deeper emotional trauma caused by a corrupted form of love that casts a long shadow over life.