Nick Cave on the Process Behind The Boatman's Call

This was the first Nick Cave album I actually bought a copy of. Until then all the recordings I had heard of him were vinyl LPs in my brother's audio collection. My brother had just left London and moved to Cape Town, in South Africa, and he'd left a fucking enormous pile of records in a box in his friend's flat in Clapham. Eventually his friend was moving house and wanted Graeme's record collection rehoused. So some time in 1999, it must've been around June, I offered to collect them and ship them to him in Cape Town. I went down to London on the train and found the house and picked up this box. God knows how I got it to the station and back to my room, but I did, and I browsed through it, but I don't think I played any of them. My brother knew genres of music I never knew existed! I did recognise a few things: he had some Marillion LPs, and a few by the Robert Cray Band, and some Chris Rea, and then there was other stuff, like Fields of the Nephilim and The Birthday Party, ... what the hell was that about?

A few months later I found myself at Cambridge Folk Festival, picking up the litter, and trying as hard as I could not to start smoking again, because I'd given it up on my 33rd birthday. I remember that I was blown away about how good Charles Wells Bombardier tasted when your mouth wasn't coated in cigarette tar, ... and some time after lunch this guy came up on the main stage, and there was a grand piano that he sat down at, and there was a woman with a cello or a double bass or something sitting behind him, and he said he was going to play a song which he used to sing to his son as a lullaby, and he sat down and they started to play, ...

The people who go to Folk festivals didn't really know what to make of him, it was clear. Some people even booed him, but I thought that was some pretty out-there stuff. I loved how raw and visceral it was and how he was just blasting the words out onto the page. And he played some other songs, but I don't remember what they were, except one was Love Letter.

Then when I got back to my room that evening I looked in the box of my brother's records, and lo, there were a few Nick Cave albums, one of which was Henry's Dream and those I listened to all through, and again and again. I couldn't get enough of it. Henry's dream in particular. When I heard John Finn's Wife I felt like I was listening to account of a dream I'd had myself, but that I'd forgotten, and now someone else was telling me what it was.

So I went to a record shop a few days later and looked at what they had, and I found The Boatman's Call and immediately bought it and listened to it on repeat for days and days, it completely caught my mood at the time, which was just a huge mess of what might-have-been and what never was. I have always had the conscious knowledge that however I imagine things might one day go, they will never, ever go that way. It's as if imagining things is a guarantee they won't happen like that. But if we're brave enough, and throw caution to the winds we can let our imaginations go from time to time, and at those moments the world becomes a magical place.

See The Red Hand Files #57 and PJ Harvey - A Child's Question, July.

David and Romany Gilmour - Between Two Points

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