I still think nothing will happen to me

Nowhere is his vanity more visible than in his commentary to a recent DVD compilation of his music videos. “At that period of my life I was at my best-looking,” he says of a 1986 performance of The Singer. The Ship Song, on the other hand, is marred by his being dressed in an overly baggy suit. The Wedding Song makes it look as if he is dancing in a gay disco. When I praise the one-take video of Henry Lee, a sexually-charged duet with his former lover Polly Harvey — two figures in black for the price of one — he grimaces: “Yeah, a great video, bad affair.”

Suntanned from life in Brighton, his luxuriant black hair now short and neat, Cave, 46, sits in a brown suit in a Chelsea hotel, smoking. He talks very slowly and carefully, as if fearing his coolness will heckle him if he says anything stupid (although he makes me feel stupid often enough). At least he responds well to praise. I say I very much like his new double album, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, which is being released next month. “I do, too. I still really like it and that’s a pretty good sign for me.”

The album is quintessential Cave, a mix of Old Testament gothic, sexual recrimination, love poetry and black humour. People compare him with Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits or Johnny Cash, but he is consistently his own thing. Even so, his group, the Bad Seeds, have been together more than 20 years now and some change is unavoidable. It is, for instance, their first double album, a form he has hitherto avoided: Abattoir Blues has the heavy drumming on it; The Lyre of Orpheus a lighter, jazzier feel. It is also the first record without the guitarist Blixa Bargeld, formerly the leader of a German “industrial” band whose instruments included sheet metal and power tools. Bargeld dumped Cave by e-mail. Unmoved, Cave seized the opportunity to include more guitar from his old friend Mick Harvey, and to add bouzouki and mandolin.

It is dedicated to his friend and professional confidant Mick Geyer, who died from cancer before he could hear it. Geyer is not the first contemporary he has lost. A godfather to Tiger Lily, Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence’s daughter, he played his lovely Into My Arms at both her parents’ funerals. His heroes, Cash and Nina Simone, both died last year. It is, I say, as if someone is telling him something. He agrees that a lot of people he knows are getting ill: “But I still feel pretty immortal, actually.”

Is that because he knows his work will survive? “Possibly, but I still have that feeling that nothing’s ever going to happen to me. I always had that feeling. Even when things were happening to me, I still had that feeling.”

And things did happen to him. At 20 he was buying heroin from dealers in Melbourne. According to Lydia Lunch, a writer and rock musician with whom he formed a sexual and creative collaboration, by his mid-twenties in London he had overdosed three times.

“I guess in those days I had an absolute obliviousness to that kind of thing. I think that still stays with me in some way. Caution isn’t something that I worry about too much.” Jeremy Dean, in Hellfire, a monograph on Cave, said it was because of his “flirtatious attitude towards death and danger”. “People talk about that as if there was some decision in the whole thing. There was no decision. I was a junkie. That’s not a daily decision to be that way.” Not a pose? “Well, it was 20 years of it. It would be a long thing to keep up.”

It must have been terrible. “No, it was all right. I had ten really good years, ten years where it didn’t bother me. I didn’t see any problems with it, and then somewhere along the line, after ten years, my attention was drawn to the fact by other people that this behaviour isn’t really on, that it’s destructive and destructive to everybody else. Then I had another ten years of trying to work that out and then trying to stop. It was not something that I did overnight and they were very painful years, I would say.”

After many a failed rehab — he often says he could write the Michelin Guide to detox clinics — he stopped shooting up in 1998, the year he met his wife Susie Bick, a fashion model with whom he now has twin four-year-old sons. “A lot of things started to go really right for me rather than go really wrong for me,” he says.

In Sussex he lives a regular life, getting up early — although not, as is sometimes reported, as early as 5am — and walking to his office to write. But he insists he was always disciplined about work. You do not, he chides, write a 300-page novel, 1989’s well-respected And the Ass Saw the Angel, “on a beer mat”.

“I get a lot of, I feel, underhand criticism about my life now by certain people: that there’s nothing to write about, that I lead an ordered life, a family life, that I go to the office and work. Certain people feel I have to exist in some moral and emotional basement to be able to write a decent song, and I find this deeply offensive. I won’t be their scapegoat. I’ll do whatever I want and do it in the best way that I can.”

Is his life separate from his work? “I just think there’s an overemphasis on the whole drug thing, that I was that way once and I’m this way now. I think that I was always the same person, with the same desires and same drives, and I’m still that same person.”

Cave’s chemical composition at any one time certainly seems to have been largely irrelevant to the music he has produced. The recurring themes of God, death and destructive love have obsessed him since his earliest songs. If, as some experts say, you can either grow or be an addict, not both, it may be that drugs froze him in this attitude. Even Cave has conceded that his likes and dislikes have “not particularly progressed”, but dates the cut-off point to the night his father died in a car crash when he was 19. He has been accused of not confronting this loss. “Yeah. I left Australia very soon after that and I was pretty shiftless and moved around a lot and lived in different places. But I don’t know if you ever confront these things, or you ever really get over them. I cried, but I cried for my mother, actually. I was really upset that my mother had lost her husband. It almost didn’t occur to me that I’d lost my father, in some weird way. We weren’t particularly close at that time because I was off doing stuff. I was a rebellious teenager out every night and out of control.”

His father, Colin, an English teacher who read classics aloud to him, had at least managed to imbue in his youngest son a love of writing. In Nature Boy, to be released as a single on September 6, he recalls watching “some ordinary slaughter” on the news (in fact, the attempted assassination of the US presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972) and his father’s response: “He said, that in the end it is beauty / That is going to save the world ...”

In this paraphrase, Colin Cave sounds like Keats. His son’s true inspiration, however, is not romantic poetry but the Bible, in particular the Old Testament. It seems to me he is a fan of it, in the way people are fans of Hammer horror movies: he enjoys being scared, but he is too cynical to take the plots seriously. “I find that it’s very difficult these days to believe,” he admits, “to take a rational viewpoint on the whole thing. So I’ve put my beliefs into the irrational part of my thinking and the magical part of my thinking and the creative part of my thinking, where I guess songwriting lives as well.”

I refer him to a song from the new album, Let the Bells Ring. With its chorus, “He is the real, real thing”, and reference to imbibing bread and wine, it seems as close as he has come to accepting Christ into his life. “Well, it’s not really about that, sorry. It’s actually about Johnny Cash, that song. Inspired by the death of Johnny Cash. He is the real thing.” Ah. Wrong J.C. “It’s ambiguous, I suppose.”

The other things we look for in a Nick Cave record are symptoms of his dysfunctional relationship with women, another theme possibly jeopardised by a happy marriage. He has characterised his personal life before Susie as “complete chaos”. It certainly had its moments. After a long relationship with an Australian singer, Anita Lane, he fell in love with a Brazilian fashion stylist, Viviane Carneiro, while on tour in São Paulo. In 1991 she gave birth to their son, Luke, a happy event complicated by the fact that an Australian woman had ten days earlier delivered him another son, Jethro. By the mid-nineties he was back in London, living near both boys, but his marriage to Carneiro was over. Next he had a heavy-duty affair with the singer P. J. Harvey. As we have established, this did not end well. Its entrails wrap themselves through songs such as West Country Girl on his 1997 album, The Boatman’s Call.

“I’m sure there was an element of bitterness to that album, a huge element of bitterness, but I think I was in a frame of mind at that time to be very wounded. There’s something self-piteous about some of that stuff and I find it difficult to sing some of those songs these days — though I think they’re really good songs.”

At least at no point on the album does he fantasise about killing her. This imaginary fate is reserved for Kylie Minogue in their 1996 duet, Where the Wild Roses Grow. The ballad, about a guy killing a girl with “blood-red lipstick” by the river, became a lush video in which the corpse of Minogue floats, Ophelia-like, amid the reeds. It did wonders for her credibility and got Cave on Top of the Pops. I wonder if he got caught up in the romance. “What are you asking?” Well, did he fall in love with Minogue? I mean, who wouldn’t? “She was an absolute joy to work with and she’s a wonderful human being, but really not my type. She’s happy all the time!”

The latest album suggests that domestic happiness is at least proving good for his ego, ie, it’s reducing it. The song Abattoir Blues mocks his habit of “waking with the sparrows” and hurrying off to work, presumably missing his share of the parental breakfast duties: “I wanted to be your Superman,” he sings, “but I turned out such a jerk.”

The Lyre of Orpheus’s title song takes a similarly scathing view of his precious muse. Eurydice warns Orpheus that, if he keeps playing, she’ll stick his lyre up his “orifice” (some of Cave’s jokes couldn’t be more basic, or more Australian). Surrendering, Orpheus decides to exchange heavenly music for a “bunch of screaming brats”. This deliberately crudely expressed but relatively charming sentiment does not, he tells me, represent his own feelings on the matter. He wants no more children and has no intention of abandoning his lyre.

“I’ve always known that I’ll be marginal to some degree,” he concludes, summoning forth all available modesty. “I know that the music that I make is not going to be for everybody. I know that there are people who’ll listen to The Lyre of Orpheus, that particular song, and die of boredom halfway through the whole thing, but at some point I gave up lying about that.”

He also says, when I say the song’s very funny, that he’s always considered himself a comic songwriter. His evil-minded humour is, of course, the sin that redeems him — and saves the Man in Black from becoming the Fonz.