By Eliot Wilder / Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain. Feeling a bit peckish after having ridden a $15 bus from Chinatown in Boston to Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. Had a mozzarella, tomato and basil sandwich with a cream soda at Miro Cafe. Bought a pair of gray socks at Yellow Rat Bastard. Picked up a copy of the new Badly Drawn Boy at Rebel Rebel. Trying to do something, anything - short of tequila shots, which would only end up making me unfocussed and cranky - to take the edge off. He's known for being somewhat intimidating and I am, I must admit, somewhat intimidated. Stop in at Lunettes et Chocolat, where - mais oui! - I decide to buy him a few pieces of almost-too-pretty-to-eat handmade confections wrapped in a Tiffany-style box. Maybe I can ingratiate myself with chocolate. After all, everyone likes chocolate. Even high-minded, low-tolerance artistic types renowned for loathing interviews and, even more, interviewers.

I arrive at my destination a bit early. It's an austere, amber hotel bar with a melancholic air, and except for the few folks polishing up glasses and wiping down tables, I am alone. Suddenly, I spy him entering across the room. He's with what I would discover is his assistant, a doting but nervous woman whose job it is to make his life as free from bullshit as possible. The two of them stride up to my table, him looking utterly urbane in his green velvet jacket, starched shirt and thicket of black hair. We greet with a handshake. I offer him the chocolates. He smiles briefly, like a flash of light along a blade and says he doesn't much care for sweets. But, wait, his wife does and he can give it to her. Whew. He's just shy of gaunt, with the kind of face you could strap on the front of a ship to plough icebergs. He sits, orders English breakfast tea (what, no absinthe?), rolls what will be the first of many "fags" and we get down to business. That being an interview with Nick Cave.

From the start, Nick Cave's songs have agitated both the shadowy sides of himself and his audience. His earliest work expressed few normative emotions, mostly concentrating on his extreme obsessions with love, hate, God, sex, death, God, depravity, Elvis and, oh yes, God. With his band the Birthday Party - formed out of the ashes of Boys Next Door, which Cave and pal Mick Harvey put together while at a Melbourne boarding school ("We played all sorts of atrocious stuff," he says. "At one point we were an Alice Cooper cover band.") - he began his exploration of the darker cavities of human behavior. The industrial-strength music of the Party - which also featured guitarist Rowland S. Howard, bassist Tracy Pew and drummer Phill Calvert - was matched by its gangrenous lyrical themes, which in turn reflected the way Cave lived - as on the edge as one can get without falling off. This was rock at its most maverick and, like a cosmopolitan Iggy Pop - with whom the young Cave has been compared - Nick was not at all queasy with drawing blood both figuratively and literally. On BP tunes like the blasphemous "Big-Jesus-Trash-Can" on records like Junkyard - whose tracks are a mishmash of bruised blues, noise punk and twisted cabaret - he let his self-destructive impulses run amok amid squalls of acid-fried cacophony. Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Nick Cave that's fucking who!

If this sounds romantic in a youthful, hope-I-die-before-I-get-old kind of way, it wasn't. Sure, it was good for creating edgy, difficult art and for projecting yourself as someone who revels in being malevolent, aggressive, brooding and bleak - but you can just bet there's going to be trouble ahead when you insist on driving 110 in the breakdown lane. Contemplate rancor and ruin too deeply for too long and, like a lettuce leaf, you begin to wither.

Ultimately, the Birthday Party, its members undone by their rabid indulgences in drugs and drink, staggered and stalled. Cave himself became seriously addicted to heroin and was facing jail time for various drug busts. But instead of allowing a very real giant leech to suck the life out of him, he entered rehab, worked hard to get straight (something he's struggled to maintain), formed the Bad Seeds - which with the addition and subtraction of certain members continues to this day - and, if that wasn't enough, in 1989, he penned And the Ass Saw the Angel. A pulpy mess of a novel, it's steeped in the mores of Southern gothic fiction, leading the reader mazily through a sprawling greenhouse of alcoholism, inbreeding and religious fanaticism, all told from the perspective of a mute, malformed outcast. Imagine William Faulkner hitting the needle instead of the booze.

Somewhere during this tumultuous, transitional period, Nick shifted what had been his staunch religious convictions. Initially attracted to the Old Testament because of its allegories of barbarism and cruelty under the omniscient eye of a mean-spirited God, Cave, as he had grown older, mellowed his beliefs. "I guess the New Testament called to me," he once told Rolling Stone, "which was a much softer, sadder, more introverted voice." Much the same can be said of the arc of Cave's artistic career, as his albums have become progressively softer, sadder and more introverted - an apt way to describe his latest, Nocturama.

It comes as no huge surprise, then, to witness firsthand Mister Dieingly Sad's rhapsodic side, one that appears filled with a zest and passion for, of all things, the whorl of life. "No one's asked me what I love," he responds fervently to my initial query, "Is there any question that you've wanted to answer that no one's asked you?" "I love manicured gardens," he begins with a smile. "I love pebble beaches, baby animals, penguins and hyenas. I love my wife and I love children - and my own children in particular." Pause. "I love the flowers and the trees and the bobbing bees!" Gardens? Penguins? Babys? Bees? This certainly jars with the image of a miserablist who lives in a blinds-drawn world, of a misanthrope who could make Franz Kafka seem like Tony Robbins. "Well, there are things I hate: oppression, hypocrisy, bullying ... and capsicums." Capsicums? "You know, they're large peppers that come in red and yellow. Not pretty, not pretty at all."

"And I love music," Cave says emphatically. "I love Bob Marley, Neil Young, Al Green, Nina Simone and Bob Dylan." But his earliest inspiration, also no huge surprise, was the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash. "I used to watch his show in Australia when I was about 9." It was a wee bit more than flattering for Nick - "I was very proud," he puts it - when, in 2000, Cash covered "The Mercy Seat" on his American III: Solitary Man. Admittedly, not all of Cave's early tastes in music were so hip or enlightened (but then, whose are?). "I listened to a lot of very, very bad English progressive rock like the Moody Blues, Yes, Pink Floyd ? and then I stumbled on the Sensational Alex Harvey band, which had a huge influence on me."

And then there were the Stooges. "They allowed everyone to find a way to move forward." And in the spirit of moving forward Cave can be credited with fomenting a style that added poetry and pathos to the visceral energy of punk. Brawn plus brains. "I've always had an interest in words," he says, referring to his knack for prose. "I had a very literary father who drummed a lot of stuff into me. In school I wrote stories. When I was a teenager, I read most of the Russians - Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy - but when I finished matriculation I never went to university." Instead, he willingly traveled down the hard road of the aspiring musician, absorbing influences like a human petri dish, fertile and fecund.

Out of that, and with a certain high-minded conviction, Cave has created an unabashedly emotional body of work of near biblical proportions. Listening to albums like Let Love In or Tender Prey or The Boatman's Call or No More Shall We Part, you lose your bearings. You fall away. You feel as if you are drowning in their space. His are songs that express longing as irony or as nightmare or as depression that stretches out in all directions like an endless desert. His are also songs that can be as restorative as an all-body massage. It's all there on Nocturama, a succinct 10-song tour of the Cave oeuvre, an album that balances the deviant balladeer (on deceptively gentle tunes like "Wonderful Life," "Right Out of Your Hand" and "Bring It On") with the brimstone rocker (the coruscating "Dead Man in My Bed" and the incendiary, 15-minute comically operatic, "Babe, I'm on Fire"). Mostly, Nocturama is a record of choleric and poignant songs, songs about isolation, about trying to connect but not always succeeding. A concept album?

"When I put a record together I go into my office and I try to write one song. It takes a long time to get that one song, but when I do, that one song suggests something else. And then it slowly unfolds, one song after another, and you find you've got a record, and very often they are attached in some ways - they all join hands and they become a family of songs."

This family of songs is then fleshed out and colored in by the Bad Seeds, which currently includes guitarist Blixa Bargeld, bassist Martyn Casey, keyboardist Conway Savage, drummers Thomas Wydler and Jim Sclavunos, violinist Warren Ellis and, of course, Mick Harvey. Throughout the vicissitudes of his career, Cave's friendship with the multi-faceted instrumentalist has only deepened. "Mick and I have been together since we were 15 - 30 years! - and we get along better now than ever, actually. We've been through an enormous amount of stuff, and I think we're a lot more relaxed about things than we used to be." Has the dynamic changed much between the two of them over the decades? "His role has varied throughout our career," Cave says. "In the Birthday Party I would tell him, 'I've got this song called "Dead Joe."' And he'd say, 'Well, how does it go?' I would sing it to him and he'd figure it out on the guitar because I didn't play anything. He worked out the music from a very skeletal idea. And that was the way we did it for a long time, although I finally learned how to play the piano. These days it's different. For the last three records, the songs have been completely written before I've gone into the studio. These days Mick's usually happiest just to be the guitarist. But being Mick, he can't help but get involved in the arrangements and working on the strings and such. He also oversees the mixing - he's always done that."

Enough of Nick Cave the musician. What of Nick Cave the man? This man with the genteel gestures and hangdog look. This mysterioso who speaks mindfully and, unremarkably, with nary a telltale trace of pretentiousness. In And the Ass Saw the Angel, the main character, Euchrid Eucrow, has been described as someone who possesses an unusual sensitivity that he hides underneath an engaging bravado. Could that be a good way to describe Nick Cave? "That might be right, yeah." Pause. "But I don't know about engaging."

"I think I've always had the same sensibilities," he goes on, "stretching back to the youthful rage and cynicism I had with the Birthday Party, and a lot of that came from the death of my father when I was 19. But my songs have always been about the same things in one form or another, just reworked and re-looked-at and progressively pared down to the bone." And performed with a passion that can only be summoned by an artist who has been to perdition and back.

From Amplifier magazine