Erstellt am: 25. 2. 2013 - 16:08 Uhr

Nick Cave on FM4 Heartbeat

And how he got to be there, even though it didn't look like it for a few difficult moments...

I am writing this quick blog while editing my Nick Cave interview for tonight's show. It all happened like this: Last week I was away on holiday, but the week before I was in Berlin to see the man. And just now I am travelling back in time, listening to myself struggling for the right wording to my questions and his patiently constructed, well-considered answers.

I like to think interviews should be like conversations, and in this context a prepared list of questions would be just as irritating, destructive and absurd as in any other conversation. A list of questions will reduce whoever is interviewed to a commodity producing soundbites. It is a bit offensive, really.

Tellingly, the first words Nick Cave said to me in my first interview with him around twelve years ago went something like: “I see you haven't prepared any notes for this interview?”
I mumbled some sort of embarrassed excuse.
“Very good,” he interrupted.
I have got on well with him ever since.

Nick Cave

So this time I had spent the night before the interview in Berlin with friends who, according to local custom, didn't want to go to bed before half four or five in the morning. A few hours later I had got up, swallowed an Aspirin and tried to regroup my thoughts about Nick Cave's new album “Push The Sky Away”.

Of course, any interviewer really needs a list of questions, otherwise you would forget to ask all the important stuff. But you have to hide it inside your head, which requires a reasonably unclouded brain.

My biggest worry though, was to get new batteries for my recorder and a replacement for my well-used SD-Card that my computer had recently refused to recognise. So when I got off the U-Bahn at Alexanderplatz, I went to a subterranean branch of Rossmann's and got myself a new card, learning in the process that both customers and sales staff in Berlin drugstores like to indulge in prolonged discussions about the finer points of gift vouchers, returns and loyalty cards. In doing so, they challenge the sanity of the queuing music journalist in whose head the worry about his ever-shrinking time cushion is competing with maintenance of order of thoughts regarding “Push The Sky Away”.

Which is the song with the 72 virgins in it, why write a blues about the Higgs Boson, why is this the first Bad Seeds record that's not on Mute, what about Cave's parallel existence on the internet, his local celebrity status in Brighton and the presence of his past here in Berlin? And what does his wife really think of the album cover?

Etcetera.

Nick Cave

As it turned out, there was still enough time for me to get lost on Alexanderplatz and answer a concerned phone call from Nick Cave's press assistant in such a reassuring way that I almost believed myself that I knew where I was going, before eventually waltzing into the reception of Nick Cave's hotel bang on time.

When he turned up a few moments later, he held a pair of unused black leather gloves in his right hand that he smacked into the palm of his left. The fact that I found this gesture charismatic rather than ridiculous says a lot about the Nick Cave phenomenon. At this moment I had a) completely forgotten what I wanted to ask and b) a feeling of absolute certainty that all was going to go well.

What happened next is one of the reasons why we can be happy to be working for a radio station round these parts. I have tried not to edit out my struggling for wordings and Cave's searching for answers completely. As you can tell from this screen shot I have sometimes lost patience after mere split seconds, and then at other times felt very laissez-faire about it all. It's not an exact science, editing interviews.

Robert Rotifer

You can hear the result tonight, Monday, from 9pm GMT/10pm CET on FM4 Heartbeat live on air and stream, as well as the archive stream from tomorrow, Tuesday, afternoon onward.

What you will not hear is me sitting in the hotel bar just after finishing the interview realising that there seemed to be nothing apart from the first few seconds saved on my recording device, jumping up and down on one leg like Rumpelstiltskin while repeatedly hissing „For fuck's sake!“, inwardly picturing the fateful consequences of this technical mishap, finally deciding to pull the offensive SD card out of my recorder and insert it straight into my laptop in a desperate attempt to look for the missing data, only to see the seemingly lost file of my interview transform itself into a satisfyingly long sound wave in front of my tired eyes. As I said, you will not hear any of this, but you are welcome to imagine it to make tonight's show that extra bit more exciting for yourself.

Nick Cave