(Credits: Far Out / Ian Allen)
When you see a headline like that, of an artist talking about another artist as a looming ‘monument’, it’s already pretty easy to guess who it is. Go on, I’ll give you three chances, who do you reckon Nick Cave is bestowing that honour upon?
Leonard Cohen? Close, but no. However, Cave is never shy about piling the praise onto Cohen or even crediting him as the man who first inspired him to start putting his words to music. In his epic poem, The Sick Bag Song, Cave wrote, “Leonard Cohen will sing, and the boy will suddenly breathe as if for the first time, and fall inside the laughing man’s voice and hide”. He talks about the first time he heard Cohen as a kind of spiritual revelation.
“For many of us, Leonard Cohen was the greatest songwriter of them all. Utterly unique and impossible to imitate, no matter how hard we tried,” Cave said, but still, that’s not the man in question here.
So naturally, it falls onto the inevitable second guess: Bob Dylan.
Martha Wainwright once put it succinctly when she said, “All roads led to Bob Dylan.” To her, the artist is unavoidable to anyone who ever plans on playing guitar and writing tunes. His legacy is simply too looming, his impact too large to ever enter the world of folk or rock and not be influence by him to some degree.
Cave would agree with that, but in particular, he looks towards a divisive era of Dylan’s career for proof.
“The Dylan of the eighties is a monument for all of us of course,” he said. For most, ‘80s Dylan is a write-off as the end of his Christian era led to a bump ride through records like Empire Burlesque. However, for someone like Cave who has always only ever marched to the beat of his own drum through whatever strange phase he might want to wander, this oddball Dylan was an inspiration.
“Above all else, he never was a collaborator. He always works at his own risk, he doesn’t seek exchange,” he said, seeing it in two ways – that Dylan is an individual always, and that Dylan, in terms of practicality and working style, is an individual.
Sure, he has some enduring collaborators, but largely, the cast has rotated as he’s moved through those different phases and chapters of his career, meaning that there was never any level of compromise to be had with a sturdy backing band. It meant that no one has ever really had a say. To a degree, Cave envied that as he said, “I on the other hand am not a solo artist. I always had exchange with my comrades-in-arms. And I plan on handling it that way until the bitter end.”
It’s the thing that sets them apart; Dylan wants to work on his own, Cave wants to call people in, working closely with Warren Ellis, especially as his creative counterpart. But despite the difference, it doesn’t change the fact that Dylan’s influence will forever loom large over them, towering like a statue above all artists.
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