Seeds of content

An acclaimed new album, a sold-out tour... don't be misled by his gloomy countenance, Nick Cave is sitting pretty at the moment. And he's full of surprises, finds Kathy Sweeney
Nick Cave
'I know a lot about prog rock' ... Nick Cave Public domain

He may not have a sports car and he doesn't order a martini, shaken or otherwise, but if they're looking to cast a new James Bond, Nick Cave should audition. Besuited and sitting in a Helsinki hotel, he gives off a certain secret-agent-on-holiday vibe. His quickness with an arched-eyebrowed quip, an old-fashioned courtesy and a certain familiarity with life's darker side make him a good fit. "Well, I don't plan to do any more acting, unless it's a small part, but I often see pictures of myself and think, yeah, I look just like Pierce Brosnan," he says drily.

He's here in Helsinki, a picture-book city known for its Baltic scenery and plentiful statues, on a small tour prior to his UK shows. Nick has plans for a statue of his own, to be erected in the town square of his home town of Warracknabeal, near Melbourne: a life-sized bronze featuring Nick sat atop a rearing horse.

"We found out it was going to cost an extraordinary amount of money so it was decided to make a film of the whole journey of this thing. We were going to make it in England, ship it to Australia, put it on the back of a truck, and dump it in my home town, which is an extremely small, ultra-conservative place. It's now been turned into a rehousing town for ex-cons who want to go straight, only nobody has gone straight, and it's turned into this strange lawless place," he explains, exhaling a lungful of smoke. "If they don't accept it we were just going to drive it out to the desert and dump it somewhere, Planet Of The Apes style."

Nick Cave, a source of civic pride? Is he serious? Apparently so, although his interviews often have a casual relationship with the truth. In the past he's told reporters that he was born with a tail, and now he's insisting that at sound-check they rocked. In a progressive way. "It's one of my darkest secrets, that I do know a lot about prog rock. Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Moody Blues, all that stuff. We do a mean version of Locomotive Breath."

Since Nick's the one supplying the information, it's difficult to know when you're being led gently up the garden path. "I'm Australian - even we don't know when we're joking and when we're not." Quizzed separately, the rest of the band back his spectacularly unlikely claim.

The band are often portrayed as being in bad need of a good laugh, but despite an obdurate refusal to look on the bright side, as with Leonard Cohen's output, there's a streak of gallows humour running through Cave's work. Broadly speaking, he writes upbeat songs about death and miserable ones about love. Anyone who duets with Kylie and sings about caving her head in with a rock has an interesting funny bone. Then there's the comic-opera campness of the Murder Ballads album, with a death count of 37. It has to be said, if you find yourself in a Nick Cave video, wear shoes you can run in and get out while you have the chance: it's unlikely to end well for you.

The new album, Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre Of Orpheus, features visions of hell, of course, but also love songs and pastoral imagery alongside black humour. A double album, it's the first without guitarist Blixa Bargeld, and is their fastest selling record to date. A "micro-Seeds" consisting of Jim Sclavunos, Martyn P Casey and Warren Ellis decamped to Paris to help with the writing. "There were certain power-driven songs I wanted to do that I had in my head, but they needed other people to get them to work and, as it turned, out it was a fruitful thing to do."

Cave has a slight punching-the-clock approach to interviews, totally at odds with his demeanour before and after. He is a musician who enjoys only the work, and not the self-promotion that comes with it. Armed with a roll-up, his words are chosen painstakingly, in a way that suggests they may have been misconstrued in the past. This reticence is matched by his profound distaste for the music industry's celebration of itself.

When offered an MTV award, he was not so much uncomfortable as utterly demoralised, declining to "harness my muse to this tumbrel, this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes". Adverts are unconscionable to him, a transgression he seems to regard as being on a par with putting cats in the microwave or murdering children. When Gap approached him, he responded with another letter: "Dear Gap, I might put on a pair of your jeans if you were to pay me $1bn, but even then I would have serious reservations."

His self-destructive past is well documented. In the late 1970s he was an art student playing in the celebrated but nihilistic band the Birthday Party, which he remembers as being "in a total state of disgrace". He became addicted to heroin and his habit continued throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s when, in the early days especially, he often looked like something the Grim Reaper threw back. Having cleaned up when he met his wife, Vivienne Westwood model Susie Bick, with whom he has twins, he now leads an almost comically respectable family life, and is widely regarded as one of the finest literary songwriters around. "I'm a non-story," he claims, slightly disingenuously. "I'm happily married, with kids, I go to the office, and I work nine to five."

Right now, Nick wants to go sightseeing. Folded into a car, he requests Finnish folk songs from the driver, threatening to sing some himself and chats about politics and films. Nick's image of a spectral figure detached from modern life is not entirely accurate; he has little time for the current music scene, and doesn't watch TV, but he reads a newspaper, and knows what's happening in the world. The residents of Porvoo, a low-rise hamlet of ancient wooden houses and antique shops, are not sure what to make of the rake-thin man with jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes striding around purposefully. A sleepy, faintly forlorn place, like an out-of-season theme park, its residents stare with who-let-him-out-of-the-house looks. Some children even salute. He seems perfectly at ease with its Scandinavian oddness, and heads off for lunch at a snail restaurant.

The band love to eat. You name it, they've eaten it. Gathered round a dinner table after the show, they order their food carefully, trading appetisers and discussing local delicacies reindeer and bear along with kangaroo and snake. They quite literally love their grub. "Have you ever eaten insects?" Warren ups the ante. "I've had witchetty grubs," Nick enthuses gamely.

The "micro-Seeds" are a robustly congenial cabal, despite a reputation for tortured intensity. Dressed way past the nines in their trademark gangster-chic suits and colourful shirts, their snap-crackle dialogue gives them a certain Reservoir Dogs flavour - like the characters, you sense they'd all want to be Mr Black - and the results are very entertaining indeed. Topics covered include what to say to the Crown Prince and Princess of Norway, who came backstage after a recent show, acceptable stage garb for their upcoming tour (suits of course, but Nick wants sequins, no less) and merchandising (Nick proposes a Lyre Of Orpheus tea towel).

This easy camaraderie goes some way towards explaining their longevity. It takes dedication to keep a band together for 20 years, nearly three times as long as the Beatles. Especially when you consider they all have their own separate musical projects, along with the sheer impracticality of being scattered across three continents. As Jim puts it, "Fuck Benetton, we were global before it was fashionable." Nick thinks it's due to their work ethic: "We are men, we wear suits and we go to work."

In any case, it is the ace up the band's sleeve. As the audience shouts out requests during their live show the following day, it's obvious that, like Nick's heroes Elvis and Bob Dylan, they really do have lots and lots of songs. To have this kind of repertory you have to have been around a while. And they're not getting off the stage until they're good and ready.

"The fact that you're getting older is the interesting thing. Obviously, it involves a series of small humiliations as you go along. It's admirable if you can suffer that stuff and be dignified about it at the same time." This is easier said than done. Earlier, in a mesmerisingly awkward TV interview, Nick was presented with a pair of orange gumboots. "The whole thing was to see my response to that. I later found out the theme of this show was sexuality, which I wasn't told, so I'm left sitting there with a pair of orange gumboots in my hand. This is a sort of metaphor for my position in rock music." He may belong outside of rock, of celebrity, but all things considered, it's not a bad gig being Nick Cave.

· Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds' UK tour begins on Wednesday