The legend of Old Nick

More excellent viewing, this time on ITV1 in the form of Sunday night's 'The South Bank Show', which focused on the work of Nick Cave. It was a superb overview of his career, moving from the raging turmoil of his post-punk rabble The Birthday Party (very clearly a massive influence on the likes of The Jesus Lizard, The Icarus Line and The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster), through the fire-and-brimstone early years of the Bad Seeds which yielded the classics 'The Mercy Seat' and 'Tupelo', and up to the more sedate and haunting songs of recent years.

Cave himself talked candidly about his drug-taking (prodigious), his influences (Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, John Lee Hooker), his literary inspirations (predominantly the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament) and his approach to songwriting. At one point he opined: "For me, the great love song has within it an ache" - true enough, and, as was illustrated by a snippet from 'The Sorrowful Wife' from 2001's exceptionally brilliant No More Shall We Part record, nobody writes them better. What particularly interested me were his comments about intensely personal lyrics - he confessed of 1997's The Boatman's Call that "there is an element that disgusts me", referring to the most openly and undisguisedly autobiographical songs like 'West Country Girl' and 'Black Hair', both written about Polly Harvey. Since then, he claims to be standing more "outside" his lyrical material.

A fine supporting cast, including Will Self, Wim Wenders, The Observer's Sean O'Hagan and members of the Bad Seeds Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey, offered their own perceptive observations - O'Hagan claimed, I think rightly, that with the Bad Seeds the focus is very much on Cave and his lyrics, the music existing as a complementary backdrop, and Self argued that although Cave's novel 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' isn't the most gripping narrative ever committed to paper, it is however "beautifully written".

And that's perhaps what the programme forced me to re-acknowledge: Cave - the son of a lecturer in English literature - possesses a conviction in the power of the written and spoken word, and often wields this power to devastating effect in his lyrics. I'll be amazed if I ever hear an opening verse of a song that's more stunning than that of 'Into My Arms' from The Boatman's Call: "I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do / But if I did I would kneel down and ask him / Not to intervene when it came to you".

Thanks to Leon for being the first to make me see the light.