Song 38: Into My Arms

Into My Arms - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

This is the first time, after finding and posting a youtube link to the song I'm going to write about, that I've sat and watched the video all the way through.

It was actually the first time I'd seen the video to this song, released as a single in 1997. You may recall my post about "writing" the Embrace song 'All You Good Good People' when I read a review of it without having the opportunity to hear it. A similar thing happened with this song - I remember the NME reviewer saying that the first line, "I don't believe in an interventionist God" was hardly the usual stuff of hit singles, and I remember not really being able to conceive of how that line could successfully scan. But it could.

My experience of Nick Cave had been fairly limited up to that point - I'd read all about Murder Ballads and seen him on Top of the Pops with Kylie, I knew he'd had 8 (or was it 16) heroin overdoses, and I knew he looked a bit funny. I think it was a while yet before I really got into Cave - I remember buying The Boatman's Call on tape from this rather funny, bad-smelling, 2nd hand store in St Andrews - pretty certain that would have been 1998, but I'm also pretty certain I'd bought a Best Of before that - I've just checked and that came out in May 1998, so that all makes sense.

And I've loved him ever since. Utterly. But I must admit, my love is pretty much entirely for Cave since that point - I've never delved into the Birthday Party or the early Bad Seeds - just that which is on the Best Of. To put it straightforwardly, there are two Cave settings - deranged punk rock beast and tender balladeer, and it's the latter which floats my boatman's call. Which is not to say I'm not partial to a bit of 'Stagger Lee', a bit of  'There She Goes. My Beautiful World', 'Babe, I'm On Fire' even a bit of 'No Pussy Blues', but the news that his 2013 return will be on the more reflective side, after a couple of Grinderman albums to let off steam, are welcome indeed.

Nick Cave's very existence seems a rather blessed thing - this extraordinary passage which has taken him from an Aussie childhood through the very abyss and aforementioned ODs to the life of a contented family man in Brighton. One of the pleasures of receiving Popbitch every week is its regular updates on people spotting the wonder from down under carrying out mundane tasks on the South Coast - I think it speaks very well of this country that this most unique man has chosen to make it his home.

The fact that he is real, that he exists among us, seems unlikely. But 'tis true. I saw him myself. In Butlins. Yes, indeed, at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2007, there he was, wandering along staring at birds on the dining hall roof. He looked relaxed and cordial, but I couldn't shake the suspicion that if I went up to him and complimented him on his genius he might just, on a whim, rip my head clean off.

For a while I had the mistaken impression that 'Into My Arms' was the first beautiful piano ballad Cave ever wrote, but he had form - 'The Ship Song' and 'Straight to You', for example, were on previous albums.  But 'The Boatman's Call' was a distinctively restrained and dignified work, its dual themes of lost love and confused faith coming together to make one of the albums of the 1990s.

In time, it would be 'People Ain't No Good', the third track, that would creep its way to the very top of my list, but 'Into My Arms' is not far behind, that's for sure. He sang it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence, apparently, but I have fonder memories of it being sung at a happier occasion, the wedding of my friends Alex and Emily - sung by their friend Liz. Rather marvellous that a song with the first line "I don't believe in an interventionist God" could be sung, utterly without controversy or taint, at not only a church wedding but a wedding of faith. A wonderful memory (though the prize of musical highlight of the day went to Alex's own rendition of 'Close to You').

A lot has been made of 'The Boatman's Call' being about Cave's affair with PJ Harvey - he says she wasn't the alonly subject matter, so who knows if she is the subject of this song, if she's the one who believes in an interventionist God. Not all of the album is as graceful and generous is this song - there is plenty of bitterness and malice on some of the songs which led PJ Harvey to be a little put out, as I recall, but no one could mind being the muse for a number like this, could they?

Some songs you know will last last a few weeks, some a couple of years, some might make it a few decades and then there are some songs you highly suspect they'll be singing in 500 years, assuming humanity hasn't been wiped out by then, which, let's be honest, it probably will have been. But, apocalypse notwithstanding, 'Into My Arms' is such a song.