The Schalter

Written by: Simon Veaney

“Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet, Ask me things, but I don’t know where to start.”
- We Call Upon the Author to Explain, Nick Cave

Recently I found myself in a strange situation. Having spent much of my life being a fan of Nick Cave to the extent of living my teenage years by his (fairly strange) values as pieced together through 25 years of his grumpy interviews, a few weeks ago I engineered a situation where I would actually be coming face to face with him. By turning up at 8.30am on a miserable Monday morning at the HMV on Oxford Street in London, my companion Ian and I wangled wristbands to an exclusive evening meet and greet as part of his campaign for the new Bad Seeds album.However, upon receiving the suitably blood red wristband, and during the long intervening hours that followed, strange and unforeseen doubts started to take shape in my mind. This is a man who I had been following in interview, record, film, book and whatever other media I could find since I first bought his book of lyrics with my history prize book voucher back when I was 14 years old.

How could a man recently turned 50 and rapidly losing his hair possibly live up to the larger than life gothic character whose joyfully uninhibited antics such as scrawling lyrics in his own blood from a heroin syringe in the Berlin U-Bahn alerted my teenage imagination to the depravity and glory of rock legend? Unless he came across as a Deep South death-row vampire poet straight out of an 18th Century opium den, could meeting him inspire anything other than disappointment?

Would seeing him across a table shatter the myth and provide a defining cut off point between the naive fan worship of my youth and the encroaching cynicism of my current life as a working 20-something? Was the risk of that happening worth more than the chance he would live up to his (and my) hype?

Ironically, I had always maintained that based on his interviews, behind the scenes documentaries and biographies Cave was almost certainly someone to admire from afar and never actually meet, with reports of him in person veering from self-obsessed egocentric arsehole to shit-kicking aussie bully to uncommunicatively catatonic shy ‘artiste’ scowling in the corner.

Why then, as soon as the opportunity presented itself was I compulsively drawn to trying to meet him even under circumstances when I would clearly be nothing more to him than a fan in a line? By joining a queue of similar obsessives (and Nick Cave does nothing if not inspire obsessives) was I resigning my own expectations to simply becoming a faceless fan in front of his hero?

Of course with the fan-hero relationship rationality is the first thing to go out the window. You subconsciously feel that you have a bond with the hero, and upon meeting you they will realise you are, in fact, the soulmate they never knew they had and will be startled into throwing back the signing table, clapping you on the back and saying, “Come my friend, join the band. Join the circus.”

This is, of course, fairly unlikely.

The cold water realisation that you are just a consumer buying a product from a man who neither knows nor cares anything for you and won’t invite you to the pub is surely inevitable, and again the fragile myth could be destroyed. This realisation or the refusal to accept it is probably the line we mentally draw in the sand between normal and stalker-like activity. In an age where celebrity minutiae is front page news and information is so readily available, the line between an interest in a celebrity’s aspirational life and the means of actually entering it is ever-decreasing.

So there we had it - by seeing the string-master would I be killing the magic of the puppet show?
And more importantly what would I say to him?

Sensibly I turned to alcohol. Having now met my companion Ian in a suitably gothic nearby pub teeming with black eyed Nick Cave fans and having mentally resigned myself to whatever fate (and Nick Cave) could throw at me - together we pondered a taxing question.

What would we say to Nick Cave?

In such a situation you want to come across as knowledgeable, funny, insightful and spontaneous.
Do you treat your hero as an equal? Do you treat them in the cagey, respectful way you treat the CEO of your company in the corridor? Do you ask how the wife and kids are or is that stalkerish? Do you launch into the most random question you can think of, demonstrating your knowledge of every facet of their career? Or ask them something facile and hope they find you amusing?

The problem was compounded with a person like Nick Cave who was famously short tempered with journalists, 80s articles were littered with accounts of violence following questions about his heroin addiction and anti-journalist murder fantasies loosely disguised as songs. Surely that anger wouldn’t stretch to his own fans? Would it?

By the time the drinks had ended I was fraught with worry.

The moment had arrived. Having got there late due to the beers we drank while waiting for the queue to die down, we ironically found ourselves at the very front of the crowd around the HMV stage, mingling with the photographers and journalists out on a limb away from the rest of the crowd. The Bad Seeds performed an electric, spontaneous set to the small crowd and then disappeared stage left. Looking across at the door they were to reappear from and the position of the signing table it became clear that the band would have to walk directly past us at the front to get to the meet and greet table. Excitement.

Suddenly they were there - in front of us.

And strangely all those doubts and questions were swept away in a sea of stalkerish calm. Seeing this man in front of me it was as if I knew him personally - and I calmly called out “Great gig Nick” and stuck out my hand. The tall, famous man in front of me by the ‘W - V pop and rock’ cds in HMV looked confused and slightly shaken but gamely reached out and shook my hand. Amusingly he then snubbed Ian’s hand and made his way to the desk.

An hour then went by as we watched the Bad Seeds interact with a massive long line of their fans from our vantage point at the very end of the snaking queue. We were close enough to see and hear what our fellow fans were doing with their opportunity to meet the band. Most of them seemed to be asking violinist Warren Ellis how long it took him to grow his impressively trampish beard (2 years apparently) and trying to get Nick Cave to pose with them by congratulating him on his new record. My new opening gambit was turning into asking him if the store could play anything else, having now heard the new Bad Seeds CD on repeat on the PA system over three times. Ian felt this could be construed as inappropriate.

Finally the queue cleared and the bouncer approached our little group of 7 who had been cut off from the rest of the queue by foolishly arranged cordons, and pushed me and Ian in front of the Bad Seeds. Suddenly there I was, the man in front of me raising a theatrical wedge of eyebrow at my entrance from the wrong side of the table.

Silence.

All my carefully constructed plans of witty, intelligent and probing questions melted away in that silence and I was left stuttering, “Er… I have to say it’s so weird seeing you up close”.

Cave gripped the table and lent towards me with an unreadable expression;

“Well it’s pretty weird seeing you up close too!”

Startled, I backed away and composing myself laughed off the insult with a mock-confident “Well, you know, I do get that a lot.”

“I can imagine,” laughed Cave. “You are an exceptionally weird looking bloke.”

My mind had by now retreated to a hiding place in the back of my head so my mouth took over.

“Well I’ve been told I look a lot like .. a young Nick Cave,” my mouth retorted.

The band looked questioning at me and then their leader. Instinctively, I pulled my patented Nick Cave aping autistic scowl expression from the cover of his Tender Prey album.

The band laughed and commended me on the likeness.

At this point with a poker straight face Nick Cave claimed he was constantly told he looked like Pierce Brosnan. Capitalising on the conversation I suggested that Cave’s guitarist of 25 years Mick Harvey to his left was increasingly resembling Michael Palin. The guitarist feigned indignation as Cave rounded on him declaring he instead resembled Stan Laurel. This culminated in the two doing their best Laurel & Hardy impression for us before I retreated clutching my signed CD case, eager not to ruin the moment by crossing the line and getting moved on by the encroaching bouncers.

Thus, sadly, I deprived Cave of the opportunity to invite us for a pint after the signing, but I didn’t mind. There will always be another CD signing.

So what were my conclusions from this brush with my hero? Far from reducing the man to the status of an everyday Joe in my eyes or reducing ‘our’ imagined bond as I had feared, seeing and bantering with Cave surrounded by his gang of grizzled musicians, having him give me the once over, taking in my Cave-esque shirt and feigning horror at my face as the roadies cleared up the amps behind us, only added to the legend.

He still resembled far more a 3D embodiment of the scratchy black and white character of his CDs covers than a real human. Had I seen him shopping for toilet paper in Tesco the veneer of glamour may have been stripped, but in his element, even in a brightly lit store, the myth was happily left intact.

And it wasn’t just me.

Twenty minutes before me, the singer of the Horrors, lanky, shy and awkward, had joined the same queue of faceless fans to meet his hero (and meal ticket). Even once you’ve become a musical celebrity yourself, it seems, you never lose the compulsion to throw away your own identity and dignity to recklessly risk everything.

And meet your hero.

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This post is tagged Celebrity, Music