'EXPRESS YOURSELF!!! / EXPRESS YOURSELF!!!' Reinhard Kleist's post-pubescent Cave screams early in this visionary biography, beating a mic stand against the skulls of his anointed 'DONK / DONK / DONK'. Los with his phallic hammer and fiery workshop becomes a metaphor for the artist who must first subdue his demons before seeking to liberate the world. Los - whose name is an anagram of 'Sol' - is for Blake the archetype of the fallen poet: a blacksmith charged with redeeming a fallen world whose guilt he shares. But if The Marriage identifies the creative artist as a conduit for divine vision and voice, it is in prophecies such as Jerusalem where Blake explores the darker implications of linking the psycho-sexual outpourings of the artist to the creative destruction of biblical prophecy.

Auden, to name but two, both seized upon that text's celebration of sexual energy and imagination. Blake's Marriage, a verbal and visual rebellion against economic and intellectual oppression, certainly enjoyed considerable currency in Cave's own counter-cultural inheritance: Jim Morrison and W.H. It is to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Cave turns: 'to loosely paraphrase William Blake: I myself did nothing I just pointed a damning finger and let the Holy Spirit do the rest'. But not, perhaps, if they were familiar with Blake's darker side. Those listeners old and brave enough to have attended a bona fide Birthday Party gig might have been surprised when, in a 1996 Radio 3 Religious Services lecture, Nick Cave described the band's violent interventions in the post-punk landscape by comparing himself to William Blake. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, 'Hammer Song' That Enthusiasm and Life may not cease: arise Spectre arise! That he who will not defend Truth may be compelld to defendĪ Lie: that he may be snared and caught and snared and taken I labour day and night, I behold the soft affectionsĬondense beneath my hammer into forms of crueltyīut still I labour in hope, tho' still my tears flow down.

Nick Cave by Reinhard Kleist