Having lacerated eardrums nd blown minds with the dirty magnificence of last year’s Grinderman project, Nick Cave has regrouped with his Bad Seeds for their 14th studio album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! A guitar-driven, strident affair, it possesses more unfettered verve and wit than anything else you’re likely to hear this year. Bizarre had an audience with Cave in a gentlemen’s club in Hove, where the staid surroundings were in contrast to the openly ebullient, Australian-born, Brighton-based songwriter.

Has your approach to the writing process changed over the years?
Yeah. I find it difficult to write a decent song on the piano these days – well, something that doesn’t sound like a song I’ve already written. It took two months of writing this record to work that out. I’d be sitting at the piano and go, “Well, that’s nice, but actually I think it sounds like something off The Boatman’s Call, or whatever”. So I changed the instruments that I wrote on for this record.

For instance, I heard my kids, my seven-year-olds, playing this little toy keyboard they got for Christmas. It’s got this drumbeat in it, which is really basic and brutal [makes noise of mental drumbeat]. I was like, “Fuck off, give me that.” Then I took it down to the office and wrote four songs!

Do the characters in your songs materialise before the situations you put them in exist?
Lazarus already existed. He was the first documented zombie. Actually, what’s this for – Bizarre?

Yeah.
Oh! I’d better liven things up a bit then. Lazarus was the first documented zombie! What a freak! I mean, the shit he must have got up to! That reminds me – I did this interview for [US porn mag] Hustler some years ago. I’d made some remark to a paper previously that “journalists are perverters of language”, or some stupid fuckin’ remark like that, and when I did the Hustler interview, their first question was, “So, these journalists who are perverts, exactly which ones are they?”

Your songs could easily be made into movies. Do you think in cinematic terms?
My songs do remind me a little of films sometimes. I think more and more people talk about them as being David Lynchian or like Michael Haneke – and I actually quite like that – not that
I think they particularly are. There’s a sort of Lynchian dream logic that I think goes on in some of the songs on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!.

It’s not that I’m trying to sit down and write songs like David Lynch’s movies, but there are similarities. There’s a kind of weird adolescent sexuality bubbling under everything. There’s a sort of sexual motive behind everything that’s Freudian, man – and Lynchian.

There are still biblical references in your lyrics. What is it that keeps you returning to it?
It just creeps in. I actually make a concerted effort to sit down and say, “Right, I’m not going there on this record.” At times I do think my audience has probably had enough.

You honestly make conscious decisions like that?
Yeah, in regard to things like, say, religion. When I’m writing a new record I want it to bedifferent from the last one. So if I start to write something and it’s a melancholy
love song, I’m less likely to pursue that idea than if it’s something that’s like, “Wow! What the fuck is this? This is something that sounds new to me.”

At what point in your life did The Bible start having significance?
When I was in art school. I was 19 or something like that.

What was it that sparked that off?
It was like… “I just did it once and look what happened to me!” It was really because I was interested in religious art. I became increasingly interested in it when I was at art school. I sort of shifted away from a lot of the modern stuff that we were supposed to be looking at and started to look at people like [16th-century Spanish Mannerist painter] El Greco. But at the same time I also knew what the paintings were about because I’d learnt all this stuff as a kid. I knew what was going on in the paintings and I’d think, “that story’s wild” – which took me back in some way to reading the Old Testament.

Do you regard yourself as being a spiritual person?
I have my good days and my bad days. But yeah, I do.

Are you a believer in the afterlife?
No. Well, it’s not that I don’t believe in the afterlife. I just don’t have any authority to talk about it.

Have you ever had what you would describe as a personal apocalypse?
What, when everything goes real bad?

Yeah, like on new song Moonland.
Yeah. Regularly. It used to happen a lot more than it does now. It’s a kind of spiral thing where you can’t get out. But at the end of the day I’m a hugely optimistic person. I have a “fuck it” switch, where I can go, “Oh, fuck it! And fuck them! And fuck everybody!” It’s a healthy reaction.

Was there a moment when you decided “I have to be a musician”?
No. I was always, “What the fuck am I doing in this business? This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.” For years I felt I had the wrong job. I thought that other musicians were in on something that I didn’t know about. Then it occurred to me that I have some other thing that they possibly don’t have.

What compels you to continue?
I’m not someone who can tinker with things. It’s all or nothing. But I can visualise in my head saying, “Right, that’s it.” And if people said, “You in a band?” I’d say, “Yeah, I used to be.” I think I’d be quite happy with that.