The quiet man?

NICK CAVE doesn't look nervous. The purple shirt, open far enough to show the top of a medallion that chimes with the big brazen rings on his fingers, would make him stand out, even if he were not an immensely tall and preternaturally thin rock star drinking tea in the foyer of a Dublin hotel, writes Fintan O'Toole.

He is, granted, polite and thoughtful, with none of the extravagant gestures and gyrations he will display before an adoring crowd that evening in the courtyard of Dublin Castle. Strip away the ornate profusions of dress and hairstyle that come with the showbiz territory, and he is, to adapt WB Yeats, a 50-year-old smiling public man. But he is already, beneath it all, feeling a familiar anxiety.

On performing: "I still get very nervous about a show"

The nerves, even after three decades as a commanding, electrifying performer, are rooted in the fact that he is, in essence, a writer. The writer, who goes to his office in Brighton every day and sits down at the computer, is Nick Cave. The performer, even the one with the notoriously raw, in-your-face presence that Cave adopted in his early punk group, The Birthday Party, is someone else.

"It's my absolute natural inclination to write. I just go and do that, and it's like a bodily function. There's other things I have to gird my loins to do - like live shows. As much as I love them, and as much as they fulfil a piece of me that I can't get anywhere else, I look on them with a certain amount of trepidation. Because you don't really have any control over them, and you don't know from one night to the next if it's going to be good or bad, or if the relationship with the audience is going to work. I still get very nervous about doing a show, I don't know why. But I don't get nervous about sitting down and writing."

Yet, he also needs that other self, the mad, lurid, satanic frontman who prances and cavorts, who croons and wails. He is still playing out the fantasy he conceived in small, dull towns in rural Victoria.

"The thing about playing live is, for a while, you can be that person you always wanted to be. One part of me always wanted it, not the whole of me, but there was certainly a part of me that used to, as a kid, run home from school and run upstairs and lock the door and put on a David Bowie record or something and jump around with the broomstick. I became someone other than the person I thought I was. I had a pretty appalling self-image as a child and I would become this other thing. There's a certain amount of that that's still there."

On songwriting: "Some songs I'm really proud of happened when I was trying to stop heroin"

To understand the relationship at the moment between the reflective intellectual who sits down to write and the star who struts his stuff, it is necessary to grasp that it works in an inverse way. If Cave's current guitar-led album with longtime collaborators the Bad Seeds, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! has a wild, expansive feel, it is not because he is leading a wild life. It is, on the contrary, because his life is quiet and ordered. Conversely, when he was writing beautiful, piano-based ballads such as Into My Arms and People They Ain't No Good for 1997's The Boatman's Call, his life was in chaos. In Cave's case, art doesn't imitate life, it compensates for it.

"I just think you write the sort of songs that you need. Something like Into My Arms, and those kinds of very simple, very beautiful songs from that period, come out of someone who can barely tie their shoelaces, who is seriously f**ked-up. There was a sense that I needed those songs because I think they were very comforting. They kind of buoyed me up in some way.

"And I think now that I lead a life that's relatively . . . the common understanding of it is that it's very sedate and conservative, but actually that's not true. But at the same time, it is a lot more secure. And within that, I feel that I can go anywhere. I don't have to worry about buoying up my life. And because it's secure, I can go into the studio and go berserk.

The looser, rockier style of Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! and of Cave's side project Grinderman, is his alternative to a midlife crisis. When he wrote The Boatman's Call and its successor, And No More Shall We Part (2001), he was feeding off large events in his life: his affair and break-up with PJ Harvey, his marriage to Susie Bick (with whom he has two sons) and his kicking of a long-term heroin habit. But now, he has to rely on his imagination.

"Most writers who have written from personal experience, like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison, they stop after a while. You just can't keep doing it. First of all, you have to keep scrabbling for things to happen. After a while, nothing happens. That's one of the problems (laughs). So you have to return to some sort of invention and imagination.

"With The Boatman's Call, there was a kind of happy collision of different events that I could feed off, coupled with a kind of drug-addicted indulgence and self-indulgence. Some of the songs that I'm really proud of, around The Boatman's Call and that, did happen when I was trying to stop [ heroin]. And that's when the chaos enters into the whole thing. It becomes a whole different thing. That kind of lovely narcoleptic stupor that you're in disappears and everything goes f**king haywire. And it was through those periods that some of those songs got written, and I don't really understand how that is.

"That all came together so I could make that record, but I don't think I could do that anymore. I don't think I could even have the audacity to make a record like that anymore. You have to be in a certain head space to be able to make a record like that, and I just can't get in that head space anymore."

On working: People who don't have creative outlets go and have affairs. They go and f**k their secretaries"

His life now is one of astonishingly productive labour that has produced two albums, a film script (The Proposition) and two film scores in the last three years.

"The more I work, the less direct experience I have, the more I'm just involved in a pure creative process. And I find that really exciting and hugely comforting. But by and large, the writer's job is a tedious one. It's a desk job. He therefore needs the aberrant music to keep him on the straight and narrow: People who don't have these creative outlets, go and have affairs. They go and f**k their secretaries. I don't do that, but maybe my songwriting these days is the equivalent of f**king your secretary."

Though he denies that his work is filling a hole where his heroin addiction once was, he does recognise his need for habits. "I've always had a need for routine. To this day, I still have a reasonably rigid work routine. My life is just made up of a series of little habits that I do over and over and over again. And one of them was drug addiction. I had a habit. And with heroin, that's very much what it is. I'm not talking about some of the other drugs."

Yet this way in which his addiction was a habit in every sense helps to explain one of the mysteries of Nick Cave - his ability to produce consistently high-quality work during two decades as a serious drug abuser.

On addiction: "A junkie leads a conservative life"

"I was a junkie. A junkie leads a relatively conservative life. It's a habitual life. And its only certain things that need to get done. You've just got to score. And you've got to get some money together, and that's basically it. And that can be a relatively quiet life. You get yourself organised, you get the right doctor - it's not like I was a crack addict, which has a whole different set of problems. But it did, in time, have this leaching effect on my creativity, to the extent that I had to make some sort of decision. Either I can be a relatively happy junkie or I can be involved in working creatively, but there came a point when I couldn't do the two. So I had to make some sort of a decision."

On his father: "It's sad to think that he missed out on what happened later . . . He was a good father"

The change in his life seems also to reflect a coming to terms with the presence, and absence, of his father. Colin Cave, an English teacher, was a huge influence on his son and Cave has written that his untimely death blasted "a great gaping hole out of my life".

The hole was filled with writing and God, and that train of thought is still present in the brilliant We Call Upon the Author on Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! in which authorship shifts between himself, his father and the Almighty. But the thought seems less troubling to him now. A decade ago, he could announce, "at 41 years of age I have become my father". Now that he is older than his father ever got to be, he feels he has gone beyond him.

"I think I've superseded my father. I'm not actually sure what age he died at, but I feel that, at some point, I met him in terms of where I was in life and now I've carried on to do something else. Unfortunately, he didn't do that. When someone dies early, they miss out on a lot. A lot of the good stuff of life happens later on - children growing up. You put a lot of effort into raising your children and it's sad to think he missed out on what happened later. Because he was a good father."

On home: "I'm a different person in Australia"

Musically, Cave's freedom from heroin, from chaos, from his father's shadow, translates itself into a kind of spontaneity that links him back, on the one hand, to his punk days and, on the other, to more sophisticated sources like the the freedom of approach and the sonic dissonance of the late Miles Davis albums, from which a lot of stuff on Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is directly coming. But in his personal life, it does not translate into a complete sense of comfort with his life as a respectable burgher of Brighton.

Again, with Cave's relationship to England and his native Australia, there is a paradox: he can't live in Australia because he feels too much at home there.

"I do still feel like an exile. I feel I've just holed up in England somewhere in some sort of bunker. It's not so much that I have problems with the modern world, it's just that I have problems living in England. There's something about it that just creeps me out."

In Australia, on the other hand, he is himself. "I always feel Australian. When I go back to Australia, this kind of psychic, and to a degree even physical weight, that I don't even realise I'm carrying around in England, just goes away suddenly. My wife says I'm a different person in Australia. I'm happy and I'm happy doing nothing. My biggest fear about Australia is that I'd go back and I'd do not a thing."

This comfort did not extend to the country's right-wing politics under the last prime minister, John Howard. ("The whole thing that's going on in Australia about immigration has always been a huge embarrassment, and to see it continue in a different forms, that's upsetting.") And it seems at odds with the almost exclusively American frame of reference for his songs. But he explains this with another paradox.

"Because its American, it is Australian. That's the way I look at it. When I grew up in Australia, all we did was look at America or look at England. And we didn't see that as being influenced by American culture or mythology. It was just what you did."

On retirement: "I don't see any reason why I couldn't just stop and do something else"

He may even return to Australia eventually to do the nothing he enjoys doing there. He admires The Rolling Stones for the perversity of their persistence: "Musically, I'd have no interest in them, but their continuing on is a real 'f**k you' to the establishment. Everything that everyone always said about The Rolling Stones never happened. They made loads of money, took loads of drugs, f**ked loads of women, and they're just happy."

But he imagines his own two-fingered salute to life as a quiet departure from the stage.

"It would be interesting for me to see if I could retire at 60 just to say its over and stop everything, the whole writing business, getting up, going to the office, all that stuff. That would be my own personal 'f**k you' - that you could have some control over the outworking of your destiny.

"And with creativity, you don't. You never know the point at which you're going down the toilet. You can always tell yourself everything's alright, until you find yourself doing stuff that's diminishing the power of what you've done before. You become embarrassing.

"I personally believe I could just stop. I know I work a lot, and people talk about it as compulsive, but I don't think it is. I don't think its deviant or pathological behaviour. It's just that there's certain things I want to do at the time, and need to get done. But I don't really see any reason why I couldn't just stop at a particular point and do something else. Gardening, maybe."

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is out now