Nick Cave: “I wanted to be like Freddie Mercury”

What do Nick Cave and Freddie Mercury have to do with anything? Apparently little or nothing, apart from the fact that they are two great frontmen, two stage animals – but with very different worlds and approaches. Yet Cave, in a new response published in his Red Hand Files, said that Mercury was his ideal model of performer, confessing that as a teenager his greatest desire was to go on stage with the same confidence as the Queen frontman.

Cave recalls seeing Queen live at Melbourne’s Festival Hall in the mid-1970s:

“Freddie radiated total, unwavering confidence: a peacock who strutted across the stage, a frontman who seemed born to be on stage. As a teenager, watching him, I felt that desire I would always feel whenever I saw a great entertainer; more than anything, I wanted to be like Freddie: a performer.”

However, the Australian musician explains that he also shares another less visible aspect with Mercury: the difficulty of watching himself perform. “I try to avoid watching footage of myself on stage and have never done so voluntarily,” he writes. “I often think I should, out of a sense of professional duty, but I simply can’t do it.”
According to Cave, the problem arises from the distance between the image an artist has of himself and reality.

“When I’m on stage I imagine I’m Elvis Presley, or Michael Jackson, or Beyoncé, or even Freddie Mercury, but in reality I’m not.” He adds: “On the rare occasions I’ve seen myself perform live, the illusion has been quickly and brutally shattered. I don’t resemble any of these quasi-divine figures in the slightest. Whatever others see when they look at me, I don’t see. I am, for better or worse, simply myself: the same all-too-human figure that stares back at me from the mirror every morning.”

Cave, however, concludes with a more serene reflection on the relationship with one’s own image. As the years passed, he explains, that discomfort eased: “It was replaced, it seems, by a growing compassion and acceptance of myself.”