Within the Cave: when you're "scum" to Nick

In the Guardian, Mat Snow recalls why Nick Cave's "Scum" is about him. "I'd got to know Nick Cave when he fronted the Birthday Party and I was just starting to write for a living. He made great music, I wrote gushing reviews. In 1983 he and his then-girlfriend Anita stayed in my flat in Brixton when they needed a room and I needed rent money. When they moved out, we lost touch, until in 1986 I came to interview him for NME. Frosty in the extreme, he explained why. The previous year I'd mentioned in print that I found his forthcoming album "disappointing". I was, he told me, "an arsehole". And he'd written a song that developed this theme. Weeks later, I bought for £1 a green 7-inch flexidisc called "Scum" off his merchandise stall at a Bad Seeds show... "Miserable shitwringing turd," he snarled to a grindcore accompaniment, "fuckin' traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser," adding, almost superfluously, "my un-friend, I'm the type that holds a grudge." It's a brilliant record, and if I have any complaints it is that Nick has squirrelled "Scum" away as a bonus CD track on his album "Your Funeral, My Trial. " ... I'd rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius's scorn than a dusty discographical footnote. Still, my Cave-fan wife-to-be was mightily impressed when, on our first date, I unrolled the story (not for the first time). Seven years later Scum is "our song".