The "beautiful" singer that Nick Cave remembered as "terrifying"

Nina Simone: The 'beautiful' singer that Nick Cave remembered as 'terrifying' In the summer of 1999, Nick Cave curated the annual Meltdown Festival in London's Southbank. He chose a range of artists in spoken word, composers, comedy and, of course, music, and on the evening of July 1st, he would present Nina Simone. The moment was, among many, a major one in Cave's life and career, as someone who revered Simone as one reveres a god. 'Nina Simone is hugely important to me. She is the real thing,' he enthused, in the 2014 documentary 20,000 Days on Earth. 'We were obviously far from the experience of the blues people, but for me, from a literary point of view, there was just an extraordinary, brutal, haunting use of words,' he continued, with her rendition of 'Ain't Got No, I Got Life' (a medley of two songs from the musical Hair) playing in the background. Adding, 'I tend to think that she sang other people's songs better because of how surprising her renditions were, and how much she made them her own'. In the 1990s, Simone had published her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, had moved and settled near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France, and in 1993, would release her final album, A Single Woman. She became known as the 'High Priestess of Soul' for a reason: Simone was an unrivalled talent whose music came with a divine energy, and she understood her worth among anyone who dared to question her. Cave recalled the moment in which the two met for the first time, backstage at the Meltdown Festival, amidst the expected chaos unfolding behind the scenes. Simone was to follow Australian writer Germaine Greer's reading of Sappho (in original Greek). Credit: Bleddyn Butcher 'She was sitting in a wheelchair, huge, with gold, kind of Cleopatra makeup on and a sort of horrific expression on her face,' Cave recalled, 'and sort of sitting around the edge of this room were these kind of 'flunkies' who were all quaking in fear of this woman.' Cave asked her what she wanted, to which she replied, 'I want you to introduce me. I want you to get it right… I am Doctor Nina Simone'. In a photograph from that moment backstage, Cave stands bespectacled with a rare, large smile, a sincere moment of fandom, while Simone stares into the camera, the horrific expression Cave spoke of still lingering. 'She was so terrifying and so belligerent, I'm like, 'OK, fine',' Cave said. When it was Simone's time to take the stage, any series of events could have transpired. As he later recalled, she struggled to get to the stage and something was clearly amiss, but her brilliance was no question. 'She sat down at the piano, took the gum she was chewing out of her mouth and stuck it onto the Steinway, and glared at the piano like it was her enemy and just thundered into the song,' he noted, recalling how she the songs progressively became beautiful, 'and she became inflated with the whole thing, and it was just an absolutely chilling thing to see. And by the end of it, she'd been kind of transformed and redeemed, in some way'. This night would later be immortalised in Warren Ellis' 2021 memoir, Nina Simone's Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found, in which both he and Cave recall the instance in which the former decided to take the discarded wad of gum, later kept in a drawer in his attic. 'The gum was in there. It looked as I remembered, the sacred heart, a Buddha,' Ellis wrote, continuing to describe it as, 'A relic from one of the greatest concerts I have seen in my life. My connection to a woman touched by the hand of God. Dr Nina Simone.'