I’ve been contemplating suicide
But it really doesn’t suit my style
So I think I’ll just act bored instead
To contain the blood I would’ve shed —
This song has always been there — at first, admittedly, through the Screaming Jets’ cover of it, but I worked my way back to the Boys Next Door version pretty early in the piece and was instantly converted. “Shivers” was actually written by Rowland S Howard, but the combination of mordancy and feeling, touched with the merest hint of wryness, with which the young Nick Cave sings the words could not imaginably be bettered.
She makes me feel so weary
My heart is really on its knees
But I keep the poker face so well
That even mother couldn’t tell —
Somewhere along the line came Love and Other Catastrophes, about which I’ve really already said everything I need to say — the scene in which “Shivers” appears just one perfect vignette amongst many, lingering still, having taken on its own particular lighting and hue in the endless sequences being played out in the theatre of my imagination, memory, call it what you will.
But my baby’s so vain
She is almost a mirror
And the sound of her name
Sends a permanent shiver —
Down my spine…
All of which wouldn’t count for half as much, of course, were the song not such sheer greatness in and of itself. From the unutterable (yet uttered) weariness of the first eight lines, breaking through into the long moan of the next four and then the bizarrely affecting drawing out of the word ‘spine’ on which everything really hinges, and then once more through, enveloping itself ever more deeply in a sadness that’s beyond expression in the lines themselves but makes itself felt everywhere else, it’s a masterpiece of sustained, allusively-conveyed mood and sentiment.
I keep her photograph against my heart
For in my life she plays a starring part
Our love could hold on cigarettes
There is no room for cheap regrets —
With all of the songs on this list, and the ones right near the upper end especially, there’s something more about the song that makes me think of it as one of my favourite songs — something that sets it apart from all the other songs that I really, really like, and I don’t think that this ‘something’ is simply quantitative. Rather, it’s something else — something of an altogether different quality — and, whatever it is, for me, “Shivers” has it in spades.
