Ewan Morrison: 'Vacuous little consumers will never know true love or commitment to Nick Cave'

I HAVE a very strange obsessive-compulsive love-hate relationship with Nick Cave. This might be something my generation (Generation X) suffers from more than others. Generation Y seem much more casual about the musicians (and relationships) they're into; they don't have the cult of "the indie genius" or experience devotion in the way that we did. How can anyone be devoted to the Scissor Sisters?

Music for Gen-Y is just like shopping. What are you into? Ask a Gen-Y'er what they're into and they'll stare blankly back and say: "Oh, a bit of everything, I've got five thousand tracks on my iPod." The vacuous little consumers will never know true love or commitment.

If anyone had asked me 15 years ago what I was into I would have replied: "Nick Cave." Anything else? Dance, classical, rap, funk, electro? "No, just Nick Cave."

In fact, to be even more OCD, it was just one album by Nick Cave – Your Funeral… My Trial. I used to wake and dress to it every day, put on my second hand pimp-suit and cowboy boots, slick back my greased dyed-black hair and light a ciggie, just the way Nick did. And it was a miserable-as-hell album, all discords and bum notes and spooky percussion and angry mumbled lyrics about mutant circus acts, evil women, dead animals and Jesus. I'd never encountered any of these things in my life but that album became my life.

So why did I stop adoring the great man and start spitting on the shadow of anyone who mentioned his name? Why the sudden reversal?

Well, it was a fate that befell many an indie star. Through no fault of his own, Nick just became too popular. He had ceased being obscure and became suddenly accessible and mainstream – normal people were getting into him. Which could only mean he had sold out.

In retrospect, such judgment was plain silly, but at the time it seemed more important to us Cave-dwellers than the Gulf War. The indie mindset requires a yearly cull of those former icons who've gone over to the other side and joined the enemy. Of course Nick was just doing what he always did, trying to stay off the bottle and the needle, shambling his way through broken relationships and writing dark songs about it all – but I didn't see that. All I saw was a love betrayed. God, I hated him.

Now I can see the problem with this whole indie mentality. It's predicated on adoring your icon only for as long as no one else does. To live an indie life one has to keep discovering obscure new bands, only to dump them as soon as anyone else has heard of them. I do actually know people who live like this and their CD collections are like graveyards – all their former loves now dead to them.

There's a terrifying kind of elitism and self-loathing at work here. It's also a bit like the way myself and many other Gen-Xers have conducted our relationships over the past decade. Short intense devotions, then abrupt breaks and betrayals when things got too main-stream, then starting again with someone new.

This all makes me wish I'd stuck to my monogamous relationship with Nick all along. Thank God, I've got a second chance with him. He's been so un-cool for so long that he's finally become cool again. Is the word 'cool' even cool? To be honest I don't care. I love you Nick.