At the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among 20,000 people. Bizarrely, it was the first time I had ever been in the audience at such a large show, and I was stunned by the depth of love in the room: people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around. I was struck by the realization of just how powerful live music is — that a group of individuals can come together and concoct a sound unique to them, and that people can connect with that distinctive vision as if it were their own experience. I could feel its moral quality, how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness.

I engage in various spiritual activities — I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate — but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay. I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers — the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.

There is an unholy voice that every self-aware artist encounters at some point in their lives. The voice that whispers, “Am I good enough?” or, “Do I deserve to be here?” or, “What if people hate me?” — the voice that can ultimately lead to a state of paralysis. Yet, whether singer, artist, or otherwise, these are the demons we all must face. Whenever we take a risk in life, or do something that might set us apart, or draw the judgment of others, these crippling voices provoke a form of “stage fright” — a fear of existence, a fear of life itself. But, if you can summon the resolve to overcome these inner voices, you can conquer anything, and the world will lie trembling at your feet.

This is what the vast crowd at the O2 recognized: a band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism — the audacity to stand before the world and declare, “This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.” Perhaps understanding that we all fight battles within ourselves can help us feel less alone and encourage us to step onto that stage. I hope so.

***

This piece was originally published on The Red Hand Files. 

Freddie Sayers: Something that struck me from reading the book and immersing myself in your songs in recent weeks is this sense that, to the superficial eye, you might seem unrecognisably changed since those early gigs with The Birthday Party, where it’s full of noise and screaming and anger. Now you seem much more at peace, you are a churchgoing person – you’ve had two interviews with Archbishops in the past three months! So, from being this countercultural person, you seem to have become a conservative person. How would you explain to people the strands that connect the earlier you to the new you?

Nick Cave: There may now be a conservative edge to things, but that word I would use cautiously. Certainly these days I still get similar delight, which I got in the early days, in sort of fucking with people to some degree. There is something about living outside the expectations of other people that is energising.

In the old days, with The Birthday Party, they were extremely energetic, extremely (I would say) violent, aggressive concerts done by a not-fully-formed person, who held the world in contempt as a sort of default. That was the energy of those concerts — and that has changed completely. Now I see the world in a completely different way, and see human beings in a completely different way. I see the brokenness of human beings, but also the unbelievable value of human beings. This is something that, back then, I could never have imagined I would have felt. I think it has something to do with becoming a more complete person, through a series of things that have happened to me through my life — things that have happened to us all, probably.

FS: You write beautifully about the creative process in Faith, Hope and Carnage, and there’s a thread of continuity there too, because these songs are not just something you’re synthesising out of nothing; they’re almost out there and you’re trying to find them. There seems to be a magical, mystical component to the process.

NC: I wish there was more of that. Actually, my creative process is extremely rigorous, and it’s just hard work. It begins at 9:00am: I sit down, and I start writing (if I’m writing songs, which I am at the moment). It finishes at 5:30 in the afternoon, and then I don’t do any other creative stuff after that. But within that, I have a very troubled relationship with my muse: it’s fraught and full of anxiety; not a very nice place at all. What I’m getting is meagre scraps of songs that slowly make their way into something that is of some kind of value. That’s the mystical thing. It’s not that there’s a big pencil in the sky that’s writing my lyrics for me. I wish it was more like that.

FS: But do these songs not have a life of their own? You’ve written about how they almost seem to predict what happens.

NC: Yeah, I think there is an element of that. It’s hard to talk about without sounding ridiculous, but I think, from my experience, the songs seem to know a little bit more about what’s going on than I do myself. Even though I’m working in a very conscious way to get songs written, I don’t have any control over the outcome. In the end, I find I’ve just written stuff. That often surprises me; the songs I’m writing now surprise me hugely, as to where they’re actually going. (Not that I really want to talk about those – it’s just too early.) I have, I don’t know, 12-13 songs that feel good, and I realised I’ve actually had no control over them, the whole time.

FS: Do you find freedom and being relaxed part of the creative process? This is where the atmosphere of wider society can be relevant. In one of your books, you write that: “The vitalising element in art is the one that baffles or challenges or outrages. As a young musician, I felt it was my sacred duty to offend.” There’s a “break things, scream and shout” part of the creative process. Is that still part of it for you?

NC: I don’t want to sit here and say that my generation was better than your generation, or whatever, but I did come from a generation where there were self-evident truths — such as free speech being a good thing — that I still fully believe in, and are an energising factor in what I do. The idea that you can offend people, or that your songs can be dangerous enough for people to be scared of them, is exciting for me. It’s not something that I personally feel I need to shy away from.

FS: Not drawing politics into it, but do you feel that the atmosphere of our culture now is that people have to be more careful? This is not a culture war question; it’s about whether it actually impinges on the creative faculty?

NC: Well, of course, of course it does. If you’re writing in a censorious mood, a fragile, brittle mood, and you’re worried about that, then of course you’ll second guess what you’re writing about. And this is just not good for the business of songwriting, as far as I’m concerned.

FS: Does that happen to you? The second-guessing, the self-censoring?

NC: “Should I say this? Or should I not?” Only as much as I would have 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. You always think: “Is this a good line or a bad line?” But I never think in terms of whether it’s offensive or not. So no, I don’t feel that I do that. However, I do feel a kind of wet blanket has been thrown over art in general, and this is just not good.

FS: What is that wet blanket?

NC: What is the wet blanket? Well, a squeamish, censorious, merciless idea that there are certain things that you can get away with saying and certain things that you can’t get away with saying.

But I get tired of hearing people say: “Well, you can’t say this; I think this, but you can’t say this.” That’s reflective of a mood, but I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think there are things that you can’t say. You just need to take the consequences of saying certain sorts of things.

Now these consequences are brutal, and merciless, and unjust sometimes, and it’s distressing to see these things happen. But I work in songwriting, and the form is abstract in its nature. So you can say all sorts of things through songwriting, approaching these matters, crab-like, sideways, so you can actually say all sorts of things in songwriting.

For example, there’s a particular song of mine called “Stagger Lee”. This is a famous Bad Seeds song, and it’s offensive on many, many levels. I won’t go through all the different sorts of people that it offends, but it’s pretty much everybody. It’s a highly problematic song. It is sort of spoken-sung over this crawling, predatory music.

But in all my days of playing “Stagger Lee”, and that’s hundreds of times of looking out into the audience, I have never seen anybody looking askance or offended at it. They’re just swept up within the music itself. So all sorts of things can be said in music and art that’s problematic, but at the same time just hugely enjoyable.

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Grief made me a person

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FS: You’ve talked about that strange year, 2020, when you wrote a whole bunch of songs for Carnage, your recent album. You’ve talked about a mood that was released in the world in 2020 that you picked up. In “White Elephant”, a song on Carnage, you talk about this sense of rage being released in the world. How did you experience that very intense, very strange year?

NC: Well, I kept thinking I was going to die, early on. That was not good. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. I remember that very, very well: of literally walking out into a crowd and not knowing if this “the big one”, or something like that. I suddenly couldn’t tour. I had a whole year’s worth of touring booked. I remember being with my manager, and him on the phone, and finding out that everything’s cancelled, we’re not going on tour. I had 15 minutes of feeling like, “Oh, my God, my life!” And then after that, this sudden burst of joy: that I wasn’t going on tour, and I suddenly had a year off.

And within that year, it was like a vacuum: all this stuff started to pour out; other things that I hadn’t had the time to do. So it was hugely creative for me, that year, including writing this book, which set me off on another course. Of course, there were things going on that year that were alarming, and we were all swept up in, to some degree, and reacted towards. “White Elephant”, I think, is a beautiful song and a beautiful lyric, that dares to be surreal and comic about what was going on within the Black Lives Matter movement. Or certainly the overreach that we saw after a while, and how that was animating the Right. That’s about as close as I can get to writing a political song.

FS: Because normally you think politics would kill a song?

NC: Personally, I don’t much like politics in music. I don’t like being told what I should or should not think. There are protest songs that are brilliant and did their work, and, of course, we need them, but personally they’re not the sort of songs today that I listen to. If we look at someone like Nina Simone, she did a whole raft of protest songs, but to me it’s her love songs that are really full of rage. She managed to sing these beautiful love songs, but you can feel this boiling rage underneath everything, and that’s much more interesting to me than hearing her sing civil rights protest songs.

FS: It seems like the big rebellion that connects what you might talk about today with the Archbishop of Canterbury to your earliest punk songs, is a rejection of a secular rationalist world in which magic isn’t possible and everything is just a machine. Do you think of yourself as a rational person?

NC: Well, I’m certainly sceptical of my beliefs — put it that way. I like going to church because church seems to be an ordered place that allows me not to believe, as much as it allows me to believe. I have both of these things going on inside me.

I have doubt about things, but it feels disingenuous to reject these yearnings and whispered intimations and softly-spoken feelings about things that I don’t know what to do with, but they are religious in nature. I find I can go into a church that allows me to do something with these feelings, to organise my spiritual nature. Without church, it’s just all over the shop. And I’m a weirdly ordered person, in my work methods. Church, in some degree, is an ordering device that I find helpful.

FS: Do you think that ritual, doing things like going to church, is part of how you access that?

NC: Yeah. For my work, sitting at my desk, at a particular time each day, and doing this work, is an ordering principle that allows me to ringfence my imagination, and allows me to focus on things. Church is similar for my spiritual life.

FS: Is that recent or has that always been the case?

NC: I’ve always worked creatively, no matter what condition I was in. I’ve always got up in the morning and done my work. And I’ve always gone to church, on and off, all through my life, since I was actually a choirboy, when I was 13, or something like that. I’ve continued to try out church.

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FS: Does it feel different in recent years?

NC: Yes, it does. I mean, I used to go to church and find reasons not to believe. Now I go to church, and find reasons that are a bit more compelling.

FS: This is going to be an incredibly unfashionable question, which you probably wouldn’t be asked by many other people, but about the figure of Christ?

NC: The question Mojo magazine never gets to!

FS: What is it about the figure of Christ that moves you?

NC: It’s weird because as far back as I can remember, even as a very small child, I’ve had an uncommon interest in Christ. In church, way before I had any notions of God or anything like that, there was this eerie, haunted figure that I was just interested in, as if it was kind of bred in me in some kind of way.

I’ve always had an interest, an attraction and an emotional relationship with this deeply haunted story. And I still do. That doesn’t mean that I buy it all, or anything like that. I just feel I relate in some way to the Christ story. Right up to the withdrawal of God — I just relate to it.

FS: Do you also relate to the devil? You have done an incredible series of ceramic sculptures that you can see on the documentary, This Much I Know to be True. They are based on Staffordshire pottery figures, and tell the story of the life of the Devil. There are 17 of them and they’re amazing to see. What brought you to do that?

NC: It is the life of the Devil, in 17 little meditations, like the Stations of the Cross. The devil is essentially just this man with horns: he inherits the earth, he goes to war, he comes back from war, he gets married, he kills his child, he is in remorse, he dies a bloody death.

I’m very proud of these things. I guess it is autobiographical in some way — not that I relate to the devil in his evilness, but I relate to the devil as a character seeking forgiveness in some way.

FS: You’ve talked in an incredibly moving way about the tragic period when you lost your 15-year-old son to a terrible accident. What many people might do in that scenario is close in and hide away from the world. But you did the extraordinary thing of opening yourself up to the world in that dark time — that’s when you started having these “in conversation” events and just talking to fans on The Red Hand Files. What has that process done to you?

NC: When my son died, I got a lot of letters coming into my house from people who weren’t just commiserating with me — they were saying: “Look, this has happened to me. I understand what you’re going through.” And these things meant a huge amount to me at the time. They took a person who was completely demolished, and forced me to turn around and look at the world in some way. I was completely absorbed with my own hurt and despair, and it turned me inside out — to see the world in some way. It was a very beautiful thing.

It wasn’t immediate, it was a gradual thing. But I think that’s what I meant when we were talking about my earlier self, at the time of The Birthday Party, as almost a half-formed person. I think that the death of my son, to some degree, completed me as a human being, and allowed me to turn around and see the world and see everyone in it as suffering individuals, as broken individuals, and understand the perilous nature of life and the value of life. That changed my outlook on things hugely — completely. To understand and respect people, all people.

FS: It almost seemed to throw you into an altered state of consciousness, the intensity of that grief. Some of the people writing in to The Red Hand Files, who have suffered grief as well, also talk about that. Away from the rational world, the world of normal, mechanistic existence, it threw you into another dimension.

NC: The world just didn’t make sense any more. It didn’t make rational sense to me, and I didn’t see why I needed to cleave to rational notions about things, when they just didn’t make any sense. And other things made more sense to me, especially early on, those feelings of a kind of connection with the otherness of things and the divinity of things.

FS: Does that include souls? A lot of people write to you about whether they feel that their loved ones who are deceased are still around. Do you believe that, after we go, there is something left behind?

NC: I don’t know. I certainly had those feelings. I would talk to my son. But whether that’s true or not, I think that they are necessary, or they certainly help lead you back to the world, these feelings. I have great respect and compassion for people who have these feelings, and people who have spiritual beliefs or religious beliefs — and their great need, that is so often looked down upon. I’ve been punishing myself by watching Dawkins talk about the lack of dignity in these sorts of religious beliefs, that it was like having to have a baby with a dummy. And it just seems like such a heartless view of things, to speak of people’s deep needs in that way. It’s very much holding on to these things, that may not be true, that are the very things that lead you out of that place.

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FS: You’re being asked on all the podcasts, in America as well as here. It feels like you’re on the cusp of talking a lot more. Are you tempted down that road?

NC: To do a podcast?

FS: Well, no — but to talk more. You did those in-conversation events. You talk beautifully. People obviously respond to it very well. It seems to break boundaries. Do you think maybe there is a role for you outside music as well?

NC: I don’t know. I haven’t done this very much — I mean, this kind of an interview, which seems to be beyond just the normal interview for me. I mean, I’ve done thousands of interviews, rock and roll interviews. But this kind of conversation seems to be about other things, and it is in itself an art form, to some degree to be able to talk openly.

FS: Which you’re very good at.

NC: Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s kind of you to say. There is something about sitting down here that’s challenging in a different way for me than to just do six interviews because I’ve got a record coming out, or whatever. There’s an excitement around talking openly about ideas and so forth.

I have noticed (without really going into names of people), that there’s a kind of podcast where the nuance goes quite quickly. When you’re doing certain types of podcasts, there’s an audience capture that goes on, expectations of what you need to think and what you need to say, and if you’re putting yourself out there, you need to hold this position on this thing, and this position on that. I don’t think — in that respect — that I’m very good for podcasts. I don’t come along with a particularly prescribed package. I just have my feelings about things, and they tend to free float.

FS: It’s a dangerous journey.

NC: You see it with podcast hosts, how they very quickly become radicalised. They become the very thing that they were told they were in the first place — which they weren’t! It’s a weird journey. Beware, Freddie. I’m here, if you ever need someone to talk to, to reel you back in…

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FS: We’re going to start taking questions from the audience.

Question 1: You said, on the one hand, you’d like to fuck people up, and on the other hand, you understood brokenness. That’s a very interesting dichotomy. Most people on their life journey understand brokenness a bit later. Could you talk about your journey of understanding brokenness? You said you were fascinated by Christ, at a very young age, and Christ is the symbol of brokenness in many ways.

NC: I may have had some basic understanding — abstract notions — of what that might be, and our flawed nature, but it was only after the death of Arthur that I understood it fundamentally. I inhabited it myself as someone who’d been dismantled. So I think that that’s the thing that changed everything for me.

Christ symbolises to me different things throughout my life, but the scene that really resonates with me is Christ in the garden, and the withdrawal of God, and the crying out into the void. That has always had a huge emotional impact on me — not so much that I relate to it, but I just find it incredibly compelling this man who in Holy Week enters Jerusalem and is lauded as the Son of God, then in pretty much the next scene, he is kneeling in the garden, completely abandoned and alone.

Question 2: I was wondering if you could comment on your relationship to Leonard Cohen’s work.

NC: I’ve always been a huge fan of Leonard Cohen. I grew up in a country town in Victoria. It was bright and hot and Australian, and I had feelings about things that didn’t correlate to the environment that I grew up in, shall we say. A friend one day played me this Leonard Cohen record they’d found, Songs of Love and Hate. I was maybe 14 or 15. On the first song “Avalanche”, this voice came out that had this gravitas to it, and that just blew me away. That particular record is absolutely fundamental to me. He also had a journey from very dark, very angry records to something gentler and more resolved. But I do like that first record. Songs of Love and Hate had a huge impact. I never met him unfortunately.

Question 3: I love the song Into My Arms, when you talk about angels. We have talked about Christ and about the brokenness of humanity, but there is a kind of in-between spiritual being, like the angels and the saints. In that song, you say “I don’t believe in them” — but what do they mean to you?

NC: Within the Christian religion, there’s some weird stuff, right? The Christian religion in itself, to me, is deeply strange and there’s a whole lot of fantastical sorts of things that are in it. But I kind of like that too. I like the strangeness, the challenge of believing – or handing myself over to – something that just doesn’t make any sense. Angels are one of those things, for sure.

Question 4: First of all, thank you Nick. There was time in my life when I felt very broken, and your words just meant everything, when most people’s didn’t — so thank you. But there’s something else about your words. They often made me laugh. And I wondered what makes you laugh?

NC: My words? No, I mean, it’s funny, because, like Leonard Cohen, we’re both humourists, probably, beyond anything. Admittedly, Songs of Love and Hate isn’t that funny, but it’s certainly got something going on in it. It’s often struck me as strange that I see much of what I do as essentially comic writing. You know, I sit down and I know that I’m writing a funny song — and there’s not many musicians that do that. Yet I’m seen as, you know, dark. That it’s all kind of bleakness and darkness. So thank you for seeing the funny side of things.

Question 5: You spoke earlier about feeling a sense of completeness. But do you really feel complete? And if so, do you think that an artist can create something in that sort of state of mind? Looking back at some of the music that you’ve created, when you weren’t necessarily feeling as complete — it’s fantastic. Can you create good art when you’re feeling “whole”?

NC: It’s a very good question. It always strikes me that we always feel, wherever we are, at that particular point in time, a sort of sense of arrival somewhere. But you look back, and you realise that it’s just never been the case. I am always looking back with a faint feeling of embarrassment at what I was up to even a year ago. So you have this feeling of arrival, but I don’t think you ever really arrive. I do have a feeling of repetition, that I’m circling around certain ideas and coming back to the same things over and over again. But completeness wasn’t a good word.

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FS: You have always been propelled by a drive for the new, from the town in Australia, where you grew up, all the way to launching your first career and leaving Australia, reinventing yourself, new styles, new horizons. Something in you seems to be constantly propelled forward.

NC: Yeah, I wouldn’t use that word, “reinvention”, either. I work with people who are extremely creative, and risk-takers, like Warren Ellis, for example, a born risk-taker with music. He simply will not go near anything that he feels, musically, has been done before. So that pushes me.

And I feel that same way about words, too — that they need to reflect where I am authentically. And that changes. Trying to do the thing that you’ve done before is just a losing battle. So you move forward, forever forward. If I do have a kind of faint pride in what I’ve done, it is that I continue to dismantle the things that have gone before, by the things that I’m doing now. And that’s maybe what the creative process is: it’s an act of murder to the work that’s gone before. Moving on, whether it’s to something better or not, I don’t know — I don’t really think of the things in that way. Just something different.

Question 6: Another question related to Leonard Cohen, I’m afraid. A very famous songwriter said that as he got older, his own songs became more like prayers. It’s something you’ve talked about on The Red Hand Files. Are you conscious of that as you write some of your songs?

NC: That they’re prayers? I think that they are to some degree prayers, yeah. I think Ghosteen in particular. At the time, I was in a deep existential crisis. And that record was some way to deal with the spiritual condition of my son who died, that it felt like those songs reached into the unknown toward him. And that felt, at the time of making that record, the purpose of that record. A way in which I could somehow affect his spiritual condition in a positive way.

I mean, this sounds crazy, but I was worried about him. And so I felt that these songs were a way of reaching toward him. and I still worry about that, to some degree, even though I obviously also understand that he may not be there. It doesn’t stop me thinking it. It’s a difficult thing, and it expands out into everything really. Of course, God may not exist, but on some level, that is a mere detail. It’s what we do ourselves: to reach beyond ourselves is the point of this sort of stuff. I’m not really explaining that very well.

FS: We think you are! Is this search for something more, for the new, the creative impulse — is it connected to the religious impulse? It feels like that was always there. Somehow, even if you were taking heroin and writhing around on the stage and semi-naked, apparently completely opposite to the person sitting on this sofa chatting to me, you had the same impulse: you were looking for more?

NC: Yes, that’s right. As a songwriter, what I’m trying to do is write songs, with the fullest heart I possibly can, and to be as open to things as I possibly can be. The atheist notion, which often seems like the most rational — I get it. I understand the atheist impulse. I have a little Hitchens inside me too! But I also want to be able to expand the parameters of what I do creatively to encompass everything. And so, for me, the inner Hitchens is just bad for the business of songwriting. That little sceptical voice — it’s just bad for art.

Question 7: You talked about having a pulse on the culture and the mood. Compared to the early days of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, there’s probably a very different set of orthodoxies now in 2023, that you might have been kicking against?

NC: When we talk about being offensive, in the punk rock days, when offensiveness was the sacred duty, it was very much to kick against the establishment. That’s what was happening, but that was not me, I was never doing that. I was much more concerned with irritating my peers, and my audience. But what I mean by “irritating” is to ignite their imaginations, and get them thinking about things, and challenge them about things. This felt like the way to make good art: to confront people.

So I was not really interested in the punk rock thing with Thatcher. That was the energy, a hatred of the establishment, behind that music. I came from Australia; I didn’t have that political fury. I was much more concerned with fucking with people on a different kind of a level. And I was always at odds with my peers, I would say.

FS: So how do you fuck with people in 2023?

NC: You’d go to church and be a conservative.

Question 8: I really love The Birthday Party albums when I was a teenager. People have mentioned the energy and the humour, but what I really identified with was your sense of alienation. I was growing up in Yorkshire in the Seventies, and I felt alienated for various reasons. I just wonder what it is about your childhood that made you feel alienated.

NC: I grew up in a country town and for the first 10 or 11 years, everything went beautifully. I had loving parents, I had a free-range childhood. My mother used to just kick me out of the house in the morning and say: “Come back for dinner.” It was like a Spielberg movie — kids on their bikes, all that sort of stuff. A very free, very beautiful, uncomplicated, happy, childhood. But there was something inside me that started to attract trouble. As soon as I became 11, 12, at high school, I felt not so much alienated, but just that I had to burst out of this fucking country town that I was stuck in. I just ignited in a wholly different way: a need to just get out. I got basically kicked out of high school, and I went to Melbourne, to a boarding school — and that was a whole other set of disasters. It wasn’t alienation so much as a need to get away from the smallness of things. I think I still feel that, on a spiritual level.

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Question 9: One of the overlooked aspects of being creative is deciding what to perform, deciding what you’re going to express on a tour. And your attitude towards people in the world has changed quite radically over the last few years. When you look back on your body of work, are there songs or periods that you think won’t get an airing anymore? If I can be cheeky and challenge you to be specific on why.

NC: No, I think you want me to name my most problematic songs. Is that right? There are certainly songs that I wouldn’t play these days, but it’s not because I’m worried about what people might think about them. They just were written by a 19-, 20-year-old kid, and they’re just not very wise songs. I have absolutely no idea what I’m even trying to say within those songs. They just sound good. Songs like that I just couldn’t engage with anymore. But there are a lot of old songs that I still play, because they are exciting to play, and I still feel something about them.

FS: Are there any songs you don’t like? That when someone comes and says “I love this song!” your heart sinks?

NC: There are songs I like…less. I wouldn’t like to say which — it’s a bit mean to your songs, isn’t it? There are some extremely famous songs in my catalogue that are not perhaps my favourite stuff. But they may also be the songs that people really treasure.

Question 10: Back to theology, sorry. It is Holy Week. I think we can all understand your profound religious faith, but we might have difficulty with your support for the church as a bureaucracy and an organisation. Can you explain?

NC: That’s a very good question. and it comes up all the time. People just won’t have it. “Just look at what the church has done!” And of course, it’s responsible for some heinous things historically (and to this day). For me, there’s much about the church, there’s so much about Christianity, that’s difficult to accept. But to sit in a church, with all this stuff around it, and to somehow be moved, seems like an achievement. “Even though there’s all this stuff, here I am.”

FS: It’s almost like a rebellion, a defiance?

NC: I’m not a historian, I’m not somebody who knows too much about theology. I don’t want to make a case or defend the church. I can only say that there’s something about the distance travelled: from sitting there with my sceptical self, in this (possibly completely corrupt) institution, and finding that I can actually walk out of there having a transcendent moment. It’s something that I don’t get sitting in a park. I don’t get the same thing watching a sunrise. I sometimes get the same thing listening to music. There’s something about music that is authentically transformative.

FS: Does any part of you worry that the Christian aspect is going to take over? That you are going to alienate fans from earlier decades? “What’s going on with Nick Cave? He’s talking about God and Christ all the time…”

NC: No, I don’t. My manager might worry about it. He’s over there. But no, I don’t worry about that. I’ve been going on about this stuff for years! I think maybe 30 years ago, NME sat me down for an interview and, right before we start, the editor says: “None of this God stuff!” This is not new.

I just had a beautiful opportunity, through writing a book in conversation with Sean O’Hagan, to expand on my beliefs. And they were news to me, to some degree! That’s what conversation can do. You can arrive at things, you can find things out about yourself. The things that I said to Sean were extraordinary, in a way. Very quickly, through the course of conversation, I changed my opinions about things all the time. He said, “Well, two weeks ago, you said yes, and now you’re saying no.” And that is the great beauty of conversation: that you hear yourself say things that feel like they mean something, and other things that are just patent nonsense. You’ve got to get that stuff out of your head.

Question 11: A few years ago, you said, as you’re getting older, you’re becoming more and more obsessed with sex. Is that still true?

NC: Just as obsessed — but not as often.

Freddie Sayers: Something that struck me from reading the book and immersing myself in your songs in recent weeks is this sense that, to the superficial eye, you might seem unrecognisably changed since those early gigs with The Birthday Party, where it’s full of noise and screaming and anger. Now you seem much more at peace, you are a churchgoing person – you’ve had two interviews with Archbishops in the past three months! So, from being this countercultural person, you seem to have become a conservative person. How would you explain to people the strands that connect the earlier you to the new you?

Nick Cave: There may now be a conservative edge to things, but that word I would use cautiously. Certainly these days I still get similar delight, which I got in the early days, in sort of fucking with people to some degree. There is something about living outside the expectations of other people that is energising.

In the old days, with The Birthday Party, they were extremely energetic, extremely (I would say) violent, aggressive concerts done by a not-fully-formed person, who held the world in contempt as a sort of default. That was the energy of those concerts — and that has changed completely. Now I see the world in a completely different way, and see human beings in a completely different way. I see the brokenness of human beings, but also the unbelievable value of human beings. This is something that, back then, I could never have imagined I would have felt. I think it has something to do with becoming a more complete person, through a series of things that have happened to me through my life — things that have happened to us all, probably.

FS: You write beautifully about the creative process in Faith, Hope and Carnage, and there’s a thread of continuity there too, because these songs are not just something you’re synthesising out of nothing; they’re almost out there and you’re trying to find them. There seems to be a magical, mystical component to the process.

NC: I wish there was more of that. Actually, my creative process is extremely rigorous, and it’s just hard work. It begins at 9:00am: I sit down, and I start writing (if I’m writing songs, which I am at the moment). It finishes at 5:30 in the afternoon, and then I don’t do any other creative stuff after that. But within that, I have a very troubled relationship with my muse: it’s fraught and full of anxiety; not a very nice place at all. What I’m getting is meagre scraps of songs that slowly make their way into something that is of some kind of value. That’s the mystical thing. It’s not that there’s a big pencil in the sky that’s writing my lyrics for me. I wish it was more like that.

FS: But do these songs not have a life of their own? You’ve written about how they almost seem to predict what happens.

NC: Yeah, I think there is an element of that. It’s hard to talk about without sounding ridiculous, but I think, from my experience, the songs seem to know a little bit more about what’s going on than I do myself. Even though I’m working in a very conscious way to get songs written, I don’t have any control over the outcome. In the end, I find I’ve just written stuff. That often surprises me; the songs I’m writing now surprise me hugely, as to where they’re actually going. (Not that I really want to talk about those – it’s just too early.) I have, I don’t know, 12-13 songs that feel good, and I realised I’ve actually had no control over them, the whole time.

FS: Do you find freedom and being relaxed part of the creative process? This is where the atmosphere of wider society can be relevant. In one of your books, you write that: “The vitalising element in art is the one that baffles or challenges or outrages. As a young musician, I felt it was my sacred duty to offend.” There’s a “break things, scream and shout” part of the creative process. Is that still part of it for you?

NC: I don’t want to sit here and say that my generation was better than your generation, or whatever, but I did come from a generation where there were self-evident truths — such as free speech being a good thing — that I still fully believe in, and are an energising factor in what I do. The idea that you can offend people, or that your songs can be dangerous enough for people to be scared of them, is exciting for me. It’s not something that I personally feel I need to shy away from.

FS: Not drawing politics into it, but do you feel that the atmosphere of our culture now is that people have to be more careful? This is not a culture war question; it’s about whether it actually impinges on the creative faculty?

NC: Well, of course, of course it does. If you’re writing in a censorious mood, a fragile, brittle mood, and you’re worried about that, then of course you’ll second guess what you’re writing about. And this is just not good for the business of songwriting, as far as I’m concerned.

FS: Does that happen to you? The second-guessing, the self-censoring?

NC: “Should I say this? Or should I not?” Only as much as I would have 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. You always think: “Is this a good line or a bad line?” But I never think in terms of whether it’s offensive or not. So no, I don’t feel that I do that. However, I do feel a kind of wet blanket has been thrown over art in general, and this is just not good.

FS: What is that wet blanket?

NC: What is the wet blanket? Well, a squeamish, censorious, merciless idea that there are certain things that you can get away with saying and certain things that you can’t get away with saying.

But I get tired of hearing people say: “Well, you can’t say this; I think this, but you can’t say this.” That’s reflective of a mood, but I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think there are things that you can’t say. You just need to take the consequences of saying certain sorts of things.

Now these consequences are brutal, and merciless, and unjust sometimes, and it’s distressing to see these things happen. But I work in songwriting, and the form is abstract in its nature. So you can say all sorts of things through songwriting, approaching these matters, crab-like, sideways, so you can actually say all sorts of things in songwriting.

For example, there’s a particular song of mine called “Stagger Lee”. This is a famous Bad Seeds song, and it’s offensive on many, many levels. I won’t go through all the different sorts of people that it offends, but it’s pretty much everybody. It’s a highly problematic song. It is sort of spoken-sung over this crawling, predatory music.

But in all my days of playing “Stagger Lee”, and that’s hundreds of times of looking out into the audience, I have never seen anybody looking askance or offended at it. They’re just swept up within the music itself. So all sorts of things can be said in music and art that’s problematic, but at the same time just hugely enjoyable.

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Grief made me a person

By Nick Cave

FS: You’ve talked about that strange year, 2020, when you wrote a whole bunch of songs for Carnage, your recent album. You’ve talked about a mood that was released in the world in 2020 that you picked up. In “White Elephant”, a song on Carnage, you talk about this sense of rage being released in the world. How did you experience that very intense, very strange year?

NC: Well, I kept thinking I was going to die, early on. That was not good. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. I remember that very, very well: of literally walking out into a crowd and not knowing if this “the big one”, or something like that. I suddenly couldn’t tour. I had a whole year’s worth of touring booked. I remember being with my manager, and him on the phone, and finding out that everything’s cancelled, we’re not going on tour. I had 15 minutes of feeling like, “Oh, my God, my life!” And then after that, this sudden burst of joy: that I wasn’t going on tour, and I suddenly had a year off.

And within that year, it was like a vacuum: all this stuff started to pour out; other things that I hadn’t had the time to do. So it was hugely creative for me, that year, including writing this book, which set me off on another course. Of course, there were things going on that year that were alarming, and we were all swept up in, to some degree, and reacted towards. “White Elephant”, I think, is a beautiful song and a beautiful lyric, that dares to be surreal and comic about what was going on within the Black Lives Matter movement. Or certainly the overreach that we saw after a while, and how that was animating the Right. That’s about as close as I can get to writing a political song.

FS: Because normally you think politics would kill a song?

NC: Personally, I don’t much like politics in music. I don’t like being told what I should or should not think. There are protest songs that are brilliant and did their work, and, of course, we need them, but personally they’re not the sort of songs today that I listen to. If we look at someone like Nina Simone, she did a whole raft of protest songs, but to me it’s her love songs that are really full of rage. She managed to sing these beautiful love songs, but you can feel this boiling rage underneath everything, and that’s much more interesting to me than hearing her sing civil rights protest songs.

FS: It seems like the big rebellion that connects what you might talk about today with the Archbishop of Canterbury to your earliest punk songs, is a rejection of a secular rationalist world in which magic isn’t possible and everything is just a machine. Do you think of yourself as a rational person?

NC: Well, I’m certainly sceptical of my beliefs — put it that way. I like going to church because church seems to be an ordered place that allows me not to believe, as much as it allows me to believe. I have both of these things going on inside me.

I have doubt about things, but it feels disingenuous to reject these yearnings and whispered intimations and softly-spoken feelings about things that I don’t know what to do with, but they are religious in nature. I find I can go into a church that allows me to do something with these feelings, to organise my spiritual nature. Without church, it’s just all over the shop. And I’m a weirdly ordered person, in my work methods. Church, in some degree, is an ordering device that I find helpful.

FS: Do you think that ritual, doing things like going to church, is part of how you access that?

NC: Yeah. For my work, sitting at my desk, at a particular time each day, and doing this work, is an ordering principle that allows me to ringfence my imagination, and allows me to focus on things. Church is similar for my spiritual life.

FS: Is that recent or has that always been the case?

NC: I’ve always worked creatively, no matter what condition I was in. I’ve always got up in the morning and done my work. And I’ve always gone to church, on and off, all through my life, since I was actually a choirboy, when I was 13, or something like that. I’ve continued to try out church.

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FS: Does it feel different in recent years?

NC: Yes, it does. I mean, I used to go to church and find reasons not to believe. Now I go to church, and find reasons that are a bit more compelling.

FS: This is going to be an incredibly unfashionable question, which you probably wouldn’t be asked by many other people, but about the figure of Christ?

NC: The question Mojo magazine never gets to!

FS: What is it about the figure of Christ that moves you?

NC: It’s weird because as far back as I can remember, even as a very small child, I’ve had an uncommon interest in Christ. In church, way before I had any notions of God or anything like that, there was this eerie, haunted figure that I was just interested in, as if it was kind of bred in me in some kind of way.

I’ve always had an interest, an attraction and an emotional relationship with this deeply haunted story. And I still do. That doesn’t mean that I buy it all, or anything like that. I just feel I relate in some way to the Christ story. Right up to the withdrawal of God — I just relate to it.

FS: Do you also relate to the devil? You have done an incredible series of ceramic sculptures that you can see on the documentary, This Much I Know to be True. They are based on Staffordshire pottery figures, and tell the story of the life of the Devil. There are 17 of them and they’re amazing to see. What brought you to do that?

NC: It is the life of the Devil, in 17 little meditations, like the Stations of the Cross. The devil is essentially just this man with horns: he inherits the earth, he goes to war, he comes back from war, he gets married, he kills his child, he is in remorse, he dies a bloody death.

I’m very proud of these things. I guess it is autobiographical in some way — not that I relate to the devil in his evilness, but I relate to the devil as a character seeking forgiveness in some way.

FS: You’ve talked in an incredibly moving way about the tragic period when you lost your 15-year-old son to a terrible accident. What many people might do in that scenario is close in and hide away from the world. But you did the extraordinary thing of opening yourself up to the world in that dark time — that’s when you started having these “in conversation” events and just talking to fans on The Red Hand Files. What has that process done to you?

NC: When my son died, I got a lot of letters coming into my house from people who weren’t just commiserating with me — they were saying: “Look, this has happened to me. I understand what you’re going through.” And these things meant a huge amount to me at the time. They took a person who was completely demolished, and forced me to turn around and look at the world in some way. I was completely absorbed with my own hurt and despair, and it turned me inside out — to see the world in some way. It was a very beautiful thing.

It wasn’t immediate, it was a gradual thing. But I think that’s what I meant when we were talking about my earlier self, at the time of The Birthday Party, as almost a half-formed person. I think that the death of my son, to some degree, completed me as a human being, and allowed me to turn around and see the world and see everyone in it as suffering individuals, as broken individuals, and understand the perilous nature of life and the value of life. That changed my outlook on things hugely — completely. To understand and respect people, all people.

FS: It almost seemed to throw you into an altered state of consciousness, the intensity of that grief. Some of the people writing in to The Red Hand Files, who have suffered grief as well, also talk about that. Away from the rational world, the world of normal, mechanistic existence, it threw you into another dimension.

NC: The world just didn’t make sense any more. It didn’t make rational sense to me, and I didn’t see why I needed to cleave to rational notions about things, when they just didn’t make any sense. And other things made more sense to me, especially early on, those feelings of a kind of connection with the otherness of things and the divinity of things.

FS: Does that include souls? A lot of people write to you about whether they feel that their loved ones who are deceased are still around. Do you believe that, after we go, there is something left behind?

NC: I don’t know. I certainly had those feelings. I would talk to my son. But whether that’s true or not, I think that they are necessary, or they certainly help lead you back to the world, these feelings. I have great respect and compassion for people who have these feelings, and people who have spiritual beliefs or religious beliefs — and their great need, that is so often looked down upon. I’ve been punishing myself by watching Dawkins talk about the lack of dignity in these sorts of religious beliefs, that it was like having to have a baby with a dummy. And it just seems like such a heartless view of things, to speak of people’s deep needs in that way. It’s very much holding on to these things, that may not be true, that are the very things that lead you out of that place.

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FS: You’re being asked on all the podcasts, in America as well as here. It feels like you’re on the cusp of talking a lot more. Are you tempted down that road?

NC: To do a podcast?

FS: Well, no — but to talk more. You did those in-conversation events. You talk beautifully. People obviously respond to it very well. It seems to break boundaries. Do you think maybe there is a role for you outside music as well?

NC: I don’t know. I haven’t done this very much — I mean, this kind of an interview, which seems to be beyond just the normal interview for me. I mean, I’ve done thousands of interviews, rock and roll interviews. But this kind of conversation seems to be about other things, and it is in itself an art form, to some degree to be able to talk openly.

FS: Which you’re very good at.

NC: Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s kind of you to say. There is something about sitting down here that’s challenging in a different way for me than to just do six interviews because I’ve got a record coming out, or whatever. There’s an excitement around talking openly about ideas and so forth.

I have noticed (without really going into names of people), that there’s a kind of podcast where the nuance goes quite quickly. When you’re doing certain types of podcasts, there’s an audience capture that goes on, expectations of what you need to think and what you need to say, and if you’re putting yourself out there, you need to hold this position on this thing, and this position on that. I don’t think — in that respect — that I’m very good for podcasts. I don’t come along with a particularly prescribed package. I just have my feelings about things, and they tend to free float.

FS: It’s a dangerous journey.

NC: You see it with podcast hosts, how they very quickly become radicalised. They become the very thing that they were told they were in the first place — which they weren’t! It’s a weird journey. Beware, Freddie. I’m here, if you ever need someone to talk to, to reel you back in…

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FS: We’re going to start taking questions from the audience.

Question 1: You said, on the one hand, you’d like to fuck people up, and on the other hand, you understood brokenness. That’s a very interesting dichotomy. Most people on their life journey understand brokenness a bit later. Could you talk about your journey of understanding brokenness? You said you were fascinated by Christ, at a very young age, and Christ is the symbol of brokenness in many ways.

NC: I may have had some basic understanding — abstract notions — of what that might be, and our flawed nature, but it was only after the death of Arthur that I understood it fundamentally. I inhabited it myself as someone who’d been dismantled. So I think that that’s the thing that changed everything for me.

Christ symbolises to me different things throughout my life, but the scene that really resonates with me is Christ in the garden, and the withdrawal of God, and the crying out into the void. That has always had a huge emotional impact on me — not so much that I relate to it, but I just find it incredibly compelling this man who in Holy Week enters Jerusalem and is lauded as the Son of God, then in pretty much the next scene, he is kneeling in the garden, completely abandoned and alone.

Question 2: I was wondering if you could comment on your relationship to Leonard Cohen’s work.

NC: I’ve always been a huge fan of Leonard Cohen. I grew up in a country town in Victoria. It was bright and hot and Australian, and I had feelings about things that didn’t correlate to the environment that I grew up in, shall we say. A friend one day played me this Leonard Cohen record they’d found, Songs of Love and Hate. I was maybe 14 or 15. On the first song “Avalanche”, this voice came out that had this gravitas to it, and that just blew me away. That particular record is absolutely fundamental to me. He also had a journey from very dark, very angry records to something gentler and more resolved. But I do like that first record. Songs of Love and Hate had a huge impact. I never met him unfortunately.

Question 3: I love the song Into My Arms, when you talk about angels. We have talked about Christ and about the brokenness of humanity, but there is a kind of in-between spiritual being, like the angels and the saints. In that song, you say “I don’t believe in them” — but what do they mean to you?

NC: Within the Christian religion, there’s some weird stuff, right? The Christian religion in itself, to me, is deeply strange and there’s a whole lot of fantastical sorts of things that are in it. But I kind of like that too. I like the strangeness, the challenge of believing – or handing myself over to – something that just doesn’t make any sense. Angels are one of those things, for sure.

Question 4: First of all, thank you Nick. There was time in my life when I felt very broken, and your words just meant everything, when most people’s didn’t — so thank you. But there’s something else about your words. They often made me laugh. And I wondered what makes you laugh?

NC: My words? No, I mean, it’s funny, because, like Leonard Cohen, we’re both humourists, probably, beyond anything. Admittedly, Songs of Love and Hate isn’t that funny, but it’s certainly got something going on in it. It’s often struck me as strange that I see much of what I do as essentially comic writing. You know, I sit down and I know that I’m writing a funny song — and there’s not many musicians that do that. Yet I’m seen as, you know, dark. That it’s all kind of bleakness and darkness. So thank you for seeing the funny side of things.

Question 5: You spoke earlier about feeling a sense of completeness. But do you really feel complete? And if so, do you think that an artist can create something in that sort of state of mind? Looking back at some of the music that you’ve created, when you weren’t necessarily feeling as complete — it’s fantastic. Can you create good art when you’re feeling “whole”?

NC: It’s a very good question. It always strikes me that we always feel, wherever we are, at that particular point in time, a sort of sense of arrival somewhere. But you look back, and you realise that it’s just never been the case. I am always looking back with a faint feeling of embarrassment at what I was up to even a year ago. So you have this feeling of arrival, but I don’t think you ever really arrive. I do have a feeling of repetition, that I’m circling around certain ideas and coming back to the same things over and over again. But completeness wasn’t a good word.

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FS: You have always been propelled by a drive for the new, from the town in Australia, where you grew up, all the way to launching your first career and leaving Australia, reinventing yourself, new styles, new horizons. Something in you seems to be constantly propelled forward.

NC: Yeah, I wouldn’t use that word, “reinvention”, either. I work with people who are extremely creative, and risk-takers, like Warren Ellis, for example, a born risk-taker with music. He simply will not go near anything that he feels, musically, has been done before. So that pushes me.

And I feel that same way about words, too — that they need to reflect where I am authentically. And that changes. Trying to do the thing that you’ve done before is just a losing battle. So you move forward, forever forward. If I do have a kind of faint pride in what I’ve done, it is that I continue to dismantle the things that have gone before, by the things that I’m doing now. And that’s maybe what the creative process is: it’s an act of murder to the work that’s gone before. Moving on, whether it’s to something better or not, I don’t know — I don’t really think of the things in that way. Just something different.

Question 6: Another question related to Leonard Cohen, I’m afraid. A very famous songwriter said that as he got older, his own songs became more like prayers. It’s something you’ve talked about on The Red Hand Files. Are you conscious of that as you write some of your songs?

NC: That they’re prayers? I think that they are to some degree prayers, yeah. I think Ghosteen in particular. At the time, I was in a deep existential crisis. And that record was some way to deal with the spiritual condition of my son who died, that it felt like those songs reached into the unknown toward him. And that felt, at the time of making that record, the purpose of that record. A way in which I could somehow affect his spiritual condition in a positive way.

I mean, this sounds crazy, but I was worried about him. And so I felt that these songs were a way of reaching toward him. and I still worry about that, to some degree, even though I obviously also understand that he may not be there. It doesn’t stop me thinking it. It’s a difficult thing, and it expands out into everything really. Of course, God may not exist, but on some level, that is a mere detail. It’s what we do ourselves: to reach beyond ourselves is the point of this sort of stuff. I’m not really explaining that very well.

FS: We think you are! Is this search for something more, for the new, the creative impulse — is it connected to the religious impulse? It feels like that was always there. Somehow, even if you were taking heroin and writhing around on the stage and semi-naked, apparently completely opposite to the person sitting on this sofa chatting to me, you had the same impulse: you were looking for more?

NC: Yes, that’s right. As a songwriter, what I’m trying to do is write songs, with the fullest heart I possibly can, and to be as open to things as I possibly can be. The atheist notion, which often seems like the most rational — I get it. I understand the atheist impulse. I have a little Hitchens inside me too! But I also want to be able to expand the parameters of what I do creatively to encompass everything. And so, for me, the inner Hitchens is just bad for the business of songwriting. That little sceptical voice — it’s just bad for art.

Question 7: You talked about having a pulse on the culture and the mood. Compared to the early days of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, there’s probably a very different set of orthodoxies now in 2023, that you might have been kicking against?

NC: When we talk about being offensive, in the punk rock days, when offensiveness was the sacred duty, it was very much to kick against the establishment. That’s what was happening, but that was not me, I was never doing that. I was much more concerned with irritating my peers, and my audience. But what I mean by “irritating” is to ignite their imaginations, and get them thinking about things, and challenge them about things. This felt like the way to make good art: to confront people.

So I was not really interested in the punk rock thing with Thatcher. That was the energy, a hatred of the establishment, behind that music. I came from Australia; I didn’t have that political fury. I was much more concerned with fucking with people on a different kind of a level. And I was always at odds with my peers, I would say.

FS: So how do you fuck with people in 2023?

NC: You’d go to church and be a conservative.

Question 8: I really love The Birthday Party albums when I was a teenager. People have mentioned the energy and the humour, but what I really identified with was your sense of alienation. I was growing up in Yorkshire in the Seventies, and I felt alienated for various reasons. I just wonder what it is about your childhood that made you feel alienated.

NC: I grew up in a country town and for the first 10 or 11 years, everything went beautifully. I had loving parents, I had a free-range childhood. My mother used to just kick me out of the house in the morning and say: “Come back for dinner.” It was like a Spielberg movie — kids on their bikes, all that sort of stuff. A very free, very beautiful, uncomplicated, happy, childhood. But there was something inside me that started to attract trouble. As soon as I became 11, 12, at high school, I felt not so much alienated, but just that I had to burst out of this fucking country town that I was stuck in. I just ignited in a wholly different way: a need to just get out. I got basically kicked out of high school, and I went to Melbourne, to a boarding school — and that was a whole other set of disasters. It wasn’t alienation so much as a need to get away from the smallness of things. I think I still feel that, on a spiritual level.

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Question 9: One of the overlooked aspects of being creative is deciding what to perform, deciding what you’re going to express on a tour. And your attitude towards people in the world has changed quite radically over the last few years. When you look back on your body of work, are there songs or periods that you think won’t get an airing anymore? If I can be cheeky and challenge you to be specific on why.

NC: No, I think you want me to name my most problematic songs. Is that right? There are certainly songs that I wouldn’t play these days, but it’s not because I’m worried about what people might think about them. They just were written by a 19-, 20-year-old kid, and they’re just not very wise songs. I have absolutely no idea what I’m even trying to say within those songs. They just sound good. Songs like that I just couldn’t engage with anymore. But there are a lot of old songs that I still play, because they are exciting to play, and I still feel something about them.

FS: Are there any songs you don’t like? That when someone comes and says “I love this song!” your heart sinks?

NC: There are songs I like…less. I wouldn’t like to say which — it’s a bit mean to your songs, isn’t it? There are some extremely famous songs in my catalogue that are not perhaps my favourite stuff. But they may also be the songs that people really treasure.

Question 10: Back to theology, sorry. It is Holy Week. I think we can all understand your profound religious faith, but we might have difficulty with your support for the church as a bureaucracy and an organisation. Can you explain?

NC: That’s a very good question. and it comes up all the time. People just won’t have it. “Just look at what the church has done!” And of course, it’s responsible for some heinous things historically (and to this day). For me, there’s much about the church, there’s so much about Christianity, that’s difficult to accept. But to sit in a church, with all this stuff around it, and to somehow be moved, seems like an achievement. “Even though there’s all this stuff, here I am.”

FS: It’s almost like a rebellion, a defiance?

NC: I’m not a historian, I’m not somebody who knows too much about theology. I don’t want to make a case or defend the church. I can only say that there’s something about the distance travelled: from sitting there with my sceptical self, in this (possibly completely corrupt) institution, and finding that I can actually walk out of there having a transcendent moment. It’s something that I don’t get sitting in a park. I don’t get the same thing watching a sunrise. I sometimes get the same thing listening to music. There’s something about music that is authentically transformative.

FS: Does any part of you worry that the Christian aspect is going to take over? That you are going to alienate fans from earlier decades? “What’s going on with Nick Cave? He’s talking about God and Christ all the time…”

NC: No, I don’t. My manager might worry about it. He’s over there. But no, I don’t worry about that. I’ve been going on about this stuff for years! I think maybe 30 years ago, NME sat me down for an interview and, right before we start, the editor says: “None of this God stuff!” This is not new.

I just had a beautiful opportunity, through writing a book in conversation with Sean O’Hagan, to expand on my beliefs. And they were news to me, to some degree! That’s what conversation can do. You can arrive at things, you can find things out about yourself. The things that I said to Sean were extraordinary, in a way. Very quickly, through the course of conversation, I changed my opinions about things all the time. He said, “Well, two weeks ago, you said yes, and now you’re saying no.” And that is the great beauty of conversation: that you hear yourself say things that feel like they mean something, and other things that are just patent nonsense. You’ve got to get that stuff out of your head.

Question 11: A few years ago, you said, as you’re getting older, you’re becoming more and more obsessed with sex. Is that still true?

NC: Just as obsessed — but not as often.

Nick Cave: I do have certain memories of the night Arthur died. Yet when I try to recall what happened after that night, it’s almost like there is a rupture that time and memory poured itself into. Everything disappears.

Seán O’Hagan: People tend not to want to revisit the moment of the actual trauma itself — and probably for good reason. Are you sure you even want to talk about this stuff?

NC: Fuck, I don’t know, Seán. I’m just kind of mystified by how little I remember, just how much I have forgotten.

I remember I was watching TV, and Arthur rings me, and I answer, but it’s not Arthur; it’s a stranger who had found his phone and his rucksack and shoes in a field near the black windmill outside Brighton. The stranger also says that there is police activity at the cliff near the windmill. Then there is this sudden roaring panic, and we are calling 999. Asking the operator what is happening at the cliffs! The police won’t tell us anything.

Then the police come to the house. My wife Susie and I standing on the doorstep, seeing the police car pull up, and the detectives stepping out and walking towards us with their composed faces, and us just knowing. The cops standing in the kitchen and telling us the news — our boy has fallen off the cliff, his body is in the hospital, he is dead, and my head starts roaring the loudest noise in the world…

SOH: I don’t know what to say, Nick. I just can’t imagine . . .

NC: I don’t remember much after that, for quite a while. Mostly, I just recall sitting on the back step of the house away from everyone and smoking and feeling the roaring body shock of it, like this alien force was going to burst out the ends of my fucking fingers. I remember feeling like I was physically detonating, like if I made any sudden moves I’d literally explode, so stuffed was my body with despair. And then sitting next to the bed, with Susie lying completely still in the dark, like a stone, her eyes closed, and saying, “I am here, babe, I’m here,” but really I’m not, I’m not there at all, I’m in a million fucking pieces, everywhere else, all over the place.

SOH: Were you angry at the world after Arthur died?

NC: No, I was in despair. I don’t think anger was part of it. Not for me, although who knows what boils away inside us. Susie, of course, entered a circle of hell that is reserved solely for mothers who lose their children. It’s a whole other level of loss and suffering, a terrible, terrible thing to happen to anyone. There are all sorts of feelings tied up in it, guilt and shame and self-loathing so primal, yet so complex, they are near impossible to unravel. We don’t have the language for it. Or maybe language itself is not up to the task. Perhaps the cultures that encourage people to dress in black and just wail, maybe that is the most articulate response.

I remember, in desperation, reaching across and taking Susie’s hand and feeling the shock of that same violent electricity in her hand. It was so physical. That physical affliction is not often talked about, as far as I can see. We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body. So much so that it can feel terminal.

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***

SOH: Nothing prepares you for it. It’s tidal and it can be capsizing.

NC: That’s a good word for it — “capsizing”. But it is important to say that these feelings I am describing, this point of absolute annihilation, is not exceptional. In fact it is ordinary. We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time — that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.

It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really — to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.

SOH: When you are deep in grief, there’s no real comfort to be had in people constantly telling you that time will make things better. But I distinctly remember waking up one morning, having finally had a decent night’s sleep, and thinking, it’s going to be okay. There was a sense that something had shifted imperceptibility. Did that happen to you?

NC: At first there was nothing but darkness, but, over time, Susie and I started to experience something like small fragments of light. These points of light were essentially thoughtful gestures from the people we encountered. We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naïve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all — in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared.

Grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive.

Arthur’s death literally changed everything for me. Absolutely everything. It made me a religious person. I am not talking about being a traditional Christian. I am not even talking about a belief in God, necessarily. It made me a religious person in the sense that I felt, on a profound level, a deep inclusion in the human predicament, and an understanding of our vulnerability and the sense that, as individuals, we are, each of us, imperilled. Each life is precarious, and some of us understand it and some don’t. I became a person after my son died.

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***

SOH: Back in your younger, wilder days, when you drew on biblical imagery as a source for your songwriting, was that also a reflection of a deeper interest in the divine?

NC: Even in the most chaotic times, when I was struggling with addiction, I always had a kind of spiritual envy, a longing for belief in the face of the impossibility of belief that addressed a fundamental emptiness inside me. I might wake in my hotel room surrounded by the detritus of a heavy night on the road — empty bottles, drug paraphernalia, maybe a stranger in my bed, all that kind of shit, but also an opened copy of the Gideon’s Bible with passages underlined.

After Arthur died, the world seemed to vibrate with a peculiar, spiritual energy. I was genuinely surprised by how susceptible I became to a kind of magical thinking. How readily I dispensed with that wholly rational part of my mind and how comforting it was to do so. Now, that may well be a strategy for survival and, as such, a part of the ordinary mechanics of grief, but it is something that persists to this day. Perhaps it is a kind of delusion, I don’t know, but if it is, it is a necessary and benevolent one.

SOH: If so, that kind of magical thinking is a strategy for survival that a lot of people use. Some sceptics might say it is the very basis of religious belief.

NC: Yes. Some see it as the lie at the heart of religion, but I tend to think it is the much-needed utility of religion. And the lie — if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood — is, in some way, irrelevant. Sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying — all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Those who discount them as falsities or superstitious nonsense, or worse, a collective mental feebleness, are made of sterner stuff than me. I grabbed at anything I could get my hands on and, since doing so, I’ve never let them go.

SOH: I have to say that I am slightly in awe of other people’s devotion. When I go into an empty church, it always feels meaningful somehow — and vulnerable — to just linger there for a moment or so. Do you know Larkin’s poem, “Church Going”, which touches on that very thing?

NC: Yes! “A serious house on serious earth it is.” And yes, there’s something about being open and vulnerable that is conversely very powerful, maybe even transformative.

For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom.

SOH: The two are connected, maybe — vulnerability and freedom.

NC: I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.

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****

SOH: It may be that the most meaningful things are the most difficult to explain.

NC: I do think the rational aspect of ourselves is a beautiful and necessary thing, of course, but often its inflexible nature can render these small gestures of hope merely fanciful. There is a kind of gentle scepticism that makes belief stronger rather than weaker. In fact, it can be the forge on which a more robust belief can be hammered out.

SOH: It’s intrinsically human to doubt, though, don’t you think?

NC: The rigid and self-righteous certainty of some religious people — and some atheists, for that matter — is something I find disagreeable. The hubris of it. The sanctimoniousness. It leaves me cold. The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority. The belligerent dogmatism of the current cultural moment is a case in point. A bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.

SOH: So, just to make sure I’ve got this right: you would like to get past your doubt and just believe wholeheartedly in God, but your rational self is telling you otherwise.

NC: Things happen in your life, terrible things, great obliterating events, where the need for spiritual consolation can be immense, and your sense of what is rational is less coherent and can suddenly find itself on very shaky ground. I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own scepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.

When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself.

I think the only way I can fully give myself over to the idea of God is to have the room to question. To me, the great gift of God is that He provides us with the space to doubt. For me at least, doubt becomes the energy of belief.

SOH: That’s fair enough, I guess, but it’s starting from the premise that God exists and allows us to doubt, which an atheist would argue is essentially flawed logic.What would you say to that?

NC: Well, Seán, since when has belief in God had anything to do with logic? For me, it is the unreasonableness of the notion, its counterfactual aspect, that makes the experience of belief compelling. I find that leaning into these intimations of the divine, that for me do exist, as subtle, softly spoken and momentary as they may be, expands my relationship with the world — especially creatively. Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical.

There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence. I see this as a sort of affliction that is, in part, to do with the increasingly secular nature of our society. There’s an attempt to find meaning in places where it is ultimately unsustainable — in politics, identity and so on.

SOH: But, hang on, are you saying atheism — or secularism — is an affliction? And that you equate it with cynicism? I mean, come on, non-believers can have a sense of wonder at the world — with nature, the universe, with the wonders of science, philosophy and even the everyday.

NC: I am not saying secularism is an affliction in itself. I just don’t think it has done a very good job of addressing the questions that religion is well practised at answering.

SOH: What kinds of questions, in particular, would you say religion is more adept at answering?

NC: Religion deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. The upshot of that is a kind of callousness towards humanity in general, or so it seems to me. And I think callousness comes out of a feeling of aloneness, people feeling adrift or separated from the world. In a way, they look for religion — and meaning — elsewhere. And increasingly they are finding it in tribalism and the politics of division.

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SOH: The decline of organised religion may be one reason for that, but there are others, of course, social and political.

Whatever you think about the decline of organised religion — and I do accept that religion has a lot to answer for — it took with it a regard for the sacredness of things, for the value of humanity, in and of itself. This regard is rooted in a humility towards one’s place within the world — an understanding of our flawed nature. We are losing that understanding, as far as I can see, and it’s often being replaced by self-righteousness and hostility. There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence.

Well, I love this world — with all its joys and its vast goodness, its civility and complete and utter lack of it, its brilliance and its absurdity. I love it all, and the people in it, all of them. I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess. I have no time for negativity, cynicism or blame. In that regard, Seán, I feel as if I am completely and hopelessly out of time.

I don’t know how to exactly say this, and please don’t misunderstand it, but since Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me. This is Arthur’s gift to me, one of the many. It is his munificence that’s made me a different person. I say all this with huge caution and a million caveats, but I also say it because there are those who think there is no way back from the catastrophic event. That they will never laugh again. But there is, and they will.

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan is published by Canongate