Distras has been expressing concern about gender ideology in private since late 2021, but the first time she went public with her opinions was in May of this year. “I’m a woman, and a woman is an adult human female,” she said in an interview with Louder than War, a music website. “I’m a woman that’s experienced domestic abuse.” She later made comments, on Twitter, about how women are silenced for questioning gender ideology: “No amount of rainbows and ‘kindness’ can hide the authoritarianism and misogyny and homophobia that’s on display here, especially in the arts.”

Born in Wakefield in 1987, Distras ran away from home in her teens and, she told me, “stayed with a lot of dangerous people who took advantage of me”. She turned to song writing as a form of escape. Her bravery is remarkable. But as soon as her straightforward resistance to gender ideology became known, she was met with horrendous abuse. Distras has been called every name under the sun, including anti-trans, Nazi, scum, prostitute, grifter, child serial killer, and witch. She soon realised that she had been “marked for life” as a “disgusting terf” — that no redemption would ever be possible. She was told she deserves to be chucked out of the music industry. Her booking agency has said that her attitude towards transwomen could “have detrimental effects on [her] musical career”. Radio stations have stopped playing her songs and venues cancelled her gigs. “If I go back to the industry as it stands,” she says, “if someone had the balls to book me for a gig, I would likely be physically attacked. It’s not safe.”

Having been rejected by the majority of her contacts in the music industry, Distras decided she might as well use her voice to speak out. Alongside five other women, her testimony featured in the Daily Mail about the experience of being ostracised for daring to question gender ideology. One of the first derogatory reactions was from Bragg. “What??”, he tweeted, linking to the feature, which included a photograph of Distras — who usually wears black and leather on stage — wearing a formal dress. “Louise Distras hates trans people so much that she’s willing to dress in a style acceptable to Daily Mail readers in order to have a go at them. What does this have to do with feminism Louise? Or punk rock?”

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Bragg fancies himself a bit of a trans ally. And prides himself on being an all-round anti-sexist bloke. In 2014, he posed with a sign, “I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about men’s violence against women in all its forms,” as part of the White Ribbon campaign.

Back in the early days of her career, Bragg championed Distras as one of a “new breed” of singers, tweeting in 2013 that her song Love Me The Way I Am should be our next Eurovision entry. Another of her songs, The Hand You Hold, is about how what women say and do should matter more than how we look, and she tells me that “Billy for some reason loved that song and that’s why he invited me to go play on his stage” — which she did that year, at Glastonbury, and again in 2017. “So for him to now take a pop at me and start criticising what I look like instead of actually listening to what I have to say means he is the biggest hypocrite.”

But it is not only men who have gone after Distras. In a recent interview with Kerrang!, Phoebe Lunny of the Lambrini Girls reacted to Distras speaking out against trans ideology and the silencing of women: “I will scrap any Terf, any day, in person, with my fists.” In a tweet, Distras pointed to the hypocrisy of claiming to be progressive while “inciting violence against women”. She also condemned Kerrang! for publishing the remarks, saying she is “ashamed my face was printed on its pages. Vile!”

Spoken word poet Amelia Vandergast also responded angrily to Distras’s public statements about being cancelled by trans activists. In a feature entitled, “Wipe away the terf tears: freedom of expression was never permission to perpetuate hate in the music industry”, published in A&R Factory website, she wrote:

“In the recent Daily Mail article, which attempted to portray women as the victims of their transphobic hate, Louise Distras bemoaned the journalists, radio stations, and her booking agency who rightly refuse to have anything to do with her for the self-piteous bile spewed across her social media platforms (anyone got a tiny little violin I can borrow?)”

For Distras, the hypocrisy within the so-called radical music scene is appalling. While the misogyny of trans activists is ignored, women are viciously attacked for daring to defend their sex-based rights. She is one of a growing list of female artists criticising cancel culture — a phenomenon of which Bragg denies the existence.

But Bragg has form. He has dismissed feminist concerns about self-identification and argued that, owing to our incompatible “hardware”, lesbians are biologically ill-equipped for sex with other women and should therefore understand the plight of men claiming to be female. When Maya Forstater was harassed by trans activists in the street, Bragg suggested that she could not possibly have been scared or upset, because she appeared to be smiling. This is a classic sexist trope. Too often, women are told by men to “Give us a smile” when we complain about being sexually harassed by them, and yet women are informed we must have enjoyed the harassment if we attempt to laugh it off.

“I think he’s a misogynist,” Distras says, of Bragg. “I think it’s just plain to see for everybody and the way he is — the way that so many men are in the music industry.” She talks about how uncomfortable she has felt with him, describing him as “creepy”. “He’s everything he says he’s not. His words and his actions just don’t match up for me… The way he goes after women over the trans issue has made it really clear to me that he’s just a misogynist, and that he just doesn’t care about women”. She says what many feminists have said of many men in recent years: “The trans thing is just an excuse for him to bully women with impunity and do it publicly and get applauded for it.”

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Bragg also showed no sympathy for Róisín Murphy, another female singer-songwriter who has faced the wrath of trans activists. After a private Facebook conversation in which she criticised the policy of giving children puberty blockers was leaked, she was admonished by Bragg for holding the wrong opinion. “Them’s the breaks,” Bragg tweeted when it was suggested that Murphy was being punished by having BBC coverage and concerts cancelled. “Think before you post is my advice, especially on issues that are contentious.” This is cowardice.

Distras strongly feels that the music industry used to be about “freedom of expression and freedom of speech”, but is currently in thrall to gender ideology and “totally monotheistic”. “There’s an urgent need to build a new one, with a proper counterculture that isn’t dominated by misogynists like Billy Bragg, where women have actually got a proper say,” she says, telling me she has had numerous messages from female musicians who are too scared to speak out — especially after seeing what happened to Murphy. “It’s well established that violence towards women is a massive problem in the music industry,” says Distras, “and here they are inciting more violence, and the rest of the music industry just applauds them for it and tells them they are stunning and brave.”

“We need more musicians to come forward courageously and without apology. There’s been so much support for me, and there will be for the other women. And the more of us that stand up, the more these men like Billy Bragg will not be so dominant.”

I could see the name registered on some level. So I asked if they knew the band I meant. “Yeah, actually I do know the band. I saw them play in Liverpool a while back, around 2015.” What did you make of them? “I thought they were great, until I noticed the lead singer was wearing this T-shirt with a joke about The Sun on it, and I just thought ‘what an absolute fucking prick’, you don’t come to Liverpool and make jokes about The Sun.”

I think I remember this controversy, I informed him. Wasn’t that T-shirt a kind of satirical mock up of a Sun front page? As in, the headline today is simply “consume more stuff”? “Nah man,” he replied, “and even if it was, in Liverpool, you don’t fuck with that. He should have known better. Have some fucking respect laa.” I’m pretty certain it was an anti-Sun T-shirt, I countered. “Nah man, it wasn’t, seriously.” Oh, I really think that it was. “How’d you know that for sure?” I was the bloke wearing the T-shirt.

This swiftly led to a five-way argument with the Scouse contingent. Seeing as any practical justification I offered up — the T-shirt said “The Sun, keep fucking buying” on it — was swatted away with waspish urgency, I reverted back to form: even if I hadn’t been in the middle of an eight-year bender, I told them petulantly, even if I’d soberly clocked the unfortunate local significance of the thing before taking to the stage, I would still have worn the shirt. They were scowling now. “So, you’re not even sorry?” I don’t want to patronise my audience, I informed them, I’m not going to water myself down for anyone either. There is no conspiracy so sinister as morality, I added, with deliberate pretentiousness. My job is to get you to ask questions. Art isn’t here to shepherd you along to a more positive perspective in life.

But my arguments were evidently beyond the pale. This group of young people couldn’t compute the absence of literalism. I would once have felt quite proud that I had been able to confuse people so permanently by simply wearing a T-shirt. Intentional or not, I would normally find this kind of outrage objectively comical. But there was something in their unanimity that was vaguely inspiring. Where else have people managed to club together and successfully banish that red rag of Murdoch-sponsored hatred? Was I fighting the wrong battle here? Either way, he eventually refused me the roll-up I’d asked for.

When the Fat White Family set out as a band around 12 years ago, we had few objectives beyond wilful abrasion. We saw the music industry — shrivelled after the streaming boom — as primarily concerned with little more than its own survival. Indie music featuring guitars had become so droll, so bitterly inoffensive and stale, that, as fans, it was difficult not to take it personally. The flipside of that — the positive, if you like — was that even through an endless fog of speed abuse, Glen’s vodka and unresolved childhood trauma, it was easy to spot a gap in the market for something genuinely discomforting. Our idols were Lou Reed, The Fall, The Make Up and The Country Teasers — wanton outsiders who turned politics into playdough in lieu of their aesthetic objectives. These people were world-builders, not box-tickers.

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I’m approaching 40 now. Life has slapped me down repetitively; it has beaten plenty of moderation into me. My taste for shock tactics has diminished considerably. Today, I’m more prone to dabbling in sentimentality. But for a protracted period during the middle of the previous decade, my organ-grinding little brother and I found ourselves seriously considering anally fingering one another on stage. Even GG Allin, perhaps the most extreme frontman that ever lived, had never committed himself to live incest. I look back on these discussions now as the high-water mark in a take-no-prisoners exploration of the contemporary limitations of the stage itself. I wanted to become the Vito Acconci of rock and roll. One of Egon Schiele’s self portraits brought to life.

When I think of the word “punk”, the first things that spring to mind are mohawks and circles with a capital “A” drawn in the middle. But if we think of punk more generally as an aesthetic of dissidence, a counter to the status quo, what does it mean today? Where can it possibly bloom?

Maybe it was an excess of freedom that brought it on, but we seem now to live in an era of taboo-building, of rapidly expanding moral expectations, but one that refuses to offer people anything sensual in return. In essence, punk entails a certain amount of aesthetic juvenilia. Where punk is concerned, problem and solution are often one and the same: a lack of restraint can often prove the key to authenticity. A project defines itself by going too far. Until it has gone too far, it quite simply isn’t. It is transcendence in the wrong direction — it is only by painting yourself into a corner that you are forced to paint yourself out.

Apparently, this mode of cultural production now causes more agony than it’s worth. With an ever-tightening fist of critical rigidity, well-meaning purveyors of carefully cultivated static carry the day. Artists are now expected to live comfortably with the fetid anxiety that, at any moment, their already paltry livelihoods might be stripped away from them on account of some antiquated faux pas on Facebook. Maybe some new media ecosystem will coalesce around the mainstream, where young people can get things gloriously wrong for a spell, but I doubt it.

The problems are too fundamental. The birth of social media has lumbered us with an apparently fatal dose of accessibility, of democratisation: everyone in charge of their own little publishing house, their own micro-judiciary, each one a captain of industry at the infinitesimal scale. There aren’t enough shadows within which groups can get fungal. Everything is out in the world before it’s had a chance to properly malform. Meanwhile, the space separating self from all the rest has been obliterated. The upshot of this suffocating proximity? Alienation, and fear.

Back when I was utterly broke, trying to get into music, I got scouted by a modelling agency. This agency had me cycling all over London chasing fantastical sums of money in exchange for a few hours pouting. I didn’t land a single job. The only “work” I ever managed to land was unpaid, for a Japanese fashionista in east London. There was no money, but the agency assured me I had to build my portfolio. I spent four hours in front of a mirror being rendered in full geisha make-up, then had my photo taken incessantly wearing a piece of linen before being cast out into the weekend.

The garb brought another me to the surface, a new kind of tenderness that Friday night. And two years ago, I made a video for the DIY acid house side project I front, Decius, in which I decided to resurrect that geisha alter ego. The video budget amounted to around £70, as chipped in for by me and the bloke cooking the beats, all of which was spent hiring a young make-up artist I’d found online. The song is called “U Instead of Thought” (Watch the video: you’ll be able to see for yourself that she did an incredible job.) The whole project is an exploration of my masochistic tendencies, an aestheticisation of my will to subjection.

Days after, the artist in question got back in touch with me to remind me to credit her when the film dropped. Of course, I replied. A day or two later, she decided she didn’t want her name on the thing, that maybe the video constituted an act of cultural appropriation. I was a little bemused at this — a great many little Algerian boys dream of growing up to become geishas — but fair enough, your call, I replied. Then she changed tack again; actually, she did want the credit. Then, days later, she made her final decision: it was too risky, the video constituted some vague kind of harm and she didn’t want the association after all. That only around 500 people were ever likely to see the thing didn’t matter.

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I brought up Flaubert’s comments on plagiarism, who regarded his own work as always nothing more than a bouquet of other people’s ideas. There are only two types of art: good and bad. Of course, good art can be put to bad ends; Leni Riefenstahl made great films for the worst people. I asked the make-up artist what she made of the blues? The bedrock of pop music. Should a barrier have been erected between black and white? She responded with a viral video of a young Asian guy attributing the racist attack he had endured on the London Underground to the prevalence of Kung-Fu thematics in Western pop culture.

Such moral urgency has supplanted spontaneity in the arts. As much as I found the make-up artist’s extreme prevaricating humorous, I recognised enough of myself in it. The endless doubt that now accompanies every outré aesthetic choice I make. Above all else, I felt sorry for her. Sorry for all of us. Are we slowly denying ourselves access to the architecture of self-knowing? As artists, are we really expected to choose between impotence and extreme marginality?

If one takes into account the serious critical acclaim heaped upon Harry Styles, it seems so. If one takes into account the even more serious journalism that props up The 1975, all is surely lost. I’ve seen the future; it is an eternal corporate skid-mark of pseudo-personality and pragmatic hypocrisy. Where provocation for provocation’s sake is concerned, the stakes are unbearably high, the competition non-existent. The orgy of self-censorship that is our historical portion thus ends here: in screaming silence.

Barrett is the main case study of the “acid casualty”: the archetypal subject who, after a few too many trips, is said to endure a mental collapse from which they may never return. His story is frequently shared as a parable in online forums such as Reddit, which is a recruitment pool for psychedelic studies. And while attitudes around psychedelics have softened in recent years, this meme still lurks subtly within the public consciousness. One doesn’t have to ask too many baby boomers before someone shares a story, perhaps of a friend from school or university, who got lost ashore on the other side.

The first recorded reference I could find was in 1974, from Changes magazine. A passage spurns the “unique contemporary type: that kind of burnt-out acid casualty who ends every sentence with ‘Man’”. Amid the Nixonian disappointments of the Seventies, the acid casualty was a way to culturally dismiss the psychedelic ruptures of the Sixties. No longer an agent for spiritual awakening or a wonder treatment, LSD was cast as a trigger for madness and a tool for mind control. Many casualties were reported in the press: Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, Arthur Lee of Love, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who suggests his LSD experiments “fucked with his brain”.

What really caused these cases of psychosis is not known for certain, but the explanation usually focuses on their internal worlds. In a new film about his life, Have You Got It Yet?, some of Barrett’s contemporaries cast him as an Icarus figure — one who communed with the Gods prematurely and “reached for the secret too soon”. Other narratives are less grand: perhaps he “boiled his brains with acid”, sustaining real organic damage to his nervous system through excessive chemical stimulation. Or perhaps the breakdown was inevitable. His former bandmate David Gilmour suggests that Barrett had in him a “switch waiting to be turned”, a “weakness of some sort”, maybe a vulnerability embedded in his genes. Such determinism echoes the public understanding of severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.

However useful such layers of analysis can be, they risk downplaying the external factors that might have engendered the distress. If an individual takes a drug to cope with experiences they find hard to bear, it is not necessarily wise to blame the drug for any subsequent mental break. Touring several nights a week for months straight, Barrett’s deranged behaviours could be partly triggered by the exploitative atmosphere of the music industry.

“He feels that the application of commercial considerations is harmful to the music,” a report in Melody Maker stated in December 1967 — after the chart failure of “Apples and Oranges”, a by-the-numbers psych-pop single that Barrett had written amid intense managerial and label pressure to produce another hit. “He’d like to cut out the record company, wholesalers and retailers.” The same year, Pink Floyd performed on Top of the Pops for the first time, and Barrett expressed some reluctance to go on stage. It was then that Pink Floyd’s bassist Roger Waters first noticed that something might be wrong.

Barrett deteriorated rapidly. Before another scheduled performance on Top of the Pops, he turned up at a friend’s door barefoot and in a panic. In 1971, Barrett — now three years out of Pink Floyd — refused to leave his home for a photoshoot; he was afraid of “aliens”. What appears to be deranged at first makes a kind of sense when one considers that the aliens he feared were in fact his managers and hangers-on.

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Robert Chapman’s biography describes how, even after Barrett had achieved some semblance of later-life balance in his hometown of Cambridge, obsessive fans would regularly knock on his door, film him with camcorders, steal his paintbrushes, climb over his fence, pose as couriers to secure autographs, and scan the neighbourhood trying to catch a glimpse. And something strangely under-discussed in the documentary and Barrett’s biographies is how the massive success of his former band — which had ejected him without warning in 1968 — might have made him feel. It can’t be a coincidence that Barrett retreated into isolation at the Chelsea Cloisters Hotel just as Pink Floyd hit the big time in 1973 with Dark Side of the Moon, which is partly about him and his madness.

Many acid casualties were as much victims of a music business that eviscerates its workers as of overwhelming psychedelic trips. Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac rejected the music industry in even more radical terms than Barrett, pledging to give away his earnings to charity, to reflect his new Christian beliefs; a move viewed by his contemporaries as the initial spark of his madness. The 13th Floor Elevators took LSD daily for long stretches of the Sixties; but their breakdowns were surely influenced by the predation of the local Texan police force, which sought to destroy the band’s acid evangelism through arrests and threats of violence.

Someone else deemed an acid casualty is Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, the subject of a recent BBC documentary. On top of the relentless psychoactive effects of fame and public pressure, Jones’s paranoia can be seen a response to prohibitionist drug policies: after a humiliating court appearance for drug possession Jones, as Nick Kent writes, “was too scared to go into a shop to buy cigarettes even, because he thought anyone behind the counter had to be a plain-clothes cop”. Jerry Berkers, bassist of the Krautrock band Wallenstein, may have collapsed under the weight of his LSD visions, but it’s thought his trips reacquainted him with the trauma of time spent serving in Vietnam.

And yet, our interpretation of mental breaks often place little emphasis on the worlds in which they’re situated. In his classic text, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff describes the ascendancy of the “Psychological Man” — the embodiment of late modernity — who understands himself in internal terms. We are our thoughts; our self stands behind the glass of our eyes, variously disappointed and enchanted with the stream of our inner lives flowing out into the world we perceive. And yet in studying history’s casualties, it seems that what was happening on the outside was flowing into, and warping, their internal worlds.

Even among those who reject the simplistic diagnosis of acid casualty, a more subtle form of othering can occur. “There can be no doubt that Syd was a schizophrenic,” Waters said — despite the fact that Syd was never diagnosed with anything other than an undisclosed personality disorder. Indeed, the schizophrenia diagnosis, applied to many of history’s casualties by both psychiatrists and onlookers, may seem like an objective description. But the reality is far more complex.

Schizophrenia is popularly understood as a biological phenomenon: an organic madness, in which its primary explanation lies within the individual. But poor outcomes for schizophrenia are independently shaped and predicted by parental socioeconomic status, poverty, class, immigration status, living in urban environments, and membership of a racial minority. Evidence tentatively suggests that those labelled schizophrenic in countries such as India and Ghana fare better than those in the United States, since they are less likely to be medicalised or face the stresses of developed modern life. This supports the idea that the music industry’s pressures may have been far more harmful to the acid casualties than either their original or psychedelically altered brain chemistry.

It’s easy to apply the labels of “acid casualty” and “schizophrenia” — and it sounds authoritative — but, in truth, the latter diagnosis is broad, vague, and variably administered. Dr Robin Murray, one of the UK’s most senior psychiatrists, suggested in 2017 that “the term schizophrenia will be confined to history, like ‘dropsy’”. As early as 1973, when many casualties were being diagnosed, the World Health Organization suggested that, for all its faults, the term should be preserved partly “for the benefit of non-professional contemporaries who enjoy talking about schizophrenia without knowing what it is”.

Commentators are therefore right to remark on the hypocrisies of “mental health awareness”: depression and anxiety are being unduly neutralised in the language of medicine, while “serious conditions like psychosis and schizophrenia are being overlooked”. The general public was understandably struck by the news last year that depression is not, as they’d been told, a mere “chemical imbalance”. The Moncrieff paper fast became one of the most accessed in modern history. But the popular reckoning with the parameters of schizophrenia is nowhere to be seen.

It is acknowledged even in the DSM-5, psychiatry’s “Bible”, that the majority of those who develop psychotic disorders have no family history of the disease — weakening the idea that genetic predisposition can fully explain mental breaks. The medical establishment has found hundreds of biomarkers “associated” with schizophrenia, but many of them overlap with other conditions, and may point to a broad “sensitivity” — which may make mental collapse more likely, but not inevitable.

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But since the Sixties, the biogenetic model of schizophrenia has been in ascendance; and the basis of diagnosis always influences the rationale of treatment. Just as the understanding of depression as unsettled brain chemistry allowed some irresponsible medical practitioners to sell antidepressants as a silver bullet, our understanding of mental breaks as caused entirely by internal factors can be harmful. Many acid casualties faced great failures from the psychiatric sector following their diagnoses: involuntary electroshock, premature discharges, and shocking over-prescription.

None of this is to say that our treatment of those experiencing mental breaks has become worse since the Sixties. The antipsychotics on offer now seem to be more tolerable than those of their forebears. But stigmas towards psychosis and schizophrenia have, by some measures, deteriorated — possibly because of the othering that associates the stereotyped schizophrenic with some alien influence in their nervous system. Though we might not label anyone an acid casualty these days, our readiness to see mental distress as solely internal may prevent us from reckoning with the unhealthy pressures our society places on individuals. Psychiatry always attempts to remain apolitical. But it might do well to accept that mental breaks can, at least in part, be blamed on a troubled world in which, to quote psychiatric researcher John Read, “bad things happen and can drive you crazy”.

Earlier in the summer I saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park and that was a good night out but nobody in their right mind would claim that the Stones are better now than they were in 1969 or 1973. Yet the best time to see the Bad Seeds, who formed in 1983, is right now. Though Cave is about to turn 65, the refinement of his craft has required no ebbing of conviction. When he inhabits a murderer on Death Row in “The Mercy Seat”, or a mad prophet retelling the birth of Elvis Presley in “Tupelo”, he still goes all in. The quasi-industrial brutality of “From Her to Eternity” is as persuasive as the naked pleading of “I Need You”. When I went back to the studio versions over the following days, I found them somehow lacking by comparison. Between songs, Cave radiated warmth and good humour. Most frontmen pick a moment to commune with the crowd from the edge of the stage but I suspect Cave could have happily spent the whole show down there, arms outstretched.

Until I read Cave’s new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, I found it hard to put my finger on why the Bad Seeds have become so much more potent and popular in recent years. Their only Top 20 entry is “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, a 1995 duet with Kylie Minogue. Two of their most popular songs on Spotify, “Red Right Hand” and “O Children”, owe their position to appearances in Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter. Many of their live highlights weren’t even singles, let alone hits. Since the creative nadir of Nocturama in 2003, the Bad Seeds have enjoyed a series of rebirths: the explosive maximalism of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, the slower, subtler Push the Sky Away and the lambent prayers of Ghosteen.

That last transformation was enforced. Seven years ago, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near Brighton. Cave’s grief was etched into Ghosteen and its predecessor Skeleton Tree, the making of which was chronicled in Andrew Dominik’s gently shattering 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling. This incomprehensible tragedy suddenly became the signal fact of Cave’s life. “The loss of my son defines me,” he says in the book.

After a period of necessary privacy, Cave chose to make his grieving public. In 2018 he started answering questions from fans on his website under the name “The Red Hand Files” and on the road with his “Nick Cave in Conversation” events: an experiment in radical transparency and fostering a community of the bereaved. The first entry in The Red Hand Files was about how he resumed songwriting after tragedy. “Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder,” he wrote. “Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.” His lifelines were “work and community” — a means of connecting with the suffering of others in order to feel less alone.

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As you can tell, Cave is one hell of a writer. As the author of countless spectacular lyrics, two novels, an epic poem and an unproduced screenplay (a berserk take on a Gladiator sequel), he could surely write a classic memoir but Faith, Hope and Carnage is something else: a series of conversations with his friend Seán O’Hagan, an Observer journalist. Kudos to O’Hagan for having the idea and Cave for running it because it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book. An alternative title might be God, Grief and Art.

Cave may claim to hate interviews but he is a miraculously fluent talker, incapable of a dull line. Many of the sentences have an aphoristic punch. Creating art is “the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense”. Hope is “optimism with a broken heart”. Twitter is “just a factory that churns out arseholes”. On lyrics: “A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow after repeated singing; a truthful line collects meaning.” On death: “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.”

Cave’s songs have always been saturated with religious imagery and language — first the Old Testament, later the New — but it was never clear how much of a believer he was. Now, he says, he is emphatically religious in the sense of feeling a “deep inclusion in the human predicament”. That sounds just like Leonard Cohen, another great songwriter whose wisdom derived from an idiosyncratic relationship with the divine and an underrated sense of humour. To call this a self-help book would horrify everyone involved but I suspect many readers will find it useful, especially those who have known catastrophic grief.

Cave describes the loss of his son as nothing less than an annihilation of the self. He has been broken to pieces and remade — born again, you might say. His songwriting, too, has required reassembly. He considers Skeleton Tree, mostly written before Arthur’s death but recorded afterwards, as an “unholy” record which he struggles to revisit. But making Ghosteen, via long improvisatory sessions with Ellis, was a “holy” experience in which his son’s spirit felt literally present. “Arthur was snatched away, he just disappeared, and this felt like some way of making contact again and saying goodbye,” Cave says. Over the course of these conversations, which began with lockdown in March 2020, there are other losses: his mother Dawn, his ex-lover Anita Lane, his friend Hal Willner and, most recently, his oldest son Jethro. Covid-19 gives the book an eerie backbeat.

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O’Hagan is a sensitive interviewer — really more of a conversationalist. Cave says that he finds relating his own history “unbearable, mostly”. What’s more, it feels to him like someone else’s life — that of a man who had not yet lost his son. So why look back?

Still, O’Hagan occasionally manages to lure Cave into the past. His idyllic, outdoorsy childhood in Wangaratta, Australia, gave way to a delinquent adolescence, which was blown apart by the death of his father, a teacher of literature, in a car accident when Cave was 19. He was already taking heroin, an addiction that he relates, perhaps surprisingly, to a conservative need for routine rather than the thirst for chaos that animated his music for many years. After the hellfire post-punk of the Birthday Party came the Bad Seeds. Cave remarks that Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, band mainstays from the beginning until the 2000s, were domineering personalities like himself. “The potential for disharmony is enormous! It’s like having Hitler, Stalin and fucking Mao Zedong trying to make a record together.” Warren Ellis, who joined in 1997, is more like a brother: an equal partner in the studio and a remarkable friend. On the topic of friendship, Cave’s affection for Coldplay’s Chris Martin is delightfully unexpected. “Obviously, there’s a fair amount of daylight between the kinds of music we play, but who fucking cares? I have always been drawn to his generosity of spirit, his engagement with the world.”

When he was younger, Cave thinks, he had too much disdain for the world. Now it inspires awe. He cherishes humility, mercy and mystery; he loathes dogma, cynicism and the morally obvious. He is therefore stronger than most on the subject of cancel culture, to which his objection is more personal than political. He recoils from the punitive impulse; the failure of empathy and forgiveness. I would argue that forgiveness needs to be sought and earned but I think he’s right to say that the online ritual of denunciation can be merely “a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue”. I hope this section doesn’t get clickbaited as “Cave slams cancel culture!” because it’s more about the particular view of human nature that he has arrived at: “I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering.”

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The context is obvious. Towards the end of the book, Cave finally talks about the night of Arthur’s death, and how he and his “astonishing and oceanic” wife Susie negotiated the immediate aftermath. Hard to read, it must have been infinitely harder to speak, but emotional availability is essential to everything he does now. The most common question submitted to The Red Hand Files, apparently, is “Does it ever get better?” To which Cave can now reply: “The answer is yes. We become different. We become better.” Instead of being diminished by loss, he has been enlarged. “I became a person after my son died” is a startling line.

It is impossible to overstate how unusual it is to find this depth of self-analysis and wisdom from a rock musician. Faith, Hope and Carnage makes most rock memoirs look like skips full of rusty anecdotes and grudges. Among other things, the book finally helped me understand why Cave and the Bad Seeds keep getting better. Cave’s growing hunger for “communal awe” makes the shows feel genuinely necessary. And he believes himself to be a more generous and expansive person than he was before, so he has more to give.

“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around,” he tells O’Hagan. “Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is.” He knows now.

It all started with “Heated”, a song in which Beyoncé raps about “spazzing on that ass”. Disability activists zeroed in on the verb, which is having a bit of a moment in American pop. Last month, Lizzo came under fire for using it in one of her songs; she altered the offending lyric. When the Australian woman who spearheaded the campaign against Lizzo was asked if she planned to make similar demands of Beyoncé, she answered the question with an op-ed in the Guardian: “When Beyoncé dropped the same ableist slur as Lizzo on her new album, my heart sank.”

This controversy was somewhat mystifying to audiences in America — where both Beyoncé and Lizzo were born and raised. The word spaz has different implications in American English — particularly African American Vernacular English, or AAVE — from the one it has in the UK or, it seems, Australia. In the US, it’s not uncommon to hear people use “spazzing out” to mean going crazy or malfunctioning; the idea that it could be a slur was met with bewilderment by American audiences. And in Lizzo’s song, “Imma spaz” is a warning: she’s about to go nuts. (The whole song, which is about getting in fights, eventually escalates to more specific details about what “spazzing”, as a verb, might entail: “I’ma go Lorena Bobbitt on him, so he never fuck again.”)

The battle over the word has also thoroughly upended the usual deference paid by progressive culture warriors to black women, particularly when it comes to the use of AAVE. The optics of a white Australian coming after Lizzo and Beyoncé, insisting that the black American cultural context for the word “spaz” is superseded by her own, are deeply weird. Lizzo hints at this injustice in her statement about changing her lyrics: “As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me.” The subtext is clear: you may have successfully painted yourself as a victim this time, white lady, but we all know that this isn’t usually how oppression works.

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These linguistic misunderstandings are a hazard of global culture in which the same word may have different meanings depending on where you are, or what language you’re speaking. For example, the periodic public freakouts by parents who have just noticed that one of their child’s Crayola crayons has the word “negro” on it. They are invariably followed by the Crayola corporation explaining patiently, for the millionth time, that all the crayons include colour translations for Spanish-speaking children and “negro” is the Spanish word for black.

You might think that Beyoncé — a woman who wrote a song called “Sorry” in which she refuses to apologise for doing what she wants; a woman who has never shied away from making art that is steeped in black American culture; a descendant of slaves who was one of the most powerful and wealthy entertainers in the world by the time she turned 40 — would have at least as much gumption as the children’s crayon company when it comes to defending her work.

Instead, she capitulated instantly.

The lyrics in “Heated” will be altered, per a statement by Beyoncé’s team. Per a recent Spotify listen, they already have been: the new iteration not-quite-seamlessly replaces “spazzing” with “blasting”. Beyoncé herself hasn’t spoken about the decision, but it’s a fair bet that Lizzo, who is already encroaching on Bey’s status as an icon not just of pop culture but of politically conscious art, had pretty much greased the skids on this one. Beyoncé’s choices were to follow her lead or look like an insensitive clod by comparison.

And as a woman who is both famously protective of her privacy as well as notoriously control-freaky about her public image — up to and including trying to get unflattering photos of herself removed from the internet — the move is hardly surprising. Naturally Bey would prefer to avoid finding herself at the centre of a cancel-culture maelstrom which is personally intrusive, professionally disruptive, and threatens to overshadow the release of the album she spent two years working on.

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By Tomiwa Owolade

That artists can now instantly edit songs because a few hundred people became outraged by the lyrics on social media is, of course, a recent thing, made possible only by the advent of streaming — and maybe one day there will be a black market for bootleg recordings of the “dirty” version of “Heated”, just as my childhood VHS copy of The Little Mermaid became a collector’s item after Disney edited out the now-notorious scene in which the priest officiating Prince Eric’s wedding appears to be sporting an erection. (The official Disney line, which absolutely nobody believes, is that it’s a poorly-drawn knee.) But even as the malleability of digital media means that we can retroactively edit out anything, anytime, for any reason, it’s hard to overstate how bad it is for art if the consensus becomes that we should.

The mistaken identity aspect of this particular controversy — the fact that activists insisted on ignoring the unique cultural context of “spaz” in order to take offence — certainly adds an extra layer of absurdity to the whole enterprise. (Imagine a group of American social justice warriors bewailing the horror of every scene in British cinema where someone asks for a cigarette using a certain f-word.) Additionally ridiculous is the part where Beyoncé is black, and writing in a racially-inflected dialect, which under any other circumstances would command absolute deference from the white progressives who are now demanding she alter her art to suit them. But the fact that it’s easy to make fun of this controversy also obscures what makes it toxic: a callow betrayal of the ideals and the legacy that have made American culture into a global force.

The US has always been a place where artists insist on their absolute freedom to create work that is provocative and daring and, yes, even offensive, and even objectively so. American music is Jim Morrison singing “girl we couldn’t get much higher” on the Ed Sullivan Show after being explicitly told not to, and laughing it off when an enraged Sullivan confronted him after the set. It’s Frank Zappa calling Tipper Gore and Susan Baker “the wives of Big Brother” during the Senate’s “Rock Porn” hearings, and railing against proposed legislation that “reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of toilet-training programme to house-break all composers and performers because of the lyrics of a few”. It’s Smack My Bitch Up, and Fuck the Police, and Papa Don’t Preach, and W.A.P. And as a culture, we have always fiercely defended the right of artists to engage in irreverence, heresy, and obscenity, understanding that these freedoms are necessary to the creation of fearless work.

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Meanwhile, the pressure to change a work of art to be more sensitive falls disproportionately on women, who are, for some reason, expected to be receptive to such demands. A list of musicians whose “offensive” lyrics were changed not only skews heavily female but shows the comparatively high bar a man’s song has to clear to be subject to the same sort of backlash; consider the nature of, say, Taylor Swift’s offence (“So go and tell all your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine, I’ll tell mine / You’re gay, by the way”) versus Michael Jackson’s (“Kill me, kike me, don’t you black or white me”.) ​​The double standard surrounding the lyrical depiction of women, and women’s bodies, is so wild that Meghan Trainor was savaged for not being body positive enough in her 2014 song “All About That Bass” — the same year that Drake, on Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint album, received no criticism at all for announcing his predilection for Rubenesque women who “wanna suck you dry and then eat some lunch with you”.

But women’s contributions to the culture are less valuable, their work assumed to be eternally open to revision in a way that makes it less serious than men’s. What gives us the idea that if it’s a woman, we may not just demand but expect apologies for how she uses language in her lyrics? What are we to conclude when the most powerful female musician in the world is expected to compromise her artistic integrity lest she hurt somebody’s feelings?

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Meanwhile, the conversation surrounding this new album has swiftly come to resemble that cautionary fable about giving a mouse a cookie. A second alteration to Renaissance has also been announced — this one the removal of a sample of the 2003 song “Milkshake,” after singer Kelis complained on Instagram that the song had been stolen. (The two men who actually wrote the song had been credited — as had Kelis, for performing it.) At the same time, Monica Lewinsky suggested on Twitter that while Beyoncé is making changes, perhaps she should also remove a reference to Lewinsky’s affair with then-President Bill Clinton from her 2013 song “Partition”. And why not? “Partition” explicitly makes light of one of the most humiliating moments in Lewinsky’s life; surely she has just as much (if not more!) claim to righteous offence as the activists who cannot recognise that the word “spaz” might mean different things in different contexts (although this argument may be somewhat undermined by the fact that Lewinsky still proudly includes “rap song muse” in her Twitter bio).

Having signalled that she’s willing to edit her work to avoid giving offence, Beyoncé can expect every single song she releases from this moment forward to be scrutinised. And perhaps more importantly, so can everyone else. Beyoncé and Lizzo have kicked this door open; there’s no telling how many other artists will be expected to walk through it.

And Beyoncé’s Renaissance, far from being a transformative and unfettered explosion of pure expression — a work that allowed the performer, during the pandemic, “to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving” — has been marked out as a place where creative freedom lost ground, and where the censors won. This moment has been stolen by self-appointed culture cops who neither understand nor appreciate what they’re tearing down, and who are drunk not on the power of the music, but on the petty power trip of successfully blackmailing a famous, gifted musician into changing her art because they said so.

“It was really devastating,” she said. “I was very low for a couple of weeks. I was just at that stage of going from one level to another level, so it’s been very disappointing not to be able to play. But instead of slumping into my sadness I went into my studio and it’s been a really productive time, with all this sudden space to write new work.”

Like most musicians I know, Georgia’s life is shaped by her art. “I’ve always been a musician and there’s nothing else I can really do,” she told me breezily. “As an artist, you have to have faith.”

It is this kind of focus and passion that has helped make our music industry such an incredible success story since the Sixties. She has created songs online with Gorillaz and Yung Baby Tate since lockdown. Yet suddenly this sector — so valuable to the economy and vital for our county’s soft power in the post-Brexit age — feels abandoned by the state.

This is a genuinely world-beating British industry with an astonishing 9% of global music emerging from islands holding less than 1% of the planet’s population. Behind the hoary old sex, drugs and rock ’n roll image lies a sector that generates £5.2bn a year for the economy, £2.7bn in exports and sustains 210,000 jobs. It also plays a key role in redefining the class-bound image of Britain in a world that, as one ambassador based in West Africa once told me, sees Downton Abbey as a documentary. Unfortunately, from stadiums to dingy pub basements, it relies on the sort of live events almost totally curtailed by Covid-19.

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By Ian Birrell

This is why there was such anger when Chancellor Rishi Sunak told ITV News that professional musicians, like others in the arts who could not earn enough to live, might have to find “fresh and new opportunities”, since “everyone is having to find ways to adapt and adjust to the new reality”. He was not helped by ITV twisting his words in a tweet that it later withdrew. And yes, he may be right. But his ham-fisted interview was heard as a flint-hearted message telling musicians to switch careers and abandon their art, which infuriated an industry that feels crushed, forgotten and forlorn. “If I were to retrain, I would like to retrain as a boxer and then go into the Cabinet and ply my skills on some of them,” responded Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze.

This sector is in pandemic-induced meltdown. One manager told me he lost £27m-worth of bookings overnight when the virus took hold in March. John Giddings, who runs the Isle of Wight festival, told me his “gut feeling is there will be shows next year but no-one knows when” but others have already written off 2021 as well as 2020. Bear in mind eight in every ten pounds of the average musician’s income is derived from live performance, after recording revenues dwindled in the digital age. And while a few superstars pocket millions, three-quarters of them earn less than £30,000 a year. Even successful artists are looking nervously at the future, regardless of a surge in streaming by people stuck at home during lockdown.

“It is really worrying: anxiety is the all-pervasive emotion in our minds,” said Jon McClure, lead singer with Reverend & the Makers. “We’ve no income and no idea when it will return.” His band has had six top 20 albums, was playing to 3,000 fans in Manchester before the pandemic, and is a festival favourite. It also includes his wife Laura — they have two young children — and earned almost all its revenue from the live circuit. “We’re not loaded but we were doing alright with a very nice existence,” he said, “but now I’m wondering if I can keep up with the mortgage and asking if I really need to go to the cafe.”

A report to be published later this week by the Live Music Group, which represents the sector, will reveal the live business is shrinking four times faster than the rest of the economy. It predicts the majority of jobs may be gone by the end of this year without more help. “These are really tough times,” said Annabella Coldrick, chief executive of the Music Managers Forum. “Why is Sunak saying artists should go and find other jobs when there are no jobs around? I know one person at a digital marketing agency recruiting and they got 700 applications for a single post.”

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These problems go way beyond the performers. Behind the artists, on stage and in studios lie an army of agents, managers, merchandisers, promoters, roadies and highly-skilled technicians, along with spin-off industries from catering through to equipment hire. Most are driven by love of music, not money — and many are now in dire straits after seeing their income dissolve overnight. “I lost my first European tour which was due to start mid-March and from there in a matter of weeks I subsequently lost every single piece of work I had well into 2021,” said one engineer. “I have no work whatsoever in my diary and no prospect of any work for the foreseeable future. The financial strain is terrifying.”

One insider told me people have killed themselves over these financial pressures, while Facebook groups are filled with tales of struggle such as the sound engineer who sold his car to pay the electricity bill so his son could still do homework. The Government, firefighting on so many fronts, argues it has given £1.57bn to protect all the creative industries and today smaller music venues across the country will find out if they have been awarded life-saving grants. “We’re on a cliff-edge,” said Mark Davyd, founder of the Music Venue Trust, which has raised £3m towards helping its 970 members. “We know this is a huge public health issue but it is painful for us and we are very concerned about the future.”

This trust represents those sticky-floored pubs and small clubs that are the bedrock of British success over decades where the likes of Adele, Ed Sheeran and Oasis honed their craft. More than 100 of these venues have tried some kind of opening since the lifting of hard lockdown. But their takings — with limits on ticket sales for social distancing and lower bar sales from seated audiences — are just one-eighth of their usual earnings, which is simply unsustainable. Now there is imposition of the 10 o’clock curfew among new restrictions. “This really is unprecedented,” said Keith Ames, spokesman for the Musicians’ Union (MU). “Even in the 1940s you could go to a dance hall and listen to music when death was falling from the sky.”

Sunak’s latest furlough plan will help clubs in lockdown zones forced to close but does nothing for those crippled by social distancing requirements, unlike schemes in Canada and France. Yet while infrastructure is important, people are key to any creative industry — and many of those in the music business fell outside Sunak’s emergency handouts since they are freelance or operating as limited firms. One-third of musicians, for instance, failed to qualify for income replacement schemes, says the MU. Its last survey of 2,000 members found two-thirds suffering financial hardship, almost half working outside the industry and one-third considering new careers. Another study found almost two-thirds thinking of quitting their profession.

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The loss of talented artists and crew could have devastating consequences. “All my roadie and engineering mates are wondering what to do now,” said David Preston, a brilliant stage manager and backline operator who has worked with Baaba Maal, Coldplay and Depeche Mode, but who is now packing pet supplies in an Amazon-like warehouse. “I miss being around creative people. You don’t get the same buzz and energy packing dog food eight hours a day but it pays the bills.”

Last year, he joined the 80-strong crew on a major Take That and Rick Astley tour alongside Freyja Lawson, a 30-year-old audio engineer. She went on to work with electronic producer Mura Musa — demonstrating the versatility of such technicians — but on March 13 was sent home from Copenhagen when the virus hit and has not worked since on a live event. Now she is living off her savings, doing some part-time teaching and searching frantically for a full-time job. “I’ve spent all my life pursuing this as a career but now I am looking at absolutely anything,” she said.

Most artists have been trying new tactics to engage with their audiences — among them Duncan Beiny, better known as DJ Yoda, who has won renown travelling the world as one of the most eclectic mixers of music. He told me he has enjoyed the creativity of finding new ways to stream shows with smart audiovisuals but “it is financially negligible, just about covering the cost of my dinner.” He tried other things including a show at a drive-in cinema in Blackheath that he described as “like DJing in a car park”, while has been kept afloat by a few well-paid events such as online film premiers. But now, aged 43, he admits he is contemplating a career switch. “This is all I’ve ever done and I have no other skills, but should I do something else now? Maybe.”

Some argue the disruption, while devastating for many people, could have some positive impact by busting open near-monopolies that dominate markets, opening up space for new artists and encouraging smarter use of streaming. “As usual, the people suffering are those that did not have a lot in the first place,” said David Bianchi, a thoughtful manager whose stable includes The Libertines and Loyle Carner. “But the pandemic is fast forwarding some changes and forcing others that might not have happened otherwise such as breaking the live market stranglehold by a few companies and helping us see the benefit of streaming shows. Some things will emerge for the better.”

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By Polly Mackenzie

Although the popular music industry leans Left politically, Bianchi underlines how it is remarkably entrepreneurial and — unlike much of the arts world — has been self-sufficient over the years. But there is deep frustration over the Government’s inertia. “We have no business,” said Harvey Goldsmith when I ask him how things are going. Like all others to whom I spoke, the veteran promoter — famous for Live Aid — has been postponing gigs and is scathing about ministerial lack of sympathy for a globally-successful industry that was thriving until hit by pandemic. “Our sector has fallen completely through the cracks. We don’t want help. We’ve never had subsidies. We just want to get back to work and find out the best way to give people confidence in a safe environment.”

Goldsmith wants to stage a Jools Holland show at the Royal Albert Hall with a full audience before Christmas, together with other events at a theatre and a smaller venue, to test the possibilities and protocols for live events. “We have been pushing very hard but no-one at the DCMS gets it.” He argues that socially-distanced shows simply do not work. “The atmosphere is vile — people love being together. We need to work out the protocols for public events, whether they are music shows or conferences. If things don’t happen by next year then dozens and dozens of businesses will go bust. It’s horrible.”

He is right. It is horrible for this industry that I have grown to admire so much when putting on shows and releasing records with Africa Express. And it is alarming to see so many talented artists and technicians struggling as their adored way of life is obliterated. Many other sectors are also suffering, of course, beyond this one with its rare ability to lift spirits and unite people in shared joy. But the crisis in the music industry is reaching a crescendo and, after the Chancellor’s bum note last week, he and his colleagues need to listen a little closer if they want to salvage the future of one of the nation’s few world beating industries.