Nick Cave

You talk about a feeling of mutual support between you and your audience. I’ve seen you play live before, and I thought it was interesting to look in the eyes of other people in the crowd because I felt I was seeing a lot of different things: joy, fear, lust, envy. What do you see in their eyes? Is it something new? I just see them in a different way than I used to, like the scales have fallen off my own eyes in respect to what they are both as a community and as individuals. In the past, I’ve gone onstage and done shows and they’re good or they’re bad, but I’d never experienced being deeply moved by the audience themselves and their own joys and sufferings and insecurities and all the stuff that you see when you actually look at the eyes of the people. I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but to now see an audience moved by what you’re doing — it’s an enormous privilege. I know all musicians say that, but it actually is. That feeling is extremely infectious with an audience. As is the opposite, complacency, when you see a band phoning it in. That’s the sinful squandering of an opportunity to improve things. The way to do that is to commit yourself to the song. Everyone gets sucked in, and there’s this incoming and outpouring of love between you and the audience. I used to revel in the divide between the band and the audience. Whether we liked it or not, in the early days, people came along and basically hated us. That friction between the band and the audience was the real anarchic energy of the Birthday Party. Things couldn’t be more different now.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/12/magazine/nick-cave-interview.html