Nick Cave Lost Two Sons. His Fans Then Saved His Life.
By David Marchese
“I try to write from the point of view,” the musician and writer
Nick Cave says, “that something can happen to your life that is
absolutely shattering that can also be redemptive and beautiful.” He
came to this perspective through fire. In 2015, Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, died after falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, England.
Afterward, over time, Cave managed to achieve a newfound appreciation
of life’s fragile grace. His art reflected the change. Cave had been one
of music’s dark princes, a revered songwriter and performer unafraid of
sonic and lyrical abrasion and provocation, an eager dweller in the
shadows of the soul. Gradually, though, he has become a transmitter of
gloriously cathartic, heartening and empathetic — though no less
unflinching — albums and live performances. Outside music, Cave’s need
to further inhabit his new way of being grew to include The Red Hand Files,
a recurring online column in which he, a formerly somewhat intimidating
figure, answers with moving care and moral clarity the frequently
soul-searching questions submitted by readers. The 63-year-old
Australian’s metamorphosis is much the focus of “Faith, Hope and
Carnage,” a book-length series of exploratory interviews between Cave
and the journalist Seán O’Hagan, which will be published on Sept. 20.
Sadly, in May, after the interviews for it were completed, Cave’s oldest
son, Jethro, died unexpectedly at age 31.
“I think grieving people are conscious of the sell-by date of their own
misery,” Cave says about the prospect of continuing to publicly explore
his losses. “But in respect to Arthur and Jethro, I can’t wipe my hands
and say, ‘OK, now I’m moving on.’”
For me, the single most devastating sentence in your
book is from Seán’s afterword. It’s when he writes that since the
interviews for the book were finished, you lost another son.
This is after 250 or however many pages that are fundamentally about
how you’ve found a way to find meaning and move back toward life after
Arthur died. Maybe things are still too fresh for you to be able to
answer this, or maybe there is no answer, but how do you think about
trying to move forward again after suffering a second loss like that? I
don’t know how to say this, really, but I do know there’s a way out.
The terrifying thing about when Arthur died was that it felt like, How
could this feeling ever be any different? I don’t want everything I talk
about and everything I am to revolve around these losses, but I feel
compelled to let people in the same situation of grief know — and there
are hundreds of people like that writing in to The Red Hand Files — that
there is a way out. Most people who write in, especially early on in
their grieving, simply cannot understand what I’m talking about in that
regard. I know exactly how they feel. I understand it around Jethro.
Arthur’s death did ultimately lead you to a place where
life has taken on a kind of religious luminosity that wasn’t there
before. I’ve felt something similar in my own life when I’ve dealt with
loss, but I’ve also worried about whether that feeling will fade over
time, which would be a loss of another kind. Do you worry about that
too? You know, in addiction terms,
you’ll be addicted to drugs and then you’ve stopped taking them and you
have what’s known as the pink cloud. You’re walking around, and
everything dazzles. Then eventually you go back down and have to deal
with life on its own terms. Maybe there’s an aspect of that, but my
religious temperament, which has always been there, was ignited after
Arthur died. Sometimes I feel more spiritually activated than others,
but there’s always been this struggle between religious belief and my
rational self’s skepticism of that, which I saw as a religious failing
on some level. Something turned around in me so that I can now see that
not as a failing but rather that the whole energy of my creativity was
within this struggle. That struggle is perhaps the religious experience
itself.
Your father died in a car crash when you were 19.
Back then, how was the effect of grief on your music different from the
effect it has on the music you make as a middle-aged man? I
was unconscious of the effect of grief entirely when my father died. I
don’t think I had any understanding of what was going on in my life. I
was extraordinarily un-self-aware about anything except my own
appetites. When Arthur died, I was thrust into the darkest place
imaginable, where it was almost impossible to be able to see outside of
despair. Susie and I
somehow managed to pull ourselves out of that, and — I know this sounds
corny — that did have something to do with the response I started to get
from people who kept writing to me and saying, mostly, This happened to
me, and this is what’s happening to you, and this is what can happen.
This was extremely affecting for me. The concerts that I did following
that, too — the care from the audience saved me. I was helped hugely by
my audience, and when I play now, I feel like that’s giving something
back. What I’m doing artistically is entirely repaying a debt. It’s — my
other son has died. It’s difficult to talk about, but the concerts
themselves and this act of mutual support saves me. People say, How can
you go on tour? But for me it’s the other way around. How could I not?
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.
The periods when you were reveling in that friction were
also periods of addiction. Did you ever find that drugs were a source
of creative meaning? Amphetamine, in regard to sheer
pathological application to the job, is amazing. But you tend to have an
overinflated regard for what you’re creating. I don’t think heroin has
much value. It certainly gets in the way, after a while, of being
creatively responsible, because you’re living your life at the whim of
the drug. I don’t think that has any true creative application. You
know, the thing I liked about heroin was the structure that it imposed
on your life, to some degree. Your choices are very limited. You get up,
you have to score or you get sick, so you score, and later on in the
evening you need to take some more. Provided you have some money and a
supply, it’s a structured life. If you don’t have money, it’s pure
chaos, and I don’t advise it. I’m sure for all drugs but certainly for
heroin I would advocate the legalization in the way that you can go
somewhere and take it safely and come back in the evening and take it
again safely. It’s the chaos around that particular drug that’s
unbelievably destructive and dangerous. The illegality is why there are
so many people dying from using this drug.
In the new book, you say that your experiences over the
last few years, and particularly your work on The Red Hand Files, have
made you more empathetic, which you also say is not in your nature to
be. That’s interesting to me, because empathy is often thought of as
being one of artists’ great gifts, even almost a kind of prerequisite.
Is that a false or overly romantic notion? God help us if art
is simply done by virtuous, empathetic people. Our compulsion toward
making art is to get to the better end of our nature. That’s certainly
the case for me. We often come up against “How can I listen to or read
these people who are revealed to be bad?” To me, sometimes the poignancy
of their art is the distance traveled from it and their worst selves.
That’s the thrilling thing about art, and also about reading and then
responding to the letters I get in The Red Hand Files.
They reveal something about myself that I didn’t even know existed. The
Red Hand Files became a way of articulating the journey toward my
better nature.
But does being more empathetic change how you relate to
the morally challenging corners of your work? I’m thinking of a newer
song of yours like “White Elephant.”
When you perform it live and get to the lines “I’m going to shoot you
in the [expletive] face,” is the connection to that sentiment different
than it was in the old days when you would sing about violence and cruelty?When
we talk about empathetic art, we’re talking about understanding the
nature of ourselves as human beings. That understanding — even that
understanding of the worser aspects of our nature — is a virtue. There’s
beauty in that, and beauty in itself has a moral value. I would say
that there’s great beauty in “White Elephant.” The effect that song has
on the audience — it’s extraordinary, regardless of what the song might
be about. There are books that are horrendous to read but remain
beautiful things. I mean, “American Psycho” is a beautiful thing on some
level. The moral value of art is not predicated upon what the art is
about.Some art that I see that is simply stating the morally
obvious is not, in my view, edifying. It’s often barely worth looking
at. It’s the push and pull of the good and the bad that exists within
art that makes it beautiful to me.
In the book, you also describe yourself as
temperamentally a conservative. To me that connotes someone maybe less
compelled by the moral push-and-pull and more of a steadfast believer in
certain truths. So when is it edifying to have one’s beliefs challenged
and when is it an affront? I’m culturally conservative in the
sense that I value the wisdom of the ages. I think that has inherent
value and needs to be challenged — but to some degree conserved. So
going back to problematic artists: Certainly within music there seems to
be some correlation between creativity and transgression. It’s not an
accident that the greatest musicians are so often problematic
characters. I understand that people have different views on this and
that I come from a generation of musicians where it was our moral duty
to offend people. It’s why we did anything: to cause dissonance and
disruption. To me, there seems to be self-evident value in that. When
you look at people who often make extraordinary music, it feels that the
journey from the person to the thing they made might have something to
do with stepping into this creative realm that is itself valuable and
good, regardless of the faulty human that has the courage to make it. I
get a little tired of this casting around for bad actors and exposing
them. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It feels like the ideal of it is
justice and mercy, but the weaponry being used is injustice and
mercilessness. That is very uncomfortable to watch, and quite obviously
it’s creating a lot of boring, self-important and morally obvious art.
This is semi-random but did you see the Elvis movie from this year? Yeah.
I was confused by it. Elvis is my hero. There was an aspect to the
story of his later years that is almost religious to me. The final Las
Vegas concerts were the Passion of crucifixion and redemption and
resurrection. In the film, the later years didn’t work in that way. I
felt there was a missed opportunity. You see it in the bit of footage
that they show of Elvis in the end.
There is a man who’s suffering on such an epic level to be onstage and
to perform and to live. I found that incredibly inspiring. They
shouldn’t have had to have shown that footage. They should have got
there on their own. The end was saved by that piece of footage. That’s
not even the best footage from that period. There’s the end of “This Is Elvis.”
The last 20 minutes of that film, starting with him doing “Are You
Lonesome Tonight?” where he [expletive] up the lyrics and the camera
gets closer and closer to his face and you see that he’s [expletive] up
on every level. His eyes are terrified. It’s an unbelievably painful
piece of footage. Then it goes on to the footage of the motorcade when
he died, and the song “American Trilogy,”
which maps out, as far as I’m concerned, the crucifixion and the
resurrection. That changed my life as an artist. It was the most
stirring thing that I’ve ever seen musically. There was something that
was happening at those shows that I’ve never seen anywhere else. When
you think you don’t want to do it, you don’t really feel like it tonight
or whatever feelings go on when you’re on tour, I often think of
Elvis’s commitment to his act. It’s extraordinary. I wonder if the
director loved that period of Elvis or whether he was afraid of showing
it for the tragic splendor that it was. That’s what I felt he missed.
In terms of commitment, you’ve expressed elsewhere that
you’re more focused on being a citizen, a neighbor, a father, a husband,
than on being an artist. Why? Well, there’s something about
the self-interested nature of the artist that after a while becomes
extremely uncomfortable. To have told my 30-year-old, 40-year-old,
50-year-old self that my artistic output wasn’t the fundamental and most
valuable aspect of my life, I would have thought you didn’t understand.
These days I don’t feel that way. That’s not to say that I’ve stopped
working as much, but it just feels, self-evidently, that other stuff
needs your attention. Like tending to the people around you. You’re part
of a larger community and part of the world. This is going to sound sad
and extreme, but there’s that description of Satan in Dante’s “Inferno”
trapped up to his waist in ice and self-absorbed in his own misery and
waving his batlike wings and gnawing on his resentments with his three
mouths. It’s this terrible picture of your self-interest, fanning your
coldness onto other people. There’s something about that idea that I see
all the time with people, especially young people, in regard to their
work. I’m happy to have let that go. All the love songs that you write,
all of this stuff that you manufacture — how little tending of that part
of your life actually goes on? When you think of yourself on your
deathbed, you generally feel there’s someone next to you. Maybe that’s
just me. I’m not going to hold my wife’s hand and say, “Darling, I wrote
‘The Mercy Seat.’” Do you know what I mean?
I do, but the way you put it — Sorry to go back
to Arthur again, but one of the first things I did after he died was
get rid of my office where I wrote. I went in there one day, and it
signified this unbelievable self-absorption. This manic self-interest
was the first thing to go.
You don’t have to apologize for going back to Arthur.
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Everywhere you go, there you are. We can’t
get away from ourselves and what matters to us. That’s right.
As an artist, I was never able to sit down and write a song where there
was a sense of remove. A lot of my songs, I suppose, the success of them
is predicated on the fact that Nick Cave is singing them. If someone
else had a crack at it, it might not work. I don’t know if that’s a
strength or a failing. But the thing about it is, you write a line, and
it is overwhelming sometimes. It means something. There’s other
lines that you write that actually don’t mean anything. They live in
the songs as little lies. But I think people know when something is true
and when it’s not. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re watching
Elvis sing. It’s all there. It’s not a washed-up performer. It’s the
truth. That’s what you’re looking for.
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