The Second Coming of Nick Cave – New Statesman

Once asked by a fan if he’d “hit the same highs” since getting clean, Nick Cave recounted the lows of drug use: “beaten up in police stations, dehumanized in rehabs, near-death experiences, suicidal thoughts, routine overdoses” – even “I like Charles Bukowski”.

With that in mind, it’s one of the most incredible twists in music history that Cave turns 65 on September 22. Equally important, the Aussie songwriter is creatively alive. While many of his contemporaries have become mere nostalgia or caricature (Morrissy, Bono), Cave recently produced two of the most acclaimed albums of his 43-year recording career: Guest (2019) with his band Bad Seeds and Butcher shop (2021). Both are richly arranged studio creations that owe more to classical and electronic influences than guitar rock. But Cave remains a talismanic live performer. in August, I saw him headlining at London’s All Points East festival, where he was forever diving into the crowd, whipping his fans into raptures, then making them cry in front of his piano.

Cave has long defied the traditional boundaries of a music career. In addition to 24 studio albums under various guises, he has written novels, screenplays and an introduction to the Gospel of Mark. He is the author of many films, starred in a film with Brad Pitt (Johnny Swede in 1991) and even dabbled in ceramics.

What accounts for this late-career zenith? That relentless pursuit of immortality? Answers appear in Faith, hope and carnagea remarkably candid new book based on more than 40 hours of conversation between Cave and journalist Sean O’Hagan from 2020-21.

[See also: Marcus Mumford lets go of shame]

The exchanges are the culmination of a long and exciting period of reflection. On 14 July 2015, Cave’s life changed forever when his 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton. (His eldest son, Jethro, died unexpectedly aged 31 in May of this year.) In the days after Arthur’s death, Cave told Warren Ellis, his chief collaborator, “Music and work are the only things that have saved me in the past … I have to I’m working.”

The result was Skeleton tree (2016), an eerily beautiful album whose prophetic nature haunted Cave (“You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the Adur River,” is the opening of “Jesus Alone,” a song written before Arthur’s death). Guestthe even more numinous record that followed was, for Cave, “a way of making new contact and saying goodbye.”

Post-traumatic growth – a psychological concept developed in the 1990s – is the term that best describes Cave’s experience. in Faith, hope and carnage, he talks about how individuals can emerge from cataclysmic events as “a different person, a changed, more complete, more realized, more clearly defined person. I think that’s what living really is – dying in a way and being reborn.” Cave did not achieve this in isolation. Rather, he relied on three key individuals.

[See also: Why we shouldn’t sanctify David Bowie]

The first, perhaps unexpectedly, is God. Cave has long drawn on the Bible for literary purposes, but his engagement with religion has recently taken on a more personal dimension. “As I got older, I also saw that maybe the demand is the religious experience,” he reflects. “The desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the movement towards the ineffable… Perhaps God is the search itself.” One of Cave’s greatest skills is to bring a secular view to the religious and a religious view to the mundane, the sacred and the profane, intertwined.

The second person Cave relies on is Ellis, an extravagantly gifted multi-instrumentalist and composer, perhaps rivaled only by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood in popular music. It was on the Bad Seeds album Push the sky away (2013), written with Ellis, that Cave had achieved a musical rebirth. “Jubilee Street”, with its majestic strings, became the most superb song in the band’s live repertoire.

Finally, there’s Cave’s wife of 23 years, Susie. Following his split with singer-songwriter PJ Harvey – featured in the Bad Seeds charts The Boatman’s Call (1997) – Susie, a fashion designer known for her brand The Vampire’s Wife, gives Cave an emotional awakening. Two years after they met, he left the clinic for the last time. They married on the day of the solar eclipse in 1999 in a medieval chapel in Surrey.

Behind these people is Cave’s dedicated fan base. Perhaps no major artist has a more direct connection with his followers. Cave rarely gives interviews and has no social media. But on his website The Red Hand Fileshe answers questions eccentric (“Have you ever met Nicolas Cage?”) and existential (“How do I stop being afraid of the end of the world?”).

“Music is a spiritual currency unlike any other in its ability to lift people out of their suffering,” he explains. “I don’t take my job lightly.” Most musicians, at this point in their careers, trade on past glories; Cave forges new ones.

[See also: Sheku Kanneh-Mason: “The cello is a part of you”]