Nick Cave: “Conservatism Is an Aspiration”
The lead Bad Seed shares his thoughts on creativity, marriage, and having a conservative temperament.
In December 2022, I saw Nick Cave and Warren Ellis perform at the Sydney Opera House as part of their Australian Carnage tour. Alternating between tender melancholy and piercing defiance, Cave stalked the stage while the crowd chanted, stamped, swayed, and clapped. He reminded me of a missionary preacher committed to saving souls, including his own. When I met Cave briefly backstage after the show, I was struck by the contrast between his larger-than-life stage persona and the humility of the man in person. His ordinariness and lack of pretension are characteristically Australian.
I’ve been familiar with Cave’s music since I was a child when I was given a Bad Seeds anthology in 1998. That career retrospective was premature, however. Since then, Cave and his band have recorded a further eight studio albums (amounting to 17 in total)— including No More Shall We Part (2001), Nocturama (2003), Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004), Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (2008), Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree (2016), and Ghosteen (2019), with an 18th studio album currently in the works.
Today, Cave is perhaps best known for his elegant ballads such as Love Letter, Higgs Boson Blues, and Brompton Oratory. But his remarkably diverse musical career reaches back into London’s early ’80s post-punk movement, when his dark and discordant live performances fronting The Birthday Party would whip audiences into Dionysian frenzies.
To date, Cave has sold over five million records worldwide. In addition to his prolific output with the Bad Seeds, he has released a further two albums with another project, Grinderman; scored numerous film soundtracks in collaboration with Ellis (with whom he also recorded the 2021 album Carnage); written the screenplay for John Hillcoat’s critically acclaimed 2005 feature film, The Proposition; featured in a brace of documentaries directed by Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik; and published several books.
In recent years, between recording, touring, writing, and sculpting figurines, Cave has somehow found time to develop a dialogue with his fans on his blog, The Red Hand Files. The site now numbers over 221 entries, including reflections on subjects as diverse as tinnitus, tattoos, free speech, inspiration, love, and more recently, ChatGPT.
In 2022, Cave released Faith, Hope and Carnage, an edited transcript of conversations with Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan, in which they discuss Cave’s unorthodox religious faith, as well as his bereavement following the accidental death of his son in 2015. Faith, Hope and Carnage has been received by popular and critical audiences with widespread acclaim.
Despite currently working on two film scores and writing the new Bad Seeds album, Cave kindly agreed to be interviewed by Quillette via email. What follows is a lightly edited reproduction of that conversation.
Claire Lehmann: The Red Hand Files is an exercise in incredible generosity not just to your fans who write in, but the wider public. You provide earnest replies to questions about bereavement, addiction, creativity, cynicism, nihilism, love, heartbreak—the full spectrum of the human experience. Have you always had this generosity of spirit—or is it something that you had to discover later in life?
Nick Cave: Well, thank you for saying that but I don’t know if generosity has much to do with it. I don’t see The Red Hand Files as a public service, as such, rather they are to do with mutuality and connectedness. It is to some degree an ongoing conversation, back and forth, with my audience and one that has benefited me enormously, changed me, pushed me toward the better end of my nature—to be less self-absorbed, more thoughtful, more compassionate, traits that do not necessarily come naturally to me. The questions in The Red Hand Files are essentially a vast repository of longing, and often extremely funny, that have helped me understand what it means to be human. What it means to be an actual person. I hope they are some benefit to those who subscribe to them.
CL: You’ve had a remarkably productive career and have contributed not just to the art of song writing, but also fiction, film, and in your spare time create ceramic figurines. Are there any limits to your creativity?
NC: Yes, I can’t act.
CL: A non-trivial amount of creative people have a predisposition towards manic/hypomanic episodes during which they experience their most fertile periods. Do you have any experience with this, and if so, would you have any advice for the aspiring artist who wants to harness their creativity but also remain sane?
NC: Boringly, my creativeness is in no way pathological. I work very hard, every day, and on some level it’s a dogged nine to five slog, and if it seems like my output is greater than your average musician or whatever it is I am, it’s because I put in more hours. It’s as simple as that.
That is not to say that on occasions I don’t enter into that wonderful space familiar to most writers and musicians when we are in the flow, and at one with the angels, a space where doubts about our abilities are superseded by the furious, giddy optimism of a cool line or a beautiful melody. We get swept away by the sudden joy of it all, we are inside the cascade, the groove, time condenses, we become giggling idiots zooming around the planets, our little pens scratching away, we are creative people! But this exalted feeling is short lived, and we are soon back in the drudgery of it all. That is the perennial joy and misery of the songwriter, at least this one. My songs are occasional things. They are the joyous but infrequent rewards for time served on the treadmill.
Mostly I just wake up, get dressed and go to work on whatever the next project is, and I’m grateful that I somehow get through that particular project relatively unscathed. There is a lovely story in Genesis, where Jacob wrestles all through the night with an angel. Well, that’s what I do but I do it in office hours.
My advice to young artists is to do what my painter friends at art school used to tell me—stop moaning and get to work, regardless of whether one is “feeling it” or not. Inspiration comes, in time, to the prepared mind, at least that is what I have found.
CL: Woody Allen has quipped that 80 percent of success is showing up. I was very impressed in Faith, Hope and Carnage when I read that over your career you had never missed a show (until the time you were arrested for possession).
How important has performing—and more broadly “showing up”—been to your success?
NC: For me, showing up to the job at hand is extremely important and something I saw that I needed to do from early in my career. I don’t say this with any false humility but when it comes down to it there are a lot of people out there who have a deeper understanding of music, can sing better, can write better, and can play the piano better, but what I am uniquely talented at is applying myself to the job at hand. I’m good at that. Losing myself in the work. I have a realistic understanding of my limitations, coupled with a kind of unsubstantiated belief in myself. This is perhaps the definition of hope. Anyway, turning up can get you a long way, at the end of the day.
CL: In Faith, Hope and Carnage, you describe yourself as having a “conservative personality.” I normally associate the conservative personality with military types and accountants, not songwriters and mystics. (I would, for example, suggest that you are high in the Big Five trait “openness to experience.”) Do you think that you really do have a conservative temperament? Or just a contemplative and introverted one?
NC: Well, I didn’t mean to imply that I was a capital “C” Conservative, it’s more that I have a conservative temperament. I would say that, as far as I can make out, a conservative temperament has something to do with a deep understanding of the inherent value of the world, and its vulnerable and precarious nature. It is suspicious of the impulse to tear things down, dismantle things, cancel things, burn things to the ground, rather it’s more naturally inclined toward cautious, incremental change, because we need to be careful with the world. The conservative understands about loss and about grief. I’m certainly open to new things, but with an appreciation of what has gone before and a melancholy understanding that it is a lot easier to tear things down than to build them back up. But, at the end of the day, I think conservatism is an aspiration, it is something we should strive for—a society that works well enough that it is worth conserving. I don’t think we are there yet, there are things yet left to reform, of course, but I think we are generally moving in the right direction.
CL: Our culture is very good at encouraging us all to be high achievers, strive for excellence, and win the tournaments of status in whatever realms we find ourselves in. But often this striving conflicts with our roles as spouses and parents—or people who are available to care and be present with those whom we love. Apart from being a successful artist, you are also a husband and father. How important are these roles to you?
NC: In some way this question feels connected to the last. For me and Susie our lives changed fundamentally after the death of our son, Arthur. Our marriage was put under an enormous amount of stress, as are all marriages when a child dies. The stats around this are not encouraging, around 80 percent of marriages where a child dies do not survive. I suspect, however, the marriages that do make it become stronger and more resilient as they are toughened in the furnace of a shared catastrophe. We come to understand the perilous nature of things and the value of the institutions that serve to hold them together. I believe that it was not just our love for one another that got Susie and me through our grief but the marriage itself. It held the shattered pieces of ourselves together. It brought home to us the sacred dimension of the institution of marriage in a radical and amplified way. The upshot of this for me was that I began to understand that there are things in life worth more than our creative achievements. Imagine that! I came to see my work wasn’t actually the most important thing! What a startling realisation! For me, this was a lesson, hard learned, that took a devastation to understand.
CL: One thing that strikes me in your personal story as told through Faith, Hope and Carnage is that you appear to resist social pressures to conform in whatever milieu you find yourself in, whether it is the Philistinism of rural Victoria, the nihilism in the Melbourne punk scene, or the general anti-intellectual climate of Australia. Today you express non-conformity in the way you resist some of the political trends impacting the arts, and the way you defend other artists (e.g., Morrissey). Do you have any reflections on this tendency of yours, and would you have any advice for the young non-conformist on how to resist social pressures without becoming a full-blown hermit?
NC: There was a bunch of Australians that had a huge influence on me as a young man growing up in Melbourne, who were certainly non-conformists. Germaine Greer, in particular, Barry Humphries, Norman Gunston, Brett Whiteley, the wonderful cartoonist, Michael Leunig, the playwright, David Williamson. It was not that I agreed with their opinions on things, or their politics, as people’s politics and opinions have never concerned me that much, it was rather that they were there as a cultural irritant, chaos-makers, scallywags, tricksters, a source of vexation within the culture, as it stood, not against the political system as such, although there was that, but rather an affront to Australian culture itself. They stirred things up, in their own singular way, shocked us, outraged us, made us laugh.
I loved these people. I still do. I carried something of them with me when I left Australia. They gave me permission to remain outside of things, be my own person, to rub things the wrong way. They showed me that there was a solemn duty as an artist, to challenge, to offend, to piss people off, in particular my peers. That impulse was absorbed into my bloodstream, as an Australian growing up in Melbourne in the ’70s. I felt proud to be an Australian as I travelled around the world, because I saw that my Australianness, in and of itself, was a kind of agitating agent. We Aussies were just too loud, our gestures too big, our ideas too perverse, we were too funny. I still naturally respond to people who have that dissonant spirit, although they are of course a dying breed.
You mentioned Morrissey. He made an enormous amount of exceptionally beautiful music, lest we forget, but he remains forever a thorn in the side of the prevailing cultural mood. Morrissey has the audacity, the courage, not to be boring. I admire that. Thank God there are some people like that still kicking around.
As for advice, I’m not sure I have any, other than to say, don’t spend too much of your precious time trying to please people. Most people, in the end, respond to authenticity, they yearn for it, and they will seek you out if they recognise in you that genuineness. It is the artist’s way to be at least that. Authentic. Genuine. Real. So be true to yourself, and what will come will come.
CL: Who are you reading?
NC: Well, speaking of troublemakers, right now I’m halfway through listening to Bret Easton Ellis read his new book The Shards. I haven’t read any fiction for a very long time, and it’s such a pleasure to listen to him read from this deeply weird, hypnotic, grotesque, and haunted book. It is a beautiful piece of writing, from a master storyteller, in my opinion. Very funny, at times, too.
Right now, I’m writing songs for my next Bad Seeds record, so I tend to read more poetry and poetic prose to sort of get me in the swing of things. Lucille Clifton, Stevie Smith, Simone Weil, E. E. Cummings, Auden, Larkin, all sorts of stuff, a book of fairy tales I read as a child, and before I sleep, Roger Deakin’s beautiful book, Waterlog, a swimmer’s journey through Britain. It lulls me to sleep and gives me floaty dreams.
CL: Occasionally you write about your faith on The Red Hand Files, and you have mentioned previously that this creates agitation in your fans. Does this bother you, and does it matter to you if a segment of your fans or the public don’t understand what faith means to you?
NC: What we believe in is a serious matter. It is a condition of being. It is not something you can hide, especially if you are a songwriter because your preoccupations rise to the surface and find their way into the songs. That’s the beauty and danger of certain songs, they reveal a great deal, not just to others, but to yourself. So, whatever my beliefs may be, they exist in what I create. They are there for all to see.
Of course, in The Red Hand Files I do my best to write about religious matters with some nuance, you know, about my belief, but also my unbelief. Religious ideas preoccupy me, for sure, as they always have, for as far back as I can remember. I don’t need it pointed out that there is something absurd about spending vast amounts of time contemplating the nature of something that quite possibly doesn’t exist. The thing is, songwriting and faith are inextricably linked, for me, I recognise one in the other. I find writing words to be dependent on a readiness to perceive what are essentially tenuous, softly spoken ideas, that reveal themselves, like God, as intimations, as ghost-like abstractions, as mysteries. And like God, a song rarely comes fully formed, without a struggle, declaring itself. So, in that respect, as a musician and songwriter, matters of faith are second nature, and well, impossible to ignore. So, I write about them occasionally on The Red Hand Files, and occasionally get some pushback from my atheist friends, but not often and usually with a certain amount of humour and good faith.
CL: How do you avoid being “captured” by your own audience? When artists have an established following, must they, on some level, be willing to piss off their own fanbase if they seek to retain their artistic integrity?
NC: I’ve always taken a long distance view of my career. Clearly, I’m in it for the long haul, you know, the duration, so I have to above all things keep the creative spark alive. As far as I can see the only way to do this is to stay interested, and the only way to do that is to create new stuff. Most of my fans understand this and are happy to be part of the journey, or the adventure. Some older fans cling desperately to the good old days because on some level they see their own younger, happier, less jaded selves reflected in that music, and see all deviation from it as a betrayal. I understand that. There is a whole raft of artists whose early music I love, and whose latter music is, to me, less interesting, but I don’t take it personally. Some musicians, it’s the other way around, their later music eclipsed their early stuff, Elvis for example.
CL: Finally, what makes you feel hopeful about the future?
NC: Well, we are told relentlessly that the world is doomed. The media amplifies this idea to the point of hysteria. We are conditioned to only see the world in terms of oppression and corruption and degradation. To some degree it is hard not be sucked into this torrent of despair, to become hardened and cynical. However, it doesn’t take much to see that this posture only adds to the world’s woes, to look at humanity only with suspicion and disdain is perhaps the very problem itself. It is, in itself, a kind of deification of our downfall.
So, I choose to be hopeful, not because there is a whole lot of evidence to support such a position, but because it is the necessary underpinning of any positive action. We must love the world to save it. In that respect I am hopeful, truly hopeful, because I believe fundamentally in the ingenuity and imagination of our species. In a way that is not such a difficult posture to hold. We are problem-solving creatures, after all, if we can just allow ourselves to be, and we should not crush that ingenious spirit with our own despondency.
