Nick Cave, here in London in 2018, thanked his fans for their support.
Photo: Redferns, Gus Stewart. All rights reserved.
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“I’m surprised you agreed to this interview,” says Sean O’Hagan at the beginning. “They eat you up. I hate it,” says Nick Cave. Then he speaks over 300 printed pages in 16 chapters about God and the world. The talks took place between August 2020 and autumn 2021 via Zoom. Around the time of the conversation, Cave’s mother Dawn, his girlfriend Anita Lane, producer Hal Willner and Chris Bailey of the Saints and finally, when Sean O’Hagan wrote the foreword in May 2022, Cave’s eldest son Jethro died in Melbourne. At the heart of the talks is the heavy grief for Cave’s son Arthur, who fell off a cliff near Brighton in 2015. So this broodingly intense, cataclysmic book is a requiem for the departed and an early legacy.
But it is also a self-assurance and a kind of work journal. During the pandemic, Cave wrote the songs for the album Carnage, which he recorded with Warren Ellis in just a few days. He talks about working on “Skeleton Tree” (2016) after Arthur’s death and on “Ghosteen” (2019), the big meditative ghost record for the son. Cave speaks of religion and the magic of the concert: “It’s about being amazed, being taken by an artist at the decisive moment – admiring the unfolding of a song second by second and being almost moved to tears by the drama. He speaks of the great ballads of Jimmy Webb. In long passages he evokes his childhood in a village in Australia, the heroin addiction, the early death of his father and concern for his mother, whom he could not see before she died, and the paralysis after Arthur died. “Faith, Hope and Carnage” is also a love letter to Cave’s wife Susie.
He now makes Staffordshire figures with biblical motifs. “Hope is heartbroken optimism.” (Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
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