It’s been over 40 years since Nick Cave first stepped onto a stage in Cologne. Together with his avant-garde band Birthday Party, he played a noisy, extreme concert in the machine room of the occupied former Stollwerk chocolate factory in Südstadt. A wild punk show and brawl as a studded leather punk pissed on bassist Tracey Pew from the left edge of the stage. Wearing a cowboy hat and muscle shirt, he briefly swung his instrument and knocked the cheeky Pipi-Punk off the stage. Wild times back then…
Today Cave sits in a tailor-made suit with a matching tie in front of more than 1000 civilized listeners in the Theater am Tanzbrunnen and chats about his best-seller “Faith, Hope and Carnage”.
As is well known, this book is the fruit of long conversations with the noble Irish-born journalist Seán O’Hagan; it should have been more than 40 hours.
Most recently, the work was expanded in the English new edition to include a current chapter from 2023. It’s called “Two Years Later” and deals (among other things) with the processing of the death of his son Jethro Lazenby last May. His other son Arthur had tragically passed away in 2015.
Photo: Ralf Juergens
So there was a lot to work through in this intensive live talk, which marked the unofficial opening of the “phil.cologne” thinker festival. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Green Party co-head Robert Habeck are also expected on the Rhine by June 13 outside of day-to-day business. Habeck parleys with world explainer Peter Sloterdijk about “The remorse of Prometheus – About mankind, the fire and the climate”.
A topic to which Nick Cave would certainly have something to contribute.
The dialogue with Spannmann O’Hagan showed how much the 63-year-old has become a stage professional. One who loves the stage as much as his audience. At the beginning of the (talk) show, he posed in a good mood for about 49 seconds for the photographers and came to the wide range of topics with a “we would have that then”.
It’s about why he doesn’t like interviews at all, but even more so about “conversations”. Cave is one of those pop stars who only handpicked to speak to journalists. Over the years he has “tired of having to read the same stories about himself over and over again.”
Of course, this spoken word gig is also part of international show business. Cave has come to Cologne with his UK publisher and appendix from Brussels for the only Germany date. He is signing his current book in a bookstore in Hamburg today (6 June), the German edition of which was published by (Till-Lindemann-)Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch. In contrast to the Rammstein counterpart, he impressively shows how that can also work with aging in pop biz, namely without scandal.
At the Q&A in the Belgian capital, he was asked about his opinion of Belgian beer by the local patriotic bar crowd. People on the Rhine wanted to know if he had ever been to the cathedral. Cave replied “Yes!”
For friends of his music, he made announcements for a new (not yet scheduled) album: According to Cave, it should be an OPUS MAGNUM after the more “minimalist” works “Ghosting” and “Carnage”. So with a lot of sound, a kind of modern opera. Apart from the well-established collaboration with Warren Ellis, Cave didn’t want to reveal any more details about the music.
What remains fascinating about Cave as a person is how seriously and yet precisely and easily he can deal with such different topics as death, grief, fun, faith, Christianity and punk rock without being annoying for even a second. His language has advanced without being ostentatiously academic. From one moment to the next, he can crack a joke and then go back to lecturing about hard strokes of fate (and how to deal with them). Accordingly, the Rhenish audience laughed and cried in equal measure.
The timing is also strictly professional: the conversation with the talk partner with the soft Irish accent lasts an hour plus. People were allowed to ask him questions of all kinds for more than half an hour. At the end, hundreds of happy fans were able to have the current book decorated with greetings and autographs. But: There was a strictly limited meeting time per person.