Nick Cave on cancel culture and music

Legendary musician Nick Cave tells Elizabeth Aubrey why negative reviews still sting, and what the grief of losing his sons has taught him about connection

ARGUMENTS, walkouts, even the odd fight — early interviews with the young Nick Cave were a health hazard. “I was a troublemaker, drug addict, chaos maker and my default setting was just a general contempt for everything,” the Australian says. First via goth-punk outfit The Birthday Party, and then the revered Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Cave railed against the world. “I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing,” he says now. “I mean, it’s not bad for young people to kick back against this world and try to do something about it.”

Until recently, Cave rarely gave interviews. In 2017, he vowed “never to do one again” after struggling to talk about grief to a journalist following the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur. Instead, Cave responded to fan questions via his Red Hand Files website, articulating the process of grief with clarity. A live In Conversation series followed and then, during lockdown, he spent 40 hours speaking to journalist Sean O’Hagan for a book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, the paperback of which is released next week.

“I’m not ashamed of those interviews that I did in the past,” he says now as we sit down to talk about the book. “I mean, f***, that’s the way it was back then. There was a sort of ideological clash between the performer and the press. It was just the way we behaved.” But he felt differently about O’Hagan. “He was not trying to bring me down,” Cave says.

He says he had plenty of “good faith” conversations with O’Hagan and thinks the book shows “what conversations can actually achieve. I start off in one position and end up somewhere different. That is through the power of conversation because Sean and I completely disagree on pretty much most things.”

Cave says he’s “full of dreadful ideas” but conversations help him work them out. “You find out your good ideas and they get firmer and better and your bad ideas drop away.”

Cave, 65, has gone through more heartache than anyone should have to. In May last year, less than seven years after the loss of Arthur, his eldest son Jethro Lazenby died, just days after being released on bail from prison. He was ordered to receive treatment for substance abuse (Cave does not speak about Jethro in interviews).

A year on from that loss, Cave says he feels “a more urgent need to connect with people” than ever before. Recently Cave’s music has seen him working through his often agonising grief in real time, chiming with bereaved people across the world. It offered them hope that, as he sang on his last album with The Bad Seeds, “peace will come”.

“There’s a kind of duty that maybe I didn’t feel before, that I have at my disposal something very valuable,” he says. “That is, to make music, and I don’t want to squander that opportunity.”

Cave says that to keep making it, he needs to know his art has purpose or is “doing something helpful”, but not “in any virtue-signalling kind of way”.

“Sometimes you think about giving this stuff up … The world doesn’t need another Nick Cave record, film, Red Hand File, but something I fall back on is that I’m doing something of some value beyond what my own art is,” he says. “If it has some kind of knock-on effect, I keep doing it.”

Cave has never been busier. Following the release of the album Ghosteen, which explored grief and loss in all its

I have at my disposal something valuable. That is to make music. I don’t want to squander that opportunity

dizzying wildness, Cave made Carnage, a collection of songs with songwriting partner Warren Ellis, as well as the soundtrack to the Ana de Armas movie Blonde. He and Ellis are back in the studio with the other Bad Seeds, working on new material. “What’s coming out is so instantly interesting and different all the time,” he says.

Cave often veers between the serious and the comical in conversation. “I’m outraged!” he says of not being involved in the new Gladiator film, after writing a rejected script for a sequel years ago. He jokes that Russell Crowe should play him in a biopic. “He’s a great actor, Russell. He can be amazing, one of those actors who’s just a wild card, like Mel Gibson. There’s just something a little off going on that’s pretty exciting.” Fortunately, Cave is too busy with other projects; his two novels, The Death of Bunny Munro and And the Ass Saw the Angel, are now in an “advanced” stage of development for television, with actors attached.

He also spends a considerable amount of his time replying to fans via the Red

Hand Files. “I’m very proud of them,” he says, but jokes that “sometimes they’re a complete pain in the arse,” when he has stuff to do at the weekend.

Many of those who write to him are devoid of hope, he says. “There are a lot of people who find nothing in this world that is of any value... They just see the world as s**t… and human beings as corrupt, evil. That to me is coming from a place of utter demoralisation and [shows] a lack of faith in ourselves as human beings. I think the Red Hand Files are an attempt to redress that in some way.”

Cave feels social media, a relentless bad news cycle and the internet are partly to blame. “I just see… people in such dire situations that there doesn’t seem to be anything to live for. There’s also a corrosive, pathological, relentless pessimism coming from the media and social media as well. It just sort of eats away at ourselves, at what we are as human beings.”

He says he doesn’t do social media and left Twitter because it just seemed “like a bunch of arseholes” all “hashing it out but in increasingly stupid ways”. As for the internet, he remembers going below the line once and wishing he hadn’t. “I think if there was a comments section on the music I made when I was starting out, I would have never gotten anywhere.”

“I looked at the comment section on Ghosteen, which I think was our 19th album, and they were actually crippling. I showed it to my son [Earl], who’s 22 and he’s lived his life on the internet; I’m like, ‘Look at what they’re f***ing saying!’ He’s just like, ‘Dude, it’s the f***ing internet, suck it up princess!’ His attitude was, ‘Who gives a f***’, it’s just people saying bulls**t. I mean, I care what people say — I care if people hate my music.” Occasionally, this spills over into the Red Hand Files too, like recently when a “long-term” fan called Cave out for attending the Coronation. He told Cave he was taking all his Bad Seed records to a charity shop.

Incidentally, how did he find the Coronation? “I’m not talking about that,” he laughs. “It was acutely interesting and extremely British.”

Cave thinks cancel culture, which he once said on his website began “as an honourable attempt to reimagine society in a more equitable way”, has itself become problematic because “the wrongs” are getting “less and less”. He argues that “the benchmark drops” and remembers some calling for his cancellation when he revealed he was fully vaccinated. “It’s not like I’m a f***ing fascist, a child molester or whatever.”

He sparks a challenging conversation, in much the same way he does with O’Hagan in his book. Cave explains that he can “separate the artist from the art”, adding that “an interesting thing to think about is that there is some correlation between transgressive and bad behaviour and good art.”

He mentions Morrissey, whose music was banned from the world’s oldest record shop, Cardiff-based Spillers, in 2019 over his alleged far-Right views. “A line was drawn somewhere and Morrissey had to go. Yet if you started to take away from their shop transgressive people over the 150 years they’ve been going, there’s just no one left, except boring s**t.” Cave has written about Morrissey before, saying: “Whatever inanities he may postulate, we cannot overlook the fact he has written a vast and extraordinary catalogue” that will “outlast his offending political alliances”.

Cave wants his music to remain politics-free and “to move people”, adding it’s vital for us to continue to find hope in something like music, which can rehabilitate some of the bad stuff going on out there. “I think music is at least one good thing we can do in the world.” ⬤ Faith, Hope and Carnage is out in paperback next week

There’s a corrosive and relentless pessimism on social media that eats away at us as humans