Radical intimacy – this is the term that Nick Cave uses to describe the hard-to-describe, fragile atmosphere of the stops on the Skeleton Tree tour in the interview volume “Faith, hope and bloodshed”, where he also says: he owes it to his audience and to these intense concerts that he recovered from grief from its deepest recesses.
Nick Cave’s son, then 15-year-old Arthur, fell off a cliff in 2015, and from that moment on, the artist rebuilt his artistic self from the ground up. Of course, not immediately, because the work completely lost its meaning in the months following his son’s burial, even lifting the pen seemed impossible. It was a long road to the memorable tour mentioned above, and then to that creative era, which, according to Cave, is no longer necessarily about Arthur, but in which “Arthur’s spirit wanders in and out”.
Described in this way, all of this may sound like a spiritual outpouring, but from the rambling conversations of the interview book, which is now also available in Hungarian, it soon becomes clear that Cave is very far from cheap esoterica. He thinks about songwriting in a deadly serious manner, without cynicism, and it is precisely this tone and irony-free thoughts that make the book a shocking read. I know how embarrassing and pathetic it sounds here, but in the book, after clashing arguments and discussions, Cave arrives at the conclusion that he thinks music changes his listeners, because it makes them more sensitive, accepting, and compassionate.
Hey Nick, do you feel like talking about something serious tonight?
Faith, hope and bloodshed is a strange book, an experiment that could have turned out to be disastrous. During the Covid epidemic, Seán O’Hagan, known as a journalist, and Nick Cave engaged in long phone conversations. Although they already knew each other from backstage, but since it was not possible to go on tour and the days flowed strangely into each other, the two men touched on deeper and deeper topics in these conversations. In addition to songwriting and the psychology of creation, grief was also an important common theme, since O’Hagan had lost his younger brother earlier.
O’Hagan, who is considered a routine interviewer, after a few long conversations, at one point it was formulated that these conversations could even be shaped into a book. Nick Cave finally gave the nod to have the phone calls recorded, as he felt that this could not be the usual biographical book, but a volume that addresses the main questions of the creative process and art. A material that helps him to understand what he went through. (From this point of view, it is a great choice that Róbert Németh, who is also known as a journalist and a musician and knows both sides of an interview situation, translated the book.)
And the book doesn’t do a lot of theorizing, because it immediately opens with a discussion of Nick Cave’s religiosity and faith, and O’Hagan, who completely rejects the organized church, is the perfect interlocutor for this. Even later, the book doesn’t let go of the really big questions, so the entire volume gives the impression that Nick Cave is articulating his new goals in his own art for the first time right in front of our eyes. It’s as if the conversations help him explain how he arrived at the aforementioned radical intimacy that resulted in his career-unique, guitar-and-drumless, mostly ethereal stream-of-consciousness album Ghosteen , which at one point he refers to as strange, sacred music. .
The album released in 2019 was not an unprecedented step in his career, Push The Sky Away and Skeleton Tree, which he brought together with his main co-creator, Warren Ellis, were also important stepping stones of this era, but, like Ghosteen, Nick Cave is certainly not yet taking a big artistic risk undertook during his career. The performer also tells about how at first the vomiting emojis and comments burying his career came to the hard-to-categorize record, then after a while people started connecting to the mystical world of the album, to the non-traditional song forms.
“Once I just got bored of writing third-person singular songs that tell structured stories: they start at the beginning and move nicely, obediently, towards the conclusion. (…)
It just didn’t feel right to treat people with these stories all the time. (…) I would have liked to write songs that somehow tell a truer and more authentic story about what I’m going through”
– says Nick Cave in the book, who also talks at length about the heightened state in which the Ghosteen album was recorded with Warren Ellis. The intensive work based on joint improvisations was interrupted with only a little sleep; they were already in a disturbing state of mind for the record, and were unsure not only about the songs, but also about the state of their own sanity. But according to Cave, this music could only be born out of this uncertainty, this consciousness beyond the sane, rational mind.
Chris Martin stomps into the studio and jams into a song
The discussions of Faith, hope and bloodshed are full of exciting stories, but it is striking how Cave quickly knocks down references to the past, drug stories, the dark days of his addiction or some more spicy details about the internal conflicts of the Bad Seeds.
However, it turns out that Blixa Bargeld, for example, left the band in the presence of film director Wim Wenders, or that Cave missed a single concert in his life, when he was detained for a night in New York for possession of heroin. After recalling these stories, Cave quickly makes it clear in conversations that he’s not interested in the past because, as he puts it, he should have slowed down over sixty, but he feels just the opposite. He works more and more intensively and freely with his personal team and his band.
Since the rambunctious nature of the conversations was not edited out of the book, the book, which basically dissects very serious topics, is full of entertaining side-tracks. For example, it turns out that the Ghosteen disc was recorded in the studio of Chris Martin, the singer of Coldplay, where Martin himself sometimes appeared and commented on the songs. “Obviously there’s quite a distance between our music, but who the fuck cares?” – states Cave, who at one point recounts that one of the songs on the record was changed due to Martin’s “disarmingly honest” reaction.
It is also a rather tragicomic detail from Cave’s drug-addicted era that O’Hagan had to give his first interview after rehab together with two performers not exactly famous for abstinence, Shane MacGowan and Mark E. Smith, the frontman of The Fall. According to the latter, when MacGowan heard that Cave was coming clean for the interview, he turned back and only went along with it after some persuasion.
Reckless rejection of the state of the world
Nick Cave’s grief processing was already in the public eye before the book, the book is more of a summary of this long process through conversations. According to Cave’s own admission, 2016, documenting the making of the Skeleton Tree record One More Time With Feeling during the filming of the film, for example, he was still so depressed that he behaved like a hostile zombie almost the entire time. Showing the Cave presented in 2022, already in a completely different form This Much I Know To Be True and the film called the song commemorated songs that ventured in an even braver, freer direction after the tragedy.
But the two films, with a slight exaggeration, would be negligible in response to personal letters from fans and non-fans. The Red Hand Files without a project. On this page, Cave sometimes gives thoughtful, honest answers to quite poignant questions, and sometimes, of course, he makes a joke of himself after an absurd question. This was also a leap into the unknown on the part of the performer, as when he announced that he would go on a mini-tour where he would answer any audience questions between songs. These were the In Conversation concerts, which of course could have gone horribly wrong, but Cave enjoyed both the good and the bad nights at these events, because, according to him, it was here that he learned to talk at all about what he was going through. These were the necessary risks that Cave used to fight crippling grief, where he could hear similar stories from others. Without the lessons of The Red Hand Files or In Conversation, Nick Cave would certainly not be living one of his most exciting creative periods at the moment, which the performer describes as a life lived more intensely.
“It is not the fiery intensity of youth, but something else—a kind of spiritual recklessness. It’s a kind of enthusiasm, fervor. That’s what I see on Susie (Susie Bick, Nick Cave’s wife – ed.) when she goes to work, and I hope that’s what’s on our last two records. Boldly confronting things, a kind of reckless rejection of the state of the world.” This is the audacity, the inclusion of uncomfortable and confrontational topics, which, according to Cave, would be the basic task of art, which is why he does not agree with the culture of erasure, which does not tolerate views that differ from the prevailing public mood.
Cave also tells quite clearly in the book that he is completely cold-hearted that not all of his previous fans have followed the path typical of his last records, and that not everyone likes what the Bad Seeds have become in recent years. But he also doesn’t deny that he’s extremely sensitive to his listeners’ reaction, and that even after all this time, he begins each record with the same self-doubting, self-flagellating paralysis until the next record’s main theme begins to take shape.
Anyone who has ever been interested in how creativity can be channeled will most enjoy the sections on the mystery of songwriting, where Cave ventures into quite daring territory. For example, when he talks about it, he often feels that his future is sometimes hidden in his songs. The most eerie example of this is the Skeleton Tree album itself, which many still do not believe that most of the songs and lyrics on it were written before Arthur’s death, so close to the tragedy permeates the entire album – as if the music was one step ahead of its author’s life would be. According to Cave, a really good song definitely reveals something about its author,
that is why he calls these creations at one point the dangerous little bombs of truth, the birth of which he speaks at one point like this:
“For me, vulnerability is essential for spiritual and creative development, while invulnerability means that someone is closed, rigid and small. There’s a lot of strength to gain from vulnerability – that’s what writing and songwriting is for me. You are open to everything, be it failure or shame. In this there is the possibility of vulnerability, but also enormous freedom. (…) To be truly vulnerable is to exist on the borderland of collapse and annihilation. In this place, we can feel that we really live.”
According to Nick Cave’s own admission, he hates interview situations, he doesn’t see the point, he often considers the whole situation humiliating for both parties. Compared to this, Faith, Hope and Bloodshed together with O’Hagan shows what the music interview genre could be like if both parties escaped from the usual paralyzing frameworks and made room for a rambling conversation that did not shy away from banal and philosophical details. . This volume in itself is a successful risk-taking in the era of concert films created by PR departments and musician interviews controlled to the extreme.
Nick Cave – Seán O’Hagan: Faith, Hope and Bloodshed
Translated by Róbert Németh
Helikon Publishing House, 2024, HUF 4999
