At the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among 20,000 people. Bizarrely, it was the first time I had ever been in the audience at such a large show, and I was stunned by the depth of love in the room: people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around. I was struck by the realization of just how powerful live music is — that a group of individuals can come together and concoct a sound unique to them, and that people can connect with that distinctive vision as if it were their own experience. I could feel its moral quality, how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness.

I engage in various spiritual activities — I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate — but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay. I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers — the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.

There is an unholy voice that every self-aware artist encounters at some point in their lives. The voice that whispers, “Am I good enough?” or, “Do I deserve to be here?” or, “What if people hate me?” — the voice that can ultimately lead to a state of paralysis. Yet, whether singer, artist, or otherwise, these are the demons we all must face. Whenever we take a risk in life, or do something that might set us apart, or draw the judgment of others, these crippling voices provoke a form of “stage fright” — a fear of existence, a fear of life itself. But, if you can summon the resolve to overcome these inner voices, you can conquer anything, and the world will lie trembling at your feet.

This is what the vast crowd at the O2 recognized: a band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism — the audacity to stand before the world and declare, “This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.” Perhaps understanding that we all fight battles within ourselves can help us feel less alone and encourage us to step onto that stage. I hope so.

***

This piece was originally published on The Red Hand Files. 

According to apocrypha and Christian folklore, the Roman centurion Longinus pierced Christ in the side with his spear during the Crucifixion. There are several versions of this. In almost all, he’s punished for his crime. In one, he is sentenced to eternal life, fated to wander the earth, reborn over and over, stuck in a helical loop, a universal soldier condemned to die in successive wars. This reincarnation myth made its way subliminally into fiction (Barry Sadler’s Casca series), music (Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman”) and cinema, in the form of Nick Cave’s script for his lamentably unfilmed sequel to Gladiator.

I first encountered Nick Cave through the medium of terror. At a young age my impressionable brain was inundated by orc metal, the sound of industrial accidents, and electronic plague dances. Most were too theatrical to be truly menacing but some got under the skin, to the extent I was compelled to hear them again.

Chief among them was “Tupelo” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I listened to it disturbed: a glorious moment of lightning-struck damnation. Describing the birth of Elvis Aaron Presley, alongside his still-born identical brother Jesse Garon Presley, it was an unholy chasm through which the night poured. I could barely piss straight with fear, and I’ve not stopped listening since.

Following the parting of Mick Harvey in 2009, the group changed their sound, embracing the absence. You can hear the space that had suddenly appeared and the unlikely influences that helped to fill it — electronic music, ambient drone.

“Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children,” Cave noted at the time, “then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat.” And these claims were not hyperbole. It required a different kind of listening, and there were fans who were left behind, preferring, to continue the threadbare metaphor, the feral street urchins of their earlier work.

The four albums that followed feel like a sequence or an era; cinematic, measured, atmospheric. Yet as Cave and Ellis continued, and the cruelties of fate took the heaviest of tolls, they changed again. The boundaries of songs began to blur into one another, verse/chorus/verse dissolved. The music felt more and more like painting. The moonless nocturne of Skeleton Tree. Or the vast Turneresque swirls and washes of Ghosteen.

Now Wild God, the new album, marks a new phase. It’s lush, built from vast walls of sound and sudden explosive choral crescendos. An album of the most extraordinary joy, it’s not a complete abandonment of the new or the old. Traces of both can be found throughout (the horses, myths, meta lyricism, Jubilee Street, an eye for the debauched) but the synthesis has resulted in a different creature, an album that feels blissfully out of time. The choirs, bells, crashing of cymbals, the hard-earned euphoria, feel antithetical to these days of lamentation and the gnashing of teeth.

The imagery of the title track feels like something bursting out of one of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ has an astonishingly wistful feel. At the other end of the spectrum, the finale of ‘Conversion’ is the band’s most intense climax since ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’ is a tribute to the late Anita Lane — once Cave’s partner in love and song — with lyrics free of piety but showing signs of the cloven-hooved Old Nick, proving the sacred and profane are never opposites but rather are wound around each other. ‘Frogs’ is open-hearted uplifting, filled with the sheer intoxication of life when faced with the smallest moments, a frog in a puddle “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” A triumphant cloudburst of a song.

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The production throughout feels like something beloved that’s been long-lost and recovered; Leonard Cohen Death of a Ladies’ Man with MDMA instead of barbiturates. The mood is one of escape but to escape you first need to recognise you’re confined.

The Bad Seeds have had their fair share of critical acclaim, yet in recent years an interesting development has taken place in the way Nick Cave is perceived and depicted. It centres around the idea that Cave has changed, become conservative, a God-botherer, betraying his earlier self. There’s a vague sense of disgrace in the air, quite different from the now-fashionable disgrace he cultivated as a young, shock-headed degenerate in Berlin in the early Eighties. The reasons can be guessed at — a typical sneering attitude towards success, a disdain for artists who are prolific or even just visible, a reaction against his role as agony uncle/psychopomp/semi-reluctant oracle of the internet in his stoical Red Hand Files. Yet there’s another deeper more reflective reason for the sense of casual disdain and it’s encapsulated in the album’s title.

Let’s consider that perhaps Nick Cave hasn’t changed at all, or at least not in the ways we’d like to think. A superficial reading of this would be to say that he has stayed still and the whole world has moved or slid. It’s a familiar claim, often voiced by tech bros claiming the Overton Window forced them to the Right when they’ve always been Liberal. The argument usually continues along the lines that all the pearl-clutching censorious Mary Whitehouse types on the Right, whom artists have had to battle for free expression are now to be found on the Left. The pendulum swings too far and if only we could get it to settle in the middle where the reasonable apolitical people are then everything would be hunky dory. Which of course is palpable bullshit.

Set aside the overly convenient dichotomy of Right and Left, and the comforting illusion of the Centre, and think instead in terms of orthodox and heterodox. The former always conforms, whatever the climate, however shameless. The latter didn’t fit then, doesn’t fit now and will never fit.

But the idea that Nick Cave’s religiosity is suddenly a problem or even a recent conversion is belied by most of his discography. In fact, it was those looming biblical shadows that first attracted me to his work and at times alienated me from it. Now a recovering Catholic, I was educated in schools run by nuns and priests and repeatedly locked horns with them. At the time, the church was infallible, hardly bothering to conceal its horrendous crimes against women and children in Ireland and beyond. It wasn’t just taboo to raise issues of abuse, homophobia, hypocrisy etc. It was forbidden to ask questions. I would ask the priests questions about the strange, puzzling details I’d chanced upon in the stories and language of the King James Bible and was completely unprepared for the hostility such enquiries would ignite. I realise now it was simply a case of orthodoxy. Questions, any sign of curiosity, were a threat to dogma. The Christian flock was not supposed to bleat, even if some had got wind of the slaughterhouse.

From the beginning, the Bad Seeds lyrics were steeped in that misty Jacobean version of the Bible. It was there in their album titles — Kicking Against the Pricks, The Good Son — and in countless songs. For every murder ballad, a spiritual. It’s even there in their name, with the Bad Seeds originating in the Good Book. This was a rich mine, and what was salvaged could be adapted in surprising subversive ways. When he used Jesus or God, at times he might just as well be singing about drugs, sex, pain, or love and its catastrophes. The themes allowed for the illumination of life at its most wretched and beautiful. It’s almost animist at heart but fed through Christian iconography – the thorns and the waves and the errant stars.

Witnessing the unfolding church scandals and how those who’d spoken out publicly like Sinéad O’Connor were made into scapegoats or sineaters, I gradually transformed into a righteous little bastard or to put it another way an evangelising atheist. Twenty years ago, I saw the Bad Seeds on their incendiary Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus and left in a state of shock, such was their energy and charisma. Yet I felt a nagging reluctance in my heart. Cave’s brilliant, frenzied tent revivalist/snake handler/faith healer performance set off alarm bells. Having escaped one cult, albeit a very powerful 2,000-year-old one, I was overly cautious about signing up for another.

Eventually, I realised there was a reactionary mirroring quality to atheism, where you could become as self-righteous and rigid as your enemy, defined and controlled by a form of negation. Mainly, I was turned off by the joyless tiresomeness of some of its primary advocates. I also had not suffered quite enough to be relieved of certain egocentric illusions. I had not yet come to know the things you don’t want are the things that give your life real knowledge — grief, heartbreak, illness, estrangement and exile. But where do you go when you begin to doubt your own doubt?

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It turns out Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were already there. The religiosity in the songs was built from doubt, suffering, absurdity, closer to Dostoevsky or existentialism than tele-evangelism. We are in the eternal, the songs tell us, every little moment, and life and death are in here with us. Wild God feels like an opening and a radical one, given the constriction we’re increasingly subject to. How narrow, for instance, to think that writing about religious themes shackles you to the moribund, slowly sinking religious establishment, discarding the realms that Cave has tapped into.

Certainty is a curse, damaging for activists, and fatal for artists. Cave gets it. There are wry lines, wrapped in enigmas in Wild God, “Who are these gods that you now defend? / And what purpose do they serve now at the end of time?” He replies not with apologetic laments or millenarian doom but with perfect inarguable euphoria. With the ecstatic doubt evident in the title track, whether the lead character is a soaring deity or just an old man in a retirement village propelling through his memory.

I still don’t believe in God, and I loathe the Church, and though I may be dumb, I am not dumb enough to deny I’m a Catholic writer. Whether the heavens are empty or not, I was permanently moulded by Jesuits. The hints were there, though it took me a while to recognise the compulsions. The countless pilgrimages. The need for rituals. The love for iconography and disdain for those who know only how to dismantle and not how to build. Listening to this cathartic album, it started to occur to me that maybe I’d got Longinus wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t have been a soldier after all. Maybe this cursed fallen figure should have been an artist. One who wanders, not smug and privileged in their certainty, not wielding belief or unbelief in order to judge or cudgel others, not resolving anything except for the small but significant consolation that some other poor wild bastard is out in the storm-beaten night with us all, bearing a lantern and somehow singing a song of joy.

But Rothenberg’s most enduring contribution would come a decade later, after a fairly radical shift from modernism to the new project of “ethnopoetics”. This shift led him to work in the vein of the anthologist, notably while compiling his Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania (1968), collecting and sharing the work of poetic traditions from around the world, rather than centring his own “sole-author” work as a poet. But the line is never so clear, and in hindsight it seems reasonable to suppose that Rothenberg’s anthological work is itself a variety of poiesis, by which he transmits to the attention of English-language readers a vastly deeper and more vital sense of what poetry might be, and of what poetry long was, than the one we got stuck with in the modern period.

What we call “poetry” today is mostly an etiolated art form, a vestige of something that in its more archaic expressions does a great deal more — does everything, in fact. Poetry, for much of human history, was not words on a page, for there were no pages, and words were not conceived as having a visible dimension at all. Nor was poetry just spoken words, but rather these words were one component of a total artistic form that also included motion, gesture, and, often, rhythm and melody. Its purpose was to realign the human with the cosmic, to affirm the embeddedness of our mundane earthly experience within a vastly larger order that also includes the animals, the elements, the heavens, the ancestors, and the gods.

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The ultimate dismantling of this total art form has occurred in lockstep with the professionalisation of the scientific disciplines and with the process of secularisation over the past several centuries. Yet even in its reduced modern form, one of the things poetry still commonly aspires to do, as best it can, is to tap into the sense of the sacred — even if its creators often do so without any overt commitment to the reality of the realms their artistic sense moves them to explore.

I have for some years been working on a translation of the Siberian Sakha-language oral-epic tradition known as Olonkho. Throughout this work, for a long time, though I was becoming quite adept at simulating Sakha meter and metaphor in English, I did not think of myself as a poet. Jerry Rothenberg convinced me I was mistaken about myself. Some poets draw their material from dreams, some from childhood memories, and others from love or politics. Some poets get their source material directly from other poets working in other linguistic realities.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these realities are just linguistic. For in fact the language of poetry, perhaps especially of “archaic” poetry, is typically condensed out of the entire lived translinguistic reality of the bard who channels it, and to try to reconstruct that reality in another language as if it were entirely constituted from words is to misrepresent (perhaps inevitably) the original work. For this reason, Rothenberg advocates, and practices, what he calls “total translation”: the rendering, in graphic form, of every possible element of another culture’s poetic traditions, including those elements that we do not ordinarily understand as linguistic. What results is also a pale shadow of the original, but it is at least a pale shadow that acknowledges what it is, and that points to everything our secular, textual, and de-ritualised poetry can typically no longer do.

One way of continuing to do these things today is by leaving poetry in our narrow sense behind, and pursuing the sort of performance that we today call “music”, even if archaically this too would have been conceptualised as the work of the poet. Rothenberg has himself consistently blurred the line between recitation and performance. One of the staples of his public appearances over the years has been a chant he learned among the Seneca people in Upstate New York in the Seventies, with a single line uttered in trance-like Sprechgesang — “The animals are coming” — followed by an uncannily realistic impersonation of what sounds like a bear. Many of the younger people in his audiences would likely take issue with the “appropriative” quality of this performance, were it not so compelling, were they not so undeniably in the presence — though such things are generally supposed not to happen anymore — of an old man who has just turned into a wild animal.

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Such transformation as this is among the potentials of “archaic” poetry — poetry conceived as a total art form whose purest expression is ritual — unlike what we might ordinarily expect from a recitation of the work of, say, Robert Frost. Such transformation, or something like it, is also possible through a sufficiently vibrant performance in the humble genre of the rock song, and indeed a number of this genre’s familiar names (Warren Zevon, Eddie Vedder), have, over the years, drawn inspiration from Rothenberg’s work. But surely no singer-songwriter’s oeuvre is more overtly indebted to the American poet than that of Nick Cave.

I’ve been listening to Nick Cave for about 35 years, and I have long seen him as one of the few singer-songwriters currently working whose lyrics deserve attention in their own right. But it was only when I happened to learn of our shared admiration for Jerry Rothenberg’s work that I began to see Nick’s lyrical sensibility as distinctly “Rothenbergian”. It dawned on me that Nick might have a greater claim than Jerry to be in the business of creating total works of art out of the “starter culture” of poetry.

That is, Nick generates poetic lyrical ideas, but he doesn’t stop with these. He puts them to music, and then he unfolds them in performances that have, perhaps increasingly in his “late style”, the character of ritual. He appears, in fact, increasingly committed to leading and facilitating some kind of collective transformation. He’s bringing us back to church, like it or not, or perhaps to the liminal place beside the fire in the night where strange and diurnally unfathomable transformations occur.

The brilliant Mexican poet and critic Heriberto Yépez, co-editor of Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013), sharply observes that “[p]ure Myth cannot exist in a world after Hollywood, nor can the shaman holistically heal because he or she is historically wounded”. Both Jerry and Nick have fully reckoned with this heavy truth of our current condition, and have succeeded in cutting their shamanic potencies with the irony and humour that are the lingua franca of our secular age. Yet for them, this is never a dilution or a compromise, but only a demonstration of their mastery of the idiom of their time and place, their commitment to being “of the world”, and of their moment, even if the aspiration of all poetry is towards the eternal.

Thus does Nick excel in the art of the juxtaposition, the mixture of registers that would be straightforwardly comical if it were not so often poignant, as in 2001’s “Darker with the Day”: “My father sits slumped in the deepening snow / As I search in and out, above, about, and below”; or in 2008’s “More News from Nowhere”: “He asks me for my autograph / I write ‘nobody’ and then / I wrap myself up in my woolly coat / and I blind him with my pen.” Again and again, Nick conjures an image from his internal world — a memory of his long-deceased father, a more recent memory of dealing with needy fans — and then projects it into the eternal mythological register of a Rumi or a Homer.

Jerry’s poetic voice is equally compelling in A Big Jewish Book, where he sought to demonstrate why it is that “after Auschwitz there is only poetry” (my emphasis). This stark reversal of Adorno’s grim formula, I believe, has something to do with Jerry’s awareness, which cannot but assert itself after any honest engagement with “archaic” poetry of the sort anthologised in Technicians of the Sacred, that the primary function of poetry for most of human history has been one of processing or managing the unceasing violence of our lived reality.

This thesis is certainly not original with me. The great Austrian classicist Walter Burkert famously speculated that the origins of human culture lie in expiation rituals meant to counteract the cosmic taint that comes with shedding the blood of animals in hunting. Much archaic poetry seems surprisingly hung up on such vivid phenomena as the sight of a deer’s viscera pouring from its underbelly when it is cut open by the knife of a hunter. Why dwell on such things? Perhaps because violence necessitates poetry; or, to put it the other way around, poetry, properly understood, concerns itself above all with violence.

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“I think on the most fundamental level he introduced me to primitive poetry,” Nick told me on the phone from London earlier this year. “I think there was a change in my writing, I can’t really pinpoint it, but I have a feeling that it coincided with me reading Technicians of the Sacred.” It is in the encounter with this anthology, too, that Nick experiences the complicated homecoming every truth-seeking colonial son must face sooner or later: “In Technicians of the Sacred, to my shame, I read my first Indigenous poetry. Even though I’m Australian, I hadn’t really read any of it.”

He recalls the excitement of discovering a new sort of poetry that was “a little violent, deeply surreal, and sexual, and also non-ironic, that was explicitly designed for ritual, and prayers, and transformation, and these sorts of things, which were really very much looked down upon by much of the modern poetry that I would read. I mean the anti-spiritual, ironic modern poetry.”

The poems in Technicians of the Sacred, Nick recollects, “reminded me of the Psalms themselves. They were these religious poems, shall we say, or spiritual or ritual poems, that were deeply violent and at the same time songs of praise, and I think that fed into something that I was blindly reaching around for… an extraordinary enmeshment of style and time, and [of] the mundane and the cosmic… It just blew my mind.” He pauses. “I mean, it’s like the fundamental… the fundamental violence of things.”

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Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen. “I keep saying to my wife,” Nick tells me, “that these songs are small, unimpressive autobiographies kind of wrapped up in heroic myths, and religious writing, and wild surrealism.” He continues: “Even though I might be seeing cosmically, [the songs] are rooted in the very most fundamental and mundane events in my rather boring life. And maybe that’s what writers mostly have to do anyway. They just sit. They don’t do anything. Most of us don’t do anything.”

The great Norman O. Brown, author of Life against Death (1959) and coiner of the term “polymorphous perversity”, was himself a famously uxorious homebody. Brown insisted in interviews that there was no contradiction here, that thanks to the liveliness of his imagination, he was able to indulge all his transgressive impulses without so much as getting up from his desk. And this is what the censorious prudes of Left and Right consistently miss about the place of violence in art: it is not a “gateway” to the real thing, nor an approval of human suffering. It is rather a lucid recognition of the fundamental violence of things — even if, per impossibile, we were to render all human beings docile, we would still be getting constantly slammed by nature — and of the deep human need to come to terms with this condition through the free play of the imagination.

We’re older now, and the light is dim. Nick Cave has done much to orient me in the world, and to give expression to my own aesthetic sensibility. In the Eighties this sensibility was, or seemed to be, fundamentally exclusionary: it was all about carving out a narrow territory of style and attitude and despising everything else. In our late dim light, by contrast, we seem to have grown far more capacious, far more generous.

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This generosity, too, it seems to me, is Rothenbergian in spirit. It has to do, I think, with a recognition of one’s place in the long chain of a tradition, which is another way of saying recognition of one’s debt to the ancestors, so that one can only approach creative work with humility and awe. We see this again and again in Nick’s willing adoption of the role of the apprentice, to sing a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Leonard Cohen or Bertolt Brecht, without any concern to outdo the masters, but only, it seems, to experience the joy of channelling them.

Because this tradition is a mythopoetic one, the spirit channelled through its apostles takes account of the full range of human experience, and therefore often turns violent. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ landmark 1995 album, Murder Ballads, channels violence in its purest form, and perhaps gives us the nec plus ultra of homicidal ideation in its rendition of the blues classic “Stagger Lee”. Would Nick really crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole? Probably not, but that is a philistine question. The faculty of the imagination is not the same thing as the will, and what an artist is channelling under the spell of mythopoetic violence is not an action plan, a manifesto or a credo, but a complete picture of human life. This is a picture that traditional and popular art forms, notably Delta blues, have excelled in capturing, in contrast with profit-driven and algorithmically optimised commercial entertainments, which unsurprisingly veer towards a conception of art as handmaiden of conventional morality and thus as appropriately inhabiting only a very limited range of possible human perspectives.

That Nick has not sought to live down any of his decades-old “excesses”, but has only kept refining them into an even purer distillation of violence (“Stagger Lee” remains a staple of his performances) is a testament to his mature inhabitation of the role of mythopoetic bard and of transgenerational mediator of tradition. In a personal sense, he seems only to grow more gentle; I’ve watched a number of tense early interviews with him, and these are a universe away from the amicable and kind spirit he maintains in interaction with strangers today, at least some of whom must objectively be quite dull. On the fence about Christianity for many years, and as far as I know resigned to some permanent condition of agnosticism, Nick has for all that arrived at Christianity’s ethical core, where loving the stranger obviates any perceived need to fix your beliefs, since this love is itself a “proof” of the reality of the divine. And yet through all this moral growth Nick just keeps putting holes in Billy Dilly’s motherfucking head, night after night, year after year. This is good for his art, of course, but it is also, if violence must exist, a pretty good way of dispatching it, through sublimation, from our own midst.

There are precious few graceful old rock stars out there, and to become one seems to me almost the same thing as transcending the limitations of the genre. In Nick’s case, I think this apparent transcendence has something to do with his positioning of himself, by design or by instinct, in the lineage of the poets — and with his understanding, no doubt helped by his discovery of Jerry Rothenberg’s work, that poetry properly understood is the total art form, from which all the other modern art forms have been parted out. It is the art form that reckons with the violence of things, and continually sets our broken world back in order again.

Nick Cave: I do have certain memories of the night Arthur died. Yet when I try to recall what happened after that night, it’s almost like there is a rupture that time and memory poured itself into. Everything disappears.

Seán O’Hagan: People tend not to want to revisit the moment of the actual trauma itself — and probably for good reason. Are you sure you even want to talk about this stuff?

NC: Fuck, I don’t know, Seán. I’m just kind of mystified by how little I remember, just how much I have forgotten.

I remember I was watching TV, and Arthur rings me, and I answer, but it’s not Arthur; it’s a stranger who had found his phone and his rucksack and shoes in a field near the black windmill outside Brighton. The stranger also says that there is police activity at the cliff near the windmill. Then there is this sudden roaring panic, and we are calling 999. Asking the operator what is happening at the cliffs! The police won’t tell us anything.

Then the police come to the house. My wife Susie and I standing on the doorstep, seeing the police car pull up, and the detectives stepping out and walking towards us with their composed faces, and us just knowing. The cops standing in the kitchen and telling us the news — our boy has fallen off the cliff, his body is in the hospital, he is dead, and my head starts roaring the loudest noise in the world…

SOH: I don’t know what to say, Nick. I just can’t imagine . . .

NC: I don’t remember much after that, for quite a while. Mostly, I just recall sitting on the back step of the house away from everyone and smoking and feeling the roaring body shock of it, like this alien force was going to burst out the ends of my fucking fingers. I remember feeling like I was physically detonating, like if I made any sudden moves I’d literally explode, so stuffed was my body with despair. And then sitting next to the bed, with Susie lying completely still in the dark, like a stone, her eyes closed, and saying, “I am here, babe, I’m here,” but really I’m not, I’m not there at all, I’m in a million fucking pieces, everywhere else, all over the place.

SOH: Were you angry at the world after Arthur died?

NC: No, I was in despair. I don’t think anger was part of it. Not for me, although who knows what boils away inside us. Susie, of course, entered a circle of hell that is reserved solely for mothers who lose their children. It’s a whole other level of loss and suffering, a terrible, terrible thing to happen to anyone. There are all sorts of feelings tied up in it, guilt and shame and self-loathing so primal, yet so complex, they are near impossible to unravel. We don’t have the language for it. Or maybe language itself is not up to the task. Perhaps the cultures that encourage people to dress in black and just wail, maybe that is the most articulate response.

I remember, in desperation, reaching across and taking Susie’s hand and feeling the shock of that same violent electricity in her hand. It was so physical. That physical affliction is not often talked about, as far as I can see. We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body. So much so that it can feel terminal.

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***

SOH: Nothing prepares you for it. It’s tidal and it can be capsizing.

NC: That’s a good word for it — “capsizing”. But it is important to say that these feelings I am describing, this point of absolute annihilation, is not exceptional. In fact it is ordinary. We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time — that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief.

It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation where someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really — to die in a way and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex reordering of ourselves.

SOH: When you are deep in grief, there’s no real comfort to be had in people constantly telling you that time will make things better. But I distinctly remember waking up one morning, having finally had a decent night’s sleep, and thinking, it’s going to be okay. There was a sense that something had shifted imperceptibility. Did that happen to you?

NC: At first there was nothing but darkness, but, over time, Susie and I started to experience something like small fragments of light. These points of light were essentially thoughtful gestures from the people we encountered. We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naïve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all — in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared.

Grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive.

Arthur’s death literally changed everything for me. Absolutely everything. It made me a religious person. I am not talking about being a traditional Christian. I am not even talking about a belief in God, necessarily. It made me a religious person in the sense that I felt, on a profound level, a deep inclusion in the human predicament, and an understanding of our vulnerability and the sense that, as individuals, we are, each of us, imperilled. Each life is precarious, and some of us understand it and some don’t. I became a person after my son died.

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***

SOH: Back in your younger, wilder days, when you drew on biblical imagery as a source for your songwriting, was that also a reflection of a deeper interest in the divine?

NC: Even in the most chaotic times, when I was struggling with addiction, I always had a kind of spiritual envy, a longing for belief in the face of the impossibility of belief that addressed a fundamental emptiness inside me. I might wake in my hotel room surrounded by the detritus of a heavy night on the road — empty bottles, drug paraphernalia, maybe a stranger in my bed, all that kind of shit, but also an opened copy of the Gideon’s Bible with passages underlined.

After Arthur died, the world seemed to vibrate with a peculiar, spiritual energy. I was genuinely surprised by how susceptible I became to a kind of magical thinking. How readily I dispensed with that wholly rational part of my mind and how comforting it was to do so. Now, that may well be a strategy for survival and, as such, a part of the ordinary mechanics of grief, but it is something that persists to this day. Perhaps it is a kind of delusion, I don’t know, but if it is, it is a necessary and benevolent one.

SOH: If so, that kind of magical thinking is a strategy for survival that a lot of people use. Some sceptics might say it is the very basis of religious belief.

NC: Yes. Some see it as the lie at the heart of religion, but I tend to think it is the much-needed utility of religion. And the lie — if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood — is, in some way, irrelevant. Sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying — all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Those who discount them as falsities or superstitious nonsense, or worse, a collective mental feebleness, are made of sterner stuff than me. I grabbed at anything I could get my hands on and, since doing so, I’ve never let them go.

SOH: I have to say that I am slightly in awe of other people’s devotion. When I go into an empty church, it always feels meaningful somehow — and vulnerable — to just linger there for a moment or so. Do you know Larkin’s poem, “Church Going”, which touches on that very thing?

NC: Yes! “A serious house on serious earth it is.” And yes, there’s something about being open and vulnerable that is conversely very powerful, maybe even transformative.

For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom.

SOH: The two are connected, maybe — vulnerability and freedom.

NC: I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.

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****

SOH: It may be that the most meaningful things are the most difficult to explain.

NC: I do think the rational aspect of ourselves is a beautiful and necessary thing, of course, but often its inflexible nature can render these small gestures of hope merely fanciful. There is a kind of gentle scepticism that makes belief stronger rather than weaker. In fact, it can be the forge on which a more robust belief can be hammered out.

SOH: It’s intrinsically human to doubt, though, don’t you think?

NC: The rigid and self-righteous certainty of some religious people — and some atheists, for that matter — is something I find disagreeable. The hubris of it. The sanctimoniousness. It leaves me cold. The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority. The belligerent dogmatism of the current cultural moment is a case in point. A bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.

SOH: So, just to make sure I’ve got this right: you would like to get past your doubt and just believe wholeheartedly in God, but your rational self is telling you otherwise.

NC: Things happen in your life, terrible things, great obliterating events, where the need for spiritual consolation can be immense, and your sense of what is rational is less coherent and can suddenly find itself on very shaky ground. I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own scepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.

When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself.

I think the only way I can fully give myself over to the idea of God is to have the room to question. To me, the great gift of God is that He provides us with the space to doubt. For me at least, doubt becomes the energy of belief.

SOH: That’s fair enough, I guess, but it’s starting from the premise that God exists and allows us to doubt, which an atheist would argue is essentially flawed logic.What would you say to that?

NC: Well, Seán, since when has belief in God had anything to do with logic? For me, it is the unreasonableness of the notion, its counterfactual aspect, that makes the experience of belief compelling. I find that leaning into these intimations of the divine, that for me do exist, as subtle, softly spoken and momentary as they may be, expands my relationship with the world — especially creatively. Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical.

There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence. I see this as a sort of affliction that is, in part, to do with the increasingly secular nature of our society. There’s an attempt to find meaning in places where it is ultimately unsustainable — in politics, identity and so on.

SOH: But, hang on, are you saying atheism — or secularism — is an affliction? And that you equate it with cynicism? I mean, come on, non-believers can have a sense of wonder at the world — with nature, the universe, with the wonders of science, philosophy and even the everyday.

NC: I am not saying secularism is an affliction in itself. I just don’t think it has done a very good job of addressing the questions that religion is well practised at answering.

SOH: What kinds of questions, in particular, would you say religion is more adept at answering?

NC: Religion deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. The upshot of that is a kind of callousness towards humanity in general, or so it seems to me. And I think callousness comes out of a feeling of aloneness, people feeling adrift or separated from the world. In a way, they look for religion — and meaning — elsewhere. And increasingly they are finding it in tribalism and the politics of division.

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SOH: The decline of organised religion may be one reason for that, but there are others, of course, social and political.

Whatever you think about the decline of organised religion — and I do accept that religion has a lot to answer for — it took with it a regard for the sacredness of things, for the value of humanity, in and of itself. This regard is rooted in a humility towards one’s place within the world — an understanding of our flawed nature. We are losing that understanding, as far as I can see, and it’s often being replaced by self-righteousness and hostility. There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence.

Well, I love this world — with all its joys and its vast goodness, its civility and complete and utter lack of it, its brilliance and its absurdity. I love it all, and the people in it, all of them. I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess. I have no time for negativity, cynicism or blame. In that regard, Seán, I feel as if I am completely and hopelessly out of time.

I don’t know how to exactly say this, and please don’t misunderstand it, but since Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me. This is Arthur’s gift to me, one of the many. It is his munificence that’s made me a different person. I say all this with huge caution and a million caveats, but I also say it because there are those who think there is no way back from the catastrophic event. That they will never laugh again. But there is, and they will.

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan is published by Canongate

Earlier in the summer I saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park and that was a good night out but nobody in their right mind would claim that the Stones are better now than they were in 1969 or 1973. Yet the best time to see the Bad Seeds, who formed in 1983, is right now. Though Cave is about to turn 65, the refinement of his craft has required no ebbing of conviction. When he inhabits a murderer on Death Row in “The Mercy Seat”, or a mad prophet retelling the birth of Elvis Presley in “Tupelo”, he still goes all in. The quasi-industrial brutality of “From Her to Eternity” is as persuasive as the naked pleading of “I Need You”. When I went back to the studio versions over the following days, I found them somehow lacking by comparison. Between songs, Cave radiated warmth and good humour. Most frontmen pick a moment to commune with the crowd from the edge of the stage but I suspect Cave could have happily spent the whole show down there, arms outstretched.

Until I read Cave’s new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, I found it hard to put my finger on why the Bad Seeds have become so much more potent and popular in recent years. Their only Top 20 entry is “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, a 1995 duet with Kylie Minogue. Two of their most popular songs on Spotify, “Red Right Hand” and “O Children”, owe their position to appearances in Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter. Many of their live highlights weren’t even singles, let alone hits. Since the creative nadir of Nocturama in 2003, the Bad Seeds have enjoyed a series of rebirths: the explosive maximalism of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, the slower, subtler Push the Sky Away and the lambent prayers of Ghosteen.

That last transformation was enforced. Seven years ago, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near Brighton. Cave’s grief was etched into Ghosteen and its predecessor Skeleton Tree, the making of which was chronicled in Andrew Dominik’s gently shattering 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling. This incomprehensible tragedy suddenly became the signal fact of Cave’s life. “The loss of my son defines me,” he says in the book.

After a period of necessary privacy, Cave chose to make his grieving public. In 2018 he started answering questions from fans on his website under the name “The Red Hand Files” and on the road with his “Nick Cave in Conversation” events: an experiment in radical transparency and fostering a community of the bereaved. The first entry in The Red Hand Files was about how he resumed songwriting after tragedy. “Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder,” he wrote. “Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.” His lifelines were “work and community” — a means of connecting with the suffering of others in order to feel less alone.

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As you can tell, Cave is one hell of a writer. As the author of countless spectacular lyrics, two novels, an epic poem and an unproduced screenplay (a berserk take on a Gladiator sequel), he could surely write a classic memoir but Faith, Hope and Carnage is something else: a series of conversations with his friend Seán O’Hagan, an Observer journalist. Kudos to O’Hagan for having the idea and Cave for running it because it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book. An alternative title might be God, Grief and Art.

Cave may claim to hate interviews but he is a miraculously fluent talker, incapable of a dull line. Many of the sentences have an aphoristic punch. Creating art is “the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense”. Hope is “optimism with a broken heart”. Twitter is “just a factory that churns out arseholes”. On lyrics: “A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow after repeated singing; a truthful line collects meaning.” On death: “If you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it.”

Cave’s songs have always been saturated with religious imagery and language — first the Old Testament, later the New — but it was never clear how much of a believer he was. Now, he says, he is emphatically religious in the sense of feeling a “deep inclusion in the human predicament”. That sounds just like Leonard Cohen, another great songwriter whose wisdom derived from an idiosyncratic relationship with the divine and an underrated sense of humour. To call this a self-help book would horrify everyone involved but I suspect many readers will find it useful, especially those who have known catastrophic grief.

Cave describes the loss of his son as nothing less than an annihilation of the self. He has been broken to pieces and remade — born again, you might say. His songwriting, too, has required reassembly. He considers Skeleton Tree, mostly written before Arthur’s death but recorded afterwards, as an “unholy” record which he struggles to revisit. But making Ghosteen, via long improvisatory sessions with Ellis, was a “holy” experience in which his son’s spirit felt literally present. “Arthur was snatched away, he just disappeared, and this felt like some way of making contact again and saying goodbye,” Cave says. Over the course of these conversations, which began with lockdown in March 2020, there are other losses: his mother Dawn, his ex-lover Anita Lane, his friend Hal Willner and, most recently, his oldest son Jethro. Covid-19 gives the book an eerie backbeat.

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O’Hagan is a sensitive interviewer — really more of a conversationalist. Cave says that he finds relating his own history “unbearable, mostly”. What’s more, it feels to him like someone else’s life — that of a man who had not yet lost his son. So why look back?

Still, O’Hagan occasionally manages to lure Cave into the past. His idyllic, outdoorsy childhood in Wangaratta, Australia, gave way to a delinquent adolescence, which was blown apart by the death of his father, a teacher of literature, in a car accident when Cave was 19. He was already taking heroin, an addiction that he relates, perhaps surprisingly, to a conservative need for routine rather than the thirst for chaos that animated his music for many years. After the hellfire post-punk of the Birthday Party came the Bad Seeds. Cave remarks that Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, band mainstays from the beginning until the 2000s, were domineering personalities like himself. “The potential for disharmony is enormous! It’s like having Hitler, Stalin and fucking Mao Zedong trying to make a record together.” Warren Ellis, who joined in 1997, is more like a brother: an equal partner in the studio and a remarkable friend. On the topic of friendship, Cave’s affection for Coldplay’s Chris Martin is delightfully unexpected. “Obviously, there’s a fair amount of daylight between the kinds of music we play, but who fucking cares? I have always been drawn to his generosity of spirit, his engagement with the world.”

When he was younger, Cave thinks, he had too much disdain for the world. Now it inspires awe. He cherishes humility, mercy and mystery; he loathes dogma, cynicism and the morally obvious. He is therefore stronger than most on the subject of cancel culture, to which his objection is more personal than political. He recoils from the punitive impulse; the failure of empathy and forgiveness. I would argue that forgiveness needs to be sought and earned but I think he’s right to say that the online ritual of denunciation can be merely “a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue”. I hope this section doesn’t get clickbaited as “Cave slams cancel culture!” because it’s more about the particular view of human nature that he has arrived at: “I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering.”

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The context is obvious. Towards the end of the book, Cave finally talks about the night of Arthur’s death, and how he and his “astonishing and oceanic” wife Susie negotiated the immediate aftermath. Hard to read, it must have been infinitely harder to speak, but emotional availability is essential to everything he does now. The most common question submitted to The Red Hand Files, apparently, is “Does it ever get better?” To which Cave can now reply: “The answer is yes. We become different. We become better.” Instead of being diminished by loss, he has been enlarged. “I became a person after my son died” is a startling line.

It is impossible to overstate how unusual it is to find this depth of self-analysis and wisdom from a rock musician. Faith, Hope and Carnage makes most rock memoirs look like skips full of rusty anecdotes and grudges. Among other things, the book finally helped me understand why Cave and the Bad Seeds keep getting better. Cave’s growing hunger for “communal awe” makes the shows feel genuinely necessary. And he believes himself to be a more generous and expansive person than he was before, so he has more to give.

“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around,” he tells O’Hagan. “Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is.” He knows now.