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29:35But it hadn't really had impact in our music. Things were happening very fast. And weirdly enough, we were wanting to play hard music, but then very quickly this thing called Power Pop happened, right? Do you remember that? Yeah, like bus cuts, right? Yeah, whatever. And suddenly Gdinsky and these characters heard that punk was out and power pop was in. I mean, this was kind of absurd as the whole thing was. We were brought into Barry Earl's office and he's like, gentlemen, you know, punks out, power pops in and he had all these sketches of the clothes he wanted us to wear, you know, and like Tracy Pugh was supposed to wear a kind of leopard skin tights and I had this and that was the point where we just sort of walked out in despair.

30:27But we got put into the studio at this time with a guy from Ernest Stranding Band called Skyhooks, Greg McKinch and his brief was to turn us into a pop band. And so we recorded half the first boys next door record in that way. And part of that was to double up all my vocals like, don't you get whatever, I don't know what, what the reason for doing that is, you might know that. It makes it more about the melody than the words. Okay. Okay. Well, so if you listen to some, we had a song called masturbation generation. If you listen to that, it's kind of who says that? I'm living in it. It's like that.

31:11And I remember having to sing that so I could copy it and stuff like it was a complete joke. Right. How old were you at that time? God. I don't know like 18 or something. I don't know. But there was another band that was going around that had this this guitarist in it, Roland Howard. And he was like an amazingly interesting, inventive brilliant musician who had an idea of his sound. He had an actual idea. I mean, he was like one of these people that had dropped from Mars who just like let the Ramones or something like that that just appeared complete in every possible way. He was like that. He knew exactly who he liked and who he didn't like.

31:59And we brought him into the boys next door and he changed the fortune of the boy. So he changed the sound dramatically, turned us from a kind of middling, confused band into something that was starting to make interesting music. And then we became the birthday party, same members, but we just changed our name when we left Australia and went to London. And he brought a kind of you can hear it on the record. The first half of the record, first side of the record is without him the second side is with him and it's a whole different ballgame. So tell me about the first trip to London. What was the experience like?

32:37Had you ever left Australia before? No, no, no. We, we, not even personally. I don't mean with the band. Had you ever been out of Australia? No, no. No, no. Never been out of Australia. But we were music nuts, you know. And we would get the enemy in Australia and sounds. And we would literally sit around and look at the back pages and see the bands that were on and think, my God, if we lived in London, we could go and see, you know, teardrop explodes tonight and then the next night, why he's and then it was just like, we couldn't believe what this place offered and how fucking dead Australia was.

33:18And so all we wanted to do was get out of Australia and get to London and just be part of something, you know. And eventually we are manager at the time, managed to get enough money together to get us all over there. And we had no idea what it would be like. You know, we just, it was unbelievably disappointing to us. Really? Partly because I think by the time the enemy got to Australia, it took three or four months in the ship to get it to get it over there. There was that. So everything had already kind of happened. That's quite a long time in music at that time. And all these bands that we thought we had their records, we thought we're going to be like the most insane things you could imagine were in fact live just boring as shit.

34:16They were kind of toe gazing sort of all that punk energy had dissipated into something that was self -serving and kind of pompous. And all of that sort of stuff that punk rock was supposed to have gotten rid of. There was just a kind of self -satisfied feeling about the music. And I think it was that we went to a few gigs early on where we saw bands that we just loved but we didn't like live or the way they were live. And then we saw the cramps which was a completely different thing all together. And you know, and I think there was a sort of combination of that that just pointed us in the right direction.

35:06And we were very different than the cramps and the cramps were essentially fun. We were jaded, disgusted and completely out of step with everything else that was going on in London at the time. We were seen in that way. We were. And that's still the birthday party came about that we started to do concerts that were manifestations of our disgust for Britain and for the world at large, shall we say. And those concerts sort of gain traction and we got our audience and people started to come along and there was just this this thing started to happen between our band and the audience. And it's very indicative actually of myself and the way I am and the way I continue to be is that my energy comes from the audience.

36:13It doesn't come from the social problems of the world. It is a direct thing between me and my audience. However that may play itself out. In the birthday party it was one of aggression and and kind of a contempt for the audience which was we were young and that's the way it was. And I think now it's a feeling of great love for the audience regardless of the sort of political world that we live in. This is the primary function of my music is to create whether it was with the birthday party. It's the same thing or what I do now, a transcendent experience within the small remit of the energy of our immediate task which is to play the concert.

37:11So we're not operating. It's quite important point this that we're not operating outside of that. When we came to London everyone was the whole of our contemporaries, the whole of the bands, the whole of the young people. We're all in a thing about thatcher and all of this sort of stuff. This was what animated everybody. The disastrous politics of it's of the time. And we had no understanding in a way or interest in speaking into that at all. We were much more concerned with chaos rather than say anarchy. We were not fighting the system. We were fighting it was an internal struggle and I think that remains the same.

38:04To understand what I'm talking about. Absolutely. And coming from where I came from, yours felt more honest. So when punk rock happened in England and then the hardcore scene happened in the US following that, most of the bands were singing about like class or things that had nothing to do with our lives, but just aping what they had heard the English band sing about. And it made no sense. What I loved about your band and minor threat was another band. It was political in a personal way, not in a political commentary way. And it felt real.

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40:00I was lucky enough to see the birthday party play in New York. There was a club called the Underground. I think I was one of eight or ten people in the room. Yeah, okay, that was the first time we went. And I remember the promoter whose name was Jim Ferrat was standing on the side of the stage watching. Yeah, there was like eight eight people. Yeah, I was one of those. No way. Really? And I think you've got to play a song and a half. That's right. I remember that question. I remember Jim Ferrat pulled the plug and the show was over. Yeah, he, we thought he were a different band or the venue had changed or something like that.

40:38And they still had this band who had to play. And he gave us a song. And I think we did a song. And I think he gave us one more song, which was we did a version of King Inc. I think a super long version of King Inc. That was quite something. I remember that. I remember getting down in the audience and I think I had this sort of sort of throttling some audience member with the Mike lead. And I mean, it was just it all just went a little too far. The first thing that happened really. That's so funny. You were there. I was there. When you came out, you pushed all of the monitors off the stage was how it started.

41:17Right. And then it went downhill from there. But it was fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that got around and the next one was cancelled and this sort of stuff happened. But that music was an attempt to sort of articulate a personal chaos that was existential. You know, it wasn't political. Well, it was political in a personal way, like you're saying. And that's really that that's just informed what I've done throughout. It's not that I'm not, I don't want my music to be political or whatever. It's just that it's not a concern of my. It's not a honest concern. It's not what drives me. No, I'm happy for that.

42:03I feel like some artist feel an obligation to do that and it really gets in the way of the purity of the art. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, at certain times, this ramps up, you know. It's not interesting when everyone is saying the same thing. Exactly. I'm interested in an alternative programming, you know. Well, in every way, right? In every way. You know, in conversation, especially who wants to sit down with someone that just has the same worldview as you and have a conversation. All it's doing is sort of affirming something rather than developing, changing or coloring the way that you feel about things.

42:51And obviously these days there's a nervousness around that. There's a nervousness around conversation, a suspicion around speech and conversation. Just scary idea. Yeah. For some. Yeah. No, it's scary that. Well, that case exists. Yes. That's right. And the odd thing about it is that when something like freedom of expression or free speech is to a person like myself, a self -evident virtue, how could it not be really feels like an argument that's out of step with the times, in the sense that it's one of those arguments your dad would have had or something like that, you know, and you kind of roll your eyes.

43:39It's interesting, as you grow older, to see that what your parents said was actually a lot of the time true. It wasn't just, you know, that there was a truth and an understanding and a kind of collected wisdom in what they had to say that as a young person, you had to reject. And unfortunately, I think some of these ideas that have been rejected these days are damaging to what it is to be able to lead a full life. Since being on the road with the birthday party, has your life just basically been on the road until now? Well, I wouldn't like to think that, but you're probably right. Well, like what's been the longest window that you haven't done?

44:30I've always been, I've always been making a record and going on tour. Yeah, I'm not saying the arts the same, but the practice of making something and going out on tour has been your life, other than maybe you during COVID. Yeah, yeah, there was COVID, although weirdly, all sorts of things ramped up through COVID for me in that COVID gave me the opportunity not to tour for a year. That was a thing. That's interesting that you put things in that way because I haven't really thought about it in that way, but that's the truth of it. It has been making a record going on tour, making a record going on tour.

45:08But what COVID gave me was suddenly I wasn't going on tour. We had released Ghostine. We had this idea for a show because the skeleton tree concerts were amazing. We'd gotten the whole live experience to such a kind of high pitched. The whole thing was quite something and the Ghostine, one was just going to kick it out of the park, right. We had, I don't know, 20 singers and a choir and all that. We had all this sort of thing that we were going to do. It was going to be big and just exquisite. Then I was just in the office and then these phone calls started coming in and my managers like on the phone and this all happened within a few hours.

45:58It looks like we're not touring America or wherever we were supposed to tour first and then within I think half a day I went from having a year of touring to nothing to do. And I think for there was like 15 minutes of panic, you know, like we're not going on tour and it's, what are we going to do? And then suddenly there was this like, oh my god, I've got a year off, a year off to do nothing. Not only that to have the absolute right excuse to do nothing, right, because we're all going to die basically. So there was this terror that there was also this huge relief. Not that I don't like touring because I love to tour and I love to play concerts, but I also love to be with my wife, not on the road and or to hang out with my kids and all of that sort of stuff.

47:04But funnily enough when COVID came, there was just this sort of tumbling of creativity that happened through that. For me, it was suddenly I was able to do other things and all this other stuff happened. Which I still find kind of mystifying. I wrote a book, Faith Hope and Carnage with Sean O 'Hagen. I became a ceramicist and I'm exhibiting them and all of that sort of stuff. I have no idea what happened there. There was just, there was a feeling of freedom in COVID for me personally, even though where I was, which was in Brighton, there was this weird, there's a few songs was one called balcony man and that's because I sat on a it was the summer and I sat on a balcony, sat there reading religious texts and writing songs and it was kind of beautiful.

48:11And directly behind me was the hospital, which was just piling up with bodies and all these terrible stories coming out of it. It was the weirdest situation, tragic situation. But for me personally, it opened up my life to a whole lot of other things and it's quite different what I do now since COVID actually. Tell me about your relationship with Jesus. And then you can ask that question and get away with it. It's funny, I don't know if this is a suggestion that things are changing in that way with people or maybe it's just you, I don't know. But I remember I mentioned this in the book, maybe this is 30 years back and interview with the enemy where the guy sat down and goes, hi, okay, before we start, my editor has told me, don't get him going on God.

49:16So that was off the table before. Anyway, it's interesting that you asked that question. I would say for me that as far back as I remember, I've just had an uncommon interest in the figure of Christ. Now, I don't really know why. It seems to even predate when I became a choir boy in the local church and then I started to learn more about that. I was just genuinely fascinated in the story of Christ, not as a Christian, but just as a someone who liked stories, I guess, as a young boy. It was just a kind of, yeah, a kind of uncommon allure that just always remained with me. Even in church when I would go to church and the other kids no one wanted to be there and we were all in the choir and everyone's just, I was just intrigued by the stories, the biblical stories.

50:26And then when I went to art school and I got really into art and I got into classical art and I would look at these paintings and I would understand them, I would know them, I know what's going on there and I know what this story is. And so before any notions of or spiritual ideas, let's say about the existence of God or something like that, there was always just this sort of haunted character of Christ sort of moving around the periphery of things that's always interested me, continuously interested me. You know, I think my relationship to that story changes over time, different aspects of it.

51:14There are different parts to the story of Christ that I relate to, you know, the Christ in the garden before he was crucified, kneeling and praying to a God that is no longer there, that has abandoned him, that has withdrawn completely, just an ordinary man kneeling in the garden. These stories to me are extraordinarily beautiful, haunting and just resonate through pretty much everything I do. Now I don't call myself a Christian, I do go to church when I can and I do get an enormous amount out of going to church that I don't get elsewhere, I get that because of the tradition of religion. I like the church, I like the idea of religion, I like that because it's like music in the sense that music sort of puts its arms around a whole bunch of disparate ideas that we have about things, spiritual ideas, things we love, it somehow sort of brings it all together in a melody, let's say.

52:38And church to me is a similar thing that it's, all these thoughts that I have can be brought together and all these yearnings and longings that I have can be contained within the walls of this institution. For all of its faults and corruptions and all the rest of it, there's something that exists there for me that I don't find anywhere else except in music. You know I slightly repelled, I'm not repelled but the idea look, music is my church and all of that sort of stuff, I'm a bit more hardline than that, church is my church. But certainly music is the sort of secular, let's say equivalent. And actually I think for the secular person churches of great utility too, if you can get over the fact that whether God exists or not, what goes on in a church, I found one in London, I won't tell you the name of it because I like to go there on my own and but it is so beautiful this church, it's so old, it's 900 years old last month, the organist is so off the planet, it's like unbelievable and the choir, I think it's like an eight piece choir that just seeing this almost Gregorian kind of stuff within minutes, you're in tears in this place, it's just allowing a presence of being that I can't find outside those walls and you're led, you're sort of varied through the from the kind of forgiveness through to communion, to a blessing at the end in the most gorgeous way.

54:37So I have a lot of time for that experience for me, I got to see you performing the church in Brooklyn, I think it was for the Harry Smith, you played John the Revelator as well, John the Revelator, it was phenomenal, it was phenomenal, everybody else were pretty much fokies, so your performance definitely stood out. Yeah, it had an old testament field.

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56:39How would you say your relationship to music has changed over the course of your life? Well, I don't have the relationship I had with music that I had as a young person. I think that's very special. I mean, there's some neuroscience around it. Between the age of 16 and 23 or something like that, you're super receptive to music. It sort of embeds itself in you. You remember it in a different way. That's certainly the case with me. There's a whole lot of stuff that I discovered at that time that remain, to this day people say, who do you like? I realize these names. Because they were just, they just became so important.

57:30Nina Simone and John Lee Huccher and Van Morrison and Neil Young and these sorts of people that I sort of found there, a lot of country music. Tammy Warnett, Elvis of course. That high -intensity relationship with music is very different than my relationship with music these days. In fact, I'm ashamed to say I don't really listen to much music. I don't listen to it in the way. Background music I find annoying to have something on in the back. So it's changed. When you start doing your own thing, I think that's it really. You start to, you're in it, you deeply in it for yourself and you're trying to work out what you are as a musician and what you want to do.

58:26After a while, you just don't have room. You don't have the same sort of room in your mind for other people's stuff. I mean, I know a lot of musicians that remain huge fans of music and are constantly listening to other people's music, but I'm not one of them. Do you feel you need to be understood or to understand yourself? I think it's to do with what understanding is. For me, I'm always, always, and I have always been attempting to expand the range of what I understand about things, especially ideas. Do you say you're open -minded in that way? I'm open -minded in the sense that I've find it a privilege to have my mind changed.

59:12I don't find it a threat. I find it is this fucking stuff of life is to, and I know enough about myself to know that when I'm getting into an argument and the wind is really in my sales and I'm going for it, I'm talking about something that I don't really know very much about. I recognize that sort of strident, argumentative thing that I can get into that I see all the time, that is strident because it has a sort of deficit of facts or understanding. When you have ideas like that, all you can do is sort of shriek them at somebody. I can be like that too, and although less so, and I'm much more interested in having my ideas developed to hold a position on things.

1:00:08I think rather than to take a side on things, I think there's a difference. I'm constantly being asked to take a side, and I understand the need for that, and I understand the need for people to do that, and that for some people to do that, that's what creates the tension of the world. But I personally find myself more taking a position on things, which tends to be more middle ground, that it's flexible, that is open to being changed, that it's uncertain. It sounds really healthy. Mostly I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. Yeah, I don't think we can know. No, that's right. That's right. And that place of unknowing, I find rather than a disadvantage, is an advantage in life.

1:01:04Absolutely. It's a pre -neighbored possibility. Exactly. There we go. So, I don't know about what understanding myself would ever really be. I do feel misunderstood sometimes about certain sorts of things, because I'm not interested in defending myself about things. I let things, the cards for what they do, and people think what they want. But I don't feel the need to defend myself. I guess the reason for that is that my position changes all the time. I just don't know about things enough to take a side in the way that's required of me. Can you tell me something that you used to believe when you were younger that you don't believe anymore?

1:01:55Well, I used to think that people, I've written a song about it, that people weren't any good. Essentially, my default setting was a kind of general contempt for the world, for the way the world operates, the way the people are, and could only really see the world, or the people in it in particular. At it's worst. I just don't think that anymore. This is not a religious point of view, but there is an aspect of that to it. But it is that understanding of a common spirit or a common predicament amongst all people that feels, that I feel I understand acutely these days, so that it doesn't matter who I'm sitting down and talking with, or that we all have a common spirit, that we are all unique and individual, but with a collective or common uniting spirit.

1:03:04And controversially, I think that that spirit is essentially good. And that's a difficult argument to make sometimes. It's difficult argument to make these days, but I think each person has the essence of good with them, that may be underneath many, many, many layers of personal suffering, and may be completely extinguished by that. I don't know. But essentially, if we can look at each other in that way, that we have a common spirit, it's difficult to hate somebody. Yes. Describe how you feel music in your body. I can describe that place we get to when we play music, when things are right. When we listen to music too, there's a sort of point of acute concentration that goes on when you're playing music, where everything is moving together at exactly the right time, and it creates something of an incoming feeling of love in the body, I would say.

1:04:32You're a Rick Ruben's eyes are lighting up at this point in time. Just saying. I love it. And that's a sort of reciprocal thing with the audience. If that's going in the right way, everyone's highly attuned to the moment, and that there's a sort of incoming and outpouring of love that can go with the audience. This can be actually attained through an almost through an entire concert. It requires concentration, but this is to me the transcendent feeling, I would say. It's both singular and communal. Is there any thinking involved? It is for me. For me, it's often getting deep into the lyric, but I'm singing about deep into the lyric or in inhabiting the lyric in a way inhabiting it in terms of your voice or inhabiting it in terms of living the story.

1:05:43Well, I feel it's both. I feel drawn into the tale. I feel that the song is speaking to me. I feel like I'm picking up information and understanding the song in a way that I didn't even know it was supposed to be. I find I'm finding out more about it and just there within that exchange between me and the song. And that's how songs reveal themselves. People, I think often think that this is just something that songwriter say or something like that. But it seems to me that songs know more about what's going on than we do, or on a personal level and on all levels, really, but information has been passed to you by the song about things that you didn't quite understand.

1:06:42It's like a conversation, in fact. So if you can drill as closely into that moment, into the very moment that you're participating in the song, without all the other peripheral voices going on in your head, which are often difficult to dispel. What are the audience thinking? Am I in tune? All of this sort of stuff. And you're just inside the story. You're receiving all sorts of information about all sorts of things through that simple collection of words. And I think I believe that the audience understands that. Like they know when that's happening. When I've been to, had the privilege of seeing Nina Simone once, there were times in her performances that were just that I've seen the Saints play.

1:07:39And there were concerts where it's just they're just so deeply attuned to what's going on at that point in time. It's mind -blowing. And this is the potential of music. This is not to be squandered. It's a sin in my view to phone in a concert that you have this opportunity. Have people come along to see you that you're not trying to find that elemental moment where all of you are coming together in a transcendent fashion. So I find that more and more I become more and more capable of that. Or more conscious of that. Maybe it was always there, but I can just feel it and see it what it's doing these days in a way that I perhaps I wasn't able to before.

1:08:34Tell me about the positive therapeutic benefit to negative dark songs.

1:08:45Well they're essential to our societal health. You don't want music to be in the hands of the virtuous. You know you want to be told things by someone who's lived something and not avoided living something. These broken people are the messengers of God if you want to put it in those terms. They are the ones with the information. These people that have avoided putting themselves in problematic situations. Right, don't want to talk about this. Don't want to write about this. These aren't the people you need to be going to to find out the information about life. Yeah, I mean I think it's the wounded that can tell us what we need to know.

1:09:45You know, and that goes back to when we're talking about darkness. I think it goes back to the idea of what sin is and to me very often sin is layers of suffering. Generally when you start to peel away at what makes a person the way they are something's going on there that's has sort of hardened around that spirit of goodness. And these are the people probably to protect themselves. I imagine for against something. Yeah, it's the problematic people that we need to be listening to. Not that we're going to end up having their views, but just that they have a more complex view of things. You know, you have these characters that are like bad characters without naming any names, but they pop their heads up every now and then and everyone freaks out and doesn't know whether they should listen to their music or not.

1:10:47Right? It happens every couple of months. There's the same question comes up, should we or should we not listen to this person's music, but it's the distance traveled from this sort of broken individual to the sort of supremely beautiful thing that they are creating. That is the stuff of what it is to be human. These are the people you should be listening to. Not, you know, taking their records off their shelves. In my view, you know, this is a difficult thing to say, but there may be a kind of correlation between transgression and great art. It may be the case. That's not to say a basically good person can't make beautiful music.

1:11:34I don't mean that. I just mean that we need to protect art and we don't have a whole lot of different things in the world. There's so much in the world that is demoralizing to us. At least we have art. At least we have songs. At least we have people making songs. And when I see these people being attacked and songs being taken away, I just think this is a mistake. We need this stuff. This is a validation of what we are as human beings. It feels like to me this ideology or whatever you want to call it is winning the battles, many battles. But I don't think it can win the war or the culture war in the sense that it's too limiting.

1:12:31And as human beings, we just want to expand. That's our nature is to grow bigger. You know, we need to speak more, not less. And if we keep honing ourselves down to our most virtuous, we will live in an impoverished world. You know, anyway, that's my rant on the subject. I have a friend whose brother just died two days ago and we were talking about love. Does love vanish after death? There's many ways to look at that, I think. It's a difficult question in a way because it depends on how you go about things. If you've lost someone, there's, well, there's two ways that two things that can happen.

1:13:22You either turn inward and bring your love inward and live your life sort of hardened around the absence of something. That's a kind of love. It's a sort of dayification of the absence of something. And that is a kind of love, but it's extraordinarily dangerous place to be in. The other way is when you lose someone that you open yourself outwards to the world and understand the perilous nature of humanity that we are all fragile, vulnerable beings. And I think that what happens with that is when you start to understand that about people, our common perilous nature, it allows you to love everyone and love expands and love grows.

1:14:21And love isn't just collected around the absence of that one person that you lost, it becomes a much greater thing. So in that respect, love grows. It's funny that because the beautiful stuff that we say is when we don't quite know what we're talking about. And I always find myself slipping in and out of a knowing because it's practiced and I've said it before. And those moments when you just don't quite understand yourself what you're saying. But in that respect, that's what I kind of wanted to do, the faith, hope, and carnage book is a conversation. Because that book, it's about a lot of things, but it is testament to the sort of power of conversation.

1:15:14That's the thing I like most about it. Me and Sean disagree on all sorts of things.

1:15:23I mean, that's how our relationship started just fighting with each other over political issues mostly. And we fundamentally do not agree. And those conversations at a very beautiful arose out of disagreement or reaching beyond disagreement into finding common ground. And the common ground that we found was extraordinarily rich. But it required, it required some kind of effort in a way to get there. And we still don't agree on things. Did you learn anything through the process of those conversations? Yeah. I learned enormous amount because I was given the opportunity to articulate things that I hadn't been able to do.

1:16:15So I had a whole lot of disparate information about things and about how I felt about the death of my child about religion. And Sean kept sort of drilling down. He was like a faulty elevator or something like that. He sort of take you down there and then they drop it down again, another floor and drop it down another floor. And this was uncomfortable, but at the same time I felt in very safe hands with Sean. And because we'd been through something already, screaming at each other down the phone about various things. And so it is at its best a testament to kind of good faith conversation. There's a line in the book, a truthful line collects meaning.

1:17:12I love that idea. I love that idea. That's true. In songwriting, I think I'm talking about. Of course, not all lines are like that. And some don't. And they become increasingly irritating with the more you sing them. And a line that's false, like a false line, something where you've just kind of like kind of works that it rhymes. It rhymes. And it sort of sounds like it might mean something or whatever. Actually, very often lines that sound like they might mean something, often do mean something. Actually, we'll find out later on. But there are lines that you know at the time aren't good. They become like you're singing the song.

1:18:05And for me at least they become like f**kings. Ten -ton truck coming at you as you know, here comes that line that you know is is not true. I don't have a lot of those lines, but there are some. Can you change them live? I do try and do that. But a good line, it can be hugely meaningful. You know, they chime differently. I'm singing a song called O Children, which was used in the Harry Potter film. So it got a lot of attention that song because of that. But it just changes its meaning all the time. And sometimes it's deeply personal and filled with all. You know, it's essentially a song about, I'm actually writing a red hand file about it at the moment actually.

1:19:03But it's essentially about the incapacity we have to protect our children from the world. And sometimes that has a painfully, painful presence that song to sing. And other times it speaks into the world in a terribly tragic way that song. And if we look at what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, that song is very, very hard to sing. But beautiful too. That what are we doing? Sorry. No, it's heartbreaking. It makes no sense. You know, and these songs, if they're good, they can redefine themselves all the time. You know, they're not just a static thing. They're a living thing. Yeah. It's the beauty of poetry is that it's written in an open enough way where the meaning can evolve.

1:20:01Yeah. Yeah. I love the last movie made with the cameras moving away. I love it. What's it called? This much I know to be true, I think. This much I know to be true. I really love it. Yeah, Andrew Dominic. It's his second film. There was the first one. The black and white one. Yeah. That was a great one. Yeah, it's an amazing film. Would you say you're doing Nick Cave or Nick Cave is doing you? I think where I've never been able to separate whatever that Nick Cave is from the Nick Cave that I'm supposed to, you know, that the guy behind the door, it's just is the same thing. It's comic in its way, especially, you know, you're going on tour where you're constantly presented with yourself.

1:20:55You know, you have to do things through the day, you're a public person, you're out there all the time. You have to prepare yourself. I'm like a pretty kind of high maintenance kind of character. So there's a lot of that, a lot of that goes on and you're confronted with your face in the mirror constantly and people are watching you and you're absorbing all this attention and all that sort of stuff. And I long to get back home where I can just sort of let all that go, but actually it just never does let go. I just just realized to my horror one day I just am that person. That person in the hotel mirror, that poor, that I always feel sorry for hotel mirrors, the amount of sort of suffering they've sort of collected of people looking at themselves, you know, with bad lighting and all that sort of stuff.

1:21:53How long does it take you to fall asleep after a show? Yeah, I'm not good at that. It varies and I know I try not to take sleeping tablets and mostly I'm successful at that, but I don't sleep well at all. I wake up very early, I go to bed at terrible time. It's just a mess, to be honest. Yeah, especially on tour. You know, I always sleep before a show at about five o 'clock, I lie down and I can't do a show without doing that. I get an hour's sleep, I wake up and I'm able to do a show without that I just couldn't concentrate and stuff. That's why most musicians are sort of brain dead zombies.