S1 EP5: Nick Cave on his remarkable career, religion and dealing with grief

26:41Feelings, softly spoken, whispered hunches about things that exist somewhere within there that feel very real to me. They feel like a kind of a truth. They're not provable, but they have a spiritual dimension. And they are not just present, but also extraordinarily helpful to you if you are going through difficult things. And this idea that religion is a crutch for people who are too afraid that there's nothing else other than what we can empirically prove or what is rational. I find that it is that it is a crutch and I don't see a problem with that at all I think we need to some extent these things and I get annoyed at those people that consider going around and kind of kicking the crutches out from under people who need them as some kind of virtue or some kind of truth telling, I find that is extremely unhuman stop me No, because my coffee's kicking in and I've got to be careful that I don't talk too much.

27:53But when you were saying it's a crutch, but I was thinking, yeah, it's a crutch to some maybe. And then to others, it's a rocket ship that can take them to space. Right. And, you know, when Christianity took hold in the Roman Empire, I think a big part of it was the amazement that the Romans experienced when they saw Christians going joyfully to their death, being fed to lions and to these sort of secular, debauched Romans. seeing these Christians kind of being chomped up with smiles on their faces must have been an extraordinary thing. And, well, it toppled the empire. But isn't that amazing to think that the intoxication of faith or whatever you call it, its ability to supercharge you with unbelievable qualities of strength and resilience.

28:37And it does provide that, you know. It provides something that, in my view, the secular world loses out on in some way. living within the sort of tyranny of what is rational. And I just think there can be a little bit of give and take in these matters. Can I share one other quick thing? Yeah. A quote that I always liked is William Burroughs, the writer, who is experimenting with a Ouija board, and someone asked him, does it seem to be objectively true, like objectively does something seem to be there? And he said, objective, subjective, what's the difference? Yeah. which is kind of a beautiful paradox.

29:17In the end, like, maybe all of that's slightly beside the point. Yeah. It becomes an unnecessary conversation after a while. I really have a lot of time for... I'm not one of them, unfortunately, but I really have a lot of time for these people who are just comfortable in their faith and they just go about their business and they go to church and it's no big thing. And I look at them with a certain amount of envy. in fact I look at them as a kind of destination at least you know that we can lay down the struggle or whatever the expression is but I very much struggle with the whole thing What do you get out of going to church specifically?

29:57Because I could imagine maybe the sermon might be off-putting or aspects of the devotion might feel like a bad fit I mean you could just read the Bible, those parts that you enjoy That's right, and I do. I do. I always have, by the way. And I've actually always gone to church off and on. But what I do get is a feeling of going to a place that's existed for 2 ,000 years that accepts me fundamentally as I am, where I can take certain feelings that I have and certain yearnings and that they sit within a kind of structure where I can allow myself to comfortably indulge. in these yearnings. And I find that I go into church as a sceptic, generally, with a little kind of Christopher Hitchens inside me, going, what are you doing?

30:51But leaving with a sense, a feeling of uplift about things, a feeling of hope of something that I don't experience in the same way in the secular world. That's not to say there are things that don't get said that seem completely absurd. But at the same time, I like the weird stuff. The whole Christian story and the fact that 2 ,000 years of history are built upon the crucifixion of this minor political agitator in the most wretched of ways, that the way we function as human beings in the West to this day are energized by that moment. Which parts of the Bible do you find yourself going back to?

31:39I read the Gospels, you know, a lot and Paul and stuff, but it's really this haunted story of Christ that really has always, as a child, resonated. There's a pretty good book. We're probably talking about this way too much, but that's fine. There's a pretty good book by A.N. Wilson, his biography of Jesus. Have you read that? I have, yeah. It's that idea that when you read it, you realise, wow, he was kind of a local figure. Like he was like, I don't know what the rock equivalent would be, like he was big in his local scene up in Nazareth. And the after effects of his teachings are to a great extent a result of Paul obviously travelling through the Roman Empire and in a way are a testament to Roman roads and the Roman polity and its ability to spread letters around.

32:26And then I kind of cheekily tweeted, they should really call it Paulianity, in the sense that he was kind of taking elements of it and saying, but this is for everyone, this isn't just for Jews, and translating it for the greater public. And the parts that I go back to, insofar as I do, are his letters where he's talking, I think it's the letter to the Romans, and there's a particular one where he says, everything that I am, I hate. And he's kind of dealing with his disgusting and depraved impulses and how much he grapples with them. Yeah, this is a beautiful thing, the idea of our brokenness, which is embodied in the figure of Christ.

33:04When I talk about this with you, what worries me often is that I sound like a Christian talking about Christ, but I don't actually come to it in that way. I'm simply... Why would that worry you? It worries me because, you know, it worries me a little bit. Because you don't want to come off like Cliff Richard. Well, there is that. But what I'm trying to say is that there's something about that brokenness that I respond to and that Paul responds to, that it's a universal thing. And the idea of original sin is something to do with our flawed humanity. We are all that way, all of us. We are broken people.

33:46We are broken things living with other broken things. and this is a very profound thought for me in the sense that it becomes this, yeah, this, yeah. What was your editor's name again? Paul. Paul, is it Paul? Yeah, do the Pauline thing. It's all balance. I find that with myself. You know, as an artist myself that has a public image, It's all a matter of balance. I have the Red Hand Files, and they're a kind of balancing act too. Yeah, let's talk about that. How did this come about, the Red Hand Files? The Red Hand Files is, I don't know, call it a website, is it? I would call it a website. That you can subscribe to for free.

34:37It's essentially began as an ask-me-anything type of situation, so people could write in and ask questions, and I would take one of those questions and answer it. It was a small thing, and it was a fan-based thing to begin with. What year was this? I think it's in its fifth year. So it would have been around 2017. Just to get this in the room, in 2015, your son Arthur died in a horrific accident in Brighton, which was obviously a life-changing event for you and for Susie. So this is in the backdrop to everything that comes afterwards, but specifically the Red Hand files. So after my son died, you know, I'm a public figure and it was a public thing.

35:21And I got an enormous amount of mail that came to me and Susie from people that essentially said, we know how you feel, this sort of thing has happened to us. Or look, I lost my husband last week. In fact, the letters were just addressed to like Nick Cave Brighton, you know, and they just managed to find their way to me. And it was difficult for us to understand at the time, but it was a way of drawing ourselves out of the total despair of the moment in time. And a kind of understanding, I think a fundamental understanding that we were kind of cohabiting a world of grievers. It was like the club you don't want to belong to.

36:06And so I think in response to that, on some level, I started up the Red Hand Files. In the back of my mind, I was trying to work out a way where I could sit down and articulate these things that were happening to me and Susie and my family in general in a careful and considered way. Initially, the questions were like, what's your favourite band and who are your influences and that sort of stuff, but within those questions, there were other questions that were asking, look, this has happened to me, what do I do? And I started answering those questions. It was for me. It was for me to work out how I felt about these things as well.

36:45And this just sort of snowballed and it's just grown over the years. And it's something that I take really seriously. I read every question and I answer one a week or something like that. How many come in? I guess it's about like 300 or 400 a week or something like that. You couldn't read all of those? Yeah, you just sit there and read them, I do. Really? It's like I do it at the end of the day. Some are long, you know, some are one line. you know, do you like Fleetwood Mac or something? So they're not all... That's the answer. Yes. Of course. Rumours. What's your favourite film? You just said Blonde.

37:21Yeah, I was just... That was you being obtuse, was it? Because you did the soundtrack. That was by your friend Andrew Dominick. Well, I did the soundtrack and Blonde came under scathing. It was being given a critical kicking for alleged crimes against gender politics. I would say critical in inadvertent commas. Yeah. It's about Marilyn Monroe. It's about Marilyn Monroe and it's an extraordinary film. It's a masterpiece. And actually many filmmakers, people who actually know about film and who actually make films and can see things beyond ideological points of view, see it as a technical masterpiece.

37:54And I think things are shifting around as they do a little bit in that respect. But at the time I wrote that it was a cultural event in terms of how angry people had gotten about this film. Well, we're off on a tangent, but let's enjoy it because it was around the same time that Dharma came out. Yeah, we had... Which you did the music for as well. We were sort of adjacent to... You got a double helping of whatever you would call that. Is that a pylon or is that... I mean, for me, I'm more sympathetic towards the criticisms about Dharma because it was family members of the victims that were coming out and it showed some perverse interest in this character that may have been unhealthy.

38:34I don't know. That's a good example of one, because I know this... It's uncomfortable, it is uncomfortable. There's this question around the freedom of the artist and it's become a cliché, a totally understandable one, of some element of the artistic community to say absolute freedom for the artist and how dare you censor me. But the question's a bit more nuanced than that and I think Dharma's a good example of a piece of art, if I can call it that, where there are aspects to it that you could see exactly as you express and think, well, these are real people with real feelings, seeing themselves depicted or seeing their loved ones depicted.

39:09And actually, is art worth that? Like, what is the ethical standard here for what we think is permissible? Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. And for me, I totally understand that. But I think the other side of the coin is worse, that if we start imposing censorship around these sorts of things, I don't know where it stops. I don't know who makes the decisions. Those decisions in small ways are being made all the time, right? Like publishers are deciding to publish this book but not that book or someone at Netflix says we're going to do an adaptation of Dharma but we don't want to do Hitler, The Child Years.

39:46Do you know what I mean? Because who needs that? In one sense, that's censorship. In another sense, that's just making a series of decisions. Civility. What you think is morally, artistically interesting. It's true. That is true. By the way, Hitler, the child years. Could be interesting. You just thought of that. You midwifed that and that could be interesting. Oh, you can have that one. You can do the music. Yeah, I'll do the music. Anyway, I sound like I'm sort of defending censorship, which isn't really my intention. It's more that sometimes we're invited to see these things in black and white and there's more going on.

40:20I don't get too riled up about it. I mean, there was Delilah, the song Delilah. Yes. There was a question about this on the Red Hand files. It's the Welsh choirs who traditionally have sung Delilah, which is the Tom Jones murder ballad where the woman is murdered. I never even knew that was what it was about. Oh, it's totally about that. It sounds like a big jaunty, seesawing... Yeah, I mean, it is a terrible song on any level, as far as I'm concerned, even though it won the Ivan of Ella Award twice. Anyway, it's been banned in the sense that these Welsh choirs are no longer allowed to sing this song at Welsh rugby matches.

41:01And what I was trying to say is that there are some things that I can't get too riled up in these situations because just the thing that they're banning is just bad and it is kind of offensive, even for someone who's written a lot of murder ballads themselves. As a murder ballad... You've done an entire album entitled Murder Ballads. That's right. So as a murder ballad, it's just bad. So I'm quite happy. And I'm also kind of happy that music has that capacity to outrage. You described it as the ultimate compliment to be bad, to be censored. You've sailed fairly close to the wind, I would say. Is that fair?

41:42In terms of being prepared to push your artistry into terrain that people might take offence at. I mean, you've said yourself, right, that you've regarded it as a sacred duty to offend at one time. Yeah. You know, I grew up and made music through the punk rock. times. And I think that was the number one thing we did as punks. You know, we were applauded for doing this. So I was sort of raised to see that art was something that got up people's noses, that confronted people, that challenged people, that kind of pushed people out of their complacency. These were self-evident virtues. And so the idea that our music, our art is to be defanged in this way, you know, it does raise my hackles to some degree.

42:30Have you ever been the subject of a kind of, this was before the pylon, and that was why I say we were sailing close to the wind. Were there times when you felt more that people were coming for you or that you were at risk of pushing too far? It's quite funny because, you know, I mean, some of my early lyrics with The Birthday Party, the murder ballads record, this kind of thing, you know, there was violence towards women. but there was actually violence towards everybody. There were just violent records and there were heroic women and female murderers and all sorts of stuff going on in that record and songs before that.

43:05But I'm not personally a misogynist. You know, I don't have those inclinations but I like to write songs that were violent. In those days I just enjoyed the thrill of language being able to write about violent things in the same way is maybe a thriller writer likes to write about violent things too. I liked what violent language can do within a song because it always sat slightly uncomfortably in a song because songs seem to be, by their very nature, virtuous things, let's say. And so if they had a kind of dissonance or a violence within them, that was exciting to me at the time. And I'm laughing because someone wrote in saying, you know, I really like your music, I'm a woman, but I don't like the fact that you built your throne on the bodies of dead women.

43:54Well, it's a compliment with a little sting in the tail.

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45:26Hi, I'm Louis Theroux and you're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. And now back to my conversation with Nick Cave. Can you unpack it at all? Like I have my own thoughts on where the power of art that rests on difficult emotion comes from. I mean, it sort of goes to Bunny Munro as well, which is your novel very much inside the head of a predatory rapist, really. A sex maniac. He's a sex maniac. In the old school. One of the things I admired was, though, that he definitely... He's dark. It's beyond like, oh, I get it away as often as I can. It's that, plus he had sex with a heroin addict who's nodding out at one point.

46:09I think I admired your willingness to make the central character disgusting to the point where I was a little uncomfortable. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's extremely dark. It's a comic novel too. Very much so, and beautiful. By the way, I wasn't making a criticism. No, no, no, I don't mind what anybody says about that book. The central character is a very dark individual and his behaviour is pretty disgusting, but at the same time he's looking after a child who's also called Bunny, Bunny Jr. Who's also inhabited in the novel. He's a POV within the novel. Yes, that's right. And I just love the dynamic of that book where we know what the central character is up to, yet the son, who's nine, just thinks his dad's the best dad ever.

46:56and the enjoyment, I think, of the book is that tension that happens between these two things, that he becomes progressively darker, his actions become worse and more and more desperate because he's not a good sex maniac. His conquests are junkie that's overdosing, as you said, and so forth. So he's not good at his job and yet his son seems to love him more and more And there was something about that that I found hugely enjoyable writing about. It's not for everyone. Did you get any pushback on that? I mean, the reviews that I saw were positive. Yeah, they were good reviews, but I did readings and Q &As and invariably people didn't like it and would stand up and say that.

47:43But I don't mind that. Yeah. I guess the bigger point then is where do you see the value residing in art that feels transgressive or discomforting? In what way is that, in your view, enriching? You mean why is that more enriching than bland? Well, that's one way of putting it. I go back to the thrill I got as a child and as a young man of stumbling on a book that genuinely shocked me, that confronted me, that changed my ideas about things, that created terrible cognitive dissonance around things. And there's a bunch of those. You know, I remember as a child reading Love Story, the book, I can't remember who wrote it, there was a film made of it.

48:27Right, famous film with... Famous film with... Was it Ryan O 'Neill? A kind of soppy romance. Yeah. And I was just reading it and, I don't know, it was left around the house and I was reading it and in the middle of this soppy romance is, you know, a four-letter word. There's a hockey match between two teams and the lead character, the Ryan O 'Neill character, says fucking Canuck. And I remember reading that and it just stopped me in my tracks and it was an extraordinary feeling. Like I was shocked to read this word. It was the first time I'd ever read that word. I was only little, you know. Fucking, not Canuck, which is probably more obscure.

49:06Well, it's obscure and probably more offensive. It's Canadian, time for Canadian. Yeah, I think. You know, I remember that to this day, the shock and the thrill and the pleasure of having my worldview shattered to some degree by a book. And I've continued to love to read books that challenge me in that way. And so I find strictures around language where you can say this and you can't say this fundamentally works against what the potential of art is, which is to challenge your ideas about things. and it's this troubling of the waters that is the self-evident value of art and that if we're to put art through a kind of righteous sieve and take all the unrighteous bits out, what we get is just the bland and, as you said, the morally obvious.

50:02We are quite disgusting people, if we're honest. Not me, but other people. That's a joke. You know, if we peer into our dark hearts, We're revolting. And when I read something that reflects some aspect of that, I feel I can breathe because I sort of feel less alone. Does that make sense? Yes, it does make sense, yeah. And if we feel as though we're always on our best behaviour and that anything we say or think, that it's visible to everyone and everyone's going to interrogate it for its righteousness, then that's insane making. I mean, that's an impossible standard and suffocating. it's anti-art as far as I'm concerned.

50:44I'll give you another example. I don't know if you know the book that came out some years ago called Go the Fuck to Sleep. Do you know that? I remember that, yeah. It's a beautiful, beautiful kids' book. It was a kid's book for adults. Well, no, it was a kid's book that adults could read their kids, right? And you read it to your 10-year-olds or something like that? I didn't think you were supposed to. I thought you were just supposed to read it as an adult. No, no. As a kind of like a stress release. Maybe I did the wrong thing here. The cows in the pasture and the sheep are in the meadow, go the fuck to sleep.

51:14Yeah, yes, exactly. But it goes a little bit longer with the traditional, you know, and your kids are sitting there. I remember reading that to the twins. When it got to the bit where it said, go the fuck to sleep, the look on the kids' faces was just never forget it. They just looked at each other. And even though they'd heard that, they hear that language everywhere else, they suddenly discovered it in a book. How old were they at this time? Yeah, I don't know, eight or something like that. Everyone parents differently. It was exciting. It was exciting, right? Yeah. Maybe I shouldn't have been reading the book to them.

51:48That hadn't even occurred to me, to be honest. I think that that probably made them want to go and read books. Yeah. You know. I remember as a kid, my dad had, it was a dictionary of slang and unconventional English, and you could look up, fuck, and it was fuck, fuck a duck, fuck you, Jack, I'm all right. There was a whole page of fuck expressions, And aged nine or ten, I just loved looking at it and thinking, wow, that's so bad. Yeah. I have, for whatever reason, responded as a child and throughout life to sort of badness in things. You know, whether it's watching Johnny Cash as a, I don't know, nine-year-old in Australia on the Johnny Cash show, suddenly realising that music could be, like, bad, like he's an outlaw guy.

52:37It excited something. I think there's always excited something in me. Well, props to Johnny Cash for among his many accomplishments. One was in the early 90s when there was a frenzy about gangster rap and he would always pipe up and say, you know, it's no different from shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He went out to bat for free expression at a time when I think rap in general was very embattled because they were pushing back on cop killer and fuck the police. Yeah, but shot a man in Reno just to watch him die is quite a line. It's a great line. Yeah, just jumps out of that song. His version of your song Mercy Seat is incredible.

53:13Yeah, it's really beautiful. All my life, been a huge Johnny Cash fan and I was on holiday in some remote place in the south of France and Rick Rubin, who produced the Johnny Cash records, just rang up out of the blue and said, look, I'm wondering if it's OK if Johnny Cash record the Mercy Seat. and I left a long pause and sort of went, OK, that's fine, sure. You decided to play it cool. I played it cool, but it's an incredible version, really amazing. We were talking about the Red Hand Files. What was the origin of the name Red Hand Files? I think it comes from Red Right Hand. Your song? Yeah.

53:59Fans of Peaky Blinders will know it. Exactly. Opening of Peaky Blinders. It's got 78 million streams on Spotify I saw yesterday. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, that's good. That's pretty good. I'm sure you're the bearer of good news. Yeah. It's quite extraordinary. It's a metaphor, I should know this, in the song. What is the...? It's taken from Milton. Yeah. Paul. John Milton. Paradise Lost. Yeah. I think so, yeah. I think it comes from Paradise Lost. Anyway. It's in your song, Red Right Hand. Yeah, and the song is a typical Nick Cave song that it characterised this sort of evil force that's travelling around the world, presenting himself as virtue.

54:49It sounds exactly like what we're talking about. That has hidden in his coat a red right hand, a blood-stained hand. Nice. And so the red hand files come from that. How does that sit alongside your other work? What does it do for you emotionally? Well, to go back to what we were talking about initially with the whole thing, for me, it has become, didn't start this way, but it certainly is now, it is just this endless torrent of brokenness or longing or yearning for something. The questions are extraordinary. Some of them you read and people are talking about things, especially in matters of grief, that have happened to them a long time ago and they no longer have the opportunity, obviously, to be able to talk about these things.

55:38People are like, get on with your life, of course. No one wants to sit round a dinner table with someone who's still going on about their partner or whatever who died two years ago or something like that. You need to move on. I understand that. But within the Red Hand Files is the idea that we don't move on, on some level, for a lot of these letters. And people feel something about sitting down and writing something about their loved one who's died, passed away. And this is extraordinarily moving to me, being in the same boat, and kind of validating and educating, you know. and I developed, I think, a way of being able to write, not talk necessarily, but write about these matters in an articulate way.

56:28And that was really stepping right out of my comfort zone. I mean, hugely out of my comfort zone as basically a musician. There was some pushback when I first started this, like, what are you doing and who do you think you are and what authority have you got to answer the question of a 16-year-old girl writing to you about feeling lonely or something like that. Who are you to be able to give your ideas about that or whatever the questions might be? And I've always taken challenging questions to answer and troubling questions too. But I find that the questions themselves in some way validate the answer.

57:04The yearning within the questions give me the authority to actually be able to answer them. They've asked, right? So I'll give it a go. And the whole thing's turned into something, a huge part of my life, actually, that's as important as anything else. And it feels good to have stumbled on something that I have a deep personal attachment to that exists outside of what people might consider to be my job. So they really mean a lot to me. Do you think you've learned anything from doing it? Yeah, yeah. It's changed me as a human being. I mean, this might sound like a weird question, but have you ever done the Enneagram?

57:51This is a personality test. Yes. I read about it in the book. Exactly, yeah. And, you know, I made a note to do it. It's an ancient Sufi personality test. Sean O 'Hagan, who's your interlocutor, you should give him a shout out. Yes. He's a co-author of the book. He's a very brilliant man who had these conversations. Brilliant journalist. He says he did the test, I guess, on your suggestion, one of the exchanges you have. Yeah. It assigns you with a number between one and nine. I'll do it. Before we put this out, I'll do it and we'll put it in the wrap-up. So you get assigned a number and each number you're called something like the searcher and mine is the challenger.

58:27I like that one. And there's a kind of line and at one end of your Enneagram line is the pathological state, which the pathological state of the challenger is the tyrant. And at the other end is someone who can be inspiring. It's the potential of the eight characteristic. And we tend to slip and slide our way up and down the line. And hopefully we make our journey through life towards the good end, not the unredeemed end but the redeemed end. And I like this particular thing, even though I don't do this sort of stuff at all, ever. It's not like the stars or some horoscope or something like that.

59:06It's extraordinarily accurate. Do you do a questionnaire? Yes, you answer 100 questions. Oh, wow. Sounds a bit like Scientology. It's not like Scientology. You do it on your own and you forget about it a few weeks later. But what I'm trying to say is that it kind of describes a line of what your nature is. And I think that the red hand files for me have forced me begrudgingly down to the better end of my nature, which is more compassionate, more empathetic, stuff that doesn't come naturally to me. When I read a question, my initial response to that question is a little bit like my initial response to walking into a church.

59:49It's a response that's at its most stripped back before it's been kind of enlivened by the spirit of compassion, shall we say. And that's something that doing these red hand files, This is what happens because I have to spend time with this person's question that's given in good faith. I want to be an artist, but the ideas won't come. Or I lost my child three years ago and, you know, life has no meaning for me. To feel what that person might actually be feeling and to answer the question in a responsible, compassionate way. So in that respect, it's me having to practice the better part of my nature.

1:00:31And it's been good for me in that respect. My day job is actually documentaries. And so for the last 20 years, mainly what I've done is go around prisons, mental hospitals full of paedophiles, porn sets, religious cults, far-right communities. And where I've given expression or explored the darker parts of the human heart, it's sort of vicariously through the experience of me almost playing a straight man to then not whatever the opposite is. and I get to hide my more deviant or my more questionable side, my embarrassing side. And I recognise in everyone I speak to something that I can relate to, that feel, even if it's twisted, I only say that in the context of a slightly safer way of working, which isn't something I'm proud of.

1:01:18And I think what I admire in what you do is a willingness to be a little more risky. And forgive me for comparing myself. It's actually comparable in the sense that, despite the chaos of the way things used to be when I was a musician with the birthday party and people see that as my big risk-taking time, it's actually, to me, it's not. And that I did something similar to you that I wrote character-driven songs. The lyrics were basically, this guy called Fred went out and did this and there was sort of a form of ventriloquism where I sat safe... Give it one more go. Give it one ventriloquism. A form of ventriloquism where I sat safely behind constructed characters in the same way as you sit safely behind these often problematic personalities that you're talking to.

1:02:08But at some point I gave that up and started writing about myself. The songs became much more personal and much more revealing. I took away the things that I hid behind. So you stand before the world in some way kind of naked, or I do these days. I know we've taken up a lot of your time. I wanted to, I should reflect the fact that you lost a second son. I mean, I feel I owe it to you and Jethro, what, 2022? Yeah, the thing with Jethro is that I don't really talk about him in respect to his mother, who just wants him to remain outside of the conversation, doesn't agree with the way I go about things.

1:02:52So at least for now, that's where Jethro lives and it's very sad. It's very sad what happened with him. My condolences. With respect to Arthur, obviously your liberty to talk as little or as much as you would like about him or the experience of losing him, it's touched on in the book gracefully and sensitively. I have a 15-year-old, I think I mentioned. Yeah. And the idea of, you know, any lessons to be learned, that sounds, again, a bit glib, but how you process an experience like that. I mean, I can't give any lessons on how to raise a child. I don't know what those lessons are, except that you just love your kids as much as you possibly can.

1:03:39That has to be the way we approach parenting, because terrible things happen. Beyond that, both Susie and I, we know a lot about the kind of mechanics of grief, what happens, you know, and what are good things to do and what are not good things to do. And I think we've been through all those things. And the thing that comes through, I think, on the red hand files, and it's in a way easier to talk about it in this way, is that there's two streams that come in around grief. Both of them, the despair is the same, but some people have worked out how to work themselves out of it and have flourishing lives.

1:04:23and other people have not. They've simply hardened around the absence of the one that they love. And this is a terrible situation to find yourself in because it requires to some degree an act of will to be able to break open your grief and to move out of that towards a productive life. And if you remain sort of hardened by this bitterness and despair, it becomes a permanent affliction. And it's terribly sad to see. I know Susie is, you know, people contact her and she's met up with some people and it's devastating. There was a mother whose son had died, I don't know, seven years earlier, and she had yet to speak to her husband about it.

1:05:17They still hadn't had a conversation about it. It's just this all-consuming thing that sits in the middle of the relationship. What I try and do is talk about grief from the other side of the trauma, because I think it's there that I can say that you can move on and that you can lead a joyful life. In some ways, and I'm not alone in saying this, you can lead a better life. This is part of the terrible beauty that exists around grief, that you can become better at life and that there's something to do with joy that comes into life that's different than happiness. Joy feels like it's something that it's deeply rooted in suffering that kind of just leaps spasmodically out of your suffering and that can be extremely powerful thing.

1:06:16And I think that you can find that outside of grief if you can somehow move towards, it's hard to say what, if you can move towards the whispers and intimations of something else that exists beyond your grief because there is something there. I'm just struck that quotes I've read from you early on in your career, it seems paradoxical that you've arrived at this humane and empathetic outlook and a kind of life of service of attempting to ameliorate the damaged souls that are seeking some kind of meaning or solace, right? And then early on, I remember a quote jumped out at me where he said, I am contemptuous of joy, I'm contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of happiness in others.

1:07:03It was a great quote because he said, after being a living shitpost to being a walking Hallmark card. No, it was a response to a letter that came from... A hallmark hippie, they called you. I guess it was a disgruntled old punk who was like, oh, Nick, you've become everything you used to rail against. Yeah, you're a hallmark hippie. And so I tried to, within that particular post, in a playful way, describe why I'm no longer a walking shitpost like this person is, and a kind of hallmark card. There's a certain amount of self-deprecation that goes on within the Red Hand files anyway. That particular letter does point out the problems with holding a position of contempt to the world.

1:07:47There are reasons to hold the world in contempt, you know, and there's reasons to be suspicious of everything in the world. It's almost like a parlour game in a way to sit there and look at something, look at something of beauty. I'm trying to find something in this studio as a thing of beauty. I won't take it personally.

1:08:10but to look at it and see it as a thing of beauty or to look inside the thing and see the kind of worm in the middle of the apple or the corruption and to be pathologically magnetised towards the contemptible nature of the world. Personally, I know that feeling. I've been there as a young man. I gleefully took that position. As someone who's been through stuff, I find that it's not a position that I have much sympathy for these days. You know, there's too little time for contempt and too much in the world not to be awestruck.

1:09:00You're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast.

1:09:13Hi, Mia Ked, Louis Theroux. Just to remind you, you're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. And now back to my conversation with Nick Cave. Thanks, Nick. That was great. Is that it? I mean, I could keep going. I wanted to say, where do you start with someone who's done, how many albums, like 30, 40? No. What is it, 25, 30? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, I was going through the Spotify playlist. This is Nick Cave. You and your playlists. It threw my way. Is this because you have to say Spotify a certain amount of times? No, you know, I know. You'd be forgiven for thinking that.

1:09:47But I just was like, play Nick Cave. And Jubilee Street, that grabbed me. I think I might have been drinking a bit. And I listened to it two or three times on the trot. And it has a mesmeric, slightly dark energy. And shout out to Warren Ellis, your musical collaborator. and the whole last act of the song is this sort of violin surge. It's an orchestral surge. Yeah, orchestral surge. Yeah. It's an exquisite, troubling song. Yeah, it's a beautiful song. I'm really proud of that song because of this sort of trajectory from abjectness to kind of transcendence within this song, both musically and lyrically.

1:10:28And lyrically. I'm very pleased with that. For whatever reason, it made me think of Hey Joe, the Jimi Hendrix. He didn't write it but did the famous version, which is a murder ballad. And songs that have that quality of a sort of repeated musical pattern. Yeah, it's a sort of circular thing that builds an intensity. It builds an intensity and arrives at this moment of kind of transcendent emotion. That's kind of what we do. Yeah. That's our thing. Yeah. And then the more recent stuff as well, where it's become a little bit more ambient and squiggly, if I can use that. Yeah, I mean, I personally think the record Ghostine was a point we got to musically and lyrically.

1:11:10The last one was Carnage and Ghostine was the one before that, which was the one that most directly addressed your bereavement. Yeah, it had a sort of parallel kind of purpose beyond just making a record. At the time, it felt to me that I was attempting to create a place for him. Not that it directly addresses him in the record or anything, but it just felt like if there was any way, this was the way. It's a very powerful, maybe difficult, but record full of meaning, for me at least. And that was very divisive, that record, but people have really grown to love that record. Ghostine. Yeah. Because it was post-rock?

1:11:50Well, it doesn't really have drums and bass and it doesn't have guitars. Yeah. And, you know, there's a bunch of old fans that wish we would return to the good old days of kind of blistering, guitar-based, four-on-the-floor rock and roll. But we've just, you know, moved on from that. And it doesn't feel like a place that offers anything to us. I mean, I think that as a form, to some degree, is maybe a little kind of dead, perhaps. You just said that. You just said rock was dead. I didn't say rock was dead. I just... For us. I mean, we've just done a lot of it. Yeah. You've got to keep yourself interested.

1:12:28You don't want to be status quo. Well, the thing that you talked about before, about the trajectory of our band, I think is entirely predicated upon us destroying our back catalogue record by record. Our next record almost always flies in the face of the records before and rejects the records before and presents itself in a new way. Now, some fans love that. They feel like they're on some crazy adventure with our music. Other fans, they attach themselves to not just the music, but the period that it was made and what was happening in their own lives at that time. And see any movement away from that as a kind of personal betrayal, shall we say.

1:13:16How dare you? Don't you know what that old stuff means to me? But for us, it's just making new music and keeping the whole thing going for better or worse. I'm talking about this in this way now because I'm in the process of writing new songs for a Bad Seeds record. What stage are you at? I've done a couple of days in the studio with Warren, but before that happens, there's a long process of just writing lyrics, and this is the pits. It's the hardest part of the whole process for me because you're just on your own in an office trying to write song lyrics, which I take seriously, you know. And I don't know, there's a whole lot of stuff that goes on in your mind when you're on your own and you're starting a project with nothing.

1:14:03It takes quite a lot to find something that's of interest or that isn't just old residual ideas. Anyway, it's going good. It's more rhythmic, very different, very, very different sounding than what we've done before. All the good signs are there. But it's not without its anxieties. And they don't get better. I was just talking to Susie about this. The anxieties, you mean? The anxieties, you know. She says, well, you always feel this way. And that doesn't help. It doesn't help. Yeah, but this one might be the one that's just no good, you know. And I think it just requires more to make a good record.

1:14:44You know, I think when you're young, you can just barrel into the studio with this energy and you're smashing things and great things are coming and you don't really have that kind of energy or you understand things a bit more. You also understand the feeling that you feel when you make a record is that what you're doing is like the best thing that the world has ever heard and you kind of get into this mindset because you have to be in this mindset and then you make the record and the record comes out and they hand you a CD, let's say back in the CD days, and it's just this little plastic thing and it's, you know, another CD.

1:15:23Yeah. And you're kind of let down by the whole thing. But there's nothing quite like that, of being in that zone, living in the sort of possible deception that what you're doing is something of true greatness. That's quite a feeling. I think we artists chase that. I think you just come to understand that it's not... You come to do things in a more measured way.

1:16:01So that was that. He did me the huge favour of speaking for several hours. It was wonderfully unhurried, unhurried and we even talked a little bit outside afterwards about other podcasts. He's a fan of podcasts, it turns out, listens to quite a few of them. And one of the inspirations for the book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, was these sort of long form podcast conversations that are freewheeling, sort of intimate and open. I suppose I wanted to honour the output, like the incredible body of work, and not simply dive into the grief and the bereavement that Nick has endured. In other words, there's so much to appreciate about what Nick has created.

1:16:47And alongside that, there exists this terrible experience that he's been attempting to make sense of and live through. You know, we spoke about the Enneagram test. Based on the teachings of the Bolivian, I'm reading this from Wikipedia, psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo from the 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s. Oh, some people say it originated way back in like the fourth century. So I did the test anyway. There's about 100 questions. You can fill it out for free. There's nine personality types. I didn't get the one I wanted. Well, these are the cool ones.

1:17:29Individualist romantic, that's number four. Achiever performer, that's number three investigator observer number five you'd think that would be me right I got number nine peacemaker mediator I was a bit disappointed but I've made my peace with being a peacemaker in the sense that I think after initially thinking like oh I think I filled it out wrong I should do it again you know like try and get something else get a better one but But then I was like, maybe that's true because some of the traits are avoiding conflicts, avoiding self-assertion, which is a trait that I have. I do have the slight weakness, but also a strength of sort of seeing everyone's point of view.

1:18:17Anyway, there's no good ones and no bad ones because I talked to Nick afterwards. I actually saw him for dinner. I said, which is the bad one? He goes, they're all bad. I go, which is the good one? He goes, well, they're all good. Nick told me he is an eight challenger protector whose ego fixation mine was indolence his is vengeance and his vice or passion mine was sloth his is lust he's definitely got a cooler one I know they aren't supposed to be good or bad but his is more of the artistic lead singer temperament mine is more of the tedious non-committal layabout I wasn't joking when I said that I was new to his work when I began preparing for the chat and since then consider myself a full-fledged convert and even evangelist and so we'll link to one or two things in the show notes that I recommend including his Kylie duet and the PJ Harvey duet and some other stuff definitely check out the Johnny Cash version of Nick's song, The Mercy Seat, the mercy seat being both the throne of judgment on which God sits and also the electric chair.

1:19:33So I suggest if you don't know Nick's work, explore, explore it. As mentioned, the book, The Death of Bunny Monroe is excellent. The Red Hand Files is also worth checking out. More recently, as I speak, Nick defended his decision to attend the coronation of King Charles III. He said, I'm not a monarchist, nor am I royalist, nor am I an ardent republican for that matter, but what I also am not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age.

1:20:16Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest. I wasn't invited, in case you were wondering. Spared me the dilemma of whether or not to accept. They did ask if I wanted to be on one of the buses during the Queen's Jubilee. Do you remember that? Where all the national treasures, so-called, Kate Moss, Joe Wicks, and many, many more, high-caliber people, went round on buses. I don't want to make a big thing out of it. It's not that I think I'm too big for it, but yeah, I didn't take up the offer.

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