The Louis Theroux Podcast - S1 EP5: Nick Cave on his remarkable career, religion and dealing with grief

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Louis sits down in the Spotify studio with musician, writer and poet Nick Cave. Nick tells Louis all about his remarkable life and career, including being a member of the “most violent band in the world”, his relationship with God and being high on Top Of The Pops with Kylie Minogue.     Warnings: Some strong language and discussions of sensitive themes, including drug use, violence and death.    Links: Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Faith-Hope-Carnage-Nick-Cave/dp/1838857680/ref=asc_df_1838857680/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=641789777959&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=7392167829579645064&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1006886&hvtargid=pla-1846328033232&psc=1&th=1&psc=1     The Death of Bunny Monroe by Nick Cave  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Bunny-Munro-Canons/dp/1782115331     The Birthday Party - ‘Junkyard’  The Birthday Party, "Junkyard"  GG Allin  The late GG Allin has violent and disturbing mood swings - DVLH (Rare documentary footage)  Kylie Minogue & Nick Cave – ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ (Live Top Of The Pops)  Kylie Minogue & Nick Cave - Where the Wild Roses Grow (Live Top Of The Pops 1995)  Kylie Minogue & Nick Cave – ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ (Live Top Of The Pops)  Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue on Top Of The Pops    Jesus by A.N Wilson   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-N-Wilson/dp/0712606971/ref=sr_1_1?crid=29KGTJJJ4YTZN&keywords=A.n+Wilson+biography+of+jesus&qid=1687183752&s=books&sprefix=a.n+wilson+biography+of+jesus%2Cstripbooks%2C69&sr=1-1    The Red Hand Files  https://www.theredhandfiles.com/     Blonde  BLONDE | From Writer and Director Andrew Dominik | Official Trailer | Netflix  Dahmer  DAHMER Trailer (2022)  Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads  https://open.spotify.com/album/4EMI48u2Fn6srocaXjuAcJ?si=AAcpIaWeSzWffLMX8On1Xw     Go The F**k To Sleep – book   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Go-F-Sleep-Adam-Mansbach/dp/0857862650     Partridge’s Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English - book    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Partridges-Concise-Dictionary-Unconventional-English/dp/0026053500/ref=sr_1_1?crid=201ZDOQ771V6E&keywords=dictionary+of+slang+and+unconventional+english&qid=1687184223&s=books&sprefix=dictionary+of+slang+and+unconventional+english%2Cstripbooks%2C66&sr=1-1    The Johnny Cash Show  Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash - Jackson (The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show)  Johnny Cash - ‘Folsom Prison Blues’  https://open.spotify.com/track/0LTSNmOLBt25GMjHlxp9OR?si=09c48ccf9dc34dc2     Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - ‘Red Right Hand’  Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Red Right Hand (Official Video)  The Enneagram Personality Test - The Enneagram Personality Test    Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - ‘Jubilee Street’  https://open.spotify.com/track/7rbw06Ngndbs8X4iPdepES?si=8fc5e05a1999454b     Jimi Hendrix - ‘Hey Joe’  https://open.spotify.com/track/0NWPxcsf5vdjdiFUI8NgkP?si=cc43c3094ec5413e     Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - ‘Ghosteen’  https://open.spotify.com/track/6tEFvxPkn2FRDmTPuu2GZV?si=9b0f84d7a43a426d     Credits:  Producer: Paul Kobrak  Assistant Producer: Maan Al-Yasiri  Production Manager: Francesca Bassett  Music: Miguel D’Oliveira  Show notes compiled by Shaloma Ellis  Executive Producer: Arron Fellows    A Mindhouse Production exclusively for Spotify  www.mindhouse.co.uk  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello. Hello. It all sounds weird. Hi, Louis Theroux here. How are you doing? Welcome to my podcast, exclusively on Spotify, and called, appropriately enough, The Louis Theroux Podcast. Today we have a very special guest called Nick Cave, the amazing, the one and only, legendary, I overused that word, but in this case it's deserved, musician, screenwriter, film scorer, novelist, agony uncle, hierophant. That means a person, especially a priest, who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles.

He has a new book out called Faith, Hope and Carnage, co-authored with Sean O'Hagan. In fact, it takes the form of a number of conversations that Sean and Nick have together, the form of a number of conversations that Sean and Nick have together reflecting on art, life, artistry, loss. Nick lost his son Arthur in 2015. Arthur was just 15 years old. Unbelievably and tragically he lost a second son Jethro in 2022. So bereavement is among the subjects under discussion. And moving out of grief, well, he's going to put it better than that. He also has a website called the Red Hand Files, where he answers letters, questions from fans and people in general who are looking for guidance on any matter, sometimes deeply intimate questions about life and other times more trivial and light-hearted questions. I was a little bit intimidated to speak

to Nick. I don't know if that comes across or not. His catalogue is so immense and the esteem in which he's held is so high. I wanted to bring my A-game so you can be the judge of whether or not I succeeded. We recorded it face-to-face at the Spotify studios. Picture this. He strides in looking a bit like a goth undertaker in a dark, exquisitely tailored suit, shirt unbuttoned, maybe one button further than I would ever risk. And I think there's a little chain around his neck. And black hair swept back like a vision of the aging Heathcliff in his Sunday best.

A lot of different references in there. So that's the scene. That's the mise-en-scene. There's some strong language, references to death, as mentioned. And, you know, what can I say? He did an album called The Murder Ballads, so it'll be those kinds of themes that we'll be talking about. All of that and much, much more coming up. Here he is.

How are you doing? I'm very well. Good to meet you. Yeah, likewise. Where am I? There, it's perfect. How are you liking being back in London? I like it. I like London. I like London a lot, actually. There. How are you liking being back in London? I like it. I like London. I like London a lot, actually.

There's always something new. Are you in London? Yeah, I grew up in London, and then I've lived in New York, and I've lived in LA, but I'll probably die in London. I don't mean to sound ominous, but I feel like when I'm in other cities or living elsewhere, I'm still kind of gathering experiences, travel in the biggest sense. And then when I'm in London, I sort of think, I just feel like I'm peering down the

corridor with an unvaried sense of days rolling out in the same city, in the same place. My sort of destination is, in that respect, is Australia, that eventually I'll end up in Australia and kind of quietly die there. Do you think you'll go back at some point? Well, you know, I have a very strong yearning for Australia. You know, through lockdown, it was really very powerful. And maybe that was because I was in the middle of a crisis, existential crisis, and there was just a feeling of needing to run back to mummy or something like that. But I do feel that I belong in Australia. Do you have a place there in Australia? No. Well, I used to stay with my mother, but she died through COVID. Not of COVID,

but she was a very old lady. I'm sorry to hear that. Did she still live in, I'm going to say this wrong, Wangaratta? Wangaratta? No, no, she lived in Melbourne. I lived in Wangaratta till I was, I think, 12 and then left and went to Melbourne. She was the librarian and my father was the English literature teacher and maths teacher at Wangaratta High School where I attended, which was not a good combination because I was kind of mischievous, let's say, by nature. Well, we could say that.

I had a kind of occasional tendency towards the tyrannical in my need for attention, and that got me into all sorts of trouble. And I was permanently sitting in the corridor outside the headmaster's office with both my parents walking past me, shaking their heads. Yeah. So they were happy to get rid of me and send me to boarding school in Melbourne, where we ended up living. And my mother lived there for the rest of her life.

While we're on the subject. Which one? Well, because you've taken us back in time, which is great. It must have been quite weird for your parents, like having a child at the school who was acting up the whole time. Do you think they found it embarrassing? We were all there. You know, there was four of us.

So she had a bunch of children who were all pretty free-spirited, if you like. There's a theme throughout your work, and I know you've been through a lot of changes, but going back years, you had a reputation for being, what's the word, I suppose chaotic or confrontational or dangerous. But I also get the feeling there's a lot of love that you had for your parents growing up you felt loved you felt attended to and cared for yeah so I'm just wondering where you see that disruptive energy where did it come from yeah yeah look I wasn't a depressed kid I had a very loving family I wasn't an angry kid but I was a rebellious contrary sort of creature and that was coddled by my parents, or at least certainly my mother,

that there wasn't anything that I could do wrong enough for her to see as my fault. So she was always on my side, no matter how clearly it was my fault. So there's something in that, you know, for someone who goes on to lead a life that maybe was quite dangerous, you know, I was a drug addict for a long time and these sorts of things, that there was always that sense that my mother was there, regardless of my kind of condition of being. So it was a saving thing, you know.

So this is exciting for me. You're a high caliber guest oh really yeah and i don't mean to suggest that you're slumming all our guests are high caliber but for me like i have to confess like i wasn't as across or as immersed in your work as i've i don't know i should have been so the last three or four weeks has been a chance to dive deep into your catalog i also read a novel of yours called The Death of Bunny Monroe, which I wouldn't mind talking to you about if you're up for it. Sure, yeah.

But it's been a huge pleasure digging into your music and as a music fan and as a fan of many of the people I would see now as your peers, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison. You know, you're up there with those guys. I don't mean to sort of kiss your bum too much, but it is what it is. Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison. You know, you're up there with those guys. I don't mean to sort of kiss your bum too much, but it is what it is.

What's your editor's name? Paul. Paul, leave that bit in, please. I'm fine with that, by the way. But you're a slightly different generation to some of those peers, having come up kind of in the ashes of punk and post-punk. Yeah, that's right. And not just that, but also in Australia, which, you know, whether you like it or not, is a different place. It's a different cultural environment than L.A. or New York or London or wherever.

So dialing back, I am going to get to the point. Back in the early days, it was quite a wild outfit, the birthday party, this group that you were part of. You're known for being confrontational. And the tag, what was the tag that you were given? The most dangerous group? No, we went on tour in Europe and the promoters put out a poster which said the most violent band in the world. Right. Which we didn't come up with that idea, right? Which didn't do us

much good. And the concerts were very different. Certainly had something to do with being called that, that it attracted certain people to our concerts. And the concerts were very violent, you know. But initially, I think it came out of being a band that was casting around for what we wanted to be. We were sort of caught in the middle of things. You know, I'd actually grown up listening to a lot of progressive rock music, got records by Iggy Pop and David Bowie and these sorts of things. And this went on to the MC5 and I got involved in punk rock. So there was a huge anticipation for me as an Australian, someone living in Melbourne, to get out of Melbourne and go to London and discover what for us was this incredible place

where everything happened. And we would sit around, you know, reading the NME and looking at all the gigs we could go to. We were all dying to get out of Melbourne and get to London and enter into this sort of artistic paradise. Sadly, by the time we got over there, things in London had kind of died. The whole punk thing had died and that outrage that existed on stage, that us-against-them attitude, the desire to offend,

all of these sorts of things had kind of dissipated into something that was more post-punk shoegazing kind of thing. So we came along and saw these groups and I think we were really upset by that. We were bored to be honest and I think the birthday

party, that kind of visceral angry, confrontational thing sort of burst open because of not just our living situation, which was diabolical, we just simply had no money and we're getting no work, but also that we felt we'd come to London, it was essentially the most depressing place on earth with nothing really good to see, in our view. And I think we really responded to that in a very visceral way. The little press that we did get didn't understand what a band like The Birthday Party was

and that we were coming from Australia and what kind of music we played. So would these shows in Melbourne, before you left, would they be pretty violent too? I mean, they weren't violent in that way, but we were doing our thing. But it really ramped up after a while, ramped up over here. I don't want to make a huge thing out of it

but I'm curious to know whether actually you're getting in punch ups with fans coming on stage and it's a kind of consensual canadian ritualistic kind of mayhem but no one's getting badly hurt. I don't no one's getting badly hurt.

I don't know. We got badly hurt sometimes. There was a sense of abandon about things that has something to do with what music did for us. It was a freeing thing. And we weren't interested in the sort of struggle that young bands normally go through with getting a record company and all of that sort of stuff.

We were just this live band that went on stage and went berserk and enjoyed that aspect. And other people enjoyed it too, a kind of chaos. Did you ever go to hospital? Yeah, from being cut and stuff, yeah. Really? During shows? And it felt like... Yeah, cut on bottles and things seriously yeah well i don't know i think a lot of musicians end up having to go to hospital for one thing or

another i suppose so yeah but the meanwhile as i understand it the band was pretty tight because the other reference i was thinking about was i mean musically it's a million miles away but gg allen yeah we weren't like that He would go up and smash himself in the face and poo on the stage. We had Mick Harvey, who was one of the members of the band. He's an extremely good, solid musician and he knocked us into shape.

Not me particularly, because I was a kind of wild card within the band to some degree in that I didn't have the same musical prowess as the other members of the band. So I just sort of did my thing. But they were tight, they were really tight, and played quite complicated music, The Birthday Party, in its way.

So there was that. It wasn't just we went on stage and smashed our instruments and cut ourselves up. In that period, it would have been the beginning of kind of new romantic. Was it bands like ultra vox and duran duran or was it something else because it all went quite yachts and rio fairly quickly we didn't get into the into that stuff really but i mean nor do we have any interest in it i think part of being in the birthday party was at least for me and I think for Roland Howard,

I think Mick was... He was your guitarist back then? He was our guitarist. Mick Harvey, who was the guy I kind of started the band with to some degree, he was more out there looking at other bands and that sort of stuff. But I was very shut down and just into my own thing. And actually that's the way it's always been to some degree. To this day I'm not part of a scene. I haven't been involved in any.

I personally have been someone I think that's just gone on my way and done things and there are some moments that the world kind of catches me and I'm suddenly fashionable for a while and then the world goes on to other things and I become a kind of anach and then the world goes on to other things and I become a kind of anachronism and it goes up and down, ebbs and flows. But you've also been on top of the pops with Kylie Minogue. Yeah. Twice? Yeah, talk about descending into the bowels of hell. Yeah. If you ever wanted to see just what young girls are like, be a kind of slightly aging rock

star and go on. Seriously, because they're like, I've come for Kylie and I'm getting Bela Lugosi. Yeah, they're just, who are you? They weren't actually heckling you, were they? They were just nasty little girls who were there for Kylie and just thought, who is this dreadful... Funereal apparition.

Drug ravaged. Reanimated mummy. In all seriousness, as someone who'd sort of been in the world of pop and rock, but then here you are kind of at its bubblegum core, right? Is it mixed emotions? Are you just happy to be there? We were loving all that. Really?

We loved all that. And Kylie loved it too. Kylie was... It was a song called Where the Wild Roses Grow. Yeah, a murder ballad. A murder ballad. Yeah. About you stoving in, not you, a character.

A character. Get that out there. It ends with, it's not about that, but it ends with the character killing the... His beloved. Yeah, his beloved. And it's a duet. And in my opinion, it's not a bad murder ballad as far as murder ballads go. It's pretty good.

Lovely. It was quite something at the time for Kylie to take on, you know. I certainly wasn't in showroom condition. Were you still active in your, what's the word? Yeah. Usage? Yeah. No way.

Yeah. Her management were like, this is really a bad idea. We were a bunch of dark, drug-addicted monstrosities, all sort of scowling in the studio. But she was determined to do that. And she was this extraordinary presence, came in and just sang the song really beautifully. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever talked to Kylie or met her or anything like that. She sort of radiates a lightness of spirit and displayed an enormous amount of courage, I think,

and the record did really well. What was the courage? To sort of walk into a studio amongst a whole bunch of degenerate... Etiolated, vampiric... Exactly. Succubi. I think that's the female. Is it?

Yeah. Incubuses. Incubi. I think that's the female. Is it? Yeah. What's the male? Incubus is. Incubi, yeah. Her management were obviously slightly nervous about what was going on with our princess, but we just became extremely good friends. And despite maybe the dubious nature of the song, it was, for me, part of my career that I really

have extremely fond memories of, and so does she, and we've stayed very good friends. Is it weird being on top? I know it's a stupid question, but is it just your cattle, here you do the thing, and then off you go? It's sort of basic TV, isn't it? I can't remember too much about it. Do you think you were high when you did it?

Yeah, for sure, of course. I couldn't have done it otherwise. I just remembered a lot of rather sour young girls sort of not finding me attractive in the way that they all seem to find other people attractive on Top of the Pops. It wasn't the Top of the Pops bit that was of any real interest to me, actually, apart from that it's just its perverse nature. But it was getting the opportunity to work with Kylie, who I'd always admired.

She was like an Australian icon. I just always felt it would be nice to slow her down a little bit and to do something that was at odds with the way she appeared. And it was quite beautiful. It's normal in the world of the kind of people I speak to that I look at, you know, what they've done and there's a kind of wilderness period, like there are fallow years when they kind of fall out of fashion or they fall by the wayside. Correct me if I'm wrong, when I look at your trajectory, there just seems to have been this very long kind of crescendo, like in the sense of a steady ramping up of interest in what you're doing is

there's never been a time when it felt like, so far as I can tell, you lost a record deal, or I couldn't get, you know, you fell so far outside the wayside that there was no coming back. Yeah, that happens, doesn happens doesn't it yeah I've been I think extremely conscious of that of the resting on your laurels thing I know that in a way there's no coming back for me it's always felt like that if I stop I'll like it too much and once that happens it's just too difficult to get it going again, get the whole thing going again. So even in the days that we're describing earlier, I worked. And that's the thing that's always been something that I've done regularly and sustained me, that I get up in the morning and I get to work.

Even through 20 years of heroin addiction, I always still did that, even if the work was nodding off at the typewriter, you know. Right. Kind of waking up with the keys imprinted into my forehead. It was still the work, if you understand what I mean. That's always been the case. It was the case yesterday and will be the case tomorrow, you know. Six days a week, is that right?

Yeah. You take Sundays off. You're like God in that respect. I found six days a week difficult to take, and now I tend to do seven. Come on. Stop it! But, you know, the creative life is, by its very nature, internal, and you live in your head and you live inside your ideas and you live inside the artificial world that you're creating at the time. It's not an ideal situation to work all the time

and not live outside your job because, you know, you need to find things that inspire you. Yeah, although you're at risk of making it sound like it's just fuel for the creative engine, whereas one would hope that it's an end in itself. No, I totally agree. I totally agree. I mean, it certainly has become more that way to me. And I think that when my son died, one of the things was a visceral shock at the way I was so self-interested

in the sense that it was the work. And after that, things changed in that respect. I still work in the same way, but I don't have that idea that the work is the important thing, you know, that everything must be sort of sacrificed on the altar of your genius. You know, I don't have that feeling at all, really. On the subject of um doing the work

even for the years that you were dealing with heroin i think you also talk in the book about the fact that heroin actually had a paradoxical kind of ordering function or in your life that it kind of imposed a routine yeah it's it's simplifying. You know, it takes away all the multitude of peripheral stress that we go through as human beings, where we constantly have these little anxieties going on about this thing. It wipes all that away and you just have a kind of polarised life. You're either stoned or you're sick and you spend your time trying not to be sick and trying

to be stoned. And there's a great ordering that happens within your life, which is why they call it like a habit. You get yourself a habit and it sets up a weird structure around your life that makes things quite simple to some degree at the expense, of course, of everything else, everything else in your life. You just need to score if you have to score, and that's the end of it. Forget anything else. So you wake up in the morning

and that's the first thing you need to do, and you need to do that at the end of the day as well. And so you just go around and around in this thing, and it's not like some of the other drugs which are pure chaos. I never really got on with a lot of drugs because they messed with your head too much. Like I couldn't smoke pot or take acid because they just got in the way.

I couldn't trust what was going on in my head at all. So aside from alleviating the sickness of withdrawal, what do you think heroin was doing for you? Yeah, that's a very good question. It's obviously doing something. But after a while, that question goes out the window because you just have to keep taking the drug or else you're going to get sick. Why I started taking it, I would find that quite difficult to answer other than I actually just thought it was a great idea at the time. Like it felt like the ultimate antisocial gesture. Quite solitary, was it basically?

It is, exactly. You don't, you know, I think a lot of people drink because it has some benefits. You know, you go to a party and you have a few drinks and you become a more interesting person and you're a little bit more fluid and relaxed and you can chat up a woman easily or a man or whatever. Heroin is not something that you do because it is a social thing. You become quite insular in a way. So I don't know, I don't really have a very good answer to that,

the why of it. Also, it just felt good at the time. In the book, there's a lot of different aspects to it. One of them is this sort of yearning for a kind of, I suppose it's a religious dimension to life, in fact, a good portion of it. I still have that rational, sceptical mind inside of me, but I do find the religious experience to be extremely interesting. And so I come to it with both a sense of belief, I would say, and unbelief.

And there's a sort of battle, I think, that goes on between the two that is extremely fertile and a creative space. Much more creative, I think, than a point-blank rejection of spiritual things. I find that being open to the intimations and yearnings that we have for something larger than what may empirically exist is extraordinarily creative and worth at the very least investigating. And so when I say that I go to church, which I do go to church, in some way I find that that is a place where I can do that kind of thing. And it's a place that is also accepting of both my unbelief and my belief. So you go to church fairly regularly?

Yeah. But you don't call yourself a Christian? I feel very uncomfortable about that. I love that because most people who call themselves Christian don't go to church. Right? You flipped it. I have to remember that. I flipped it. People get hung up on the idea there's two registers, sort of what is factually, scientifically true and that which is demonstrably false.

And in fact, between the two, there's a world. There are many worlds, many universes. There's the world of not just metaphor, irony, religious thought, myth, but many others besides in which we interpret and understand our experience. Yeah. I find that there are intimations within the world that exist somewhere between what is rational and what is kind of woo-woo that are worth investigating.

Feelings, 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. You know, 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 if I'm... 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. 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 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 was 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. In 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, 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? Because 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 skeptic, generally, with a little kind of Christopher Hitchens inside me, going, what are you doing? But 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. 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? I 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've probably talked 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 realize, 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 traveling 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. And 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. When 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, you know... 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. We 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.

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. It 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. And 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.

And 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. And 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, some are one line? It's like I do it at the end of the day and 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. Yeah, I was just... That was you being obtuse, was it? Because you did the soundtrack, that was why your friend Andrew Dominic... 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 inverted commas. 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. And 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. Yeah, we were sort of adjacent to... You got a double helping of whatever you would call that. Is that a... 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. I don't know. That's a good example of... 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. And 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. Do 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. I 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 was a beautiful example because 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. Yeah, because 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 Ivor Novella 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. And 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 an entire album entitled murder that's right so so as a murder ballad it 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. That's right. Yeah. You've sailed fairly close to the wind, I would say. Is that fair? In 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, 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.

Have 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. They were just violent records and there were heroic women and female murderers and all sorts of stuff going on in that record and, and songs before that. But I'm not personally a misogynist. 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 as 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. Well, it's a compliment with a little sting in the tail. You're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. Hi, 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 Bundy 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 has sex with a heroin addict who's nodding out at one point. I 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 Junior. 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. And 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 desperate because he's not a good sex maniac. His conquests a 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 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. But 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 or in what way is that, in your view, enriching? You mean why is that more enriching than bland?

Well, that confronted me, that changed my ideas about things, that created, you know, 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, but there was a film made of it. Right, famous film. Famous. Was it Ryan O'Neill? A kind of soppy romance yeah and i was just reading it and i don't know was left around the house and i was reading

it and in the middle of this soppy romance is a you know a four-letter word there's a hockey match between uh two teams and the lead character of the ryan oNeill character, says fucking canic. 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 canic, which is probably more obscure. Well, it's obscure and probably more offensive.

It's Canadian, term 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. 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. We 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. I'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 remember that? Yeah, it ago called Go the Fuck to Sleep. Do you remember that? I remember that, yeah. It's a beautiful kids' book. It was a kids' book for adults. Well, no, it was a kids' 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. Yeah, 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? I don't know, eight or something like that. Everyone parents differently. It was exciting. Maybe I shouldn't have been reading the book to them. That hadn't even occurred to me, to be honest. I think that that probably made them want to them. That 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 there 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 bad, like he's an outlaw guy. It excited something. It'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, 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.

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. Yeah. 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. Fans 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 the bearer Oh, that's good. That's pretty good. I'm sure the bearer of good news. Yeah, it's quite extraordinary. It's a metaphor, and 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. 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 characterises this sort of evil force that's travelling around the world, presenting himself as virtue. It sounds exactly like what we're talking about. That has hidden in his coat a red right hand, a bloodstained hand. 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, it 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. People are like, get on with your life. Of course, no one wants to sit around 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. And 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. The 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. This might sound like a weird question, but have you ever done the Enneagram? This 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 is about this. 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. I 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.

That'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.

It's extraordinarily accurate. Do you do a questionnaire? Yes, you answer 100 questions. Oh, wow. Sounds a bit like Scientology. It's not 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 it'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. And 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. 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 their not whatever the opposite is and i get to hide my more deviant or more questionable side my embarrassing side and i recognize 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 and 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... Give it one more go. Give it one more go. 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. But 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. So 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. That 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 and 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. They still hadn't had a conversation about it. It's just this all-consuming thing that sits in the middle of their 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 rooted in suffering, that kind of just leaps spasmodically out of your suffering and that can be extremely powerful thing. And 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 of me where he said i'm contemptuous of joy i'm contemptuous of beauty contemptuous of happiness in others it was a great quote he said after being a living shit post 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. There are reasons to hold the world in contempt, you know, and there's reasons to be suspicious of everything in the world. There 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. But 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. You're listening to the 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. But I just was like, play Nick Cave. And Jubilee Street 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. 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. And lyrically. I'm very pleased with that. For whatever reason it made me think of Hey Joe

that 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. It's a sort of circular thing that builds in intensity. It builds in 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.

The last one was Carnage, and Ghost Teen 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 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? Well, it doesn't really have drums and bass and and it doesn't have guitars and 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 there's i didn't 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 you don't want to be status quo well 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.

How 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. It 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. You 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. Yeah. 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 you come to do things in a more measured way. So that was that. He did me the huge favour of speaking for several hours.

It was wonderfully 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 honor 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, and 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 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s. Some people say it originated way back in like the fourth century. So I did the test anyway. There's about a hundred 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. Individualist romantic, that's number four. Achieist 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, oh, I think I filled it 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 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. Anyway, 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. 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, seat being both the throne of judgment on which God sits and also the electric chair. So 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. Not 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. Credits. This podcast was produced by Paul Kobrag and Maan Al-Yazari.

The production manager was Francesca Bassett, and the executive producer is Aaron Fellows. The music in this series is by Miguel de Oliveira. This is a Mindhouse production exclusively for Spotify.