After three years of death and divorce, I really needed this book. Read it slowly because I kept having to stop and think. It is profound, thoughtful, helpful. Thank you Nick. ( )

Worthwhile read of a series of interviews conducted over the better part of a year during the pandemic, explicitly modeled on the Paris Review long-form type, for people who enjoy Nick Cave’s music, especially his hauntingly more abstract work of recent years created in partnership with Warren Ellis, and who find him to be an interesting person. Indeed, who else would be likely to read it. Strong running themes include discussions of what is art for and what does it do, the death of Cave’s 15 year old son which is as he says now the condition of his life, and of course his intelligent and emotional wrestling with God, faith and doubt. He’s a real one.

Below passages are just ones that particularly resonated with me.
—-
O’Hagan: So, for you, it’s a part of the artist’s duty, not just to create work but to make sure it goes out into the world and is experienced by others?

Cave: There are obviously a multitude of reasons why people might choose to make art or music, but, as far as I’m concerned, the work I do is entirely relational, actually transactional, and has no real validity unless it is animated by others. It does not exist in its true form unless it moves through the hearts of others as a balm. Otherwise, it is just words and notes and little more.

So your music is a force for good?

Well, yes, it is. Music is a spiritual currency unlike any other in its ability to transport people out of their suffering, so I don’t take my job lightly. The indisputable goodness of music, the clear benefits it brings - its capacity to enlarge the spirit, provide solace, companionship, healing, and, well, meaning - is much like religion in a way.
—-

O’Hagan: Do you think that, on some subliminal level, your brain tells you not to take creative risks as an artist?

Cave: I do. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The brain enjoys its patterns and paths and wants us to do the things that are familiar. What I’m saying is that you can’t get to that truly creative place unless you find the dangerous idea. And, once again, that’s like standing at the mouth of the tomb, in vigil, waiting for the shock of the risen Christ, the shock of the imagination, the astonishing idea.
——-

O’Hagan: When you were younger, people bought into an image of you as a dark and dangerous, self-destructive figure. You have certainly confounded them of late.

Cave: Well, good, I’m glad. But, as you know, I really don’t see the young man in The Birthday Party as a separate entity from the person who made Ghosteen or does The Red Hand Files. That’s not how it goes. What I mean is, we may shed many skins, but we are essentially the same damn snake.

But surely your outlook is entirely different now?

Well, the young Nick Cave could afford to hold the world in some form of disdain because he had no idea of what was coming down the line. I can see now that this disdain or contempt for the world was a kind of luxury or indulgence, even a vanity. He had no notion of the preciousness of life - the fragility. He had no idea how difficult, but essential, it is to love the world and to treat the world with mercy.
—-

Cave: “Oh man, I’ve still got to read Bobby’s biography. I hear it’s good, but it’s sitting there on an ever-growing pile of book to be read. Christ, there is so much to read. Do you find that?”
—-

Cave: “I don’t know about you, but for me there is forever a struggle between the rational side of myself and the side that is alert to glimpses or impressions of something otherworldly. And, of course, I know there is no coherent argument to be had here. My rational self has all the weaponry, all the big guns - reason, science, common sense, normality - and all that far outweighs the side of me that only has suspicions and hints and signs of something else, something mysterious and quietly spoken. But, even still, it feels, under the circumstances, that to dismiss the existence of these things that live beyond our reasonable selves outright is, at best, ungenerous. Don’t you think? I mean, I don’t blindly succumb to these feelings, but still I remain watchful for that promise. This is how I have chosen to live my life - in uncertainty, and by doing so to be open to the divine possibility of things, whether it exists or not. I believe this gives my life, and especially my work, meaning and potential and soul, too, beyond what the rational world has to offer.”
—-

Cave: “Many people will, of course, disagree, although I tend to think most musicians have more time for these spiritual considerations, because when they make music, when they lose themselves in music, fall deep inside it, they encounter such strong intimations of the divine. Of all things, music can lift us closer to the sacred.”

O’Hagan: And yet there are many great songs and pieces of music that don’t reach into the divine. You’ve written some of them.

Well, I don’t know what those songs are. A song doesn’t have to be explicitly religious to have transcendent qualities.

Did this notion of transcendence apply when you were writing your older, less obviously religious songs?

Yes, I think so.

A song like ‘Breathless’, for instance, seems to me to exalt the luminous beauty of the everyday. Is that not a wondrous subject in and of itself?

Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.
But ‘Breathless’ is, in fact, an explicitly religious song. A love song to God.

No! It was one of the songs we played at our wedding. I never took it for a God song.

Well, that’s what’s known as Jesus smuggling! And it worked. But, to be honest, it’s not about a God that is separate from nature, or apart from the world; rather, it’s about a God that is in attendance and animating all things. ( )

The immense pain and grief that followed the death of his teenage son Arthur changed Nick Cave as a human being and changed the focus of his engagement with the world from creating art to spreading a message of compassion and kindness. This is particularly astonishing given the level of provocation, violence and obscenity in his early work (much of which was, it must be said, a way of grappling with horror's connection with divinity--what Burke called the sublime--as much as it was an exercise in rock'n'roll affront). About three years ago, Cave started a free online venture, the Red Hand Files, to answer questions from fans. This turned almost immediately from the where-do-you-get-your-influences kind of fan site to one of the world's best advice forums, as Cave responded to suffering people with more wisdom, empathy, and even humor than anyone, I'm sure, could have imagined before. I find it a must read, even as Cave's music has turned away from what I like most to something more ethereal.

In keeping with Cave's new mission, this series of conversations with a journalist friend of long standing exhibits a similarly unprecedented level of transparency and self-revelation. Cave is no longer willing to be one of those artists who lets their art be their sole public means of expression. He wants to talk about grief, loss, faith and transformation because he knows that other human beings have and will experience the same things and will be comforted by what he has to say about his own experience. Accordingly, he is as generous in sharing himself as a human being as someone at his level of fame can afford to be. I can't think of many others who have undertaken a similar mission, with the possible exception of the Dalai Lama (a comparison which might make Cave laugh out loud).

Obviously, this isn't the right book for someone who's heard some of Nick Cave's back catalog and wonders about the man behind the music. It's better suited to those who have been wounded in a serious way and are still finding a way to survive their pain and loss, even if they've never heard of Nick Cave or don't like what they've heard. I'm certainly not saying that fans should avoid it; only that they should realize that this Nick Cave is not the Nick Cave of a few years ago.

For a more in-depth discussion, see Mike Futcher's excellent review on LibraryThing. ( )

"I have since come to understand that there is little headway that we can make around grief until we learn to articulate it – speak it, say it out loud, sing about it, write it down…" (pg. 95)

Faith, Hope and Carnage exists in a strange area for me, which makes it hard to review. On the one hand, I've been a fan of Nick Cave for many years and I am always drawn to anything he puts out: the challenge, the honesty and the lyrical potency of it, whether that's his music, his writing or his films. At a time when Cave has proved his emotional courage and literary credibility once again with The Red Hand Files, a published book of interviews seemed like a great idea. On the other hand, I finished Faith, Hope and Carnage – a loose and intimate series of conversations with the Guardian journalist Seán O'Hagan – thinking there was no reason it shouldn't have been a magazine piece instead, particularly as it hews so determinedly to the present.

"The loss of my son defines me," Nick Cave says at the start of the book (pg. 5), and certainly the sudden death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015 has driven his radical artistic change in the years since. O'Hagan notes Cave's "dramatic creative and personal transformation in the face of great personal catastrophe" (pg. 277), and while I personally feel his post-Arthur music to be a bit too ambient and sensual (Skeleton Tree, because of its raw immediacy, being an exception), the new Nick Cave is a fascinating creature. Not only is his music increasingly free of conventional bounds (which has both positives and negatives), but he's made Arthur the forefront of his art. Rather than bury the pain deep and refuse to access it, he speaks profoundly and articulately about the trauma, about grief and pain, and about his changing perspective on all the other things (hope, God, forgiveness) that have been challenged by the cruel loss of Arthur.

Faith, Hope and Carnage is at its best when it's addressing this – which is great, because it's the predominant topic of discussion. Cave has clearly thought a lot about the emotional turmoil he went through – is still going through – and the rational and metaphysical realities and assumptions that underpinned it. Whenever he talks about the nature of grief, compassion, spirituality or a shared humanity, it's touchingly honest and fragile, and his insights are hard-won. Aside from one stark conversation in Chapter 14, when Cave relates his memory of the day Arthur died (pp228-9), the specific trauma is not addressed directly. The one moment when O'Hagan cautiously probes into what Arthur was like as a person sees Cave unravel slightly, and O'Hagan respectfully changes the subject (pg. 218).

This leads me to one of the most persistent flaws in Faith, Hope and Carnage: O'Hagan struggles to really challenge Cave during their conversations. Now, in the above passage about Arthur, O'Hagan rightly backs off when Cave's wound opens, but it's a revealing moment. For most of the book, Cave speaks freely and eruditely about being connected to Arthur spiritually, that his son is still around him and is waiting in a special place, but in the one moment O'Hagan asks about the boy himself, as opposed to the abstract (though intimate) ideal Cave has cherished since his death, things wobble. It's only when O'Hagan immediately allows Cave to return to how he would wish to talk about Arthur that the conversation can continue. On one level – perhaps the most important one – this is decent and humane, but on another the lack of challenge is to the detriment of the ideas discussed, which is surely the whole point of the book. Cave talks at great length about visions and dreams and spirits and energies, and at one point about how he and his wife Susie share each other's memories – that he was also with her when she went swimming in a lake as a child (pg. 197) – and such oddness and indulgence is unchallenged by his interviewer. You don't have to be a cold-hearted cynic or a smug, scoffing rationalist to want to see this kind of talk examined with less credulousness. O'Hagan writes of Cave's interest in the long-form podcast (pg. 276), and I did find myself wondering what would emerge if Nick Cave sat down with someone like Jordan Peterson, who dabbles with many of the same Biblical, metaphysical and storytelling ideas, but who would provide greater rigour and a more serious intellectual collaboration. Faith, Hope and Carnage is interesting, but too unfocused to meet the depth of its philosophical ideas.

With respect, O'Hagan is very much the junior partner in this book, and it is perhaps because of this that Faith, Hope and Carnage fails to become the grand, sprawling, divine force it could perhaps have threatened to be. Cave only agreed to the project if it focused on his current work (pg. 276), and while old collaborators Anita Lane and Blixa Bargeld are discussed once or twice, the decision to be a Ghosteen/Carnage accompaniment means the book lacks the comprehensiveness found in, for example, the vastly entertaining retrospective Conversations with Tom Petty by Paul Zollo. It's interesting to hear Cave's views on his music as he's making it (even if, as I mentioned earlier, I find the post-Skeleton Tree albums a bit too out there), but the lack of pushback from O'Hagan – however well-intentioned – means Faith, Hope and Carnage is too often that familiar spectacle of an artist jawing about his process. "It feels like a massive leap forward," Cave says at one point regarding his new album Carnage (pg. 162), and it's in such moments that I thought about what I mentioned at the start of this review, that there's no reason this shouldn't have been a magazine piece, or a series of them. When O'Hagan writes that the Carnage album seems "to be speaking directly to this moment we're in: the pandemic and, in particular, our collective experience of suspended time" (pg. 166), he sounds like every other damn music journalist out there. O'Hagan hovers on the precipice of sycophancy; Cave on the edge of pretentiousness – and the book is saved only because both are sincere in where they are. It's a good book, but as a reader you're constantly worried it's going to stop being one.

As I said, it's in a strange area for me and hard to review. The discussion of grief and the impossibly raw challenges of life is honest, affecting and, at its best, astonishingly lucid, but without the focus and rigour that would make the book itself – as opposed to the ideas writhing within it – a triumph. As a music book, it is consumed by the present, with the only real point of note for the older Bad Seeds fan being Cave's admission that he "really cannot imagine ever making an electric guitar-based rock record again" (pg. 67). On the rare occasion Cave steps outside of these two umbrella topics, such as when he addresses the zeal nowadays for tearing down statues (pg. 192), or 'cancel culture' in general (pg. 222), it's bracing, and his take on such things astute, but it is, as I said, rare. Meanwhile, the song 'Lavender Fields', from the Carnage album, is introduced twice, and talked about in depth in Chapter 11 in much the same way as it was in Chapter 9. The book is "something that is just unfolding before us. I have no coherent idea of what we are doing", Cave says on page 211, and unfortunately, this sometimes shows. The book brings with it "a sense of discovery" as things unfold, but the trade-off is that the reader often feels they are stepping into a fast-moving stream at some indeterminate point, rather than beginning a journey and a reading experience.

It even feels wrong to review this book as a reading experience. Cave acknowledges that people can feel hesitant around grieving people "because it feels invasive" (pg. 230), and that perhaps explains why I find it difficult to fix my perspective on the book and review it adequately. To criticise it as unfocused seems wrong when Cave is striving gamely to explore and articulate something unfathomable. To want a man's ideas to be challenged when he is, naturally, fragile and vulnerable also seems wrong, particularly so when those ideas are also compassionate, humane and sincere. "I think in a way my work has become an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity," Cave says on page 199, and certainly I don't want to be negative in reviewing it. My response to the book was overwhelmingly positive, but with some caveats. Just as I yearn for more structure to his increasingly sensual and abstract music (not necessarily a return to "electric guitar-based rock records", but to an embrace of form and popular appeal), I also yearn for more challenge to his ideas, because those ideas are good – and can be greater. When I hit my limits with Ghosteen and Carnage (and it seems I hit them sooner than other fans) it's with the sense that I don't think Cave has reached what he's searching for, or expressed it in his music – yet. Nick Cave is not so much stumbling around in the dark as stumbling around in the overwhelming light, and it speaks a lot to the talent of this artist that he might well find his feet and lead us there in time.

"… Arthur showed us that – the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world." (pg. 240) ( )