Nick Cave on how unimaginable loss reanimated his spirituality and connection with the world
The Aussie singer celebrates the women in his life through song, channels his grief through the Red Hand Files and lets fans behind the curtain in a moving virtual exhibition.
The women in Nick Cave’s life have always loomed large in his music, films and myriad creative endeavours.
Susie, his wife of 26 years, has been his primary muse for the music he has composed since they were married in 1999, with Cave often writing from her perspective.
The ghosts of girlfriends past inspired Cave classics including Deanna, while the more recent O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is), from the Wild God album he will be celebrating on his tour of Australia in January, was inspired by his late lover and creative sparring partner Anita Lane.
Cave said it an “interesting, complex thing” to consider the relationship those who inspire him have with the songs written about them.
He cites the example of the brutal song Scum, a vitriolic response to a former flatmate and journalist Mat Snow’s lacklustre review of an early Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, as demonstrating that “people mostly like having songs written about them.”
“Even the nasty ones. I wrote a song back in the day about an English journalist who’d given me a bad review called Scum and he claims that to be his favourite song,” Cave said from his London home.
“Not always, but mostly, my songs paint the people in the songs in a pretty good light.”
As Cave and his band The Bad Seeds have travelled the world with the defiantly joyous album Wild God, fans have also had the opportunity to explore his loves and creative life in an expansive exhibition called Stranger Than Kindness.
Curated with the Royal Danish Library and now available to explore for free as a virtual exhibition, a panel attached to the lyrics for the 1988 hit Deanna paints a different picture.
Written in the wake of an intensely passionate relationship, the song’s protagonist regarded the song as “the bane of my existence” at the height of its popularity.
“What she didn’t like was that she was remembered for this song, it’s not that she didn’t like the song,” Cave said.
“Maybe that was at the time. Maybe when she’s a little granny sitting in her rocking chair and someone asks ‘Are you Deanna from the song?’ she’ll go “Yeah, I am.’ And the other person will go ‘Oh, I love that song.’
“But Anita didn’t like that song, that’s for sure.”
As for Lane, who died in 2021 and also features prominently in the exhibition, Cave says he is “sure she’s pleased” about her song Oh Wow Oh Wow.
Cave also pays tribute to one of his most shocking and successful collaborations in the exhibition, with a tender hologram dance with Kylie Minogue to a music box remake of their murder ballad hit Where The Wild Roses Grow.
The unlikely coupling of the rock god and pop star forged an enduring friendship after their recording in 1995, with Cave saying the hologram video is one of the “pieces I loved so much.”
An insight into his early years as an aspiring rock star, when he moved to London in 1980 with his band The Birthday Party, is the trunk of letters he wrote to his adored mother Dawn discovered after her death in 2020.
“Of course she kept the letters, and I know that now because we kept all our kids’ letters,” he said.
“When I read a couple of them, I could see me desperately trying to make my mother feel like I was okay in London, that everything was okay when clearly it wasn’t, and I was just struck by the idea that if my children had written me letters like those, I would have been absolutely terrified of what was really going on.”
The Wild God album followed two deeply personal records Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, which dealt with the tragedy of the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015. His older son Jethro Lazenby died in 2022 aged 31.
Alongside the records, Cave delved deeply into the nature of grief in the Red Hand Files, an ask-me-anything blog where he answers questions from fans, many of whom reach out to him after losing loved ones.
While Cave might appear to be an improbable agony uncle to the world, he regards the Red Hand Files as an equally powerful communication with his audience as his transcendent live shows.
Videos of the Wild God shows through Europe and the US over the past year capture the euphoric connection between Cave and his people. Everyone looks like they’re living their best life.
“That’s a great way to put it,” he said chuckling.
“I think people understand on some level just how precious this thing is to get up on stage and play live music. As the world becomes more narrow, more divided, there is this place where everyone can come together.
“Music is just good for us. For me personally, I feel I have these two things; I’m able to play music and I’m able to do the Red Hand Files and both of those things feel to be a form of communication (with) a kind of moral dimension to them and are of true value to us.”
The final “room” in the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition called Shattered History seeks to explain how Cave has embraced a spiritual awakening after the heartbreaking tragedy of his sons’ deaths.
“I suppose I feel that certain things happen in our lives that are able to reanimate the spiritual side of us, that this world we live in doesn’t really value … and that these events can lead us back to our true human nature which is both rational and spiritual,” he said.
“I think that’s what I was trying to say with that exhibition and with Wild God.”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have released their Live God album this week.
Tickets to the Wild God tour of Australia in January are now available via nickcave.com and you can tour the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition via https://thenickcaveexhibition.com/
More Coverage
Originally published as Nick Cave on how unimaginable loss reanimated his spirituality and connection with the world
Detail in Gaga’s Aussie show divides fans
