Nick Cave draws a crowd – but the queues aren’t to listen to his music this time

London: Australian singer Nick Cave has surprised shoppers at a small store in England by giving them an insight into his creative life – not with his music, but with his books.

The singer has generated queues at an Oxfam bookshop at a seaside resort by donating 2000 books on topics including philosophy, religion and rock.

Nick Cave in a scene from the documentary 20,000 Days on Earth.Credit:

The first of his boxes was opened last week and drew a crowd of buyers when word reached the local media in Hove, near Brighton in south-east England.

“I guess there were between 50 and 100 people queuing in the first couple of hours of the stock going out,” store manager Richard, who asked to be quoted without his surname, told this masthead.

Cave lived near Brighton with his family for many years and donated the books after they were used in an art installation about his creative process.

That exhibition, called Stranger Than Kindness, included a recreation of Cave’s office, with his entire personal library, as presented in the Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard film 20,000 Days on Earth.

Word of the donation reached the local newspaper, The Argus, which broke the news and triggered the crowds.

About 800 of the books were put on display last week and included Australian books such as Helen Garner’s This House of Grief, her account of the trial of Robert Farquharson for driving his car into a dam, killing his three young sons.

Other titles on display included The First Bad Man by Miranda July, Night Train by Martin Amis and Fear Itself by Walter Mosley.

“We’ve kept them strictly quarantined from the rest of the shelves,” Richard said.

Whether the songwriter’s name has added to their value, however, is uncertain. Most of the books have nothing to identify their provenance, although a few have dedications on the opening pages, scrawled notes in the margins or slips of personal papers between the pages. They are being sold in the same price range as other books in the store.

“It’s an incredibly eclectic collection,” Richard said.

“There is quite a lot of philosophy, and quite a lot about religion. There are also many books about film.

“There is loads of fiction – and it is incredibly mixed. There are quite a lot of music biographies, as you’d expect.”

When reporter Hugo Daniel of The Sunday Times visited the store, he found a book with an airline boarding pass in the singer’s name – Frankfurt to Amsterdam, seat 4A – as well as a copy of The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda by Miguel de Cervantes, with a note to Cave from filmmaker Peter Sempel.

Cave’s time in Brighton was marked by tragedy in 2015 when his son, Arthur, died in a fall from a cliff at age 15. An inquest found he had taken LSD. Another son, Jethro, died in 2022 at the age of 31.

The interest in Cave and his music has only grown with the creation of his website, The Red Hand Files, and its discussion of philosophy and faith.

Fans gathered at the weekend in Pompeii to see Cave’s latest tour. He performs in Cannes later this week and tours Europe over the next few months; most of the concerts are already sold out.

While about 800 books were put on display over the past week, the Oxfam store team believes it has shown barely half of the donated books.

Richard said the team would need until later this week to prepare the rest for sale. If it meets that deadline, customers will have more books to queue for by Wednesday or Thursday.

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