Nick Cave’s first words in Faith, Hope and Carnage are: “Who wants to be interviewed? Interviews in general suck. “I don’t like ’em.” Not bad as a foreword for a book that’s basically an interview. 300 pages. Maybe he’s wasting his time during quarantine Conditioned by the need to find something to keep him busy, in 2020 Cave accepted an offer from Northern Irish journalist (and friend) Séan O’Hagan to make a series of phone calls about his “current concerns”, leading up to the production of a book. The interviews lasted a year; In total, there are more than 40 hours of footage in which the Australian singer-songwriter not only looks back on her 40 years in music, but also deals with the most painful periods of her life and with rather brutal candor topics such as loss, grief, freedom, spirituality, addictions and the redemptive power of art. A long and disturbing confession that the Sexto Piso publishing house has now published in Spanish with the translation of Eduardo Rabasa.
The central topic of these conversations, to which Cave returns again and again, is the death of his son Arthur, who fell off a cliff after taking LSD in Brighton in 2015, when he was 15. In the book’s foreword, O’Hagan admits to being “consistently” surprised by the musician’s “candor and openness” in discussing the tragedy, as well as the “frank nature” of his responses. “It’s important to talk about this because the loss of my son defines me,” Cave says at one point in the interview.
Some passages are almost unbearably difficult. The part where the artist remembers the night of Arthur’s death was widely read. This is also the moment when he ensures that all his work in recent years has been a quest for “confession”, a way of asking for forgiveness for what happened to his son. But Cave tries to repeat over and over again that this unimaginable family catastrophe spurred a personal and creative transformation that gave his life and work greater meaning. “Since Arthur died, I have been able to escape the absolute power of pain and experience a kind of joy that is completely new to me,” she says. “Even though it was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me, I experienced periods of much more happiness than before. “This is the gift Arthur left me.”
come out of the dark
In the midst of existential collapse and engulfed in pitch darkness, Cave and his wife, Susie, gradually discovered that people’s kindness could be a reliable source of light, and left the darkness behind, clinging to the belief that “the world does not exist.” .” “It’s animated by evil, as we’re often told, but by love.” That’s certainly how they found their way back to life, but they were no longer the same people they were before. Cave says: “I want to convey a message about the question that everyone who experiences grief asks themselves: At some point you can feel better. Do you feel it? And the answer is yes. We become different. Hill”.
At the risk of alienating even his most skeptical fans, the artist makes no secret that this trip is connected with an intense exploration of his religious faith. It’s true that this is an old interest, dating back to the primitive and wild times of the Birthday Party – “There were plenty of people to get high, but few to accompany me to church,” he notes of those days. – and is present in all his work as a source of artistic inspiration, but Cave emphasizes that in recent years there has been an increasing tendency to accept the “poetic truth” of God’s existence. And he goes a step further by stating, quite categorically, that “atheism is bad for the art of songwriting” because it denies “the fundamental sacred dimension of music.”
Although the topics discussed are apparently serious, the pages of Faith, Hope and Carnage also satisfy those looking for delicious stories about sex, drugs and rock and roll. Although he makes a feeble complaint whenever the subject of his addictions is brought up, Cave speaks openly about his relationship with heroin and alcohol, recounting wild moments such as the day he left his first stay at a rehab clinic and was featured in New Musical Express magazine’s Shane MacGowan (The Pogues) and Mark E. Smith (The Fall). The infamous idea of arranging a meeting with two irreducible dipsomanias is now dead. What could go wrong? “They were sitting there doing drugs and drinking until they got lost. “They didn’t really empathize with my situation,” she says.
The book is filled with reflections on the convoluted process of composing music – “songwriting is a bloody business,” he argues – and descriptions of the internal dynamics of the bands he led. Regarding The Bad Seeds’ earliest and most legendary formation, he points out that living in the studio with multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey and guitarist Blixa Bargeld was “like Hitler, Stalin, and fucking Mao Zedong trying to make an album together.” . And he displays delightful surprise as he describes the day the gruff Bargeld left the band in the middle of a recording and uttered the immortal line: “I didn’t get into rock and roll to play rock and roll.”
But even when recalling funny scenes like these, Cave’s story seems imbued with a deep sense of melancholy. O’Hagan describes this as a keen awareness “of the instability of life” that is present throughout the book. In fact, during the 12 months the conversations lasted, the artist lost his mother, his music producer friend Hal Willner, and his teenage girlfriend and close collaborator Anita Lane. Very soon after, his eldest son Jethro died at the age of 30. So much destruction that it leaves no trace of sadness even in the brightest passages. Cave admits this with a high-flying poetic image: “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”