126•GQ•MAY 2017NICK CAVE SITS in a Sydney hotel room,
his chair facing the floor-to-ceiling windows,
the city bathed in summer sun beyond and
below. “Look,” he continues, patiently choos-
ing his words, “not to just keep going on
about this, but the whole grief thing, there’s
nothing good about it whatsoever. People
will tell you other things, but it’s like a fuck-
ing disease. A contagion that not only a≠ects
you but everybody around you. And it’s cun-
ning. And you can feel good and you can be
getting on with things, and then it just comes
up and sort of punches you in the back of
the head and you’re down and you’re out for
the count for a while. I don’t just mean psy-
chologically, I mean physically too. Grief and
illness and tiredness feed o≠ each other in
a kind of feeding frenzy.”
It is January 2017. Eighteen months ago,
Nick Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur fell from
a cli≠ near Brighton, the town on the south
coast of England where Cave has lived since
2002 with his wife Susie, Arthur, and Earl,
Arthur’s twin brother. (Cave also has two
sons, Jethro and Luke, both in their mid-
20s, from earlier relationships.) After it hap-
pened, Cave obeyed some kind of instinct
that told him he had to keep working. He
relates a conversation with Warren Ellis,
who for several years has been his closest
musical collaborator. “I said to Warren a
week after Arthur died: It just goes on, you
know. I didn’t even know what I was talking
about. I was just, like: We continue doing
whatever we were doing. We continue to
do it.” Partly, he suggests, out of “some sort
of bizarre responsibility” to those around
him. But also because he could see no other
option. “It was not like an act of courage or
anything, it was just that I didn’t know what
the fuck else to be doing. All I knew is that
what I do is work, and that kind of contin-
ues. I think I knew, fundamentally, that if I
lay down, I would never get up again.”
So in the months that followed, Cave
and his group the Bad Seeds completed a
new album, Skeleton Tree—a somber mas-
terpiece that seemed to ooze the circum-
stance of its creation—and then he and Ellis
returned to the studio to compose six scores,
including those for Hell or High Water and
the National Geographic television series
Mars. “Working very much as a kind of
therapeutic activity, to be honest,” he says.
But until this month Cave hasn’t performed
in front of an audience. Nor has he sat
down like this to talk.
He didn’t know what to expect from this
tour, back to Australia, the country of his
birth. He wondered whether things would
be di≠erent, and how these new songs would
sit next to older ones, many of those more
directly forceful and visceral. And it has been
di≠erent, in a way that seems to have slightly
taken him aback. “You know, the audience
has been hugely helpful,” he says. “And I find
it di∞cult to articulate this to them, onstage,
but, and maybe don’t put this in, I would
just want to thank them for this. Because
for me it’s, like, this is not the way it should
be. I’ve always felt as a performer a sort of
combativeness. You know, the finger would
come out and I would be here I am and this
is fucking it and stand there and take it. And
it was a very one-way kind of experience
for me.... I come from a di≠erent school of
frontmen. Full-on attack. It’s an attack on
your audience of some sort. It’s just the way
it’s always been.” That has changed. “Even
though the finger comes out, it doesn’t feel
like that in the same ways it used to feel.
It feels much more that there’s something
coming back.... Something di≠erent has
been happening with the audience—a kind
of dynamic, emotional exchange—that is
quite beautiful. There’s just some kind of
communal feeling. Maybe this is what it’s
like to be in Coldplay or something.”
He had worried that he would come away
to Australia, and get sick. “The opposite has
happened, really,” he says. “It’s like the best
thing you can do.” What he says next is clearly
doused in a certain wryness, but I think he
means it, too: “That’s my advice if anything
terrible ever happens to you: Form a band
and go on tour.”¤¤¤A STORYTELLER AS FINE AS Nick Cave can’t
help but be a little sensitive to the narratives
he finds himself placed in, and in recent years
he has noticed a pattern emerge. “You know:
hell-raiser cleans up, and now lives a com-
fortable life in a seaside town type of thing.
This may be true, but there’s something
about that story that I kind of bristle against.”That latter-day Nick Cave story replaced
an earlier version, one in which it was already
clear that Cave was creating a body of work
that was of a di≠erent kind and worth than
most of his peers, but when a cleaned-up,
comfortable-life, seaside-town next act still
seemed somewhat improbable. I wrote one
of those stories myself, a quarter of a century
ago, spending a couple of days around him
and the Bad Seeds on tour in Athens, Greece.
I found him happy, or at least willing, to talk
through the path that had led him here: start-
ing out in a one-street Australian town to a
librarian mother and an English-literature-
teacher father who read him the first chap-
ter of Lolita when he was young to show him
how wonderful the words were. The adoles-
cent Cave competed with, and tried to shock,
his father—“I would say my relationship with
my father fueled a lot of my innate o≠ensive-
ness I had at the time”—a competition that
was abruptly curtailed, never to be resolved,
by his father’s death in a car accident when
Cave was 21. His school group, the Boys Next
Door, mutated into the Birthday Party; in
1980 the band moved to London where their
sound, a thrilling vitriolic whirlwind, a kind
of hectic, violent, and surreal assault that was
part punk snarl, part Stooges abandon, and
part something much weirder and swamp-
ier, was both embraced and rejected. They
responded in kind. “There was a point,” he’d
observed to me, “where we changed from a
group of drunks who just went onstage and
played with a ‘fuck you’ attitude...to a group
who very much took to insulting the audi-
ence.” When the Birthday Party fell apart in
1983, few people expected too much of Cave.
Even setting aside all the other things he has
done since—the books, the film scripts, the
lectures, the soundtracks—there were only
fleeting signs of the commanding, vision-
ary, idiosyncratic, and masterful songwriter
and singer he would become, one rooted in,
and leaching from, every kind of musicalSongwriting is an
immensely positive
act, nothing to
do with sadness or
depression, no
matter what you’re
writing about.”