128•GQ•MAY 2017
IN THE TWO WEEKS before his son’s death,
Cave had been improvising and writing
new songs with Warren Ellis. The plan had
been to later rework those songs, and record
newer ones, in a studio in Paris, and in the
spirit of it just goes on they went ahead. It was
a disaster. “That was just so fucked-up and
such a stupid thing to be doing,” says Cave. “I
was in absolutely no condition to be outside
the house, or around other people. And to me
everything sounded terrible. I’d written some
new songs and I would get halfway through
playing the song and say, ‘Oh, this is fucking
bullshit...,’ and abandon it.”
There had also been a plan to shoot a
film of the band making their new album,
a film that would be shown around the world
the day before the album’s release. And so,
one further attempt at it just goes on, Cave
asked the filmmaker Andrew Dominik to
do just that. Dominik is best known as the
director of movies like Chopper and The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford (for which Cave and Ellis wrote
the score), but he and Cave share a much
longer history. Their paths first intersected,
as Dominik has put it, “at the drug dealers’
in 1986,” and they were linked through the
inspiration for one of Cave’s finest early
songs, “Deanna,” an ex-girlfriend of Cave’s
who later had a child with Dominik. (Back in
Athens, when I asked Cave about the song, he
told me that Deanna liked it but “she didn’t
like the line, which is my favorite line, I cum
a death’s-head in your frock.”) Dominik
eventually told Cave he would shoot the film
“provided we address the Arthur situation.”
Cave agreed. “On the condition,” he says, “I
could edit anything out I didn’t like.”
The film that resulted, One More Time with
Feeling, while still purportedly a document
of an album’s creation, is an incredible por-
trayal of grief, and of the real ways in which
tragedy shapes and bends the world that sur-
rounds it and must continue after it. When
Cave first saw the film, he was horrified.
“I was angry about it,” he says. “I could
see from an aesthetic point of view it was
an extremely accomplished and beautiful
piece of work, but there were aspects of it
that grated against what I am, as a person.
Maybe it’s an old -school Australian thing,
you know, a queasiness around public dis-
plays of emotion.... The film showed a very
vulnerable person in a desperate situation
and it was something that I thought that I
would be embarrassed about for the rest of
my life.” He also had a very specific concern:
“I was worried that it would do a terrible
disservice to my son, mostly. That it would
appear exploitative.”
Lined up against these fears and concerns,
one thing gave him and his wife a sense that
there might be something of worth here, even
if it was di∞cult for them to see or appreci-
ate. “I was extremely moved by Susie in the
film,” he says. “There was something so raw
and honest about it. An excruciating reluc-
tance to be there in front of the camera but
an openheartedness too. A terrible need.
And she felt the same way—she loved me but
hated herself in the film.” Ultimately, Cave
didn’t ask for any cuts.
“We had to just let it go,” he says. “Who
were we to judge?”
Cave’s view of the film didn’t change
until it had what was intended as a one-
day-only release. His people told him about
the online reaction and made him sit down
and read some of the comments. “It really
was extremely moving,” he says. “The film
seemed to give people an opportunity to
open up about their own experiences.”
Wanting to discover what others were see-
ing, he rented a cinema in Brighton the
following afternoon and watched the film
again, this time in 3-D, with Ellis, just the
two of them in an empty cinema. “And saw
the film much more for what it was,” he says.
“And that it was actually something that
Andrew had done that was beyond...”
Cave pauses, and it is the one time in our
conversations when his voice breaks. “Sorry,
I get quite emotional talking about this,” he
says, and then he continues.
“...that Andrew had an agenda that was
beyond anyone’s expectations, and that
it actually was a gift, to me and Susie, but
most importantly, to Arthur. It gave Arthur’s
absence, his silence, a voice. This shifted
something hugely in me. I mean, Susie and
I were like birds trapped in an oil slick. We
were incapable of moving. And this film had
a freeing sort of e≠ect on us. So the film has
become really important to me, because
of the kind of community that’s arisen
around the film. The potential it has had as
a force of healing has been extraordinary
for me and Susie, but for other people too.
This was Andrew’s astonishing gift. It was
completely unexpected.”
One further extraordinary fact about the
songs on Skeleton Tree, which were widely
assumed to have been written in the wake of,
and in response to, calamity, is that nearly all
of them were based around those sketches
and improvisations and lyrics that were
recorded before Arthur’s death—including
those that seemed to allude directly to what
had happened. “I don’t know—it’s kind of
too spooky to think about it really,” says Ellis.
“You think about stu≠ like that, I’m not sure
it does you any good.”
Understandably, Cave is not inclined to
read too much into these things, but he
acknowledges them. He asked his wife to
listen to “I Need You,” which sounds like a
forlorn howl of anguish at what has taken
place, and which was actually the final song
he and Ellis worked on before Arthur’s
death. “Because there’s a lot of lines in it
- ANTON CORBIJNhas been
photographing Nick Cave
for more than 30 years.
Opening pages and previous
page:Brighton, England,
February 2017. These pages,
from left:London, 1997;
New York, 1983; Santa Monica,
1991; London, 1993, with
Luke, one of Cave’s elder sons.
