and this tragedy has been buried or side-
stepped. Here is an excerpt from the New York
Times review of the movie:
Even after the son’s name is mentioned, the
drug-related circumstances of his death are not.
Nor is the fact that Mr. Cave was once addicted
to heroin.And here is the review from Variety, where
the same kind of logic, to me an o≠ensively
wrongheaded one, is made more explicit:
[T]here’s something arguably cagey and protec-
tive about the way the basic facts of what hap-
pened are left out of the movie. We never learn
how Arthur died: High on an overly hefty dose
of LSD (and marijuana as well), he reportedly
“freaked out” before falling o≠ a cli≠ in Brighton,
England, near their home. The movie achieves a
quality of poetic loss by leaving out these details,
and by never showing us a picture of Arthur. But
given that Cave has admitted to his own intense
battle with drug abuse (he is now clean), some-
thing seems amiss in his never remotely con-
fronting the issue of whether he feels in any way
responsible for the death of Arthur.A week or so after the end of the Australian
tour, I send Cave an e-mail with links to these
reviews, asking for his thoughts. After he has
noted, “I don’t want to give too much oxygen to
the matter of responsibility because it raises a
point that only someone who knows nothing
about parenting, drug- taking or bereavement
would suggest,” he replies like this:
“Most of the time, Susie and I try to stay
clear -eyed about the whole thing, that it was
a terrible, senseless, tragic accident, that
could happen to any high -spirited, curious
young man. We definitely don’t attach any
sense of morality to it. But grief has a way
of turning you against yourself and you can
find yourself indulging in all sorts of irratio-
nal and self-destructive thoughts—self -pity,
self-blame—because they form a direct con-
nection to the small but present part of you
that just wants to die. But we are vigilant with
each other about this sort of thinking, I watch
out for Susie and she watches out for me,
because even though we lost Arthur we are
still parents, and as parents, we still have our
work to do. I have to say that our family was
and remains a very loud, lively happy place.
Things are softer now with Arthur gone,
because he was just so completely vibrant,
but we remain extremely close, and it’s that
closeness that’s pretty much made it possible
to get up and go on tour and all the rest of it.”
Not that it should make a di≠erence in
pushing back at the noxious implications of
those reviews, but perhaps it’s somehow useful
to relay some of the real details that came out
during Arthur Cave’s inquest. That afternoon,
he and a friend met at a local windmill to take
LSD for the first time. The friend had Googled
the e≠ects the previous evening. By the wind-
mill, they debated whether to even go ahead.
But they did. As the trip went bad, the two of
them became separated. At one point, Arthur
texted another friend. “Where am I?” he asked.
Later, he appears to have been walking home
along the coastline. People in nearby tra∞c
saw him staggering close to the cli≠ ’s edge,
and then disappear from sight.- ••
IN THE WORLD in which Cave’s early career
took place, the alternative music and art
scenes of London and Berlin in the 1980s, the
interest in God, and in biblical imagery and
narratives, that showed itself in many of his
songs and his first novel was unusual. If it was
at first often taken as a transgressive stylistic
a≠ectation, it soon became obvious it ran far
deeper than that. In the mid-1990s he gave a
British radio lecture called “The Flesh Made
Word” as part of BBC Radio 3’s religious pro-
gramming, explaining how he developed an
interest in religious art at art school (“largely,
I think, because it irritated my instructors”)
that led him deep into the Old Testament,
whose stories and characters gave what he
called “a nasty, new energy” to the songs he
then began to write. “Floods, fire and frogs
leapt out of my throat,” he explained. “Though
I had no notion of that then, God was talking
not just to me but through me, and His breath
stank. I was a conduit for a God that spoke in
a language written in bile and puke. And for a
while that suited me fine.” Since then, though,
he had discovered the New Testament and, it
was implied, a faith that might be a little more
recognizable to the average BBC listener. The
lecture’s last line referred back, again, to his
early loss: “Like Christ, I too come in the name
of my father, to keep God alive.”
Cave has since talked about a period around
this time when his faith in God was at its stron-
gest, but in a peculiar and possibly self-serving
way, as these were the years when he was try-
ing to slip his heroin addiction with, for now,
only intermittent success. In a 2013 interview,
he summarized the situation: “I was fucking
crazy. Towards the end, I was waking up cold
turkey and going to church, sick as a fucking
dog. I’m sitting there sweating and listening to
everything, and then trotting down...and scor-
ing and getting back home and shooting up and
going, ‘I’m living a well-rounded existence.’ ”
And even though a deep interest in religious
tales and ideas has clearly remained, he said
that once his addiction went, so did his belief.
I would have asked him about this eventu-
ally, but I don’t have to. Perhaps because he
assumes, correctly, that I may be wondering, or
perhaps because it’s a subject that comes to the
fore in times of crisis or torment or loss, in one
e-mail he appends a question that I haven’t
asked—“something that is probably of no use
what-so-ever but I’ll throw it out there any-
way”—and then answers it.
“Do I believe in God?” is the question. And
this is what he then writes:
“As a songwriter it is important for me to
have a kind of belief system that can travel
and change as I see fit. Orthodoxy and atheism
seem to be like battery hens, stuck in the same
cage, having the same old debate. Of course,
my beliefs, such as they are, cannot bear up
to much scrutiny and fall apart when chal-
lenged, but that is because the debate about
the existence of God seems to rest on the con-
cept of truth. As a songwriter, I am not much
interested in truth, or at least truth takes a
backseat to meaning and emotional reso-
nance; meaning, not in the sense of rational
meaning, but rather, meaningfulness or value.
So, when I hear a song of praise sung to a God
that on any empirical level probably doesn’t
exist, I am somehow moved more, and filled
with a deep respect for that human need for
meaning that is so powerful, so desperate and
so beautifully absurd.”
The next day, he writes to me again, just a
paragraph, ostensibly about why we are drawn
to butterflies:
“Some say why waste your time believing
in God when there is so much natural beauty
and awesomeness around us. Some say that
there is more beauty and wonder looking at a
butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful
things, but if you get a human being to look
closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and
get some more human beings to look at that
butterfly so that there is a collective of people
all peering intently at the butterfly they will
ultimately fall to their knees and worship that
butterfly. It’s the way humans are put together.
I don’t think that makes them stupid. I think
it’s kind of sweet. Until someone says well my
butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not
and flies a plane into the twin towers.”- ••
ONE OF CAVE’S first great songs, “The
Mercy Seat,” is the testament of a man on death
row who likens the electric chair to the throne
of God on the Ark. Cave wrote it in 1987 while
he was consumed with And the Ass Saw the
Angel, writing a verse every now and then as a
relief from the intensity of the novel.
Though he clearly knows it has a potency—it
is the song he has played live the most times,
and he has continually revisited and rearranged
it—he is equivocal about its worth. “There are
songs that I pretty much think are as good
as I can get, and ‘The Mercy Seat’ isn’t one of
them,” he says. “I mean, I was surprised that
people went for it the way they did.”
One of those who went for it was Johnny
Cash, who covered the song on one of his
late-period Rick Rubin albums. But Cash made
a significant change. At the beginning of Cave’s
version, the man on death row describes him-
self, marvelously, as “nearly wholly innocent,”
something that seems to prefigure the song’s
final lines: and anyway I told the truth / but
I’m afraid I told a lie. But Cash must have seen
the song di≠erently; in his version, the pris-
oner describes himself as “totally innocent.”
I mention what Cash sings to Cave when we
talk in Australia.
“Oh, does he?” Cave says, as though he’s not
really aware of this, and then says something
quite mild about how he adores Cash and
can imagine why he would have done this. At
the time, I leave it there, but the more I think
about it afterward, the more absurd it seems
to me that Cave could possibly have been
unaware of this change—it’s discussed, for one
thing, in one of the essays in the lavish and
extensive new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
box set, Lovely Creatures—and I realize that
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NICK CAVE130 GQ.COM MAY 2017