In the indestructible mind of Nick Cave: how he turns his tragedies into art

Nick Cave it is a shark condemned to swim forever so as not to sink. From stage to stage, from album to album, from book to book, the Australian musician and writer lives focused on work. Unanimously considered one of the best singer-songwriters of all time, in the lineage of Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey and Tom Waits, Cave (Warracknabeal, Australia, 1958) returns to Spain twice: this Friday he performs with his band The Bad Seeds in the first edition of the Malaga festival Cala Mijasand next monday sees the light stranger than kindnessa luxurious book for collectors edited by Sexto Piso that takes us to the depths of his tormented and hyperactive creative universe.

Cave drags a heavy backpack of tragedies that never fills up. The last stone, last May, was the death of his firstborn, Jethro Cave, at 21 years old. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, the boy had just been released from prison for assaulting his mother. Seven years earlier another of his sons died.Arthur, at 15. He fell off a cliff after using LSD for the first time.

Before that there was more. Cave finally got rid of heroin after a long addiction in the 1980s and 1990s. But the first big blow came before that: the death of her father in a car accident. Nick was 21 years old and in jail for robbery the night his mother broke the news to him. Shortly afterward, Cave left Australia and settled in London with his fellow members of The Birthday Party. It was the punk and aggressive stage of him. There was still a long way to go to transform him into a dark, lyrical singer-songwriter.

Emotional cannibalism and religion

Accustomed to death taking his loved ones, Nick Cave’s great merit has been to use all that baggage of trauma and loss as raw material for his work, without falling into self-pity. yes in the movie 20,000 days in the Earthhalfway between fiction and documentary, confessed a “cannibal” who feeds on other human beings (especially Susie, his wife of more than 20 years) and spits them out in the form of a song, one could say the same of the way he digests his own sadness. His work has become a healing therapy that he shares with the world.

Cover of ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, edited by Sexto Piso

The routine (for many years he has written every day with office hours) and a high production rate they help you move on. In 2021, Cave published carnival next to his current right hand, Warren Ellis, a member of his backing band, The Bad Seeds. Before him, Cave leaned on other lieutenants: Roland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld. Deep and complex creative relationships gone wrong (more examples of emotional cannibalism?). But Ellis survives. Along with him, Cave has composed numerous soundtracks in recent years, including those of comancheria and of Blondethe biopic by Marilyn Monroe starring Ana de Armas and which is going to premiere these days at the venice festival.

Nick Cave’s latest album, released just two months ago, is Seven Psalms (Seven psalms)a disc of spoken word accompanied by a soft background music with which he seeks consolation and forgiveness from God. As a child, Cave was a member of the choir at the Cathedral of Wangaratta, his hometown, and attended church two or three times a week. That explains why the Bible has always been a source of inspiration for his songs. “I have never considered myself a true Christian, but the bible has always spoken to me in a way that other religious texts do not speak to me. I don’t know to what extent this has to do with nostalgia and reliving my childhood or is it just due to the majesty of the texts themselves”, explains Cave in the notes that contextualize the materials that make up the memorabilia collection that is stranger than kindness.

Cave’s Creative Inventory

stranger than kindness borrows the title from the song “Stranger Than Kindness”, one of Cave’s favorite songs. She wrote it in the mid-1980s by Anita Lane, a professional and sentimental partner in the crazy years of The Birthday Party who also recently passed away.

The book was born as an extended catalog of the homonymous exhibition produced in 2020 by the Royal Danish Library and shows us crudely, how an intimate and visual diary, the elements that nurture Cave’s creative process, and also his first results. Cave himself defines it as “the material from which the official work is born and fed”. “Behind the song there is a huge amount of secondary things: drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photos, paintings, collages and drafts, things that are the property of the artist, secret and unfinished.”

'Euchrid's Crib 1' (The cradle of Euchrid 1). Nick Cave in Yorkstrasse, East Berlin, 1985. Photo: Bleddyn Butcher


‘Euchrid’s Crib 1’ (La cuna de Euchrid 1). Nick Cave en Yorkstrasse, Berlín Oriental, 1985. Foto: Bleddyn Butcher

“Estas cosas —continúa el artista— no deben considerarse tanto obras de arte como la superestructura alucinada y compulsiva que da a luz a la canción o al libro o al guion o a la partitura”. En este muestrario encontramos de todo. Numerosos manuscritos, su máquina de escribir, un ejemplar de su primera novela, Y el asno vio al ángel, dibujos hechos con su propia sangre en su época de heroinómano, fotografías de su infancia y juventud, estampitas religiosas, un busto de Jesús que compró en un mercadillo de Buenos Aires o tres mechones de pelo que compró en otro de Berlín.

Por su parte, los garabatos de mujeres desnudas que dibuja compulsivamente en habitaciones de hotel sirven para explicar la manera en la que funciona su mente: “Es un hábito compulsivo que tengo desde mi época escolar, y tengo miles de estos garabatos por todas partes. No tienen ningún mérito artístico: son más bien una prueba de una especie de pensamiento ritual e incontrolable, no muy distinto al acto de escribir, en realidad; simplemente me siento cada día y escribo. He condicionado mi cerebro para que funcione de ese modo. Es la mente aplicada que se limita a hacer su trabajo, al margen de la inspiración”.

Caída y resurrección en cinco fases

El libro comienza con “Una historia destrozada”, un breve texto en el que Cave define sus cinco fases vitales. Uno: la construcción de la propia identidad. “Te conviertes en una encarnación heroica y única tanto de las cosas que aprecias como de las que te generan dolor”. Dos: llega la tragedia. “Eres una ilusión, y el acontecimiento te destroza, dejando una gran cantidad de piezas sueltas”. Tres: el colapso. “Las piezas que formaban parte de ti se alejan rodando”. Cuatro: la reconstrucción, lenta y dolorosa, hasta convertirse en “algo que te parece completamente ajeno, y que sin embargo es reconocible sin ninguna duda y al instante”.

Cave se ha vuelto cada vez más cercano a sus seguidores en los últimos años, apoyándose en ellos para seguir adelante. Incluso abrió una sección en su página web en la que intercambia impresiones trascendentales con ellos y responde a sus preguntas. La quinta y última fase de su “historia destrozada” lo explica así: “Te pones en pie de nuevo, rehecho […]. you have become an usand we are everyone else: a vast community with awesome potential holding up the sky with our suffering, holding the stars in place with our limitless joy, bringing the moon within reach of our gratitude and put in the place of the divine. Together we are reborn”. A miracle that will happen again this Friday, on the stage of Cala Mijas.

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In the indestructible mind of Nick Cave: how he turns his tragedies into art