by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan
Religion is spirituality with rigour, I guess, and, yes, it makes demands on us. For me, it involves some wrestling with the idea of faith – that seam of doubt that runs through most credible religions. It’s that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity.
those early Birthday Party shows were religious in their way, with all that rolling around on stage and purging of demons and speaking in tongues. It was old time, God-bothering religion!
Perhaps the chaos was one of the reasons for my underlying yearning for some deeper, more substantial meaning,
The idea that there was no God or no such thing as the divine – no spiritual mysteries to speak of, nothing beyond what the rational world could offer us – was just too difficult for me to accept.
Even in the most chaotic times, when I was struggling with addiction, I always felt desirous of those who had a religious dimension to their lives. I had a kind of spiritual envy, a longing for belief in the face of the impossibility of belief that addressed a fundamental emptiness inside me. There was always a yearning.
I have also come to see that maybe the search is the religious experience – the desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the moving towards the ineffable. Maybe that is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it. Or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it.
The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority. The belligerent dogmatism of the current cultural moment is a case in point. A bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.
Well, my rational self seems less assured these days, less confident. Things happen in your life, terrible things, great obliterating events, where the need for spiritual consolation can be immense, and your sense of what is rational is less coherent and can suddenly find itself on very shaky ground.
I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own scepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.
who says creativity is the be all and end all? Who says that our accomplishments are the only true measure of what is important in our lives? Perhaps there are other lives worth living, other ways of being in the world.
I think music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked-up ways we have learned to cope with this world – all the prejudices and affiliations and agendas and defences that basically amount to a kind of layered suffering – and get at the thing that lies below and is essential to us all, that is pure, that is good. The sacred essence. I think music, out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.
we may ultimately find that, to our surprise, our creative endeavours are not the defining element of our lives. They are perhaps a means to an end.
sadly, organised religion can be atheism’s greatest gift.
I have to accept that part of the fire and energy of my life comes from the fact that I devote a significant portion of my time to thinking about and agonising over something that may well not exist!
So, in a way, it may actually be the doubt, the uncertainty and the mystery that animates the whole thing.
I think, more recently, particularly within the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity, and felt the desire, to apply myself to the practice of belief and to spiritual acceptance. By doing that, I feel I could get to a place where my relationship with God was a little less fraught, shall we say. And to me the benefits are self-evident. I’d certainly be happier for it.
I am more inclined to accept the idea of poetic truth, or the idea that something can be ‘true enough’. To me that’s such a beautiful, humane expression.
the idea of poetic truth, or metaphorical truth, as I’ve heard it called – the idea of things being ‘true enough’ – can be of real practical benefit. Metaphorical truth, as far as I can make out, works on the premise that even though something may not be literally or empirically true, it may…
If you attend Narcotics Anonymous, for instance, which is something I know about because when I first got clean I used to go to meetings, you come up against the ‘true enough’ idea all the time. Essentially, you have a group of apparently hopeless drug addicts, many of whom may not have a spiritual bone in their body, who are being asked to hand their lives over to a higher power in order to get clean. Initially, many of them are reluctant to even consider doing that, which is a perfectly rational response. I mean, why should you surrender your life…
And, in a great many instances, they get better, they get clean, their lives greatly improve. Not only that, but what often happens is that many of them end up handing their lives over to a higher power as a matter of course. They find that believing in something that is ‘true enough’ works throughout all aspects of their life. I guess what I am saying is that the believing itself…
Essentially, you are being asked to surrender and have faith, and, if you are prepared to do that…
So, for me personally, having a religious dimension in my life is highly beneficial. It makes me happier, it makes my relationships with people more agreeable, and…
So do you believe in redemption in the Christian sense? Well, I think…
and I have personally needed to find some kind of…
One way I do that is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all…
I feel that when I have done something to hurt an individual, say, that the wrongdoing also affects the world at large, or even the cosmic order. I believe that what I have done is an offence to God and should be put right in some way. I also believe our positive individual actions, our small acts of kindness, reverberate through the world in ways we will never know.…
I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things – the impossibility of things – and…
For me, writing and playing music – especially playing music – is a kind of firming up of…
I tend to think most musicians have more time for these spiritual considerations, because when they make music, when they lose themselves in music, fall deep inside it, they encounter such strong intimations of the divine. Of all things, music can lift us closer to the sacred.
the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.
perhaps God is the trauma itself.
perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain – you are taken to the very limits of suffering. As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering.
this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. Everything seems so fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem so endangered, and yet so beautiful. To me it feels that, in this dark place, the idea of a God feels more present or maybe more essential. It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined.
the utility of belief.
it does seem possible – even against the criminal incompetence of our governments, the planet’s ailing health, the divisiveness that exists everywhere, the shocking lack of mercy and forgiveness, where so many people seem to harbour such an irreparable animosity towards the world and each other – even still, I have hope. Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former. I feel there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe.
Through writing, you can enter a space of deep yearning that drags its past along with it and whispers into the future,
Well, we’ve talked about this a lot, the idea that suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change, and that it somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better. That God bestows upon us these terrible, devastating opportunities that bring amelioration and transformation. This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.
Actually, I think it is more than that. I think the pandemic offered us an opportunity to improve the world and we blew it. We squandered it. Early on, many of us felt that a chance was presented to us, as a civilisation, to put aside our vanities, grievances and divisions, our hubris, our callous disregard for each other, and come together around a common enemy. Our shared predicament was a gift that could potentially have transformed the world into something extraordinary. To our shame this didn’t happen. The Right got scarier, the Left got crazier, and our already fractured civilisation atomised into something that resembled a collective lunacy. For many, this has been followed by a weariness, an ebbing away of our strength and resolve and a dwindling belief in the common good. Many people’s mental health has suffered as a consequence.
there is a very dangerous and seductive feeling to living life on the brink that I think should be resisted. In that very dark place, the grieving person can feel a proximity to the one they have lost that can be difficult to turn away from, or return from. That particular kind of grief can have a deadening and, I don’t know, mechanising effect that, in some cases, can be permanent. I mean, Susie and I felt this within ourselves; for a while, there was a kind of zombification.
there can be a kind of morbid worshipping of an absence. A reluctance to move beyond the trauma, because the trauma is where the one you lost resides, and therefore the place where meaning exists.
on one hand, swept up in a kind of commonality of human suffering, but also I was suddenly entirely alone, almost as if I had been marked or branded by the loss of Arthur. That extreme paradox can feel like a kind of madness. I have never experienced such aloneness. You are essentially beyond the reach of any assistance – all the best intentions people have for you. Susie was the same. We had each other but we were also unreachable, even at times to each other. We were together, but essentially alone.
It was so physical. That physical affliction is not often talked about, as far as I can see. We tend to see grief as an emotional state, but it is also an atrocious destabilising assault upon the body.
We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naïve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all – in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared. I think Susie and I instinctively understood that we needed to move towards this loving force, or perish.
I do like to think I could put it all aside at any point and just enjoy what this astonishing world has to offer, in and of itself.
but I suspect that for me the world is enlivened by the creative process. It enhances the way I see things and makes the world feel sufficient, even abundant. Without creative engagement in the world, without contributing to the spirit of the world, I think I would start to feel a bit like an onlooker or something. But maybe that would be enough, just to observe what the world has to offer. It’s a rich and amazing place and perhaps it has wonder enough.
if my twelve-year-old son had asked me what had I done to contribute to the world, I hope I would have ruffled his hair and said, ‘Made you, little guy.’ Because it has to be about the ones you love, beginning with those closest to you and then emanating outward. There is the work, of course, and if we can free it from that sort of self-absorption or self-conceit, so that it becomes an expression of love, then that has extraordinary value.
when I came off Twitter, the world suddenly improved. It became a better place to live in, and the quality of my life improved immeasurably, the sun started to shine and the little birds started singing in the trees. I wasn’t feeling so ill in my body, so worn out and depressed by it all. As far as I can see, social media makes you sick.
I love this world – with all its joys and its vast goodness, its civility and complete and utter lack of it, its brilliance and its absurdity. I love it all, and the people in it, all of them. I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess. I have no time for negativity, cynicism or blame. In that regard, Seán, I feel as if I am completely and hopelessly out of time.
Or rather you reconcile yourself to the acute jeopardy of life, and you do this by acknowledging the value in things, the precious nature of things, and savouring the time we have together in this world. You learn that the binding agent of the world is love. That’s what I want to say, not just with this record, but pretty much everything I do.
I think in a way my work has become an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity. I simply have no time for it. I mean that quite literally, and from a personal perspective. No time for censure or relentless condemnation. No time for the whole cycle of perpetual blame. Others can do that sort of thing. I haven’t the stomach for it, or the time. Life is too damn short, in my opinion, not to be awed.
A promise that the intimations of the presence of those who have passed away are more than just mere wishful thinking. And, like I said, Seán, this is beyond reason. I don’t know about you, but for me there is forever a struggle between the rational side of myself and the side that is alert to glimpses or impressions of something otherworldly. And, of course, I know there is no coherent argument to be had here. My rational self has all the weaponry, all the big guns – reason, science, common sense, normality – and all that far outweighs the side of me that only has suspicions and hints and signs of something else, something mysterious and quietly spoken. But, even still, it feels, under the circumstances, that to dismiss the existence of these things that live beyond our reasonable selves outright is, at best, ungenerous.
I don’t blindly succumb to these feelings, but still I remain watchful for that promise. This is how I have chosen to live my life – in uncertainty, and by doing so to be open to the divine possibility of things, whether it exists or not. I believe this gives my life, and especially my work, meaning and potential and soul, too, beyond what the rational world has to offer.
Arthur is a reminder that I don’t really have to conform to the rules the world has laid down for me, because the world feels chaotic and random and, well, indifferent to any rules. When I call Arthur to me and I feel him around, as an optimistic force, a hopeful force, I don’t have to be afraid. I am aware of how that sounds to many people, but this is, at the very least, a survival strategy – and grievers know. Generally, they know.
I followed all these people, people I admired, people I had been interested in for years – podcasters, writers, journalists, public thinkers, social critics – and I found that the form somehow diminished almost all of them. Not all, but most. Initially, I thought it was like the Wild West or punk rock, but Twitter is really just a factory that churns out arseholes. I got off all social media in the end.
I’ve become quite accustomed now to that queasy feeling of stepping into the unknown. I think I’ve learned to trust that sense of discomfort as a signifier that something important may be afoot, that change is happening.
These kinds of ideas are often the agents of progress and change.
Like everybody, Seán, I’ve been on a journey, and that must involve change, or what’s the point of going on the journey at all? With hindsight, part of it is about shedding the foolishness of youth. That’s what maturity is, but I also think I’ve maintained a consistent essentialness of character throughout, because many of the things I discovered and loved as a young man, teenager or, indeed, child, I still carry with me. They remain the touchstones.
How would you define that essentialness of character? It has something to do with beauty and sorrow. Or maybe the proximity of one to the other. Something like that. And I remember feeling that as a child.
the compensatory gift at the heart of grief. The usual precepts collapse under the weight of the calamity: the terrible demands that we place upon ourselves; our own internal judging voice; the endless expectations and opinions of others. They suddenly become less important and there is a wonderful freedom in that as well.
I can’t imagine there is anyone with no regrets, unless they are leading extraordinarily unexamined lives, or they are young, which often amounts to much the same thing.
for me, prayer is not so much talking to God, but rather listening for the whispers of His presence – not from outside ourselves, but within.
The Red Hand Files tell me, explicitly and repeatedly, that we all suffer. They tell me that suffering is the defining element of the human story. I know this to be true because I recognise myself in these letters – I have my own situation mirrored back at me, my own pain – and I also know that by engaging with these people, I get better.
Music, of all the creative forms, best repairs the heart. This may be its actual purpose. It is within music that the ameliorating spirit is most vibrant,
I was not going to avoid speaking about Arthur because it was a difficult subject, or worry that it might make people feel uncomfortable, or that it was bad for my career, or that I didn’t have the right vocabulary.
So, really, one of the reasons the project was created was an attempt to find a language to set forth, in words, the travails of grief. It was an attempt to remain open and vulnerable to the needs of others, as well as my own. I didn’t set out to do that, exactly, but it quickly found its purpose.
That theme keeps recurring throughout our conversations – things finding their purpose or revealing their meaning through the doing. The creative journey as a series of revelations, almost. Yes, now you point it out, that’s exactly right. Most of the time, I have no idea what I am doing while I’m doing it. It is almost purely intuitive. That should be pretty clear. But I do have a strong commitment to the primary impulse, the initial signalling of an idea – what we could call the divine spark. I trust in it. I believe in it. I run with it.
grief is not just an amorphous fog-like state of being. Grief actively revolves around a point of torture, a moment of realisation, an actual tangible thing.
The power of her poem made it safe to turn around and face my own point of trauma.
There is such courage in the world I am awed, and I think this extraordinary woman will be all right in the end. She has found the facility and the fearlessness to say the unsayable, to broach the forbidden, solitary horror of her moment in Hell and communicate it to someone else.
Nick, my 22-year-old son died of an overdose 5 months ago. He was a beautiful sensitive boy who was studying classical piano at WAAPA and wanted to become an expert in fortepianos. He was an anxious child and I worried about him a lot. I’m wracked with guilt about him and have bad PTSD from the trauma of his sudden demise. He’d been clean for two years and was doing so well in his life. He was so kind, so sensitive, so compassionate.
Arthur is a reminder that I don’t really have to conform to the rules the world has laid down for me, because the world feels chaotic and random and, well, indifferent to any rules. When I call Arthur to me and I feel him around, as an optimistic force, a hopeful force, I don’t have to be afraid. I am aware of how that sounds to many people, but…
It seems to me that people who are grieving, especially the recently bereaved, live their lives at the edge of a potentiality, adjacent to death, in a kind of poetic twilight world. I say this not only because I inhabit this world myself at times, but because in The Red Hand Files I am confronted with the same story, time and time again – ‘I feel his presence’ or ‘I sense her all around’. Now, we are repeatedly told that these kinds of ‘feelings’ or intimations are a delusion brought about by our desperate need, or that they are somehow a denial of the finality of death, or, worst of all, they reveal a lack of intellectual integrity. Now, we know that. We fucking get it. But these feelings, indefensible as they may be to rationalists, are real and loving and nourishing, and go some way to being a bridge to normality. They may well be delusions, but these…
Well, grief can lead some people to dark places from where they simply never return. I have seen it often. People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world, and never recovering. There is nothing to lead them from the abyss. And beyond that, too, I think the point-blank rejection of all spiritual matters as mere nonsense has its own problems. I’m talking about the outright rejection of religion by some who basically see it as a kind of inherent evil. That stance is a denial of all the potential good religion brings: the comfort, the succour, the redemption, the community. This thinking can bring its own kind of nothingness – not always, of course, but often. And, as we are seeing, people find a version of religion elsewhere, in…
So, essentially, what I am trying to present is the idea of grief as a gift. Grief as a positive force. Grief that can become, if we allow it its full…
Talking in public in itself has become a fraught thing to do. It’s looked at by many with suspicion. You know, who would stand up on stage and speak their mind unless they had bad intentions?
I don’t use social media because I don’t have the time for it. It makes great demands on us, not just on our precious time, but damaging emotional demands, as far as I can see. I personally find the dissonance and narcissism of social media energy-sapping and counter-productive. I need to look after my inner world as best I can. That is a seriously high-maintenance job in itself!
I think grief needs to be measured by action. It’s not so much about working on your feelings. Your feelings come and go. They retreat and change and can ultimately surprise you. But you need to put some structure and method in your day, as best you can. I mean, that seems sound advice for any situation. You have to construct a series of actions around your day in order to survive: you exercise, you go down to the sea for a swim, you meditate, you make breakfast for your kid – you do all the small things that maintain order. Or you go and make a dress. That’s what Susie did, and that’s what she still does to this day. Her energy comes from a strange veneration of Arthur, a glorification of the spirit of her child, but she is also warding off a kind of perennial sadness. It is also a way of staying present in the world so that she can look after her family.
I don’t think strength has much to do with anything. It seems to me that you just take the next least-wounding step. And strength suggests there is also weakness. Is it a weakness to be bedridden for days on end because you lost a child? Is it a strength to keep your chin up and soldier on? I don’t think these terms are applicable. People often say to me, ‘How do you stay strong?’ They say it to Susie, too: ‘You’re so strong.’ But we are not strong. We survived because we remained together. It is as simple as that.
And, you know, we live a wonderful life now, but it is as fragile as anything can be, and tumbles down often.
The life Susie and I have is full and replete with meaning. I love Susie more than I ever have. She feels the same about me. Our love is often joyous, which doesn’t mean we don’t shed our share of tears. I don’t know how we got to where we are, because, in truth, I don’t know where that is. I do know we shall never recover fully from the death of our son, nor should we. We are marked by it, and Susie carries a sadness that lives just below the surface of her loveliness,
perhaps that’s what also makes her the astonishing and oceanic woman she is.
I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering. I think people can do both terrible things and wonderful things when faced with the true understanding of their own powerlessness, vulnerability and lack of control. And I think Susie and I are acutely aware of the precarious nature of not only our lives, but all lives – their rareness, their preciousness – and that it can all disappear in an instant. In the light of that knowledge, we find gratitude to be a simple and essential act.
Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us.
I don’t know what this strange place even is, but it was reached with baby steps, and through darkened rooms and countless cigarettes and a multitude of kindnesses from so many people, and many lessons learned along the way – just like anything else.
I had no idea that ‘Carnage’, the song, was so emotive until we played it live. For me, it was extremely affecting. It was hard to keep my shit together. ‘White Elephant’ tapped in to a kind of inner rage that was overwhelming some nights. ‘Lavender Fields’ became less of a death trip and more of a gentle spiritual song of comfort.
‘Hand Of God’ was just fucking nuts.
My wife’s niece went to the Cardiff show and she loved it, but she was a bit freaked out by ‘Hand Of God’. She said you sounded like a religious cult leader. Really? I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that. ‘Hand Of God’ does have that evangelical spirit, for sure. I’ve often thought, on stage, how easy it would be to become a cult leader.
an ever-growing pile of books to be read. Christ, there is so much to read. Do you find that?
I’m pretty good at being alone. So what did you do to fill in the time between shows? Oh, I meditated, I wrote lots of stuff, read a bit, thought about things, talked to you, dyed my hair, conversed with the dead. Sometimes I don’t know whether you’re being serious or not. Yeah, neither do I. It’s a problem I’ve had all my life.
when we were young Anita was very influenced by a Swiss Dadaist poet and boxer named Arthur Craven, who said something like, ‘The best art is never seen.’ I didn’t agree with that, of course. I’d say to Anita, ‘That’s just not true. You might think it is, and have some sort of romantic attachment to that idea, but art has its beneficent value and is something that needs to be shared with other people. Others need to experience what you’ve done. It has something to do with connectivity and, well, duty or service.’
Music is a spiritual currency unlike any other in its ability to transport people out of their suffering, so I don’t take my job lightly. The indisputable goodness of music, the clear benefits it brings – its capacity to enlarge the spirit, provide solace, companionship, healing and, well, meaning – is much like religion in a way. I can see why people conflate the two.
Regrets are forever floating to the surface, don’t you find? They require our attention. You have to do something with them. One way is to seek forgiveness by making what might be called living amends, by using whatever gifts you may have in order to help rehabilitate the world.
I don’t know about you but I find I have to write my ideas down to really know what I think. And, furthermore, I have to say those ideas out loud, or indeed to sing them out loud, to somebody else, before I know if they are valid or meaningful, or not. It’s that relational thing I was talking about.
talking can often reflect back on us the folly of our own ideas. In certain circles there is a notion that by having a dialogue with someone whose views conflict with your own, you might be giving oxygen to bad ideas. What an appalling idea that is. We need to talk about contentious ideas as much as possible, for our own health and the health of society. In any case, I have quite a lot of time for bad ideas. I’m full of them, as you know!
forgiveness is an essential component of any good, vibrant friendship – that we extend to each other the great privilege of being allowed to be wrong.
conversation is also an antidote to dualistic thinking,
we discover that disagreements frequently aren’t life- threatening, they are just differing perspectives, or, more often than that, colliding virtues.
in my estimation we are forever moving in a circular way, with all the things we love and remember in tow, and carrying all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are, and all the ghosts who travel with us. It’s like we are running towards God, but that God’s love is also the wind that is pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination, and it resides in both the living and the dead. Around and around we go, encountering the same things, again and again, but within this movement things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world. It is this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn.
the creative process itself is the trauma. One minute you’re flying around the cosmos like a giggling idiot, possessed by your own genius, and the next you are back down in a dungeon of general uselessness.
I’ve just never had that much confidence in inspiration. I don’t trust it to deliver. I prefer to think that, if you sit down and work, and put in the hours regardless how frustrating it may be, in the end, things come. Things cannot not come. But maybe I do need to start writing songs in a different way, because even though I sit there all day, I may only have a burst of activity for an hour or so in which something gets written. Maybe two hours if I’m lucky. The rest of the time is just thinking and reading and dreaming and looking out the window.
there are some things that, for our own sanity, probably should remain beyond our understanding. It gives us somewhere to go.