Nick Cave will publish a memoir 'Faith, Hope and Carnage' on life in the wake of his son Arthur’s sudden death in 2015, Pitchfork reports. The book, based on 40 hours of interviews with the journalist Sean O’Hagan, a longtime friend of Cave, is “a meditation on big ideas including, faith, art, music, grief and much more”.
Nick Cave shared some advice about aging in his latest blog post, with plenty of charm and wit: "Entering your sixties brings with it a warm and fuzzy feeling of freedom through redundancy, through obsolescence, through living outside of the conversation and forever existing on the wrong end of the stick. What a relief it is to be that mad, embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, a product of his age, with his loopy ideas about free speech and freedom of expression, with his love of beauty, of humour, chaos, provocation and outrage, of conversation and debate, his adoration of art without dogma, his impatience with the morally obvious, his belief in universal compassion, forgiveness and mercy, in nuance and the shadows, in neutrality and in humanity — ah, beautiful humanity — and in God too, who he thanks for letting him, in these dementing times, be old".
"Hope too resides in a gesture of kindness from one broken individual to another or, indeed, we can find it in a work of art that comes from the hand of a wrongdoer. These expressions of transcendence, of betterment, remind us that there is good in most things, rarely only evil. Once we awaken to this fact, we begin to see goodness everywhere, and this can go some way in setting right the current narrative that humans are shit and the world is fucked" - Nick Cave wrote deeply humanistic on his The Red Hand Files blog.
"Everyone wanted to work with her but it was like trying to trap lightning in a bottle" - Nick Cave writes on his Red Hand Files blog about his Birthday Party and Bad Seeds colleague Anita Lane, after the news of her death was published. Cave describes Lane as “the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far”, and chooses 'Stranger Than Kindness' as his favourite Seeds song. Cave describes how "at my kitchen table drawing things, she had a quickness of touch and a clear, light line full of humour, throwing each drawing away and starting another, charged with a rampant, unstable, fatal energy that would follow her all her life. My line, amateur and ponderous... It was both easy and terrifying to love her. Leaves a big crying space".
Movie director Andrew Dominik is making a new documentary about Nick Cave and Warren Ellis "attempting to play 'Carnage' and 'Ghosteen' live", Cave has announced in his Red Hand Files blog. Cave also describes how he and Ellis recorded 'Carnage' while not really trying to make a record - "I had been sitting at my desk — suddenly and shockingly not travelling — writing lyrics and poems into a void, with no real objective other than to make sense of this stationary moment. The world felt weird. My body felt weird. I had been jet-lagged for forty-five years. Now my inner clock had begun to tick regularly. Some nights I even slept. I think Warren’s experience was not dissimilar. I think we both felt the enforced stasis, not just unnerving, but also strangely and fitfully energizing, and so, when we began working in the studio, Carnage came out fast and necessary, as proof of life".
A fan described Nick Cave on his Red Hand Files blog how he gave his father an Elvis-themed funeral, and wondered what Cave had in mind for his final hour. Cave answered he would "be very happy with one too - to be ushered into the next world by the voice of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll singer of them all. 'Kentucky Rain', that’s what I’d like, 'Kentucky Rain' and 'How Great Thou Art' - Elvis singing gospel, with heaven and all its angels listening".
"Ostensibly the story of Nick Cave’s formative years, it is so beautifully constructed that one is not just delivered besides the young Cave, but also next to the modern version" - The New Cue says recommending Mark Mordue's new book 'Boy on Fire'. The writer also describes the difficult path he took while writing it - "basically the project just got bigger and bigger as the range and the depth of Nick Cave’s output kept rolling on. I ended up in a situation where I had long ago spent my advance. If I was working on the book, I was not earning money to live and support a family. If I was doing freelance journalism and teaching writing at uni, I was not working on the book. So nothing was right with anyone anywhere. Eventually my former publisher got tired of me. My relationship collapsed. I had nowhere stable to live. Depression, chaos, drinking … it was the full disaster as I tried to hang on to myself and put it all back together again. That is the other side to the book when people say it took me ten years. Well, really, five years to write it, yeah, and another five years to learn how to live again". Nick Cave also likes it.
Cave and Ellis' new album 'Carnage' comes out as a slightly more structured jam session, and critics really appreciate it. Alexis Petridis argues that "Cave and Ellis’s musical approach is still vividly alive, the dense, constantly shifting sound complementing the richness of Cave’s writing now". Pitchfork appreciates the lyricism of if - "As ever, Cave uses overtly religious imagery in ways both subversive and devout". Guardian's Kitty Empire loves the "immense grief and vast love" of the album, whereas Clash Music hears 'Carnage' as something "both beautiful and visceral, tender and blood-thirsty, wholly terrifying and completely absorbing".
Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis made a new album in lockdown - their first non-soundtrack album as a duo - called 'Carnage' and it was just surprise-released today. Warren says "making 'Carnage' was an accelerated process of intense creativity. The eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two-and-a-half days and then it was, ‘let’s just make a record!’ There was nothing too premeditated about it". Cave calls it "a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe". Read the lyrics here.
An amusing article in the Quietus about 'Nick Cave's Bar', a new book by Aug Stone about a bar in Berlin in the 1980s which was a "home from home" for many creative people - musicians, filmmakers, painters, poets, and punks. Risiko stood at 48 Yorckstraße in West Berlin, on the border between the Kreuzberg and Wilmersdorf-Schöneberg sections of the city. It wasn't really Nick Cave's bar (although some in Europe did call it that back then), but Blixa Bargeld bartended at Risiko during Einstürzende Neubauten’s early years, and Cave would come to visit it with the rest of The Birthday Party.
