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The amazing thing
about the world
that Nick created

through the movies, books,

and the ones
we know the most, songs,

is they're full
of the most divine,
beautiful characters.

Does it look all right?

Man, look.

And then,
you know, there's
the most pathetic of victims.

The most ruthless of evildoers,

and just the worst of humanity.

In Nick's world,
there's always characters,

people, songs,
him dealing with the unknown.

It's so deep,
the worlds that he conjures up.

The kind of feeling is always
deep and intense in everything.

You know he feels
an incredible responsibility

when he's writing.

He's curious about words.

Sometimes it can be
like ten years later,

and I'll call him up and say,
"It's such a beautiful song."

And he's like, "Duh!"

He is
and always was a poet.

His creativity,
his intelligence.

There's no fear.

The sort of reference
for songwriting
is a mystical force.

It's heavily influenced

a lot of the way
that I approach my work.

Nick's
constantly going "What if?"

"What about here?
What's happening there?
What do we do with that?

What's love?"

I think it's his search
for the human soul.

Nick wants to know
why he's here.

Not many people
want to know that.

I wanted
to ask you
about the music.

There's always been
lots of archetypes
in your music

and mythic figures.

It is
my natural language
to do it in that.

I'm a storyteller.

These characters in the songs,
I don't look at them

as sort of literary
inventions as much
as just parts of myself.

I think what's
interesting with Nick is

the way it's evolved over time.

He was somebody who wrote
songs about characters.

He wrote songs,
he wrote stories.

The songs
begin to take on
these sort of archetypes,

I think Nick is very good
at pulling the gears

to push forward

at different points
of those characters.

Yeah.

We're not an outlaw,
or we're not an angel

or a saint or a devil or a god.

We contain all of those things.

But in a way, what they
collectively show us
is far more important

than what they show us
individually.

An archetype
is a set of characteristics

that we recognize universally.

The archetypes become
like a roadmap

showing you
where you need to go.

They're the things
that lead you.

The hero's journey and Jung
and Freud, you name it,

going all the way to Buddhist
and ancient Chinese myths.

It's usually
"how do you cope
with the darkness?

What you do with that?"

This is my room.

My gun.

Nick, I think,
was very interested
in the outlaw,

the kind of
Old Testament type world,

the so-called norms of society

and what is
considered acceptable,
what is just.

The outlaw challenges
all those things.

What do you dream at night?

Um...

Uh...

Committing sins.

I dream about sin.

"He sticks
a Lambert & Butler
in his mouth,

lights it and blows
a trumpet of smoke
at his reflected image.

Then he notices
the shadows behind him

have begun to bleed and smudge
and reposition themselves.

They seem to be growing longer
and taking on personalities

that would not normally
be attributed to them

as if they were
advancing upon him
from the spirit world.

Bunny has
the unforeseen feeling
that he is going to die."

Bunny Munro
came out of this idea

that I'd been formulating
for a while

about a kind of total fuck up.

Nick took those ideas,

embellishing it further
as a novel.

Crucially, Bunny Munro
is a very complicated man.

I think that
he's sexy, he's funny,
he's endlessly charismatic.

He's also vile
and thoughtless
and careless

and, crucially, I think, broken.

Guess what my name is.

I'm Bunny.

- Bunny?
- Bunny.

I think part of
what makes him
so insidious

is that he's great with women.

He is able to give them
what they need

up to a certain point
and then he's out.

Bunny is an outlaw
in that he exists outside
of a moral framework

we've all accepted
as the moral framework
to live by.

Doesn't give a shit
about any of it.

I think the great thing
about anti-heroes

is that they give us

permission to transgress
without actually transgressing.

I know Nick
likes to write about
these outlaws and bandits

who are actually
incredibly complex.

And then it's
incredibly intriguing.

You're developing this bond
with this desperado.

Well, I mean,
it's cool that stuff, right?

Everyone loves an outlaw, no?

The outlaw is something
that really galvanized us
at a younger age.

We're very taken
by those figures.

Ned Kelly was an outlaw figure

that loomed very large
in our imaginations.

Nick actually grew up
in Kelly country.

There's a direct lineage

to some of
the very dramatic things

that were happening
in Melbourne

when Nick was growing up.

Tonight, Melbourne police
are still at a loss to explain

who bombed the city's
police headquarters or why.

But we're also
in a very extreme
part of the world.

It's like another planet.

And we are the uninvited.

For me, it's always been
fundamentally important

that I'm seen
as an Australian performer.

I mean, it's always
been my thing.

It's my shtick.

And that the Bad Seeds
are an Australian band.

I think Nick could
only come from Australia.

Australian art,
when it's at its best,
someone like Barry Humphries,

there's a poetic nature to it.

There's a playfulness,
a sort of sacredness,

and a profanity to it.

It wasn't many moons ago
that they thought we were

a bunch of rough diamonds
down here.

We've got more culture
than a penicillin factory
in Australia.

The Australian morality
is like criminal morality.

Like, the rules
you're taught at school

are very much jailhouse rules.

In Australia,
you had to be good

or the audience
would rip you apart.

The Birthday Party
and the early Bad Seeds

is confrontational music.

The idea was to provoke.

You got that feeling
when you went to see them

that anything could happen.
Violence could erupt.

Like, they were ready
to die on stage, you know?

Nick was always
a figure of myth.

He was like Jesus or something.

Like evil Jesus of Melbourne.

I met Nick
at the drug dealer's.

I was just
an innocent private schoolboy

working on
my first heroin habit,

and I walked in
and there was
the prince of darkness

sitting on the couch.

He was watching a documentary
about earthworms.

I asked,
"What are you watching?"

And he just turned around
and bared his teeth at me.

For me,
certain drugs...

It wasn't so much
the drug itself.

It was more
the chaotic lifestyle around it

and the weird and wonderful
people you meet

when you're leading
that lifestyle.

That formative experience,
provides a lot of the seed corn

for the characters
you subsequently create.

The engine room
of that creativity

is often that kind of
disinhibition of youth.

I mean, they were
definitely outlaws
in Melbourne

and then they came to London.

And London
clearly wasn't enough,
so they went to Berlin.

Berlin in the '80s was
the ideal territory for Nick.

It was an outlaw place.

If you didn't shoot anybody,
you could basically do

everything else
you wanted to do.

Anything could happen.

A lot of creative people
came to Berlin.

I mean, Bowie and Iggy Pop
came here for a reason.

And I think pretty much
the same reason

pulled Nick Cave to Berlin.

The reason
for going to Berlin

was that each time
we went there,

we would become
acquainted with people

who just had
an extremely open
attitude towards music

and towards art in general.

They're just concerned
in the joy of creating,

which sounds
totally pretentious.

But it's quite true.

People seem to
conduct themselves
in a decadent manner.

Always staying up all night,
getting drunk, taking drugs.

One more song, then it's over.

But I'm not gonna
tell you about a girl.

I wanna tell you about a girl.

Nick was the king of Berlin.

When I made
Wings of Desire,

he had split up
The Birthday Party.

He had formed the Bad Seeds.

The Bad Seeds were always
this kind of...

It felt, as an onlooker,
a force to be reckoned with.

They looked amazing,
didn't look like anything else.

The Bad Seeds was like
this crew of mad pirates.

Rare to have that place
where it's art and action

and yearning
and danger and love,

and all those things
come together.

What Nick did was
he put together

very dynamic individuals.

So Blixa Bargeld

was from Einsturzende
Neubauten.

He is so unique
and such a creative force,

and Mick Harvey was
kind of like the anchor

keeping everything together.

The dynamic
between him
and all the Bad Seeds

is unlike anything
I have experienced
with any other artist.

Most bands
write the song, do demos,

play that
to the record producer.

The producer then has ideas,
then they get into rehearsal

and work out different
arrangements and all that.

There's none of that.

He'll sit down at the piano
and start going,

"Right, this song
goes like this.
Dun-dun-dun!"

And he goes,
"There's another bit

that comes in
and goes like this.

Then there's a stop.

And I don't know
what happens after that.
All right, you ready?"

Shall we record it?

- Yeah.
- All right.

One, two, three.

That pressure of time
is 100% down to the fact

that he's just
incredibly impatient.

He's the most impatient person
I've ever worked with.

He has
surrounded himself
with these people

who are so imaginative

and have a beautiful
aesthetic on music,

but they can follow him
and it works.

Yeah, I'm Nick Cave.
This is the Bad Seeds.

I think
his earlier music
had more archetypes.

These kind of wild men
who were actually
incredibly complex

and you know,
or homosexual or whatever,

you know, just
everything was much more
than met the eye,

but they had
this threatening manner.

But of course they had
all this kind of
devastation inside.

The Mercy Seat.

"The face of Jesus
in my soup"

seems like a classic
Nick Cave line

because it is the transcendent
and the ordinary, all together.

"The meal trolley's
wicked wheels" like...

I think that's something
I've so learned from him
is just like...

The mystical and the mundane,

bring them together,
and that makes a good line.

The Mercy Seat is his first
monumentally great song.

It's something he was
drawing on,

which came
from an older tradition,

with Johnny Cash,
John Lee Hook and stuff,

where you find a persona.

For The Mercy Seat,

you sing from the persona
of the guy on death row.

The idea of
the electric chair
being called a mercy seat

and then it gets so fast,
and it's so manic and wild.

It's just
this sort of swirling miasma
of terror

that builds into this feeling
of, "You're going to
meet your maker."

And it's just such

a fantastic
piece of theater.

The kiss-off line at the end,
about, you know, the confession.

There's almost a joy
in how dark
the lyrics are being.

It's so him.

He's exploring the depths
of the human psyche.

It's like all these things
that we're scared to admit

'cause it's terrifying
to admit it.

Everybody has it in them.

I think there's a voice
that you have

that stands outside
of who you seem to be
in this mortal life.

The greatest gift
that you have

is a subconscious.

That's the connection

with the bigger forces
in the world.

The different dimensions,
the different cosmic forces

that you don't really
understand yourself.

So if you let the subconscious
do the heavy lifting in art,

that gets you into these places.

We all have
our shadow.

Our shadow side,
we tend to repress and bury,

and that tends
to unleash itself

in other ways.

It builds up
and it will spill out.

That shadow world of ours
is almost limitless.

I think it's
a very healthy thing

to force ourselves
to look in the mirror
and see the full picture.

Much of the time
we spend pushing down

particular aspects
of our characters
that we don't want to look at,

you know,
I find that it is healthy

and therapeutic,
if you want to use that word,

to look at those aspects
of your character.

There've been
criticisms, really,

about the kind of characters
I write about,
that they are me.

And they're right.

You know,
Stagger Lee's exploits

got more and more extreme.

And provocative.
And... what's the word?

Transgressive, right?

I remember
seeing the first time
they did Stagger Lee,

which is obviously
an old traditional song.

When he got to the part about
"I'll crawl over 50 pussies

just to get to
one fat boy's arsehole,"

you could feel
the absolute shock.

The audience was shocked.

There's like 50,000 people

that just felt like
they'd been slapped.

I believe
there's some interesting
projects in the works,

a concept album based
around the murder ballad.

Is it a very strong genre
of lyric writing?

Yeah, particularly
in blues and country music
and stuff like that.

It's just an excuse
for me to write a whole lot
of violent lyrics, really.

Fucking "Murder Ballads"
devastated me.

It fucking shook me to my core.

He's touching
something in me

in a way that is
absolutely terrifying.

I had nightmares for weeks.

Getting out of bed
shaking, panic.

You know what I mean?
Because it expressed

such a fucking part of humanity
that's so terrifying.

So many people,
I've played
that record for them.

"You gotta fucking hear this."
They don't wanna hear it.

They don't want to hear it.
They don't want to admit it.

You know what I mean?
It's a mirror.

Art has a purpose.

It's not just entertainment.

It's there for us to grow
and understand how to be alive.

We're all a lot darker
than we like to believe.

By the time
we got to "Bunny Munro",

Nick was well settled
into Brighton.

He is
with the love of his life.

She's pregnant,
they're gonna have twins.

They have twins.

It was a whole new chapter.

The Death of Bunny Munro
is his feverish nightmare

about how bad he could
fuck up his own marriage.

And like a sort of
self-flagellating,
masochistic horror tale

about how evil
he personally could be.

"He realizes,
in a shadowy way,
for a brief moment,

the weird imaginings
and visitations and apparitions

that he has encountered
with the ghosts of his own grief

and that he was being
driven insane by them."

The interesting
thing about creating
your own myth

is, at a point,
where does that line dissolve?

Are you the myth
or are you the person?

After most of the shoots
I did with him,

I'd go, "Never again.

I'm never gonna
fucking photograph Nick again."

'Cause it was torturous.

Am I being too revealing?

You know someone so well,
you don't want to piss them off.

The hair was a huge thing.

I remember him
spending hours on his hair.

I started to point out to him
that I never had got

really a bad photo of him.

And I think he just
started to kind of
give himself to the process.

This is the famous
Nick Cave in Blue Wig.

He didn't question
me dressing him up.

You know, he loved
the feeling of the Lycra,

and he was up for that.

Everything's so dusty in here.

My God.

Okay, so this is what...

This is what he was wearing.

And, of course,
in my usual perverted way,

I cut the nipples out,
but we don't
get to see that in the photo.

So that's what
I would have done.

And then I would have
painted the lipstick here.

You know, he wanted to be
in uncharted territory

with not S&M
or any of the other fetishes.

There was no guardrails.

Nick's just got this capacity
to grow, grow, grow.

Like, that's what he does.
He's never still.

There's definitely
a feeling of restlessness.

Like these pilgrims,

these characters,
these adventuring guys
trying to find new worlds.

It is him.

The Pilgrim is the person
who has to, in the human form,

journey out into the world,

with all its complexity
and all the fragility
of being a human.

I love the word anyway,
the pilgrim.

Nick is on a mission.

I think it's his search
for the human soul.

Nick wants to know
why he's here.

Not many people
want to know that.

The Pilgrim's journey is
both towards what is known
and what is unknown.

You're going somewhere.
You're not just rambling.

And then, on that journey,
you meet people,
have conversations.

They...

sometimes hold you back
and they sometimes
push you forward.

Nick decided one day

that he wanted to do
a duet with Kylie.

She was pure pop,

and everyone was like,
"What the fuck?"

But that was Nick.

It was hugely controversial
within her own management.

And so it was something
for her to step into this
male drug-addicted world,

which she did,
to sing this song.

And she just showed
extraordinary courage
to do that.

He's a believer
in the unknown

and in having a relationship
with the unknown.

He's a believer
in putting himself

in situations where
he doesn't exactly know
what he's doing.

I think collaboration
is like that, because

you're dealing with an element
that's beyond your control.

It's the other person.

Nick had finally
cracked the drugs.

He was not returning
and he was on fire, creatively.

He was always,
like a lot of addicts,

very nervous
that without the drugs,

will that creative energy
be fully expressed?

And I tried very hard
to convince him

that's a trick and a delusion
that a lot of artists fall into.

I think the people
he collaborated with
along the way

have changed definitively,

and the nature
of the collaboration
has changed.

I think
the collaboration
with Warren is different,

because they actually
sit and do it together.

They make music together.

Whereas I don't think
that's what was going on

with Nick and Blixa
back in the day.

If you don't change,
you just stagnate.

Is that all right, then?

Ninety eight out of a hundred.

I just love working
with the guy, right?
I-I don't...

I don't really look
at what he's doing or...

That's for you guys to do,

fucking journalists
or whatever.

There's also
an improvisational element
to Warren and Nick,

how they work,
versus the early days
of the Bad Seeds.

Certainly, by the time
they get to Push the Sky Away,

it's the first inkling
that things are shifting,

that Nick's idea
of the song is shifting.

Nick called one day
and said, "We're
about to start a new record.

Do you want to come down
to Brighton and hang out?"

On the first day we got there,

they came in,
and Nick sat at his desk

with piano at the side of him,

and Warren sat on the floor

with synths and pedals
and weird...

stuff
all around him.

And they just started
hammering away at these things.

It was the most bizarre...

Chaos.

Sonic chaos.

We had to avoid
looking at each other

for either giggling or going,

"This is gonna be
the worst record ever.

What are they doing?"

You're asking me
to map a process

that I've never
tried to analyze

because, call it
superstitious or whatever,

I've always felt that
whatever was kind of,

you know, mystical
about it or whatever,

should remain that way.

You know, five, six hours
of hammering away

and you just figure,
"This is the end of
anything creative at all."

Then something will appear.

Warren doesn't know
where he's going,
and he doesn't care.

It's in the process
of making it

that you're discovering
what it is.

Just jamming.

And when you do that,
the song itself surprises you.

It gets out of
what you think you should do,

and it gets out of
what you know,

and it becomes something
that's its own thing by itself.

All I care about
is the exhilaration

of being in that moment

when the fucking atom's
splitting.

"Higgs Boson Blues",
obviously it's a journey,

but it's a hallucinatory
journey, isn't it?

It questions
whether there's a god,

and you've got this guy
who's driving to Geneva

uh, because he doesn't like
the fact

that they're
experimenting with the atoms,

and if it comes out
a certain way,

it means God doesn't exist.

I mean, that's to me,
the underlying threat.

But it's not obvious.

There's
this journey to check in
on what's happening

to the spiritual state
of the world

as well as

the physical,
atomic state of the world.

Think of them
in the line of people like
Carl Sagan or Carlo Rovelli.

These are explorers.

They're explorers of
"what does it mean to be human?"

When that record
Push the Sky Away was finished,

it felt like it wasn't the end.

It felt like it was
the beginning of something,

it was going to go
somewhere else.

I remember Nick and I
having a talk, you know...

It was like a promise,
and it was like
it was signaling.

It was like a promise
being thrown down.

The Pilgrim
is just a reminder
to stay grounded,

even with this
transcendent power,

to kind of stay attached
to the Earth

and to stay attached
to the people in it,

and that the human connection
as well as the divine

is just as important.

On a journey of any kind,

the weather will
sometimes be good,
and sometimes bad.

Sometimes it will feel
like a pilgrimage.

Sometimes, it'll just feel like
a really difficult journey.

We respond as best we can
to what comes to us
along the way,

in terms of trial,
frustration,
company, support.

We learn as we walk,
and we learn to cope

with the dead times,
the empty times,

when we walk.

This is a sensitive
but important question.

How did the tragic death
of Nick's teenage son

impact on him,
not just as a man,
but as an artist?

For most of my life,
I was just sort of, um...

in awe of my own genius,
you know.

A-And I had an office,
and I would sit there

and write every day,

and whatever else
happened in my life,
it was peripheral...

Even annoyances,

because I was involved

in this great work
that I, you know...

And this just
collapsed completely.

And I just sort of saw
the folly of that,

the kind of disgraceful
sort of self-indulgence
of the whole thing.

Um, it just...
My priorities changed.

You know, I still
work all the time.

Um, I still go on tour.

I still piss everyone off
because I'm making a new record

or I'm depressed
because I can't write songs.

So the same things still apply.
But that, um, that...

that idea that art
sort of trounces everything,

it just doesn't
apply to me anymore.

I'm a father and I'm a husband
and a person of the world.

These things are
much more important to me

than the concept
of being an artist.

That kind of grief
is a form of madness.

It brings you
pretty close to going under.

We're all gonna know
pain and loss.

We're all gonna know
joy and euphoria.

These elements
are battling away within us,

and I think that's,
to me, is a place

where great things are made.

He's just got to
put one foot
in front of the other.

Suddenly, it felt like
the worlds collided,

his creative world
and his sort of private life.

Children in Nick's work,
and certainly in "Bunny Munro,"

are symbols
of hope and potential.

and unsullied as yet

and impossibly wise, I think.

You know, I think
that being able to see
the world unfiltered

allows us then
to see the world
through their eyes,

and to see it
in different ways.

Nick still has
that inner child.

He actually was
always great with kids

because there was a freedom
and a kind of anarchy,

to kids that he loved.

He loved
the naughtiness of kids,

when the kids were
calling out the adults.

That's one of
the great things about kids,

is they-they
expose our bullshit.

You have a song
like "O Children",
which is like an anthem

to all the children
that get abandoned
by the adults.

That, to me,
is what storytelling is.

It's not just the narrative.

It's all the emotional
sort of landscapes

and the thematic issues
that you can dive into.

And he managed
to do that in song.

I was in awe
of that artistry,
that majesty, really.

And I still am.

He dealt with a tragedy
that I cannot fucking imagine

the depth of pain and suffering
that he's gone through.

And to come through it
to the other side,

into a place
of honoring his son

and living a life of art
and dealing with his pain,

fucking handling it
and dealing with it.

Who can do that?
Very few fucking people.

"Ghosteen"
is made in such
an extraordinary context.

You know, after this
personal catastrophe.

I was living
with Nick in LA
at the time.

And my introduction
to Ghosteen was
him with his computer

just playing
various bits of music

and actually just singing
over the top in his kitchen.

And then I went out
to where they were recording,

this place out in Malibu.

That record
was a really
isolated experience.

We'd just set up
and do all this...

these overdubs and that,
and then go to bed

and I'd sleep
for a couple of hours

and then the mixers
would be there,

and I'd go down
in my underpants

and sit on the bench
and just listen to them.

And I couldn't really believe
what was coming out.

"Ghosteen", for me, felt like
the only time
I've been in the studio

where it really felt like
something else was in there,

there was another
force present in there.

They were
locked into something.

And it does make
a nonbeliever like me
suddenly think,

"Hang on. What was
going on in that studio?

What was hovering about there?"

'Cause there were spirits
hovering around them, for sure.

I remember
when he and Warren
were making "Ghosteen,"

and I just remember feeling
like my heart would explode.

It was so affecting,

and so, um, extreme,
the feelings,

and to be in the room
while that was happening, was...

fascinating.

Whoa.

So...

You know...

here's a guy writing about...

these things that are
beautiful and terrifying,

mythological
and hard to imagine,

but so vividly
you can imagine them,
the way he writes about them,

these horses on fire,
running into these
magical fields.

I just wanted it to be
in my system,

so I was resonating
with this thing
that Nick had done,

which was
to make this record that...

was about after Arthur's death.

And I wanted to be part of that,
because Arthur was my godson.

And I never...

I wanted him to be
in my system irrevocably

and never to leave.
And this was another way

of having
that child's imprint in me,

and being able
to hold on to him
for as long as I live.

I'd sort of had
this young person's idea

that I'd make something
really great one day,

and that would be the end of it.
Like, a masterpiece.

Um...

And when we finished Ghosteen,

Nick just looked at me
and he said, "Fuck, we did it."

But I just thought
maybe that's the end
of our collaboration.

Like, how could you
get outside of that?

You find a place
where Arthur exists,

and his spirit enlivens
and animates that place,

and you can possibly
begin to think about him

without that terrible,
searing pain of loss.

Nick was
sharing his grief.

He shared the pain,

how thoroughly
he reached people

and moved people
in a different way

than rock and roll
can ever move them.

He moved them
in an existential way.

The songs took on
a whole different
quality afterwards.

So I don't know
where I read it

that he was asked
by a teacher in high school

what he wanted to be
when he grew up.

He said, "I wanna be a guru."

And I thought
that was interesting.

Well, what do prophets do
in the Biblical stories?

They name
what other people
don't name.

What's going on, I think,

in some of the great
classical prophets
of the Bible,

they call people back, to say,

"This is what
you're supposed to be.

This was the vision
that got you going.
What have you forgotten?"

I've always had
a religious temperament,
even as a child,

but no need for it.

And I was sort of drug addicted
for a couple of decades,

and had a great interest
in this sort of stuff,

but no need for it.

And, I think,
after Arthur died,
not immediately, but...

You know, it's been
quite a while now,

but rather than feeling anger
towards that sort of stuff

or rejecting
that sort of stuff,

I felt a slow movement
towards a religious life

that I've found
extremely helpful,

and a kind of widening thing
that's happened in my life.

One time, we had
a conversation

about Christianity,

and I said,
"So, do you believe

in redemption then?

You know,
the fundamental tenet

of the Christian faith,

that you're born again."

He goes, "That doesn't
interest me in the slightest.

I never even think about that."

That is the fundamental thing,

but that is not
what's foreground in his mind.

His line on it
is that to believe in God,

it's an act
of imagination, you know?

And he believes
in the imagination.

But he's also somebody

that would see doubt

as being part of faith.

It's a more
responsible way to be.

It's more responsible
to be a believer.

And it's easy to be a cynic.

He's a doubter of faith, right?

My last conversation with him,

I don't even know

if I should be saying this,

but it was about--
He can have these moments

where we'll really
go into, you know,
"Is it foolish to have faith?"

Is it ridiculous to have faith?

He'll have no problem
opening that up.

And that's what I feel like,
with Nick, it's more like
God working through him,

and sometimes,
I'll be trying
to remind him of that.

He will write
in what you might call

strongly mythological terms
sometimes.

Like "Wild God."

It's both...

chaotic and life-giving.

Interesting title,
as well.

"Wild God."

That notion that the god
isn't just benevolent,

that it's
an unpredictable spirit.

I mean, the power
with which he's
doing it now is staggering.

You just can't believe it.

I couldn't believe it
when he played me Wild God.

I literally couldn't believe it.

He's always looking
to not repeat himself in a way,

yet there are themes
that follow through.

The songs are not loaded
with the weight
of the other records.

They're kind of--
"It's a new dawn.

Come on, here we go."

His voice, too,
is coming into his own.

He's finding that voice
that talks to humanity.

I was sent a copy
of "Faith, Hope and Carnage."

This is the book
of conversations between
Sean O'Hagan and Nick.

And was really very, very moved,
very struck by it.

Two things he insisted on

when we agreed to the book

was that we wouldn't go back

and be nostalgic
about the old days.

And that it wouldn't
be an interview.
It had to be a conversation.

Sean O'Hagan
is kind of prodding Nick

to say more about
what is it that feeds

and nourishes
and energizes him,

and how does that relate to his
experiences of deep trauma

and dislocation, disconnection
and almost unbearable loss

that he's been through.

Nick has a way of rising
to that challenge

and digging quite deeply,
and, I guess quite painfully,

and talking about
the decision to...

to let other people in

to the world of trauma
and how you handle it.

When we toured
the book
around Britain and Europe,

people would
come up and tell you,

"This book has
changed everything.

I feel there's hope."

Particularly people
who have lost a child,

which is as bad as it gets.

There was a lot of that stuff.
It was, it was profound.

That's the interesting thing
that Nick talks about.

How he used to wind himself up
to go on stage, and he would...

He sort of intimated
that he didn't like them.

He didn't particularly like
his audience.

He went to war with them.

So, I always think the distance
he has traveled since that

is kind of...

to a position
of complete respect
for his audience

and love for them even.

This is really
quite a complicated thing,

but the sort of void
that was left...

There was a kind of
rushing in of meaning

that came into that void,
in all sorts
of different ways...

that allowed me
to see the world
in a different way.

Allowed me to be
much more, um...

basically compassionate
towards the human predicament.

Less embittered.

It was kind of
a counterfactual response.

It, in fact, rather than
made me bitter,

it did the opposite
in some way.

It made me much more connected
to, um, people in general.

There's
something prophet-like
about coming back

and trying to talk about hope.

Nick's trauma that he had

been processing

was a horrendous one,

and it was a current one.

It was the loss of a child.

Mine was like
another form of trauma.

What I was realizing
in my trauma recovery

was that I'd already died
a long, long time ago.

I died...

as an infant,
when I was first abused.

You've died.

Thomas decided
that he was gonna
give up art, you know?

Nick was like, "Okay,
that's not a good idea."

And Nick, at the at that time,
I think was struggling with...

he was in his
three-month depressive period

of having to write songs,

struggling to come up
with some songs.

He said, "Well,
I'm going to write you a poem.

And if I do that, you've got to
at least make me something."

He made
this kind of weird trade.

Two days later,
I get White Elephant.

I can vividly right now
remember reading it

and understanding that
this was his invitation
to an intimacy.

The violence
in that song was my violence.

I would shoot you
in the fucking face
if you got too close to me.

You know what I mean?
At that time.

I was trail running
after he'd written me
that song.

There'd been
these huge fires in Malibu,

so it'd be like
a volcanic wasteland.

I'd see this purple flower,
almost like a thistle,

but it was like,
in the morning sun, like...

And there was something
about this song

and seeing that flower
that I felt like...

My feeling was that
that was Nick, that flower.

That was who Nick was
in my life.

Yeah, it's a beautiful gift.

You know?

And out of that,

I painted...

I painted
The Kingdom in the Sky.

Really early on,
any chance I'd get,

I would go and see
the Bad Seeds tour.

And then,
when I joined the band,

suddenly I was
either behind him
or to the left of him

or to the right of him,
or in the studio.

And it wasn't until recently,

I was mixing
the live show from Paris,

and I watched the film of it
as I was mixing it,

and it was the first time
I'd watched him

from the audience,
for a few decades.

And I was moved to tears
watching him.

You know, he does
have this thing

that he's a conduit
for something else.

And you know
he fucking means it.

He just means it.

He means it when he delivers.

The spirit
of the music
is moving through him.

The different levels
of focus, concentration,
humility, respect,

that's swirling around
in the moment.
It's just so brilliant.

His persona
on stage
became different.

He became
so much more generous.

The way he sees single people
in the audience,

the way he
communicates with people,
really communicates,

not just as a show,
but he wants to communicate.

And that is such a great thing
in rock and roll, because...

The Rolling Stones
don't communicate.

They're a great band,
but they do not communicate.

And Nick is communicating.

I think now it's, um...

It's less "bad boy
fire and brimstone"

and more like,
"How do we heal? How do we
look after each other?"

He's probably become
more of a helpful preacher,

even though he was also
a helpful preacher to me

in the fire and brimstone era.

When I went
to see Nick Cave perform,
I see, like...

To me, I guess the way
that I understand God is

I understand it
through performance.

And when I see Nick...

And for a second, something
is pouring into the room

and I think it's love
or presence or something,

it really does feel like
the heavens kind of pour in.

The Prophet traditionally has
the skills of a showman,

of a magician,

and is able
to conjure something.

These great
kind of religious experiences

that people very eloquently
described over the centuries,

the moments of revelation,
are moments of conjuring.

Joy in this context is radical.

It is revolutionary.

It's certainly not happiness,

not sort of mindless,
beaming complacency.

That's not quite
a Nick Cave style.

It's not even positivity,
positive thinking.

It's just letting
something of the...

exuberance of life...
Exuberance even
is the wrong word.

The abundance of life
rise up.

I think Nick's
pretty happy.

And it's weird, you know,

because ten years ago,

the idea of Nick ever
being happy again
seemed impossible.

And I'm sure
if the Nick
from ten years ago

met the Nick from now,
he wouldn't be ready for him.

You know what I'm saying?

Thank you very much!