Faith, hope and carnage

After the death of his 15-year-old son five years ago, raucous but durable Australian musician Nick Cave stopped doing big interviews. But in 2020, when his international tour was shut down by pandemic, he decided to open up at length to friend and Observer/Guardian journalist O'Hagan. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

The Australian alt-rock icon talks at length about the relationship between faith, death, and art. Like many touring musicians stalled during the pandemic, Cave pursued an autobiographical book project while in quarantine. But rather than write a standard memoir, he instead consented to a book of extensive interviews with U.K. arts journalist O'Hagan, photography critic for the Guardian and a feature writer for the Observer. Cave chose this approach in order to avoid standard rock-star patter and to address grittier, more essential matters. On that front, he has plenty of material to work with. Much of the book focuses on his 15-year-old son Arthur, who died from an accidental fall off a cliff in 2015. The loss fueled Cave's 2019 album, Ghosteen, but Cave sees the connection between life and art as indirect, involving improvisation, uncertainty, and no small amount of thinking about religion. "The loss of my son is a condition; not a theme," he tells O'Hagan. Loss is a constant in these conversations--during the period when they were recorded, Cave's mother also died, as did his former band mate Anita Lane. Yet despite that, this is a lively, engrossing book energized by Cave's relentless candor--and sometimes counterintuitive thinking--about his work and his demons. His well-documented past heroin addiction, he says, "fed into my need for a conservative and well-ordered life." Grief, he suggests, is surprisingly clarifying: "We become different. We become better." Throughout, he talks about the challenges and joys of songwriting and improvisation (mostly around Carnage, the 2021 album he recorded with band mate Warren Ellis during this period) and about the comfort he gets answering questions from fans and strangers on his website. O'Hagan knows Cave's work well, but he avoids fussy discographical queries and instead pushes Cave toward philosophical elaborations, which he's generally game for. A somber, sage book about art-making that deserves a readership beyond Cave's fan base. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.