Faith, Hope and Carnage , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Nick Cave

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175 pages

English

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THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEARA TELEGRAPH BEST MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave's inner life. Created from more than forty hours of intimate conversations with the journalist Sen O'Hagan, this is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave's own words, of what really drives his life and creativity. The book examines questions of belief, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave's life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years. Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true creative visionary.

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Musician

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	20 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838857677
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0880€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Also by Nick Cave
And the Ass Saw the Angel
The Death of Bunny Munro
The Sick Bag Song
Stranger Than Kindness

First published in Great Britain in 2022
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH 1 1 TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Lightning Ltd (on behalf of Nick Cave) and Seán O’Hagan, 2022
The right of Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan to be identified as the authors of these works has been asserted by them under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Lyrics by Nick Cave
Reproduced by kind permission of
BMG Rights Management and Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.
Letter and poem pp. 212-214 © Tiffany Barton
Extract from interview with Susie Cave: ‘My Imagination Can Get a Little Bit Scary’
by Eva Wiseman. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2022.
Extract from We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
by Joan Didion © Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
‘Me and Bobby McGee’
Words and Music by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster
Copyright © 1968 Combine Music Corp.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC,
424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Ltd .
‘Church Going’ by Philip Larkin. Taken from The Less Deceived (2011).
Reproduced with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 766 0 e ISBN 978 1 83885 767 7
For my family N.C.
For Kieran S.O’H.
A little child shall lead them.
Isaiah 11:6
Contents

  1 A Beautiful Kind of Freedom
  2 The Utility of Belief
  3 The Impossible Realm
  4 Love and a Certain Dissonance
  5 A Kind of Disappearance
  6 Doubt and Wonder
  7 A Radical Intimacy
  8 A Sense of Shared Defiance
  9 The Astonishing Idea
10 A Series of Ordinary Carnages
11 A Beautiful, Desperate World
12 Anita Led Us Here
13 Things Unfold
14 The God in the Cloud
15 Absolution
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Index
1
A Beautiful Kind of Freedom

Seán O’Hagan: I’m surprised you agreed to do this given that you haven’t done any interviews for a long time .
Nick Cave: Well, who wants to do an interview? Interviews, in general, suck. Really. They eat you up. I hate them. The whole premise is so demeaning: you have a new album out, or new film to promote, or a book to sell. After a while, you just get worn away by your own story. I guess, at some point, I just realised that doing that kind of interview was of no real benefit to me. It only ever took something away. I always had to recover a bit afterwards. It was like I had to go looking for myself again. So five or so years ago I just gave them up.
So how do you feel about this undertaking?
I don’t know. I do like having a conversation. I like to talk, to engage with people. And we’ve always had our big, sprawling conversations, so when you suggested it, I was kind of intrigued to see where it would go. Let’s see, shall we?
When I spoke to you back in March (2020), your world tour had just been cancelled because of the pandemic. I have to say, you sounded remarkably philosophical about it .
It was a strange moment, that’s for sure. When Covid hit and my manager, Brian, told me that we wouldn’t be going on tour, I felt this kind of emptying out, like the whole world had dropped out from under me. We’d all put an enormous amount of thought and effort into how we were going to present Ghosteen live – we’d been rehearsing with ten backing singers and created a whole visual structure for the show that felt completely unique and very exciting. A lot of work, mental energy and expense. So when I heard it definitely wasn’t going to happen, I was initially horrified. It struck at the very core of my being because I was this thing that toured. It’s what I was.
Now, I say this with great caution because I know how disappointed the fans were, but, to be honest, that feeling of existential collapse, well, it lasted about half an hour. Then I remember standing in my manager’s office and thinking somewhat guiltily, ‘Fuck! I’m not going on tour. And perhaps for an entire year.’ Suddenly, there was an extraordinary sense of relief, a sort of wave washing through me, a kind of euphoria, but also something more than that – a crazy energy.
A sense of potential, maybe?
Yes, but true potential. Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something. It suddenly struck me that I could just be at home with Susie, my wife, and that was amazing in itself because we’d always measured our relationship in terms of my leaving and my returning. Suddenly, I could see my kids, or just sit in a chair on my balcony and read books. It was like I had been given the license to just be , and not do.
And as it went on, there was the sense that time was out of joint, the days just drifting into each other. Did you feel that?
Yes, time seemed altered. It seems almost wrong to be saying this, but on one level, I really loved the strange freedom it gave me. I loved getting up in the morning and having another day where I could just exist and not have to do anything. The phone stopped ringing constantly and very quickly my days became beautifully repetitious. It was oddly like being a junkie again, the ritual, the routine, the habit.
Now, I’m saying all this even though the previous tour, when we played the Skeleton Tree album live, was one of the defining periods of my professional life, just being on that stage every night with that fierce energy coming off the audience. It is difficult to exaggerate the extraordinary feeling of connection. It was life-changing. No, actually life-saving! But it was also seriously punishing, physically and mentally. So when the recent tour was cancelled, the initial disappointment was replaced by a feeling of relief and, yes, a strange and wayward potential. I feel guilty even saying this, because I know how devastating the pandemic has been for many people.
From the chats we had back then, it was clear that you sensed early on that the lockdown would be a time for reflection .
I instinctively felt that. I remember feeling that it really didn’t seem right to try and do a performance online from my kitchen, or from my bathtub, or in my pyjamas, or whatever else it was that some artists were doing back then, all those artless and conspicuous displays of fellow feeling. It felt to me like it was a moment to sit inside history and just think. I felt chastened by the world. I had a weird, reflective time throughout that Covid summer. I’ll never forget it, sitting on my balcony, reading a lot, writing loads of new stuff, responding to questions on The Red Hand Files. It was an interesting time, despite the constant background hum of anxiety and dread.
I remember that we were talking on the phone right at the start of the pandemic, and you said, ‘This is the big one.’
Yes, I think I’d just read something that really brought home to me the sheer immense power of the virus, and how extraordinarily vulnerable we all were, and how completely unprepared as a society. You and I were both pretty spooked by this invisible thing that was outside the door. Everyone was. It really did feel like the end times had arrived, and the world had been caught sleeping. It felt as though, whatever we assumed was the story of our lives, this invisible hand had reached down and torn a great big hole in it.
That makes me think of the idea of the disrupted narrative I have heard you talk about in relation to your songwriting: how both the subject matter and meaning of your more recent songs have become less straightforward and more elusive .
Well, exactly. My songs have definitely become more abstracted, for want of a better word, and, yes, less dominated by a traditional narrative. At some point, I just grew tired of writing third-person songs that told a structured story that began at the beginning and moved obediently towards their conclusion. I just became suspicious of the form. It felt unfair to inflict these stories on people all the time. It felt like a kind of tyranny. It was almost as if I was hiding behind these neat, manicured narratives because I was afraid of the stuff that was boiling away inside me. I wanted to start writing songs that were truer somehow, that were authentic to my experience.
Specifically to your more recent experience?
Yes. Which was one of rupture, I would say, same as most people’s. But purely from a personal point of view, living my life within a neat narrative didn’t make much sense any more. Arthur died and everything changed. That sense of disruption, of a disrupted life, infused everything.
In terms of what you and I are doing here, it is difficult for me to go back there, but it is also important to talk about it at some point, because the loss of my son defines me.
I totally understand. So telling a straightforward story in a song, however dramatic, became altogether less important to you?
Yes, but I didn’t step away from highly visual songs; it’s more that the storylines became more twisted, entangled, mutilated – the form itself became more traumatic. My music began to reflect life as I saw it.
That said, the songs on my last few albums are still narrative songs, but the narratives have been pushed through the meat grinder. Ghosteen , for instance, is still telling a story. In fact, it’s telling a vast, epic tale of loss and longing, but it’s all busted up and blown apart.
It’s certainly a very different kind of narrative, much more ambitious, even conceptual .
Yes. Radically different. There’s nothing linear about those songs. They shift direction, or rupture, or, worse, atomise before your eyes. The songs exist on their own freakish term