And
lvis is alive, has renamed himself Nick Cave and travels the world in an astonishing fury. Anyone who has seen it live knows that on stage it looks like – I would say – excited, at least as much as the child who read the stories of the Bible and who in church, when he sang in the choir, bought a small wooden cross and found it written: “Made with the wood of the true Cross”. And he believed it. Conversely possessed, possessed by God, like an electric Blaise Pascal or a Flannery O’Connor who took over the Velvet Underground. As usual, a bit tender and a bit ferocious, a bit collected in prayer and a bit of an idiot who spits blanks in a bar, above all a bit Old and a bit New Testament, always him, the receding chin, the potato nose, the shrill voice yet coolthe very deep eyes, the shy and almost embarrassed smile of himself, the very dry physique, the articulated word, the superfine art of combining narrative with allegory (the distant, perfect opening of I Let Love In: “Despair and Deception / Love’s ugly little twins / Came a-knockin ‘on my door / I let’ em in”), the plastic figurativeness of the images that perhaps comes to him from the art school he attended in Australia, blind trust in the blues that Johnny Cash had, Dylan’s irritating restlessness, the ability to combine the punk energy of the Birthday Party with the literary grace of Leonard Cohen. I used to like to say that, as much as Ligabue, Nick Cave had always written the same song, only the first one was beautiful. The joke had its own truth, even in a workaholic research itinerary that had passed from the furious pieces of the beginnings to expressionist, almost Brechtian songs, such as the cover of “Avalanche” or “Well of Misery”, from the nervous cinematography of Henry’s Dream to the majestic despair of No More Shall We Partfrom the Rodinian sensuality of The Boatman’s Call from the garage derailments of the Grindermans to a series of experiments that it would be useless to list, including the latest gamble spoken of psalms, vocals and synths. Yet there has always been a red thread. When I saw in 2014 the first strange docu-film about himself (20000 Days On Earth) I was stunned in “Jubilee Street” by the vehemence with which he sang “I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, look at me now”, where there is one of the many omens of his life. Look at me, here, I’m about to change, look at me. And then the red thread is really severed, and he changes, he really evolves: vibrating. Always the same, more and more different. For a bad, almost banal reason. The death.
The association between spirituality and detoxification as overlying and healthy normative immateriality, creativity as a ‘dimension of the mystery’ or as a ‘question of faith’, the songs that ‘exist on the basis of their singular wills’.
There isn’t much anecdotal, or tripe for fans, in this book-interview with journalist Seán O’Hagan (Faith, hope and carnage, The ship of Teseo, translation by Chiara Spaziani). Some revelations on the separations from Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey, some illuminations on the birth of important songs like “Into My Arms” or “Brompton Oratory” or “Sad Waters”, the disheartening account of a detox that leaves Shane at the first meeting MacGowan so baffled that he immediately pushes him to swallow two acids, Lou Reed’s tears when Cave and Hal Willner play him a bluegrass version of “White Light / White Heat”, a short portrait of his childhood in the countryside that is very reminiscent of Mark Twain ( on the other hand an ancient piece was dedicated to Saint Huck). There are usual emphases, perhaps even more pronounced. For example, the association between spirituality and detoxification as overwhelming and healthy normative immateriality, creativity as a “dimension of mystery” or as a “question of faith”, songs that “exist on the basis of their singular wills”. Even when he decides to work with ceramics, Cave – as a senile and afternoon demiurge – does not give up on outlining the contours of an obsession, asserting that at night he dreams of the colors, shapes, allegories that he is trying to bring out from the ‘clay. But there are also very human tendernesses, like the page where he hopes to be able to do a long time on stage knee drop as it should be behind the ghosts of James Brown and Patti Smith or the mention of hair dye in the tour paraphernalia or the memory of a dark storybook he read as a child (“even now, it exerts an influence on me” ). Yet in the center, as it is no longer possible that it is not, there is an absence that has become the only possible presence, declined in every possible creative dimension. And that is the loss of his son Arthur, who fell in 2015 from a cliff not far from home, next to a mill which – in one of the many disturbing echoes – Arthur himself had drawn as a child and which at the time had been framed (in black) from parents. Cave goes back to it all the time, he can’t do otherwise. “There can be a kind of morbid adoration of an absence. A reluctance to go beyond the trauma, because the trauma is the place where the lost person resides and consequently the place where the meaning exists ”. And not to bask, but on the contrary to free ourselves, free ourselves.
In his poetics everything has always had this binary trend, very conventional yet sincere, of curse and redemption.
Everything that Cave had done in the past, every artistic gesture, every word of damnation and atonement together, in retrospect, seems to converge towards the black prism of that death, which unveils an individual who, after all, is now satisfied and dormant in his songwriting and poetic form. and throws him into the darkness from which he emerged towards that light he has always sought. In his poetics everything has always had this binary trend, very conventional yet sincere, of curse and redemption. The poses of a junkie in love with Jesus, the wild guitarists juxtaposed to the angelic choirs, the cover of Nocturama flooded with light, love for William Blake, the dark preacher’s profile in a deconsecrated church, the murder ballads as a form of understanding of life because always, once again, “death is not the end” (as all his musician friends sang in chorus at the end of that glorious record). Death is not the end because it is the only thing that makes sense in the exact moment it takes it away. And at a certain point in the book, after countless clarifications and embroideries and redefinitions that in any case anguish and move the reader, he circumscribes the shock that came from mourning with three words that are difficult to digest, yet perfect: “a rebellious, unsettling energy”. It’s as if to tabloid voyeurism – the maudit singer with his terrifying nemesis, the drug taking his revenge – Nick Cave has reacted with total denuding of himself (“Nick the Stripper” was an old song, but already on the cover of Let Love In he appeared bare-chested: hairless, Christological), that is, the ostentation of fragility, becoming a body in suffering and success. Be a catalyst for the pains of the world. And make sure they are not the burden that we carry with us from birth. To free evil, to be possessed by the love that is buried there, to make it live in what in a powerful page Cave defines “the impossible kingdom”.
His speech free from the piano and the guitar moves inside the synthesizers and the noises and the litanies in search of an adolescent ghost, inside a ‘shapeless and fragile’ music.
There are many heartbreaking narratives following that fateful day. To say, he receives letters of solidarity that tell as many griefs addressed simply to “Nick Cave, Brighton”. But above all there is a small scene that strikes him. On his first outing after the tragedy, Cave goes to a vegetarian restaurant where he used to eat often before. The girl at the counter doesn’t say anything to him, she doesn’t immediately show her solidarity, she just asks him what she wants. When she reaches out to him the rest of her, though, she holds his hand longer. That’s all. Here, that affectionate grip, which also already existed in his art, has exploded in a series of initiatives that can appear crazy, obsessive, frenetic. Post-death record first (Skeleton Tree, where all but one songs foreshadowed the loss in an unspeakable way: “Write a verse asking the future to reveal its meaning”), recorded in a trance state in a studio in a French grove and immediately immortalized in a film ambiguous where Andrew Dominik’s all too sophisticated black and white enters Cave’s sunken face to somehow help him redefine himself and his family (he trivially says he needed someone to tell him what to do: put yourself here , stand there, speak by the window). So the public confrontation, in a therapeutic sit-in, with In Conversation. Then the open dialogue, cathartic as much as possible, with the newsletter in response to readers “The Red Hand Files”. Therefore Ghosteenthe record in which he really faces mourning and in which he is convinced that he rests literally the spirit of the son. In the record – also thanks to the work of Warren Ellis, now something more than a member of the band – he opens the song form of the past to a more airy tone, I would like to say more nebulous (in another passage of the book he talks about the possibility of knowing goodness only through suffering, through a biblical passage on the God of the clouds), in which his speech free from the piano and the guitar moves inside the synthesizers and the noises and litanies in search of an adolescent ghost, inside a music that also he proudly defines “shapeless and fragile”.
Post-pandemic tours have become a secular mass, a cry for redemption, a celebration of the blood running through his veins, in which Cave recalls the ghost of a grieving Elvis.
It actually seems like an ever-changing process (it’s a mantra: “The loss of my child is a condition, not a theme”; “The loss of my child defines me”; “God is the trauma itself”; “It happened to us, but it actually happened to him ”) as it probably is for anyone who has suffered such a loss. And in fact, after all this, even if it would have exhausted a giant, here is the tumultuous search for contact with the public in a series of post-pandemic tours that have become a secular mass, a cry for redemption, a celebration of the blood that flows. in the veins, in which Cave at the age of sixty-three recalls the ghost of a grieving Elvis, exploding on stage with an energy that can’t help but shiver. At the Arena di Verona he was visibly irritated because he could not find contact with the audience from the distant stage, then he found a way to get off and literally let himself be devoured by the crowd while singing entire songs surrounded by strangers, a washing made of hands and screens. prosthesis in which even an earlier and very simple verse like that “Can you feel my heart beat?” from “Higgs Boson Blues” (a hypnosis-song worthy of Robert Johnson) it becomes a moment of sharing and, fundamentally, of love for life and human beings. Suddenly he says, courageously: “It is as if the experience of mourning had somehow enlarged my heart.” It is not an easy point to reach and he made it in public, together with the public – Elvisian, narcissistically – in one of the clearest and most beautiful stories in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.