ON HIS album Seven Psalms (2022), Nick Cave recites: “I have trembled my way deep into surrender / I have stretched my aching body across the world / I have stood at the threshold of your wonder / Bid me enter, Lord, allow me to unfold.”
These words of submission to a loving deity typify Cave’s recent work, wherein God is “both the impetus and the destination” of his creative life. In Faith, Hope and Carnage, the journalist Séan O’Hagan collates 40 hours of conversations in which Cave engages in “that struggle with the notion of the divine which is at the heart of my creativity”.
The conversations took place during the lockdowns of 2020-21. Overlaying the context of pervading disorientation was the personal tragedy of Nick and Susie Cave, who lost their 15-year-old son Arthur in a clifftop fall near their Brighton home in July 2015. The book explores the interplay between Cave’s songwriting, spiritual yearning, and grief. He describes his 2019 album release Ghosteen as “a record that feels as if it came from a place beyond me and is expressing something ineffable. [Perhaps] God is the trauma itself. . . perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things.”
While Cave’s past writings dwelt on the actions of a loathsome demiurge (as in the song “Red Right Hand”, popularised as the theme to the BBC drama Peaky Blinders), increasingly they express devotion to a loving God. Since Arthur’s death, there is evidence of this transformation in Cave’s relationship with his audience. After a 2018 tour, “Conversations with Nick Cave”, he launched the Red Hand Files, an online exchange with fans, partially driven by “an impulse to engage with, and maybe help, people to articulate their experiences of loss”.
The book ends with Cave’s proposal that life is a “circular reciprocal motion” in which “things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world,” and which “grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn”. In his afterword, O’Hagan records the announcement of the death of Cave’s oldest son, Jethro, in May 2022.
The Revd John Davies is Priest-in-Charge of Clapham with Keasden and Austwick with Eldroth, in the diocese of Leeds.
Faith, Hope and Carnage
Nick Cave and Séan O’Hagan
Canongate £20
(978-1-83885-766-0)
Church Times Bookshop £18
Read an interview with Nick Cave here
