Nick Cave on wild swimming, sons’ deaths and why a broken world can be beautiful at the same time

Every morning Nick Cave jumps in a lake. “I’m one of those wacky wild swimmers,” he says. “Rain or shine, summer or winter, regardless of what country I’m in, I try and find someplace.” 

To justify the appeal, he draws on nature writer Roger Deakin’s description, that “you jump in with all your devils and leap out a giggling idiot”. 

“I highly recommend it,” Cave continues. “If you’re the kind of person that wakes up feeling a little despondent, go and jump into freezing water. It’s so fucking catastrophic to your nervous system that it recalibrates everything. It’s amazing.” 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

This is not what people expect from Nick Cave. From raw post-punk roots he has grown into an icon of gothic otherworldliness, a modern-day prophet, with songs about love, loss and redemption delivered with a voice that sounds like it holds the wisdom of the world. 

“I’m not trying to work out the meaning of life or anything,” Cave says. “Explaining a song is generally a bit of a dead end in an interview,” he adds, shifting a flower vase sitting on the table between us, meaning I can’t hide my notepad full of questions about songs. “I find it’s very difficult to do without doing a disservice to the song itself.” 

Nick Cave meets Big Issue in the anteroom of a boutique West London hotel, near where he lives with his wife, fashion designer Susie Cave. The 66-year-old is dressed sharply in monochrome, sweeps of supernaturally black hair crowning lean features. He settles on an apt way to describe his back catalogue. 

“These records are about the big issues! They are attempting to deal with larger matters, I think. I hope. 

“I’m not sitting down and thinking: ‘write a song about whether God exists’. I don’t think of things in that way. I’m just trying to write a collection of songs that present the place I am at this particular time, authentically and with a feeling of truth, in the hope that somehow radiates out and other people can relate or are moved in some way.” 

If his music reflects the journey he has taken, in recent years it has gone to unimaginable places. In 2015, one of Cave’s twin sons, Arthur, died after falling from a cliff in Brighton, aged 15.  

After Arthur’s death, Cave received countless messages from people offering support or who were experiencing a loss of their own. He began posting responses on his website and over time this evolved into The Red Hand Files.

Each week, Cave answers a question that’s been submitted, asked by people struggling to overcome one of life’s obstacles or simply curious about a lyric and now thousands are looking to him for guidance. 

He checks the inbox regularly. “It’s around 300-400 questions a week. Hang on…” He reaches for his
MacBook and reports that the tally currently stands at 98,462 questions. 

“It always feels impossible to write another one. But I find a question sticks its head up. I do my best to answer one that’s come in that week because the temperature of the questions changes through time. 

“At the moment there’s a lot of rage and anger. Through Covid, people were just fucking crazy. The questions coming in were really disturbing. So I try and reach into the general preoccupations of the people that are writing.” 

The Red Hand Files has become a core part of Cave’s output – and he puts out a lot. Artist, author, ceramicist, screenwriter,  and – alongside Warren Ellis, who also serves as musical director of Cave’s band, the Bad Seeds – film composer. The group’s new album, Wild God, is released this month. 

The record has an expansive soundscape, both bracing and embracing. There is vulnerability in Cave’s words and vocals but stubborn positivity too. He wouldn’t want to explain the new songs but in any case their meaning has yet to emerge. 

“You don’t really know what songs are trying to say until you start playing them to an audience, then they reveal themselves. In fact, sometimes they reveal themselves over many, many years. If the songs are good, you remain in a kind of intense dialogue for as long as you can play them.” 

It’s similar for a listener. I tell him that it is simultaneously scary and a comfort to know that some of his songs are waiting to show their true significance to me. 

“Yeah, that can be frightening. I’ve been playing the song O Children live with Colin Greenwood [of Radiohead] in Australia. That song I wrote 22 years ago watching my children when they were little playing in a playground. I wrote about this fucked-up world we were creating and that we had no way of protecting our children from. That seemed relevant when it came out but it’s always found its theme. 

“From a personal level, I was not able to protect my children [in 2022, Cave’s eldest son Jethro also died, aged 31]. Today too, children are dying everywhere in their thousands. And it asks the same question – what kind of a world are we creating for our children?  So I understand what you mean. You can write a song that is a critique of the world and you hope it ultimately becomes irrelevant. But sadly, often these songs retain their relevance.” 

• Why Faith, Hope and Carnage is The Big Issue Book of the Year 2022
• Artificial Intelligence is no match for the human heart

A series of conversions

Nick Cave’s musical career began as a choirboy in his local Anglican church in Wangaratta, rural Australia. Since then, God has been a recurring but changing character in Cave’s songs (he has as complicated a God complex as other great songwriters like Cohen, Dylan, Cash), from the vengeful figure in The Mercy Seat to the protective presence in God is in the House. He has written an introduction to The Gospel According to Mark and in 2022 released the spoken word Seven Psalms. Now, he’s introducing a Wild God. 

Has your perception of God evolved over time? “I’m not so sure it’s changed. It’s just something that is, for me, a destination, or a direction travelled toward, without any understanding of what I’ll be greeted with upon arrival. That is all a great mystery riddled with all sorts of doubts and uncertainties.” 

Cave started attending church again after Arthur died. It’s a refuge, providing a “structure that can contain my unbelief and belief both”. The light to be found in darkness has long been a contradiction to explore. 

“I guess the way I see the world is that it is broken, fundamentally broken,” Cave says. “And shockingly, it continues to be systemically beautiful at the same time. I think that both about the world and the people in it as well. 

“I think the record seems to me to be a series of conversions, by which I mean something changing from one thing into something else. If you’re asking has that happened to me or to my wife on a spiritual level, I would say yes.” 

The obvious metaphor for metamorphosis on Wild God is the song Frogs. It outlines a typical Sunday
morning in London. 

“If I’m lucky, I go to church. And then spend the rest of the day with my wife. That is what Frogs – without diminishing the song – is about. Walking through the rain on a Sunday morning, back from church, back home, to bed. The children are in heaven and they’re all banging [he raps his hands against the table] making it rain. The frogs are jumping up to God but finding themselves back in the gutter again.  

“That felt fundamental – the way I feel about things. That’s what I’m doing all the time, leaping up…” 

But like the frogs, Nick Cave inevitably returns to Earth. You can never ascend? 

“One day, maybe,” he says. 

For all the soul-stirring songs and imagery drawn from memory, mythology or imagination, if you had to pick one word to describe Wild God it is wet. The record opens with Song of the Lake and contains plenty of rain before closing with As the Waters Cover the Sea.  

Cave points out that that title comes from the bible. “I think that’s the apocalypse probably. The flood.” 

Do you think we’re overdue a flood? 

“I think we’ll be alright for a while,” he says dismissively, before clarifying, “Well, we are doomed. It’s just a matter of when. I don’t think we’re doomed imminently. I mean, you’re personally doomed. I’m sorry to have to break this to you in an interview, but you only have a certain amount of years left.” 

But before we’re extinct – personally or collectively – we have more evolving to do. 

“We change,” Cave says. “Sometimes multiple times, shattered by events. It may not have happened to you yet, but it will certainly happen at some point in your life. This can fundamentally change the way that you perceive the world and the way you behave. I think that happened to me to some degree. Made me a little less precious about my own place in the world. The worst had happened. It maybe made me a little braver about things.” 

Wild God hinges on the song Joy, which signals a reset with the line: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.”  

Is joy a choice? 

“You can point yourself in that direction. No one’s able to be joyful all the time. Joy is a sort of euphoric spasm, like a frog jumping into the air. Happiness is a different emotion altogether. Joy is dependent upon our suffering. Otherwise we’re not jumping from anything.” 

Suffering then is not merely unpleasant, Cave believes it is essential for creation. He has reacted to the countless verses people have sent him written by ChatGPT ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ on the Red Hand Files, warning that AI represents “the erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself”. 

Is the main difference between technology and ourselves that suffering is not part of the creative process? 

“I’m not talking about AI in general. Thank God, there’s AI in general, right? I’m talking about song replication, people using ChatGPT to write their lyrics for them. It seems to be viewing the thing that you’ve created as the ultimate prize. It’s the commodity that we need and the artistic struggle itself is simply something that gets in the way. 

“For me, the creative struggle, not just artistically but in all ways for us as human beings, is the essential engine of the world. Without that, what do we even have? That’s what worries me. That ultimately, we will be kneeling to something, in awe of something, that’s utterly banal and completely empty
of meaning.” 

In an attempt at unimaginative irony, I asked ChatGPT to suggest some questions for its critic Cave. One it churned out was about the future: Do you think there will be a distinct separation between AI-generated art and human-created art? 

“I don’t know what the tech world has up its sleeve,” he answers. “I tried Suno, the song generator thing. And the song was fine. In two or five years it’s going to be amazing. Without a doubt eventually you’ll be able to make a Nick Cave song that’s as good if not better than I can do myself. But it will have no intrinsic meaning. 

“What I worry about most is that at the end of the day, people just don’t give a fuck. Sometimes I see evidence to suggest that people don’t really care about these sorts of things and the idea of the artistic struggle may just be a kind of artistic indulgence. But I care. I also understand that I’m just some old guy crying in the wilderness about this stuff.” 

Do you think artists are an endangered species – not only because of AI but because culture is underfunded and underappreciated? 

“Yeah, probably. I’m not worried about my own position. If for some reason suddenly I’m not needed as a songwriter or musician, that’s not a major tragedy for me personally. I’m quite happy to do something else. I’m more concerned about the way we value ourselves as human beings.” 

Technological advancements have similarly failed to improve our ability to relate to other people and other points of view too. 

“[Social media] represents a binary, polarised, this-side-that-side situation and I just don’t think that’s the way things actually are,” Cave says. “Most people don’t really know, including myself, and sit somewhere in the middle. If there’s one thing I fight for, it’s the right to be wrong about things.” 

All this means he’s reluctant to be drawn on the UK’s general election or politics. 

Do you have a message for the new prime minister? 

“No.” 

Do you have a message for the populist right-wing that might in its attempts to rebuild fall towards more extreme views? 

“I am not politically affiliated in that way I’m sorry to say, so I don’t really have anything to say. I wish I could help you out. I hardly see any real significant difference between these parties anyway – I might be wrong there.” 

The extent of his political engagement is to “glance at the newspapers just to see if someone’s made a decision where the world’s going to end”. 

“I want my music to be a communal activity where everyone is invited. I’m not playing for one side and the other. It’s a political position for me to sit somewhere in the middle. I think it’s the best place to be for the business of songwriting, to be open, flexible, fluid, but also personally I am uncomfortable with taking a side and a question like you’ve asked me immediately boxes me into one side or the other. 

“There’s often an accusation made toward me, especially on the Red Hand Files, you have a platform, you should be speaking about this, this and this. And I completely disagree with that.

“The Red Hand Files provides a service to people in a completely non-divisive way, most of the time. Sometimes I say something political and regret it because it immediately fractures things, and they provide a service to everybody. 

“I think my music does that as well. I don’t care what side is listening to my music. It’s for everybody. The songs that mean the most to me are songs that reach everybody and are not attempting to educate or advocate. 

“Music has intrinsic goodness. It makes things better and improves the world just being out there. So I feel like I do my bit in that respect without having to be the houseboy for someone else’s political objectives.” 

To be godlike

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds will be putting more music out into the world on tour later this year. Cave has long been a magnetic and frenzied performer who has over recent years found himself playing arenas. The Skeleton Tree tour in 2017 saw concerts turned into almost spiritual experiences for those in attendance. 

“I felt that too,” Cave says. “There were some very beautiful moments on that tour for me.” 

He often appears possessed on stage. When you watch footage from concerts, does it feel like watching someone else? 

“It doesn’t feel like I’m watching someone else. But I don’t really watch them. I feel quite awkward. They never seem nearly as good as I think they are.  

“That’s the beautiful thing about being on stage. At the time – I think that any artist will tell you – the way you feel about yourself is enormously inflated. I mean, you do feel godlike. You feel like everyone understands all the years of meaning that every line you sing has collected and everyone is amazed by you. Then you see a bit of footage of yourself. And you’re like… really…? It doesn’t translate.” 

The upcoming tour will be the first time that songs from Wild God truly reveal themselves. Songs will be found and refound and meaning will materialise, making the world make sense if only momentarily. That is why live music is so precious for an audience, as well as for Cave. 

“That live experience, which we have for another five years until they work out a way to take that away too, is perhaps the last surviving way we can have a transcendent experience,” he says. 

“It’s amazing to be sandwiched in between this incredible band and the audience. It’s pure joy. For the time I’m on stage, it’s a little frog leaping in the air.” 

Wild God is released on 30 August. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds tour the UK in November. Get tickets here.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.