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MALE 1: Record. Yep.
(PIANO MUSIC PLAYING)
(SINGING INTO MY ARMS)
FLEA: The amazing thing about the world that Nick created
through the movies, books,
and the ones we know the most, songs,
is they're full of the most divine, beautiful characters.
Does it look all right?
MALE: Man, look.
FLEA: And then, you know, there's the most pathetic of victims.
The most ruthless of evildoers,
and just the worst of humanity.
(PLAYING PIANO)
In Nick's world, there's always characters,
people, songs, him dealing with the unknown.
(GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING)
BELLA FREUD: It's so deep, the worlds that he conjures up.
The kind of feeling is always deep and intense in everything.
You know he feels an incredible responsibility
when he's writing.
WARREN ELLIS: He's curious about words.
(GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING)
Sometimes it can be like ten years later,
and I'll call him up and say, "It's such a beautiful song."
And he's like, "Duh!"
POLLY BORLAND: He is and always was a poet.
His creativity, his intelligence.
There's no fear.
(GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING)
The sort of reference for songwriting is a mystical force.
It's heavily influenced
a lot of the way that I approach my work.
THOMAS HOUSEAGO: Nick's constantly going "What if?"
"What about here? What's happening there? What do we do with that?
What's love?"
I think it's his search for the human soul.
Nick wants to know why he's here.
Not many people want to know that.
(MUSIC STOPS)
IAIN FORSYTH: I wanted to ask you about the music.
There's always been lots of archetypes in your music
and mythic figures.
NICK: It is my natural language to do it in that.
I'm a storyteller.
These characters in the songs, I don't look at them
as sort of literary inventions as much as just parts of myself.
I think what's interesting with Nick is
the way it's evolved over time.
He was somebody who wrote songs about characters.
He wrote songs, he wrote stories.
FORSYTH: The songs begin to take on these sort of archetypes,
I think Nick is very good at pulling the gears
to push forward
at different points of those characters.
Yeah.
(HORSE WHINNIES)
FORSYTH: We're not an outlaw, or we're not an angel
or a saint or a devil or a god.
We contain all of those things.
But in a way, what they collectively show us is far more important
than what they show us individually.
IRVINE WELSH: An archetype is a set of characteristics
that we recognize universally.
The archetypes become like a roadmap
showing you where you need to go.
They're the things that lead you.
The hero's journey and Jung and Freud, you name it,
going all the way to Buddhist and ancient Chinese myths.
It's usually "how do you cope with the darkness?
What you do with that?"
(CLACKING)
This is my room.
My gun.
(GRUNTS)
JOHN HILLCOAT: Nick, I think, was very interested in the outlaw,
the kind of Old Testament type world,
the so-called norms of society
and what is considered acceptable, what is just.
The outlaw challenges all those things.
What do you dream at night?
(SIGHS) Um...
(CLEARS THROAT)
Uh...
Committing sins.
I dream about sin.
PETE JACKSON: "He sticks a Lambert & Butler in his mouth,
lights it and blows a trumpet of smoke at his reflected image.
Then he notices the shadows behind him
have begun to bleed and smudge and reposition themselves.
They seem to be growing longer and taking on personalities
that would not normally be attributed to them
as if they were advancing upon him from the spirit world.
Bunny has the unforeseen feeling that he is going to die."
Bunny Munro came out of this idea
that I'd been formulating for a while
about a kind of total fuck up.
Nick took those ideas,
embellishing it further as a novel.
Crucially, Bunny Munro is a very complicated man.
I think that he's sexy, he's funny, he's endlessly charismatic.
He's also vile and thoughtless and careless
and, crucially, I think, broken.
BUNNY: Guess what my name is.
I'm Bunny.
- Bunny? - Bunny.
I think part of what makes him so insidious
is that he's great with women.
He is able to give them what they need
up to a certain point and then he's out.
JACKSON: Bunny is an outlaw in that he exists outside of a moral framework
we've all accepted as the moral framework to live by.
Doesn't give a shit about any of it.
I think the great thing about anti-heroes
is that they give us
permission to transgress without actually transgressing.
FREUD: I know Nick likes to write about these outlaws and bandits
who are actually incredibly complex.
And then it's incredibly intriguing.
You're developing this bond with this desperado.
Well, I mean, it's cool that stuff, right?
Everyone loves an outlaw, no?
The outlaw is something that really galvanized us at a younger age.
We're very taken by those figures.
Ned Kelly was an outlaw figure
that loomed very large in our imaginations.
Nick actually grew up in Kelly country.
There's a direct lineage
to some of the very dramatic things
that were happening in Melbourne
when Nick was growing up.
Tonight, Melbourne police are still at a loss to explain
who bombed the city's police headquarters or why.
HILLCOAT: But we're also in a very extreme part of the world.
It's like another planet.
And we are the uninvited.
NICK: For me, it's always been fundamentally important
that I'm seen as an Australian performer.
I mean, it's always been my thing.
It's my shtick.
And that the Bad Seeds are an Australian band.
I think Nick could only come from Australia.
Australian art, when it's at its best, someone like Barry Humphries,
there's a poetic nature to it.
There's a playfulness, a sort of sacredness,
and a profanity to it.
It wasn't many moons ago that they thought we were
a bunch of rough diamonds down here.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
We've got more culture than a penicillin factory in Australia.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
(ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)
ANDREW DOMINIK: The Australian morality is like criminal morality.
Like, the rules you're taught at school
are very much jailhouse rules.
In Australia, you had to be good
or the audience would rip you apart.
The Birthday Party and the early Bad Seeds
is confrontational music.
The idea was to provoke.
You got that feeling when you went to see them
that anything could happen. Violence could erupt.
Like, they were ready to die on stage, you know?
(ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)
Nick was always a figure of myth.
He was like Jesus or something.
Like evil Jesus of Melbourne.
I met Nick at the drug dealer's.
I was just an innocent private schoolboy
working on my first heroin habit,
and I walked in and there was the prince of darkness
sitting on the couch.
He was watching a documentary about earthworms.
I asked, "What are you watching?"
And he just turned around and bared his teeth at me.
IRVINE WELSH: For me, certain drugs...
It wasn't so much the drug itself.
It was more the chaotic lifestyle around it
and the weird and wonderful people you meet
when you're leading that lifestyle.
That formative experience, provides a lot of the seed corn
for the characters you subsequently create.
The engine room of that creativity
is often that kind of disinhibition of youth.
I mean, they were definitely outlaws in Melbourne
and then they came to London.
And London clearly wasn't enough, so they went to Berlin.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
(TUPELO PLAYING)
(PEOPLE SHOUTING)
Berlin in the '80s was the ideal territory for Nick.
It was an outlaw place.
If you didn't shoot anybody, you could basically do
everything else you wanted to do.
Anything could happen.
A lot of creative people came to Berlin.
I mean, Bowie and Iggy Pop came here for a reason.
And I think pretty much the same reason
pulled Nick Cave to Berlin.
NICK: The reason for going to Berlin
was that each time we went there,
we would become acquainted with people
who just had an extremely open attitude towards music
and towards art in general.
They're just concerned in the joy of creating,
which sounds totally pretentious.
But it's quite true.
People seem to conduct themselves in a decadent manner.
Always staying up all night, getting drunk, taking drugs.
(CROWD CHEERING)
One more song, then it's over.
But I'm not gonna tell you about a girl.
I wanna tell you about a girl.
(GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING)
Nick was the king of Berlin.
WIM WENDERS: When I made Wings of Desire,
he had split up The Birthday Party.
He had formed the Bad Seeds.
ELLIS: The Bad Seeds were always this kind of...
It felt, as an onlooker, a force to be reckoned with.
They looked amazing, didn't look like anything else.
The Bad Seeds was like this crew of mad pirates.
Rare to have that place where it's art and action
and yearning and danger and love,
and all those things come together.
ELLIS: What Nick did was he put together
very dynamic individuals.
So Blixa Bargeld
was from Einsturzende Neubauten.
He is so unique and such a creative force,
and Mick Harvey was kind of like the anchor
keeping everything together.
NICK LAUNAY: The dynamic between him and all the Bad Seeds
is unlike anything I have experienced with any other artist.
Most bands write the song, do demos,
play that to the record producer.
The producer then has ideas, then they get into rehearsal
and work out different arrangements and all that.
There's none of that.
He'll sit down at the piano and start going,
"Right, this song goes like this. Dun-dun-dun!"
And he goes, "There's another bit
that comes in and goes like this.
Then there's a stop.
And I don't know what happens after that. All right, you ready?"
MALE 1: Shall we record it?
MALE 2: Yeah. MALE 1: All right.
MALE 2: One, two, three.
(GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING)
LAUNAY: That pressure of time is 100% down to the fact
that he's just incredibly impatient.
He's the most impatient person I've ever worked with.
(IN GERMAN)
LAUNAY: (IN ENGLISH) He has surrounded himself with these people
who are so imaginative
and have a beautiful aesthetic on music,
but they can follow him and it works.
(CROWD CHEERING)
Yeah, I'm Nick Cave. This is the Bad Seeds.
FREUD: I think his earlier music had more archetypes.
These kind of wild men who were actually incredibly complex
and you know, or homosexual or whatever,
you know, just everything was much more than met the eye,
but they had this threatening manner.
But of course they had all this kind of devastation inside.
FLORENCE WELCH: The Mercy Seat.
WELCH: "The face of Jesus in my soup"
seems like a classic Nick Cave line
because it is the transcendent and the ordinary, all together.
"The meal trolley's wicked wheels" like...
I think that's something I've so learned from him is just like...
The mystical and the mundane,
bring them together, and that makes a good line.
(SINGING THE MERCY SET)
SEAN O'HAGAN: The Mercy Seat is his first monumentally great song.
It's something he was drawing on,
which came from an older tradition,
with Johnny Cash, John Lee Hook and stuff,
where you find a persona.
For The Mercy Seat,
you sing from the persona of the guy on death row.
FREUD: The idea of the electric chair being called a mercy seat
and then it gets so fast, and it's so manic and wild.
GREENWOOD: It's just this sort of swirling miasma of terror
that builds into this feeling of, "You're going to meet your maker."
And it's just such
a fantastic piece of theater.
The kiss-off line at the end, about, you know, the confession.
There's almost a joy in how dark the lyrics are being.
It's so him.
(CROW CAWING)
FLEA: He's exploring the depths of the human psyche.
It's like all these things that we're scared to admit
'cause it's terrifying to admit it.
(DISTANT EXPLOSION)
Everybody has it in them.
WELSH: I think there's a voice that you have
that stands outside of who you seem to be in this mortal life.
The greatest gift that you have
is a subconscious.
That's the connection
with the bigger forces in the world.
The different dimensions, the different cosmic forces
that you don't really understand yourself.
So if you let the subconscious do the heavy lifting in art,
that gets you into these places.
HILLCOAT: We all have our shadow.
Our shadow side, we tend to repress and bury,
and that tends to unleash itself
in other ways.
It builds up and it will spill out.
That shadow world of ours is almost limitless.
I think it's a very healthy thing
to force ourselves to look in the mirror and see the full picture.
NICK: Much of the time we spend pushing down
particular aspects of our characters that we don't want to look at,
you know, I find that it is healthy
and therapeutic, if you want to use that word,
to look at those aspects of your character.
NICK: There've been criticisms, really,
about the kind of characters I write about, that they are me.
And they're right.
(SINGING STAGGER LEE)
You know, Stagger Lee's exploits
got more and more extreme.
And provocative. And... what's the word?
Transgressive, right?
DOMINIK: I remember seeing the first time they did Stagger Lee,
which is obviously an old traditional song.
When he got to the part about "I'll crawl over 50 pussies
just to get to one fat boy's arsehole,"
you could feel the absolute shock.
The audience was shocked.
There's like 50,000 people
that just felt like they'd been slapped.
INTERVIEWER: I believe there's some interesting projects in the works,
a concept album based around the murder ballad.
Is it a very strong genre of lyric writing?
NICK: Yeah, particularly in blues and country music and stuff like that.
It's just an excuse for me to write a whole lot of violent lyrics, really.
FLEA: Fucking "Murder Ballads" devastated me.
It fucking shook me to my core.
He's touching something in me
in a way that is absolutely terrifying.
I had nightmares for weeks.
Getting out of bed shaking, panic.
You know what I mean? Because it expressed
such a fucking part of humanity that's so terrifying.
So many people, I've played that record for them.
"You gotta fucking hear this." They don't wanna hear it.
They don't want to hear it. They don't want to admit it.
You know what I mean? It's a mirror.
FREUD: Art has a purpose.
It's not just entertainment.
It's there for us to grow and understand how to be alive.
(SEAGULLS SQUAWKING)
We're all a lot darker than we like to believe.
HILLCOAT: By the time we got to "Bunny Munro",
Nick was well settled into Brighton.
He is with the love of his life.
She's pregnant, they're gonna have twins.
They have twins.
It was a whole new chapter.
The Death of Bunny Munro is his feverish nightmare
about how bad he could fuck up his own marriage.
And like a sort of self-flagellating, masochistic horror tale
about how evil he personally could be.
"He realizes, in a shadowy way, for a brief moment,
the weird imaginings and visitations and apparitions
that he has encountered with the ghosts of his own grief
and that he was being driven insane by them."
HILLCOAT: The interesting thing about creating your own myth
is, at a point, where does that line dissolve?
Are you the myth or are you the person?
(ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)
POLLY BORLAND: After most of the shoots I did with him,
I'd go, "Never again.
I'm never gonna fucking photograph Nick again."
'Cause it was torturous.
Am I being too revealing?
You know someone so well, you don't want to piss them off.
The hair was a huge thing.
I remember him spending hours on his hair.
I started to point out to him that I never had got
really a bad photo of him.
And I think he just started to kind of give himself to the process.
(GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING)
This is the famous Nick Cave in Blue Wig.
He didn't question me dressing him up.
You know, he loved the feeling of the Lycra,
and he was up for that.
Everything's so dusty in here.
My God.
Okay, so this is what...
(CHUCKLES)
This is what he was wearing.
And, of course, in my usual perverted way,
I cut the nipples out, but we don't get to see that in the photo.
So that's what I would have done.
And then I would have painted the lipstick here.
You know, he wanted to be in uncharted territory
with not S&M or any of the other fetishes.
There was no guardrails.
Nick's just got this capacity to grow, grow, grow.
Like, that's what he does. He's never still.
FLEA: There's definitely a feeling of restlessness.
Like these pilgrims,
these characters, these adventuring guys trying to find new worlds.
It is him.
WELCH: The Pilgrim is the person who has to, in the human form,
journey out into the world,
with all its complexity and all the fragility of being a human.
I love the word anyway, the pilgrim.
Nick is on a mission.
(ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)
I think it's his search for the human soul.
Nick wants to know why he's here.
Not many people want to know that.
The Pilgrim's journey is both towards what is known and what is unknown.
You're going somewhere. You're not just rambling.
And then, on that journey, you meet people, have conversations.
They...
sometimes hold you back and they sometimes push you forward.
BORLAND: Nick decided one day
that he wanted to do a duet with Kylie.
She was pure pop,
and everyone was like, "What the fuck?"
But that was Nick.
NICK: It was hugely controversial within her own management.
And so it was something for her to step into this male drug-addicted world,
which she did, to sing this song.
And she just showed extraordinary courage to do that.
DOMINIK: He's a believer in the unknown
and in having a relationship with the unknown.
He's a believer in putting himself
in situations where he doesn't exactly know what he's doing.
I think collaboration is like that, because
you're dealing with an element that's beyond your control.
It's the other person.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
(SERENE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
HILLCOAT: Nick had finally cracked the drugs.
He was not returning and he was on fire, creatively.
He was always, like a lot of addicts,
very nervous that without the drugs,
will that creative energy be fully expressed?
And I tried very hard to convince him
that's a trick and a delusion that a lot of artists fall into.
O'HAGAN: I think the people he collaborated with along the way
have changed definitively,
and the nature of the collaboration has changed.
(SLOW INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
DOMINIK: I think the collaboration with Warren is different,
because they actually sit and do it together.
They make music together.
Whereas I don't think that's what was going on
with Nick and Blixa back in the day.
If you don't change, you just stagnate.
NICK: Is that all right, then?
Ninety eight out of a hundred.
I just love working with the guy, right? I-I don't...
I don't really look at what he's doing or...
(HESITATING)
That's for you guys to do,
fucking journalists or whatever.
DOMINIK: There's also an improvisational element to Warren and Nick,
how they work, versus the early days of the Bad Seeds.
Certainly, by the time they get to Push the Sky Away,
it's the first inkling that things are shifting,
that Nick's idea of the song is shifting.
Nick called one day and said, "We're about to start a new record.
Do you want to come down to Brighton and hang out?"
(SLOW INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
On the first day we got there,
they came in, and Nick sat at his desk
with piano at the side of him,
and Warren sat on the floor
with synths and pedals and weird...
stuff all around him.
(ORGAN MUSIC PLAYING)
And they just started hammering away at these things.
It was the most bizarre...
Chaos.
Sonic chaos.
We had to avoid looking at each other
for either giggling or going,
"This is gonna be the worst record ever.
What are they doing?"
(INDISTINCT CHAOTIC MUSIC PLAYING)
ELLIS: You're asking me to map a process
that I've never tried to analyze
because, call it superstitious or whatever,
I've always felt that whatever was kind of,
you know, mystical about it or whatever,
should remain that way.
You know, five, six hours of hammering away
and you just figure, "This is the end of anything creative at all."
Then something will appear.
(STRUMMING GUITAR)
DOMINIK: Warren doesn't know where he's going, and he doesn't care.
It's in the process of making it
that you're discovering what it is.
Just jamming.
And when you do that, the song itself surprises you.
It gets out of what you think you should do,
and it gets out of what you know,
and it becomes something that's its own thing by itself.
(STRUMMING GUITAR)
All I care about is the exhilaration
of being in that moment
when the fucking atom's splitting.
O'HAGAN: "Higgs Boson Blues", obviously it's a journey,
but it's a hallucinatory journey, isn't it?
(VOCALIZING)
It questions whether there's a god,
and you've got this guy who's driving to Geneva
uh, because he doesn't like the fact
that they're experimenting with the atoms,
and if it comes out a certain way,
it means God doesn't exist.
I mean, that's to me, the underlying threat.
But it's not obvious.
GREENWOOD: There's this journey to check in on what's happening
to the spiritual state of the world
as well as
the physical, atomic state of the world.
POLLARD: Think of them in the line of people like Carl Sagan or Carlo Rovelli.
These are explorers.
They're explorers of "what does it mean to be human?"
ELLIS: When that record Push the Sky Away was finished,
it felt like it wasn't the end.
It felt like it was the beginning of something,
it was going to go somewhere else.
I remember Nick and I having a talk, you know...
It was like a promise, and it was like it was signaling.
It was like a promise being thrown down.
WELCH: The Pilgrim is just a reminder to stay grounded,
even with this transcendent power,
to kind of stay attached to the Earth
and to stay attached to the people in it,
and that the human connection as well as the divine
is just as important.
DR. ROWAN WILLIAMS: On a journey of any kind,
the weather will sometimes be good, and sometimes bad.
Sometimes it will feel like a pilgrimage.
Sometimes, it'll just feel like a really difficult journey.
We respond as best we can to what comes to us along the way,
in terms of trial, frustration, company, support.
We learn as we walk, and we learn to cope
with the dead times, the empty times,
when we walk.
PRODUCER: This is a sensitive but important question.
How did the tragic death of Nick's teenage son
impact on him, not just as a man, but as an artist?
(IN GERMAN)
(THE SPINNING SONG PLAYING)
NICK: (IN ENGLISH) For most of my life, I was just sort of, um...
in awe of my own genius, you know.
A-And I had an office, and I would sit there
and write every day,
and whatever else happened in my life, it was peripheral...
(STAMMERS)
Even annoyances,
because I was involved
in this great work that I, you know...
And this just collapsed completely.
And I just sort of saw the folly of that,
the kind of disgraceful sort of self-indulgence of the whole thing.
Um, it just... My priorities changed.
You know, I still work all the time.
Um, I still go on tour.
I still piss everyone off because I'm making a new record
or I'm depressed because I can't write songs.
So the same things still apply. But that, um, that...
that idea that art sort of trounces everything,
it just doesn't apply to me anymore.
I'm a father and I'm a husband and a person of the world.
These things are much more important to me
than the concept of being an artist.
That kind of grief is a form of madness.
It brings you pretty close to going under.
WELSH: We're all gonna know pain and loss.
We're all gonna know joy and euphoria.
These elements are battling away within us,
and I think that's, to me, is a place
where great things are made.
ELLIS: He's just got to put one foot in front of the other.
Suddenly, it felt like the worlds collided,
his creative world and his sort of private life.
JACKSON: Children in Nick's work, and certainly in "Bunny Munro,"
are symbols of hope and potential.
and unsullied as yet
and impossibly wise, I think.
You know, I think that being able to see the world unfiltered
allows us then to see the world through their eyes,
and to see it in different ways.
HILLCOAT: Nick still has that inner child.
He actually was always great with kids
because there was a freedom and a kind of anarchy,
to kids that he loved.
He loved the naughtiness of kids,
when the kids were calling out the adults.
That's one of the great things about kids,
is they-they expose our bullshit.
You have a song like "O Children", which is like an anthem
to all the children that get abandoned by the adults.
(O CHILDREN PLAYING)
WELSH: That, to me, is what storytelling is.
It's not just the narrative.
It's all the emotional sort of landscapes
and the thematic issues that you can dive into.
And he managed to do that in song.
I was in awe of that artistry, that majesty, really.
And I still am.
He dealt with a tragedy that I cannot fucking imagine
the depth of pain and suffering that he's gone through.
And to come through it to the other side,
into a place of honoring his son
and living a life of art and dealing with his pain,
fucking handling it and dealing with it.
Who can do that? Very few fucking people.
O'HAGAN: "Ghosteen" is made in such an extraordinary context.
You know, after this personal catastrophe.
DOMINIK: I was living with Nick in LA at the time.
And my introduction to Ghosteen was him with his computer
just playing various bits of music
and actually just singing over the top in his kitchen.
And then I went out to where they were recording,
this place out in Malibu.
ELLIS: That record was a really isolated experience.
We'd just set up and do all this...
these overdubs and that, and then go to bed
and I'd sleep for a couple of hours
and then the mixers would be there,
and I'd go down in my underpants
and sit on the bench and just listen to them.
And I couldn't really believe what was coming out.
"Ghosteen", for me, felt like the only time I've been in the studio
where it really felt like something else was in there,
there was another force present in there.
(PIANO MUSIC PLAYING)
O'HAGAN: They were locked into something.
And it does make a nonbeliever like me suddenly think,
"Hang on. What was going on in that studio?
What was hovering about there?"
'Cause there were spirits hovering around them, for sure.
FREUD: I remember when he and Warren were making "Ghosteen,"
and I just remember feeling like my heart would explode.
It was so affecting,
and so, um, extreme, the feelings,
and to be in the room while that was happening, was...
fascinating.
(BRIGHT HORSES PLAYING)
(BRIGHT HORSES CONTINUES PLAYING)
Whoa.
So... (LAUGHS)
You know...
here's a guy writing about...
these things that are beautiful and terrifying,
mythological and hard to imagine,
but so vividly you can imagine them, the way he writes about them,
these horses on fire, running into these magical fields.
FREUD: I just wanted it to be in my system,
so I was resonating with this thing that Nick had done,
which was to make this record that...
was about after Arthur's death.
And I wanted to be part of that, because Arthur was my godson.
And I never...
I wanted him to be in my system irrevocably
and never to leave. And this was another way
of having that child's imprint in me,
and being able to hold on to him for as long as I live.
ELLIS: I'd sort of had this young person's idea
that I'd make something really great one day,
and that would be the end of it. Like, a masterpiece.
Um...
And when we finished Ghosteen,
Nick just looked at me and he said, "Fuck, we did it."
But I just thought maybe that's the end of our collaboration.
Like, how could you get outside of that?
O'HAGAN: You find a place where Arthur exists,
and his spirit enlivens and animates that place,
and you can possibly begin to think about him
without that terrible, searing pain of loss.
WENDERS: Nick was sharing his grief.
He shared the pain,
how thoroughly he reached people
and moved people in a different way
than rock and roll can ever move them.
He moved them in an existential way.
The songs took on a whole different quality afterwards.
(SONG OF THE LAKE PLAYING)
BORLAND: So I don't know where I read it
that he was asked by a teacher in high school
what he wanted to be when he grew up.
He said, "I wanna be a guru."
And I thought that was interesting.
Well, what do prophets do in the Biblical stories?
They name what other people don't name.
What's going on, I think,
in some of the great classical prophets of the Bible,
they call people back, to say,
"This is what you're supposed to be.
This was the vision that got you going. What have you forgotten?"
NICK: I've always had a religious temperament, even as a child,
but no need for it.
And I was sort of drug addicted for a couple of decades,
and had a great interest in this sort of stuff,
but no need for it.
And, I think, after Arthur died, not immediately, but...
You know, it's been quite a while now,
but rather than feeling anger towards that sort of stuff
or rejecting that sort of stuff,
I felt a slow movement towards a religious life
that I've found extremely helpful,
and a kind of widening thing that's happened in my life.
One time, we had a conversation
about Christianity,
and I said, "So, do you believe
in redemption then?
You know, the fundamental tenet
of the Christian faith,
that you're born again."
He goes, "That doesn't interest me in the slightest.
I never even think about that."
That is the fundamental thing,
but that is not what's foreground in his mind.
DOMINIK: His line on it is that to believe in God,
it's an act of imagination, you know?
And he believes in the imagination.
But he's also somebody
that would see doubt
as being part of faith.
It's a more responsible way to be.
It's more responsible to be a believer.
And it's easy to be a cynic.
He's a doubter of faith, right?
My last conversation with him,
I don't even know
if I should be saying this,
but it was about-- He can have these moments
where we'll really go into, you know, "Is it foolish to have faith?"
Is it ridiculous to have faith?
He'll have no problem opening that up.
And that's what I feel like, with Nick, it's more like God working through him,
and sometimes, I'll be trying to remind him of that.
DR. WILLIAMS: He will write in what you might call
strongly mythological terms sometimes.
Like "Wild God."
It's both...
chaotic and life-giving.
O'HAGAN: Interesting title, as well.
"Wild God."
That notion that the god isn't just benevolent,
that it's an unpredictable spirit.
THOMAS: I mean, the power with which he's doing it now is staggering.
You just can't believe it.
I couldn't believe it when he played me Wild God.
I literally couldn't believe it.
(WILD GOD PLAYING)
He's always looking to not repeat himself in a way,
yet there are themes that follow through.
(WILD GOD CONTINUES PLAYING)
The songs are not loaded with the weight of the other records.
They're kind of-- "It's a new dawn.
Come on, here we go."
(WYLDER SPEAKING GERMAN)
(SINGING WILD GOD IN SHRILL VOICE)
(LAUGHS)
(WYLDER SPEAKING GERMAN)
WENDERS: (IN ENGLISH) His voice, too, is coming into his own.
He's finding that voice that talks to humanity.
DR. WILLIAMS: I was sent a copy of "Faith, Hope and Carnage."
This is the book of conversations between Sean O'Hagan and Nick.
And was really very, very moved, very struck by it.
Two things he insisted on
when we agreed to the book
was that we wouldn't go back
and be nostalgic about the old days.
And that it wouldn't be an interview. It had to be a conversation.
DR. WILLIAMS: Sean O'Hagan is kind of prodding Nick
to say more about what is it that feeds
and nourishes and energizes him,
and how does that relate to his experiences of deep trauma
and dislocation, disconnection and almost unbearable loss
that he's been through.
Nick has a way of rising to that challenge
and digging quite deeply, and, I guess quite painfully,
and talking about the decision to...
to let other people in
to the world of trauma and how you handle it.
O'HAGAN: When we toured the book around Britain and Europe,
people would come up and tell you,
"This book has changed everything.
I feel there's hope."
Particularly people who have lost a child,
which is as bad as it gets.
There was a lot of that stuff. It was, it was profound.
That's the interesting thing that Nick talks about.
How he used to wind himself up to go on stage, and he would...
He sort of intimated that he didn't like them.
He didn't particularly like his audience.
He went to war with them.
So, I always think the distance he has traveled since that
is kind of...
to a position of complete respect for his audience
and love for them even.
NICK: (HESITATING) This is really quite a complicated thing,
but the sort of void that was left...
There was a kind of rushing in of meaning
that came into that void, in all sorts of different ways...
that allowed me to see the world in a different way.
Allowed me to be much more, um...
basically compassionate towards the human predicament.
Less embittered.
It was kind of a counterfactual response.
It, in fact, rather than made me bitter,
it did the opposite in some way.
It made me much more connected to, um, people in general.
THOMAS: There's something prophet-like about coming back
and trying to talk about hope.
Nick's trauma that he had
been processing
was a horrendous one,
and it was a current one.
It was the loss of a child.
Mine was like another form of trauma.
What I was realizing in my trauma recovery
was that I'd already died a long, long time ago.
I died...
as an infant, when I was first abused.
You've died.
DOMINIK: Thomas decided that he was gonna give up art, you know?
Nick was like, "Okay, that's not a good idea."
And Nick, at the at that time, I think was struggling with...
he was in his three-month depressive period
of having to write songs,
struggling to come up with some songs.
He said, "Well, I'm going to write you a poem.
And if I do that, you've got to at least make me something."
He made this kind of weird trade.
Two days later, I get White Elephant.
(TYPEWRITER CLICKING)
(SINGING WHITE ELEPHANT)
THOMAS: I can vividly right now remember reading it
and understanding that this was his invitation to an intimacy.
THOMAS: The violence in that song was my violence.
I would shoot you in the fucking face if you got too close to me.
You know what I mean? At that time.
(CONTINUES SINGING WHITE ELEPHANT)
THOMAS: I was trail running after he'd written me that song.
There'd been these huge fires in Malibu,
so it'd be like a volcanic wasteland.
I'd see this purple flower, almost like a thistle,
but it was like, in the morning sun, like...
And there was something about this song
and seeing that flower that I felt like...
My feeling was that that was Nick, that flower.
That was who Nick was in my life.
(MIC CRACKLES)
(MUSIC TEMPO CHANGES)
(CONTINUES SINGING WHITE ELEPHANT)
Yeah, it's a beautiful gift.
You know?
And out of that,
I painted...
I painted The Kingdom in the Sky.
(CHUCKLES)
ELLIS: Really early on, any chance I'd get,
I would go and see the Bad Seeds tour.
And then, when I joined the band,
suddenly I was either behind him or to the left of him
or to the right of him, or in the studio.
And it wasn't until recently,
I was mixing the live show from Paris,
and I watched the film of it as I was mixing it,
and it was the first time I'd watched him
from the audience, for a few decades.
And I was moved to tears watching him.
You know, he does have this thing
that he's a conduit for something else.
And you know he fucking means it.
He just means it.
He means it when he delivers.
GREENWOOD: The spirit of the music is moving through him.
The different levels of focus, concentration, humility, respect,
that's swirling around in the moment. It's just so brilliant.
WENDERS: His persona on stage became different.
He became so much more generous.
The way he sees single people in the audience,
the way he communicates with people, really communicates,
not just as a show, but he wants to communicate.
And that is such a great thing in rock and roll, because...
The Rolling Stones don't communicate.
They're a great band, but they do not communicate.
And Nick is communicating.
(ORGAN MUSIC PLAYING)
WELSH: I think now it's, um...
It's less "bad boy fire and brimstone"
and more like, "How do we heal? How do we look after each other?"
He's probably become more of a helpful preacher,
even though he was also a helpful preacher to me
in the fire and brimstone era.
WELCH: When I went to see Nick Cave perform, I see, like...
To me, I guess the way that I understand God is
I understand it through performance.
And when I see Nick...
And for a second, something is pouring into the room
and I think it's love or presence or something,
it really does feel like the heavens kind of pour in.
(SINGING JOY)
The Prophet traditionally has the skills of a showman,
of a magician,
and is able to conjure something.
These great kind of religious experiences
that people very eloquently described over the centuries,
the moments of revelation, are moments of conjuring.
(CONTINUES SINGING JOY)
DR. WILLIAMS: Joy in this context is radical.
It is revolutionary.
It's certainly not happiness,
not sort of mindless, beaming complacency.
That's not quite a Nick Cave style.
It's not even positivity, positive thinking.
It's just letting something of the...
exuberance of life... Exuberance even is the wrong word.
The abundance of life rise up.
(CONTINUES SINGING JOY)
(VOCALIZING)
DOMINIK: I think Nick's pretty happy.
And it's weird, you know,
because ten years ago,
the idea of Nick ever being happy again seemed impossible.
And I'm sure if the Nick from ten years ago
met the Nick from now, he wouldn't be ready for him.
You know what I'm saying?
(JOY CONTINUES PLAYING)
(CROWD CLAPPING)
NICK: Thank you very much!