'I care what people say and if they hate my music'

Legendary musician Nick Cave tells Elizabeth Aubrey why negative reviews still sting, and what the grief of losing his sons has taught him about connection

ARGUMENTS, walkouts, even the odd fight — early interviews with the young Nick Cave were a health hazard. “I was a trouble maker, drug addict, chaos maker and my default setting was just a general contempt for everything,” the Australian says. First via goth-punk outfit The Birthday Party, and then the revered Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Cave railed against the world. “I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing,” he says now. “I mean, it’s not bad for young people to kick back against this world and try to do something about it.”

Until recently, Cave rarely gave interviews. In 2017, he vowed “never to do one again” after struggling to talk about grief to a journalist following the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur. Instead, Cave responded to fan questions via his Red Hand Files website, articulating the process of grief with clarity. A live In Conversation series followed and then, during lockdown, he spent 40 hours speaking to journalist Sean O’Hagan for a book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, the paperback of which is released next week.

“I’m not ashamed of those interviews that I did in the past,” he says now as we sit down to talk about the book. “I mean, f***, that’s the way it was back then. There was a sort of ideological clash between the performer and the press. It was just the way we behaved.” But he felt differently about O’Hagan. “He was not trying to bring me down,” Cave says.