Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Nick Cave

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Nick Cave is a musician, songwriter, author, and actor, best known as the frontman of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, though is also beloved for his early group, The Birthday Party. Albums from The Boatman's Call (1997) to Skeleton Tree (2016) showcase Cave’s ability to craft emotionally charged and intellectually stimulating compositions filled with hauntingly poetic lyrics. Beyond music, Cave’s authored several books, including And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) and Stranger Than Kindness (2021). His collaborations with director John Hillcoat on movies like The Proposition (2005) and Lawless (2012) have received critical acclaim. And he maintains an open and engaging dialogue with his fans through his newsletter, The Red Hand Files. This podcast was recorded the day after the conclusion of Caves’s duo tour with Radiohead’s bassist, Colin Greenwood, in Los Angeles. A few days after recording this podcast, he used The Red Hand Files to write the following message to his fans: “After I stepped off stage at the final show, I changed from my grey suit into a blue suit, ate some seafood with Colin, and then headed to the aftershow, where I hung out with some old friends for an hour or so before going back to the hotel with Susie. We stayed up for a few hours and then tried to sleep, but I was hyped up, so I took a sleeping pill at 4 am — which was a dumb idea because I had an interview that morning with Rick Rubin for his podcast. Anyway, when I woke up, I put on a grey suit, jumped into the car with my driver to go to Malibu, did Rick’s podcast (which could turn out quite interesting as I’m not sure the sleeping pill had completely worn off), then started back to L.A. In the car, I began to feel a bit rough, so we parked up at Zuma Beach, where I threw off my clothes and jumped into the sea in an unsuccessful attempt to restore myself; then we carried on to the hotel, where I changed from my grey suit into a blue suit before heading to Book Soup for [a] signing . . . After the signing, I returned to the hotel feeling tired and weird, sat up with Susie for a while, went to bed, woke up about 2 am, threw up in the sink and collapsed unconscious on the bathroom floor. Susie found me there and hauled me back onto the bed; my assistant was called to the hotel, some extremely handsome emergency paramedics turned up, a lovely nurse arrived and fixed me to a drip, and later, I spoke to an eighty-nine-year-old saint of a doctor who diagnosed an acute gastro event.” ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------

I think the red hand files began after my son died in a response essentially to the amount of questions, no, not questions, the amount of letters that came into me, not just in sympathy or commiseration, but how people have gone through the same things. This happened to me. I know what you're going through because this happened to me. And it was a huge amount of letters and they just kept on coming. And I think I just wanted to be able to talk to those people. I found it gratifying for myself. I found it a way of moving forward, a way of working out, how to articulate things that were going on. And it just sort of grew out of that.

I mean, first of all, the Red Hand files, it was like an ask me anything type of thing. And most of the questions that came my way were initially, who's your favorite artist, what are your inspirations, all that kind of thing, you know, music-related questions. But I just sort of gently expanded the range of what I was prepared to talk about, and people responded by asking questions or writing in letters that set outside what I do musically. Until now, it's a massive thing.

Do you feel like, in the wake of of the tragedy that the strangers who reached out had a more profound effect than the friends who reached out? I have to say, in these sorts of situations, you remember who reaches out and who doesn't reach out. Now, it's very difficult, actually, to reach out to people with this sort of tragedy. It's not, not everyone can do it. And I understand that. But you do sort of, you remember acutely

the small gestures from people. You know, someone writes you a letter and says, look, this happened to me. It's not a small gesture. It's a massive gesture. But I think in the book I talked about other small acts of practical kindness that were extremely helpful when we were just in the whole, to the maelstrom of the whole thing. But I had very good friends

that were always there, always sent to know how to be and how to behave. And other people, I think, just the monumental nature of the whole thing was just beyond them, and they weren't able to respond in some kind of way. But you remember the people who were there. You remember the people who were there initially, and you remember the people who sort of stayed there? Yeah. That's another thing. There's two different sorts of people there too.

There are those that rush to the crisis and the ones that stay in a more quiet way and are just always there. Did the experience change your relationship with your partner? Yeah, yeah, it's strengthened. Our family operates around a common catastrophe that sits at the centre of our family, too, actually. And this is something that I think holds us together. That kind of care for each other is like a default setting. So even if you're going at each other, you know at the base that you care and that you don't go at each other too hard, because we each know how fragile the other one is. You know, I mean, it's the statistics are terrible.

It's, I think, 75 or 80% of marriages break up if there's a loss of child. So we were very lucky. What was the focus of the relationship before that? Well, I was just blown away by Susie, you know what I mean? You know, so there was always that and there always has been that. I just love her very much. And the institution of marriage meant a lot to both of us. We both really wanted to be married.

We really wanted to marry each other. And I think we took that idea of what marriage was quite seriously. And it's certainly more, more sellers we've grown older. What that? That it is a kind of entanglement of the most beautiful kind. I know you're not supposed to say that. I know we're supposed to lead separate lives and be separate people, but me and Susie for better or worse, are utterly intertwined. I was saying.

That only sounds good. Yes, so far. My favorite of your albums is then No More Shall We Part. Oh, really? Is that somehow related to Susie? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me the story of that album. Wow. Now you're asking really hard questions. Okay, so when me and Susie got together, Susie was in recovery. She was three

years, I think, clean from various drug-related things and starting up a relationship with Nick Cave who was not in recovery, was considered by many of the people who kind of looked after Susie as probably not the best idea she'd ever had, but she was sort of persistent and we were fine, but I was using and so we weren't really fine. And eventually I think she found that it just didn't work and she left. And that was a very despairing time for me and the whole addiction thing just got even worse. And eventually, after like eight months, Susie came back to me and said, look, I tried to stay away from you, but I'm coming back. You can do whatever you like. And that song, the title song of that album and no more shall we part, is a sort of response to that. It has to be the strangest kind of marriage song, I think, anyone's ever written. You know, the ring is locked upon the finger and...

He will no longer be a mess of it. The contracts have been drawn up. You know, you can't go away anymore. There's a silence. All the hatchets have been buried now. And yes, exactly. Your chain of command has been silence. That's all the people who are telling her what she heard

because sponsors and all of these people. But it has a very, very beautiful line, which I've always been extremely proud of, which is... It says that... All the birds will sing to your beautiful heart. All the birds will sing to your beautiful heart upon the bow. It says in the first time around, now that we're married. And then there's this little twist to it, which is the second time around.

It says, at all the birds would sing to your beautiful heart anyhow. In other words, she didn't really need to marry me. The birds were already singing. I was very happy with that. Beautiful. The rhyming of bound anyhow. So these small things. Yeah, yeah, small victories. In a small victories. Small victories. Yeah, and they can be uplifting, you know.

Yeah, you can take the day off. There's another one on that album that I love called The Sorrowful Wife. Can I play you a little bit? Yes, sure. Just remind you. I married my wife on the day of the eclipse. The daily clips, our friends awarded her courage with gifts. Now's the night's grow longer and the season shifts. I look to my sorrowful wife.

It's unbelievable. It's sort of... The picture that's made in Super Junior. Instead of... The picture that's made is... It's a brutal picture, you're being... Thank you. The water is high on the beckoning river and a meadery promise I could not deliver and the cry of the birds Sends a terrible shiver through me and my sorrowful wife Who is shifting the furniture round? Who is shifting the furniture round? The furniture. I always thought the songs through this period could have had a little bit of editing. I love it. I love it just the way it is.

Now we set beneath the knotted you and the blue bells Bop up around our shoes and the tears Can remember in those telltale clothes Goes to my sorrowful wife Who is counting the days on her fingers? Who is counting the days on her? Come on, help me, baby! Come on, now! It's not, although I love the whole. Yeah, I don't know about that. That in-bit never felt right to me.

I think you only did it two times on this album, whereas up until this album it was more of a standard feature. The restraint that you showed on this album was impressive, and then when you did do it, it felt cathartic and good, because it wasn't the standard. Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, okay. That's that's one way of looking at it. That was like a very generous of you. In terms of the lengths of those instrumental sections between the verses, there's a real confidence, you know, it's not a traditional song structure. No, no, it's, I'm just a melody guy,

man, I've seen that way, but I just love a melody and so I'm quite happy to listen to that sort of stuff. But I often listen to stuff from that period, I think, and think someone where we didn't have, you know, we let things run and very often, I listen to that, some of that stuff. I think, are we going back to the chorus again? And oh my god, another time.

It's, you know, I think it could have been a little editing. When did you first fall in love with music? Well, I always like music, but I think the first time I was found a sort of potential in music that talked to me rather than listening to something that my brother played or something like that. I found someone that was talking to me and that was Johnny Cash and that was in Australia for some bizarre reason. We had the Johnny Cash show, his TV special, on Saturdays I think. I remember just watching, that is a, I don't know how old I was 10 or something like that, 10 years old.

And seeing something in music that I didn't understand was even there, which was a kind of darkness and a kind of age, and that it was like a music made by a criminal or something. It was hard and I don't know. There was something about Johnny Cash. It's just the start of that high on Johnny Cash thing, the way he did that and everything like that. I was just intrigued by him as someone who showed to my young self

the capacity for evil in music. That's how I saw it as a little kid. So when you rang me up, do you remember that? I was on holiday. I was on holiday in the south of France with Susie. And you rang me up, I think, on a landline. It felt like, I don't know how you got that, but I don't think I had a... I don't think we had self-wounds. I was on a landline, too. I remember where I was.

So I got a landline in this, some sort of shadows somewhere. I mean, you know, in the south of France, where we were on holiday for a week. And you ring up and I'm like, you know, in the south of France where we were on holiday for a week and you ring up and I'm like, who's it? Fucking Rick Rubin on the phone. And Jay said, you just said in your very, you know, Zenway, Jimmy Hendiff, Johnny Cash records the mercy set, you know. And I do remember taking a little bit of time for I gave you my permission, just to play it cool. Yeah. But there's a lot that happens to us as musicians and there's people working in the music industry, but there are some things that can't be taken away. You meet someone that you respect and admire and they say something genuine to you, or

someone records one of your songs. These are the things that, you know, I mean, look, without getting kind of corny about it, on my deathbed, it's not that I wrote the mercy seat. It's that Johnny Cash recorded that as you see. You know, I mean, it's just something, it reaches back into my essence and right back into my childhood. And then you got to sing with Johnny Cash, as you came when we were recording. Yeah. And I remember the conversation because I suggested you sing harmony.

And you looked at me and you said, you want me to sing harmony. And I said, I'm sure you can do it. Don't worry. And June was going, you can do it. You can do it. Hell am I here. You can do it. Jesus will help.

You know what? It was quite something. That was a beautiful thing. And yeah, I sang that. That was Harmony on. You suggested a... I'm so lonely on some mic. I'm so lonely on some mic cry.

And then we did Cindy. Do we do that? Cindy. Yeah, we do. We go home, Cindy, Cindy. Yeah. And maybe that was it. Maybe.

He knew. Oh absolutely. He just like, oh yeah, I can do that song and it off he goes. Right. He knew, he seemed to know all songs. Right. He might not have known modern songs, but he knew the history of music. Yeah.

Yeah, he didn't, we didn't have to sort of Google the words or anything. I remember having a disagreement with Johnny about the Mercy Seat after the fact. Already? Yeah. You know, we finished all the songs, and clearly the Mercy Seat was the strongest song on the album.

And Johnny said, let's have it be the first song on the album. And I said, I don't think it could be the first song on the album, because then it's going to make the rest of the album seem like it doesn't mean anything. It's like we have to build to it. Otherwise, people stop listening after the second song. He understood what I was thinking, but he still thought it would go first. We put it, I don't know, third or fourth, worked up to it, and in retrospect, he was 100% right. This is an interesting interpretation of the song in a way. It's different.

It's very Johnny Cash. Mine's very Nick Cave actually, in the sense that I think in Johnny's version, the guy is innocent. Is that right? It feels like he's been hard done by. I don't know if that's just... I think he changes a couple of words. He changes a couple of words that makes you feel like the guy didn't do it, He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse.

He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse.

He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He just doesn't want to become a worse. He You know he's there for a reason. Yes. And we learned

that at the end of the song. Yeah and he's suffering as he should for his sins. My mind is more of a Christian. But I loved, I loved, really loved his version and it was extremely moving to hear that. You also recommended that we do a Will Oldham song. We didn't do the one you suggested but we did another one from hear that. You also recommended that we do a Will Oldham song. We didn't do the one you suggested, but we did another one from that album. I see darkness. I see darkness, which would not have happened had you not suggested. It's a beautiful song. It's a great song. And Johnny did it really well. Yes, got that lift, that surprise, simple surprise lift,, you know, that sort of surprise, simple surprise, lift of, and you know that I love you or whatever it is. You know, it's beautiful songwriting in that there's just this lift from the heart that happens in all this sort of complex sort of stuff that's going on in the rest of the time. It's beautiful. Here's a beautiful songwriter. Great songwriter.

I love his songs. Yeah. There's a part in the first verse where it's almost like another voice answers the narrator. It's almost like a backup part, even though the lead vocal does it. And I remember saying to me, like, I don't think Johnny can sing those,

doesn't suit the way he sings. And he's like, but that's how the song goes. You can't not do it. So Will came and he sang those answers because he thought they had to be there. It's interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. What song did I suggest? Death to everyone. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it wouldn't have been any of these others. Did we get the Super Wolf album? Yeah. I love that one. Yeah, tell me about the Australia that you were born into. As a child? Yeah.

I grew up in a country town in Victoria. Would you say it was farms? There were farms around it, but it was essentially a town. I think it had a wall mill and all of that sort of stuff, but maybe there was a wheat growing around it. But essentially, it was actually a city. It was just big enough to be a city. It was called Victoria's premier city.

You used to have that as you went into Wengeradda. Anyway, it was small enough to be able to have a very free, free range kind of childhood. You know, this is such a privilege to be able to have a childhood like that, where your mother kicks the kids out the door in the morning and tells you to come back at tea time as we call it there. That's dinner time. And you don't wear shoes, you're often running around the town on your bikes and going down the river and all of this sort of stuff. So it was in my memory a completely idyllic childhood, at least up until about 11 years old. We were just

until about 11 years old. We were just enthusiastic, curious. Kids getting up to all sorts of mischief and all that sort of stuff. Then I went to high school and the sort of small townness of Wengeradda started to sort of chafe a bit and I had other ideas about the world. And I started to get, do badly at school, get on badly with the people in the high school.

My father worked there as an English literature teacher and a maths teacher. And my mother was the librarian there. So they were constantly informed in the, you know, staff room about what a pain in the ass their son was. I was constantly sitting outside the headmasters office and my parents walking past, you know, and I think this just became impossible to sustain. And so they sent me to Melbourne to, like, the big city where I boarded for a year

that then they all moved up to Melbourne. I'm good. Do you like that? Did you like the Melbourne experience as a child? Well, I boarded in an all-boy school and Yeah, I mean there was school, you know, but did you prefer being away from home to being at home? No, I missed I missed it. I missed my home. Weirdly enough, even though I've had very little to do with, it's a bit like the Johnny Cash thing we talked about, but I have these longings in my old age for the Australian countryside that seem to be a relatively new thing, a kind of desire to go back and live in the Australian bush, not that that will happen. L-M-N-T. Element electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun?

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I was going to ask you if you felt like an Australian. Yeah, I do. I do feel like that's home. That is home. I love Australia. I love the Australia that I remember, at least. I don't know what Australia is like these days. I don't think small towns change that much. It's usually the hubs that move faster. Yes, that's right. I think the city of Melbourne, Sydney and stuff, in their effort to become international cities have embraced progressive ideas to the max. You know, I think that's actually just an extension of the kind of what was called the cultural cringe of when I was growing up there where we thought we as a country felt inferior to the rest of the world.

We didn't know, we didn't understand whether our own culture was of any value. No one knew what a good band was or a bad band was. If you were doing anything new musically, no one in the industry had any benchmark as to whether it was good or not. You know, no one would go, I think it's good. It's a bit, you know, to understand what I mean. And you had to go overseas and get a good review in, you know, the NME or something like that. Soon as that happened, bang, you could go back to Australia as kind of heroes and superstars and all of this sort of stuff.

I don't think it's the same in that way now. I hope not. But the good thing about that for us, though, growing up in Melbourne and making music, is that we all knew fundamentally to our core that we would never be successful. And this was an immensely sort of freeing. But perhaps like the punk thing was for a while, where it was just this sort of no one really thought of things in terms of success or that comes with that huge freedom, you know. Yeah. And so there were in the Melbourne scene a lot more interesting bands than the band I was in actually, who were doing a lot of interesting experimental kind of stuff.

Tell me the story of the birthday party. Well, the birthday party were first the boys next door, which were basically we were all at school together. Same members. Yes. And in the boys next door to begin with, and we were essentially a Alice Cooper, Alex Harvey band, cover band. I think we did 80% of our repertoire was just Alex Harvey band songs, who remains one of my great heroes. Was Alex Harvey popular in Australia?

No, not at all. We just sort of round on your stuff. Randomly fell on his records and you know we're living in Australia. Don't know anything about the rest of the world and Alex Harvie, his vocal style is the most eccentric thing you've ever heard and as an Australian I could barely understand a word he was saying and didn't realize that was like a glaswegian accent. But his singing style is so bizarre. And his lyric writing is just off the planet. This guy is like, as a lyric writer, his pure inventiveness is just off the charts. Anyway, the first song we ever played, which was at a battle of the bands thing, was an Alex Harvey bandsong. So that's what we were. And then I started to write songs and

they weren't very good. And I didn't really know what I wanted to do or who I was. So these songs were highly influenced by whatever was going on at the time. The first recordings of the Boys Next Door, what happened with that was we were just a band that played in small clubs and the record industry heard about this thing called punk rock, right? That was happening over in England and it sent a couple of, you know, Gdinsky and these sort of big players in the Australian music scene into a bit of a kind of a, a, a, a, a, Tiz and, and they sent out this man uh, called Barry Earl to find, collect up whatever bands could sort of pass as a punk rock band in Australia at the time, which were very few actually. Did you think of yourself as a punk rock band?

No, but, but those influences, you know, we'd moved away from... Post punk. We were, you know, into all that stuff, MC5, the stooages and stuff like that, but it hadn't really had its impact in our music. Things were happening very fast. And weirdly enough, we were wanting to play hard music, but then very quickly this thing called Power Pop happened, right? Do you remember that? Yeah, like bus cups, right? Yeah, whatever. And suddenly Gdinsky and these characters

heard that punk was out and Power Pop was in. I mean, this was kind of absurd as the whole thing was. We were brought into Barry Ols' office and he's like, gentlemen, you know, punks out, power pops in, and he had all these sketches of the clothes he wanted us to wear, you know, and like Tracy Pugh was supposed to wear a kind of leopard skin tights and I had this,

and that was the point where we just sort of walked out in despair. But we got put into the studio at this time with a guy from Ernest Raining Band called Skyhooks, Greg McKinch and his brief was to turn us into a pop band. And so we recorded half the first boys next door record in that way. And part of that was to double up all my vocals, like double track. To get whatever, I don't know what the reason for doing that is, you might know that. It makes it more about the melody than the word. Okay.

Okay. So if you listen to some, we had a song called masturbation generation. If you listen to that, it's kind of, who says that, I'm living in it, it's like that. And I remember having to sing that so I could copy it and stuff like that. It was a complete joke, right? How old were you at that time? God, I don't know, like 18 or something like that.

I don't know. Mm-hmm. But there was another band that was going around I don't know, like 18 or something like that. I don't know. But there was another band that was going around that had this guitarist in it, Roland Howard. And he was like an amazingly interesting, inventive, brilliant musician who had an idea of his sound. He had an actual idea. I mean, he was like one of these people that had dropped from Mars who just, like, let the Ramones or something like that, that just appeared complete

in every possible way. He was like that. He knew exactly who he liked and who he didn't like. And we brought him into the boys next door and he changed the fortune of the boy, boys next so he changed the sound dramatically, turned us from a kind of middling, confused band into something that was starting to make interesting music. And then we became the birthday party, same members, but we just changed our name when we left Australia and went to London. And he brought a kind of... You can hear it on the record, the first half of the record, first side of the record is without him,

the second side is with him, and it's a whole different ballgame, so. Tell me about the first trip to London, what was the experience like? Had you ever left Australia before? No, no. We, we, and not even personally, I don't mean with the band,

had you ever been out of Australia? No, no, no, I'd never been out of Australia. But we were music nuts, you know, and we would get the enemy in Australia and sounds, and we would literally sit around and look at the backpages and see the bands that were on and think, my God, if we lived in London, we could go and see, you know, teardrop explodes tonight and then the next night, why he's, and then it was just like, we couldn't believe what this place offered and how fucking dead Australia was. You know, and so all we wanted to do was get out of Australia and get to London and just be part of something.

And eventually we managed to get enough money together to get us all over there. And we had no idea what it would be like. You know, we just, it was unbelievably disappointing to us. Really? Partly because, I think, by the time the enemy got to Australia, it took three or four months in a ship to get it over there. There was that. So everything had already kind of happened. That's quite a long time in music at that time.

And all these bands that we thought we had their records, we thought were going to be like the most insane things you could imagine were, in fact, live just boring as shit. They were kind of to-gazing sort of all that punk energy had dissipated into something that was self-serving and kind of pompous and all of that sort of stuff that punk rock was supposed to have gotten rid of. There was just a kind of self-satisfied feeling about the music. And I think it was that we went to a few gigs early on where we saw bands

that we just loved but we didn't like live or the way they were live. And then we saw the cramps which was a completely different thing all together. And you know, and I think there was a sort of combination of that that just pointed us in the right direction. And we were very different than the cramps, and the cramps were essentially fun. We were jaded, disgusted, and completely out of step with everything else that was going on in London at the time. We were seen in that way. We were. And that was still a lot of work. Still a lot. Well, that's how the birthday party came about

that we started to do concerts that were manifestations of our disgust for Britain and for the world at large, shall we say. And those concerts concepts of gain traction, and we got our audience, and people started to come along, and there was just this, this thing started to happen between our band

and the audience. And it's very indicative, actually, of myself and the way I am and the way I continue to be is that my energy comes from the audience. It doesn't come from the social problems of the world. It is a direct thing between me and my audience. However, that may play itself out. In the birthday party, it was one of aggression and kind of a contempt for the audience, which was, we were young, and that's the way it was.

And I think now it's a feeling of great love for the audience, regardless of the sort of political world that we live in. This is the primary function of my music, is to create, whether it was with the birthday party, it's the same thing, or what I do now, a transcendent experience within the small remit of the energy of our immediate task, which is to play the concert. So we're not operating. It's quite important point this, that we're not operating outside of that. When we came to London, everyone was the whole of our contemporaries, the whole of the bands,

the whole of the young people. We're all in a thing about thatcher and all of this sort of stuff. It was, this was what animated everybody, the disastrous politics of the time. And we had no understanding in a way or interest in speaking into that at all. We were much more concerned with chaos rather than say anarchy. We were not fighting the system. We were fighting, it was an internal struggle. And I think that remains the same. To understand what I'm talking about. Absolutely. And coming from where I came from, yours felt more honest. So when punk rock happened

in England, and then the hardcore scene happened in the US following that, most of the bands were singing about like class, like things that had nothing to do with our lives, but just aping what they had heard the English band sing about it. And it made no sense. What I loved about UR band and minor threat was another band. It was political in a personal way, not in a political commentary way. Yes. And it felt real. real. 7. Link to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamia's. Art healthy and bring boosting fats. Macadamia's. Failure friendly.

Cheatle and plant-based. Macadamia's. No wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMO's, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar, a house of macadamia's. I roosted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips, snack bars come in chocolate, coconut white chocolate, and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacademius.com slash tetra. I was lucky enough to see the birthday party play in New York. There was a club called the Underground.

I think I was one of eight or ten people in the room. Oh, yeah. Okay, that was the first time we went. And I remember the promoter whose name was Jim Farat was standing on the side of the stage watching. Yeah, there was like eight people. Yeah, I was one of those. No way.

Really? And I think you got to play a song and a half. That's right. I remember that close to the show. I mean, Jim Ferrari pulled the plug and the show was over. Yeah, he, we thought he were a different band or the venue had changed or something like that. And they still had this band who had to play. And he gave us a song.

And I think we did. Or a song. I think he gave us one more song, which was we did a version of King Inc. I think a super long version of King Inc. That was quite something. I remember that. I remember getting down in the audience and I think I had this sort of sort of throttling some audience member with the Mike lead. And I mean, it was just, it all just went a little too far. The first thing that happened really, that's so funny.

You were there. I was there when you came out, you pushed all of the monitors off the stage was how it started. Right. And then it went downhill from there. But it was fascinating. Yeah. yeah, and I think that got around and the next one was cancelled and this sort of stuff happened. But that music was an attempt to sort of articulate a personal chaos that was existential, you know, it wasn't political. Well, it was political in a personal way, like you're saying. And that's really that's just informed what I've done throughout. It's not that I'm not, I don't want my music to be

political or whatever, it's just that it's not a concern of mine. It's not a honest concern. It's not what drives me. I'm happy for that. I feel like some artist feel an obligation to do that, and it really gets in the way of the purity of the art. Yeah. Yeah, and of course, at certain times, this ramps up. You know. It's not interesting when everyone is saying the same thing. Exactly.

I'm interested in an alternative programming, you know. Well, in every way, right? In every way. You know, in conversation, in every way. In every way. Who wants to sit down with someone that just has the same worldview as you, and have a conversation. All it's doing is sort of affirming something rather than developing, changing, or coloring the way that you feel about things. And obviously these days there's a nervousness around that, there's a nervousness around conversation, a suspicion around speech and conversation.

To scary idea. Yeah, for some. No, it's scary that. Well, that case exists. Yes, that's right. And the odd thing about it is that when something like freedom of expression or free speech is to a person like myself,

a self-evident virtue, how could it not be really feels like an argument that's out of step with the times in the sense that it's one of those arguments your dad would have had or something like that, you know, and you kind of roll your eyes. It's interesting, as you grow older, to see that what your parents said was actually a lot of the time true. It wasn't just, you know, that there was a truth and an understanding and a kind of collected wisdom in what they had to say that as a young person, you had to reject. And unfortunately, I think some of these ideas that are being rejected these days are damaging

to what it is to be able to lead a full life. Since being on the road with the birthday party, has your life just basically been on the road until now? Well, I wouldn't like to think that, but you're probably right. Well, like what's been the longest window that you haven't done before? I've always been, I've always been making a record and going on tour. Yeah, I'm not saying the arts the same, but the practice of making something and going out on tour has been your life.

Yes. Other than the maybe you during COVID. Yeah, yeah, there was COVID. Although weirdly, all sorts of things ramped up through COVID for me. In that COVID gave me the opportunity not to tour for a year. That was a thing. That's interesting that you put things in that way because I haven't really thought about it in that way.

But that's the truth of it. It has been making a record going on tour, making a record going on tour. But what COVID gave me was suddenly I wasn't going on tour. You know, we had, we released Ghostine. We had this idea for a show because the skeleton tree concerts were amazing. We've gotten a whole live experience to such a kind of high-pitched... The whole thing was quite something, and the ghostene one was just going to kick it out of the park, right?

We had, I don't know, 20 singers and a choir, and all that. We had all this sort of thing that we were going to do. It was going to be big and just exquisite. And then I was just in the office and then these phone calls started coming in and my managers like on the phone and this all happened within a few hours. It looks like we're not touring America or wherever we were supposed to tour first and then within I think half a day I went from having a year of touring to nothing to do and I think for there was like 15 minutes

of panic you know like we're not going on tour and it's, what are we going to do? And then suddenly there was this delay. Oh my God. I've got a year off, a year off to do nothing. Anything. Not only that, to have the absolute right excuse to do nothing, right? Because we're all going to die, basically. So there was this terror, but there was also this huge relief.

Not that I don't like touring, because I love to touring, I love to play concerts, but I also love to be with my wife, not on the road, or to hang out with my kids, and all of that sort of stuff. But funnily enough, when COVID came, there was just this sort of tumbling of creativity

that happened through that. For me, it was suddenly I was able to do other things and all this other stuff happened, which I still find kind of mystifying. I wrote a book, Faith Hope in Carnage, with Sean O'Hagan. I became a ceramicist and I can't exhibit them and all of that sort of stuff. I have no idea what happened there. There was just, there was a feeling of freedom in COVID for me personally even though where I was which was in Brighton There was this weird

There's a few songs Was one called balcony man and that's because I said on it was the summer and I said on a balcony because I sat on a, it was the summer and I sat on a balcony, sat there reading religious texts and writing songs and it was kind of beautiful. And directly behind me was the hospital, which was just piling up with bodies and all these terrible stories coming out of it. It was the weirdest situation, tragic situation, but for me personally,

it opened up my life to a whole lot of other things, and it's quite different what I do now since COVID, actually. Tell me about your away with it. It's funny, I don't know if this is suggesting that things are changing in that way with people. Or maybe it's just you, I don't know. But I remember, I mentioned this in the book, maybe this is 30 years back, an interview with the enemy where the guy sat down and goes, hi, okay, before we start, my editor has

told me, don't get him going on God. So that was off the table before. Anyway, so it's interesting that you asked that question. I would say for me that as far back as I remember, I just had an uncommon interest in the figure of Christ. Now I don't really know why. It seems to even predate when I became a choir boy in the local church, and then I started to learn more about that. I was just genuinely fascinated in the story of Christ, not as a Christian, but just as someone

who liked stories, I guess, as a young boy. It was just a kind of uncommon allure that just always remained with me. Even in church, when I would go to church, and the other kids, no one wanted to be there, and we were all in the choir, and everyone's just, I was just intrigued by the stories, the biblical stories. I was just intrigued by the stories, the biblical stories. And then when I went to art school and I got really into art and I got into classical art and I would look at these paintings, I would understand them, I would know them, I know what's going on there and I know what this story is.

And so before any notions of or spiritual ideas, let's say about the existence of God or something like that, there was always just this sort of haunted character of Christ sort of moving around the periphery of things that's always interested me, continues to interest me. I think my relationship to that story changes over time, different aspects of it. There are different parts to the story of Christ that I relate to. The Christ in the garden before he was crucified, kneeling and praying to a God that is no longer there, that has abandoned him, that has withdrawn completely, just an ordinary man kneeling in the garden. These stories to me are extraordinarily beautiful, haunting and just resonate through pretty much everything I do. Now, I don't call myself a Christian.

I do go to church when I can, and I do get an enormous amount out of going to church that I don't get elsewhere. I get that because of the tradition of religion. I like the church. I like the idea of religion. I like that because it's like music in the sense that music sort of puts its arms around a whole bunch of disparate ideas that we have about things, our spiritual ideas, things we love. It somehow sort of brings it all together in a melody, let's say. And church to me is a similar thing that it's, all these thoughts that I have can be brought together and all these yearnings and longings that I have can be contained within the walls of

this institution. For all of its faults and corruptions and all the rest of it, there's something that exists there for me that I don't find anywhere else except in music. You know, I'm slightly repelled, I'm not repelled, but the idea look, music is my church and all of that sort of stuff. I'm a bit more hard-line than that. Church is my church. But certainly music is the sort of secular, let's say equivalent to. And actually I think for the secular person churches of great utility too, if you can get over the fact that whether God exists or not, what goes on in a church? I found one in London, I won't tell you the name of it because I like to go there on my own and but it is so beautiful this church, it's so old, it's 900 years old last month. The organist is so off the planet, it's like unbelievable and the choir, I think it's like an eight piece choir that just

seeing this almost Gregorian kind of stuff within minutes, your entiers in this place. It's just allowing a presence of being that I can't find outside those walls. And you're led, you're sort of varied through the, from the kind of forgiveness through to, to communion, to a blessing at the end, in the most gorgeous way. So I have a lot of time for that experience for me. Yes, you know. I got to see you perform in the church in Brooklyn,

I think it was for the Harry Smith. All right. You played John the Revelator as well. John the Revelator, and it was phenomenal. How really? It was phenomenal. Everybody else were pretty much fokies. So, yeah.

Your performance definitely stood out. Yeah, it had an all testament field. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using of square spaces best in class templates. With a built-in style kit you can change fonts, imagery, margins and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engine, a highly intuitive drag and drop editor.

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Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. How would you say your relationship to music has changed over the course of your life? How would you see your relationship to music has changed over the course of your life? Well, I don't have the relationship I had with music that I had as a young person. I think that's very special. I mean, there's some neuroscience around it between the age of 16 and 23 or something like that. You're super receptive to music. It sort of

embeds itself in you. You remember it in a different way. And that's certainly the case with me. There's a whole lot of stuff that I discovered at that time that remain, you know, to this day, people say, who do you like? And I real off these names. Because they were just, they just became so important. You know, Nina Simone and John Lee Hukker and Van Morrison and Neil Yang and these sorts of people that I had sort of found there, Elvis, of course. So that high-intensity relationship with music is very different than my relationship with music these days. In fact, I'm ashamed to say I don't really listen to much music. I don't listen to something on in the back. So it's changed. You know

it's when you start doing your own thing I think that's it really. You start to you're in it you know you deeply in it for yourself and you're trying to work out what you are as a musician and what you want to do. And after a while you just don't have room, you don't have the same sort of room in your mind for other people's staff. I mean I know a lot of musicians that remain huge fans of music and are constantly listening to other people's music, but I'm not one of them. Do you feel you need to be understood or to understand yourself?

I think it's to do with what understanding is. And for me, always, always, and I have always been attempting to expand the range of what I understand about things, especially ideas. You know, if you say open-minded in that way? I'm open-minded in the sense that I've find it a privilege to have my mind changed. I don't find it a threat. I find it as this fucking stuff of life is to,

and I know enough about myself to know that when I'm getting into an argument and the wind is really in my sails and I'm going for it, I'm talking about something that I don't really know very much about. I recognize that sort of strident, argumentative thing that I can get into that I see all the time, that is strident because it has a sort of deficit of facts or understanding. And so when you have ideas like that, all you can do is sort of shriek them at somebody. I can be like that too, and although less so, and I'm much more interested in having my ideas developed to hold a position on things, I think, rather than to take a side on things. I think there's a difference. I'm constantly being asked to

take a side and I understand the need for that and I understand the need for people to do that I understand the need for that, and I understand the need for people to do that, and that for some people to do that, that's what creates the tension of the world. But I personally find myself more taking a position on things, which tends to be more middle ground, that it's flexible, that is open to being changed, that it's uncertain. It sounds really healthy. Mostly, I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. Yeah.

I don't think we can know. No, that's right. That's right. And that place of unknowing, I find rather than a disadvantage, is an advantage in life. Absolutely. It's pregnant with-neighbored possibility. Exactly. There we go. So, I don't know about what understanding myself would ever really be.

I do feel misunderstood sometimes about certain sorts of things. Because I'm not interested in sort of defending myself about things. I let things, the cards for what they do and people think what they want. But I don't feel the need to sort of defend myself. I guess the reason for that is that my position changes all the time. I just don't know about things enough to take a side in the way

that's required of me. Can you tell me something that you used to believe when you were younger that you don't believe anymore? Well I used to think that people, I've written a song about it, that people weren't any good. You know that essentially my default setting was a kind of general contempt for the world, for the way the world operates, the way the people are, and could only really see the world or the people in it in particular. At it's worst, and I just don't think that anymore.

You know, and this is not a religious point of view, but there is an aspect of that to it, but it is that understanding of a common spirit or a common predicament amongst all people that feels, that I feel I understand acutely these days, so that it doesn't matter who I'm sitting down and talking with, or that we all have a common spirit, that we are all unique and individual, but with a collective or common uniting spirit and controversially I think that that spirit is essentially good and that's a it's a difficult argument to make sometimes it's difficult argument to make these days but I think each person has the essence of good with them that may be underneath many, many, many layers of personal suffering and may be completely extinguished by that, I don't know.

But essentially, if we can look at each other in that way, that we have a common spirit, it's difficult to hate somebody. Yes. Describe how you feel music in your body. I can describe that place we get to when we play music, when things are right. When we listen to music too, there's a sort of point of acute concentration that goes on when you're playing music, where everything is moving together at exactly the right time and it creates something of an kind of incoming feeling of love in the body, I would say. Your Rick Rubens eyes are lighting up at this point in time, just say.

I love it. And that's a sort of reciprocal thing with the audience. If that's going in the right way, everyone's highly attuned to the moment and that there's a sort of incoming and outpouring of love that can go with the audience. This can be actually attained through and almost through an entire concert.

It requires concentration and... But this is to me the transcendent feeling, I would say. It's both singular and communal. Is there any thinking involved? It is for me. For me, it's often getting deep into the lyric, but I'm singing about deep into the lyric, or inhabiting the lyric in a way.

Inhabiting it in terms of your voice or inhabiting it in terms of living the story. Well, I feel it's both. It's both. I feel drawn into the story. Well, I feel it's both. It's both. I feel drawn into the tale. I feel that the song is speaking to me. I feel like I'm picking up information and understanding the song in a way that I didn't even know it was supposed to be.

I find I'm finding out more about it and just there within that exchange between me and the song. And that's how songs reveal themselves. People I think often think that this is just something that songwriter say or something like that. But it seems to me that songs know more about what's going on than we do, or on a personal level and on all levels really. But information has been passed you by the song about things that you didn't quite understand. It's like a conversation, in fact. So if you can drill as closely into that moment into the very moment that you're participating in the song,

without all the other peripheral voices going on in your head, which are often difficult to dispel, what are the audience thinking? Am I in tune? All of this sort of stuff. And you're just inside the story. You're receiving all sorts of information about all sorts of things through that simple collection of words. And I think I believe that the audience understands that. Like, they know when that's happening, when I've been to, had the privilege of seeing Nina Simone once,

there were times in her performances that were just that. I've seen the saints play and there were concerts where it's just, they're just so deeply attuned to what's going on at that point in time. It's mind-blowing. And this is the potential of music. This is not to be squandered. It's a sin, in my view, to phone in a concert, that you have this opportunity, have people come along to see you, that you're not trying to find that elemental moment where all of you are coming together in a transcendent

fashion. So I find that more and more become more and more capable of that, or more conscious of that. Maybe it was always there, but I can just feel it and see it what it's doing these days in a way that I perhaps I wasn't able to before. Tell me about the positive therapeutic benefit to negative dark songs. Well, they're essential to our societal health. You don't want music to be in the hands of the virtuous. You want to be told things by someone who's lived something and not avoided living something. These broken people are the messengers of God, if you want to put it in those terms.

They are the ones with the information. These people that have avoided putting themselves in problematic situations Right don't want to talk about this don't want to write about this That these aren't the people you need to be going to to find out the information about this about life Yeah, I mean, I think it's the wounded That can tell us what we need to know You know and that goes back to when we're talking about darkness.

I think it goes back to the idea of what sin is, and to me very often, sin is layers of suffering. Generally, when you start to peel away at what makes a person the way they are, something's going on there that's as sort of hardened around that spirit of goodness. And these are the people probably different things themselves. I imagine for against something. Yeah.

It's the problematic people that we need to be listening to. Not that we're going to end up having their views, but just that they have a more complex view of things. You know, you have these characters that are like bad characters without naming any names, but they pop their heads up every now and then and everyone freaks out and doesn't know whether they should listen to their music or not, right? It happens every couple of months, there's a new one. And the same question comes up, should we or should we not listen to this person's music? But it's the distance travelled from this sort of broken individual to the sort of supremely beautiful

thing that they are creating, that is the stuff of what it is to be human. These are the people you should be listening to, not taking their records off their shelves. In my view, you know, this is a difficult thing to say, but there may be a kind of correlation between transgression and great art. It may be the case. That's not to say a basically good person can't make beautiful music. I don't mean that. I just mean that we need to protect art. And we don't have a whole lot of different things in the world. There's so much in the world that is demoralizing to us. At least we have art, at least we have songs, at least we have people making songs.

And when I see these people being attacked and songs being taken away, I just think this is a mistake. We need this stuff. This is a validation of what we are as human beings. Feels like to me, this ideology of whatever you want to call it, is winning the battles, many battles. But I don't think it can win the war or the culture war in the

sense that it's too limiting. And as human beings we just want to expand. That's our nature, is to grow bigger. You know, we need to speak more, not less. And if we keep honing ourselves down to our most virtuous, we will live in an impoverished world. You know, anyway, that's my rant on the subject. I have a friend whose brother just died two days ago and we were talking about love. Does love vanish after death? There's many ways to look at that, I think. It's a difficult question in a way because it depends on how you go about things. If you've lost someone, there's, well, there's two ways that two things that can happen.

You either turn inward and bring your love inward and live your life sort of hardened around the absence of something. That's a kind of love. It's a sort of dayification of the absence of something. And that is a kind of love, but it's extraordinarily dangerous place to be in. The other way is when you lose someone that you open yourself outwards to the world and understand the perilous nature of humanity, that we are all fragile, vulnerable beings. And I think that what happens with that is when you start to understand that about people, our common perilous nature, it allows you to love everyone and love

expands and love grows. And love isn't just collected around the absence of that one person that you lost, it becomes a much greater thing. So in that respect, love grows. It's funny that because the beautiful stuff that we say is when we don't quite know what we're talking about. And I always find myself slipping in and out of knowing because it's practiced. And I've said it before.

And those moments when you just don't quite understand yourself, what you're saying. But in that respect, that this way I kind of wanted to do the faith hope and carnage book as a conversation because that book, it's way I kind of wanted to do the faith-hope and carnage book as a conversation, because that book, it's about a lot of things, but it is testament to the sort of power of conversation. That's the thing I like most about it. Me and Sean disagree on all sorts of things. I mean, we really disagree on a lot of different things. And that's how our relationship started just

fighting with each other over political issues mostly. And we fundamentally do not agree. And those conversations at a very beautiful arose out of disagreement or reaching beyond disagreement into finding common ground. And the common ground that we found was extraordinarily rich, but it required some kind of effort in a way to get there. And we still don't agree on things. Did you learn anything through the process of those conversations? Yeah, I learned enormous amount, you know, because I was given the opportunity to articulate things that I hadn't been able to do. So I had a whole lot of disparate information about things and about how I felt about the death of my child about religion and Sean kept sort

of drilling down. He was like a faulty elevator or something like that. He sort of take you down there and then he'd drop it down again, another floor and drop it down, another floor. This was uncomfortable, but at the same time I felt in very safe hands with Sean and because we'd been through something already, you know, screaming at each other down the phone about various things. And so it is at its best a testament to kind of good faith conversation, you know. There's a line in the book, a truthful line collects meaning. I love that idea. Oh yeah, I love that idea.

That's true. In songwriting, I think I'm talking about. Of course not all lines are like that and some don't And they become increasingly irritating with the more you sing them. And a line that's false, like a false line, something where you've just kind of like, it kind of works. It rhymes. It rhymes. And it sort of sounds like it might mean something or whatever. Actually, very often lines that sound like they might mean something, often do mean something,

actually, you find out later on. But there are lines that you know at the time aren't good. They become like you're singing the song and for me at least they become like f**king, you know, ten-ton truck coming at you as you know, here comes that line that you know is not true. I don't have a lot of those lines, but there are some. Can you change them live? I do try and do that, yeah. But a good line, you know, it can be hugely meaningful, you know. You know, they chime differently, you know.

I'm singing a song called Old Children, which was used in the Harry Potter film. So it got a lot of attention at song because of that. And but it just changes its meaning all the time. And sometimes it's deeply personal and filled with all. You know, it's essentially a song about, I'm actually writing a red hand file about it at the moment actually,

but it's essentially about the incapacity we have to protect our children from the world. And sometimes that has a painfully, painful presence, that song, to sing. And other times it speaks into the world in a terribly tragic way, that song. And if we look at what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, that song is very, very hard to sing. But beautiful too. What are we doing? Sorry. Now it's heartbreaking, it makes no sense. And these songs, if they're good, they can redefine themselves all the time. They're not just a static thing. They're a living thing. It's the beauty of poetry, is that it's written in an open enough way where the meaning can evolve. I love Yeah. I Love the last movie you made with the cameras moving away. I love it. What's it called?

This much I know to be true. I think this much. I know to be true. I really love it. Yeah, Andrew Dominic It's his second film. There was the first one the black and white one black and white. Yeah, that was a great one Yeah, it's an amazing film. Would you say you're doing Nick Cave or Nick Cave is doing you? I think where I've never been able to separate whatever that Nick Cave is from the Nick Cave that I'm supposed to, you know, the guy behind the door. It's just, is the same thing. It's comic in its way. Especially, you know, you're going on tour where you're constantly presented with yourself.

You know, you have to do things through the day, you're a public person, you're out there all the time, you have to prepare yourself. I'm like a pre-high maintenance character. So there's a lot of that goes on and you're confronted with your face in the mirror constantly and people are watching you and you're absorbing all this attention and all that sort of stuff. And I long to get back home where I can just sort of let all that go, but actually it just never does let go. I just just realized to my horror one day I just am that person. That person in the hotel mirror.

That poor, that I always feel sorry for hotel mirrors, the amount of sort of suffering they've sort of collected of people looking at themselves, you know, with bad lighting and all that sort of stuff. How long does it take you to fall asleep after a show? Yeah, I'm not good at that. It varies and I know I try not to take sleeping tablets, and mostly I'm successful at that, but I don't sleep well at all. I wake up very early, I go to bed at terrible time.

It's just a mess, to be honest, especially on tour. You know, I always sleep before a show at about five o'clock. I lie down and I can't do a show without doing that. I get an hour's sleep, I wake up and I'm able to do a show. Without that, I just couldn't concentrate and stuff. That's why most musicians are sort of brain dead. Zombies! Thank you.