The first thing Nick Cave says in Faith, Hope and Carnage is that he hates interviews. You could see that as a dispiriting start to a book that’s basically a 304-page interview – by Observer journalist Seán O’Hagan – but it’s hardly news. In the 1980s, Cave’s relationship with journalists was so fraught and combative it occasionally spilled over into actual violence. It subsequently calmed considerably, but always remained slightly uneasy and guarded. Eventually he stopped giving interviews altogether, a decision that seemed understandably prompted by the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, in 2015.
Giving up speaking to the press is not uncommon in a 21st-century pop world rich with other means of communicating with your audience – few major stars still submit to the old-fashioned treadmill of promotional interviews around a new release. But it’s usually rooted in a desire to tightly control one’s public image: better to maintain a painstakingly curated presence on Instagram, with every photo digitally airbrushed to perfection, every accompanying caption carefully vetted, than have your off-the-cuff thoughts mediated by a journalist. What’s striking about Cave’s retreat is that it presaged a radical shift in the opposite direction. He has never been more open, or more available, than in recent years. In 2018, he started The Red Hand Files, a website on which he invited fans to “ask me anything”: four years on, he’s written hundreds of disarmingly frank, thoughtful answers to questions that range from profound to playful. He took the same approach during 2019’s Conversations With Nick Cave, a world tour that revolved not around music but an audience Q&A. In both online and live incarnations, the topic returned again and again to his son’s death and its aftermath: the assumption it was a subject Cave wouldn’t want to discuss publicly couldn’t have been more wrong.
