Until very recently, nobody much cared about Nick Cave’s political opinions, including Cave himself. For most of his career, which began in Melbourne in the late 70s, he was too entrenched in the badlands of his imagination to be one of those musicians to whom journalists turned for a righteous line on an election or a war. He has never written a protest song nor aligned himself with a cause. Since 2018, he has sometimes discussed cultural politics in The Red Hand Files, his online project answering questions from fans, but it is just one part of a mix which spans grief, literature and the end of the world. Faith, Hope and Carnage, his recent bestselling book of conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan, delves deep into life, death, God and art but features just one brief exchange about cancel culture. (He’s against it.)
Lately, however, there has been growing chatter about whether or not the 65-year-old is that rare beast in music, a conservative, and what exactly that would mean. His statements tend to be long on principles, especially his opposition to censorship, but short on details. In the book he says he is “temperamentally” conservative and “that’s always been the case” – he was even a “conservative heroin addict”. Speculation about Cave’s leanings came to a head last month when he expressed his intention to attend King Charles’s coronation, due to his fascination with the spectacular and bizarre, and caused a social-media ruckus. A lot of people now seem invested in overstating Cave’s conservatism for a range of reasons, which prove the old line that the right looks for converts while the left looks for heretics.
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