“YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH!” barks Nick Cave, crouched face to face with the first few rows of an audience who are having, at a conservative estimate, the time of their lives. Four-and-a-half decades into an already serpentine career, the Australian singer-songwriter’s recent history has thrown up a great many surprise developments, not least a radical rapprochement between this often forbidding artist and the rest of humanity.
On his Red Hand Files – a kind of open-source life coaching website – Cave now makes himself publicly available, answering existential dilemmas and basic factchecks with candour and no little humour. Since the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015 and the outpouring of fellow feeling it provoked, Cave’s worldview has undergone a tectonic shift. Previously, his output most often saw mankind – and it was most often mankind – as bad to the bone.
