Devouring the new Nick Cave documentary on Sky, I am reminded how critics go wild for arty musicians who constantly change direction and dabble in everything. This is its own kind of myth. I know plenty of artists who keep moving – one week they’re sewing fish scales on to jackets, the next they’re painting mirrors or putting seahorses in samovars. The problem is, no one cares. If poet and ceramicist Nick Cave didn’t also write classic songs, he’d just be a local weirdo. I definitely wouldn’t buy a hardcover transcription of conversations he’d had with a mate about God. I’m glad I did, though.
The documentary, Nick Cave’s Veiled World (Saturday 6 December, 9pm, Sky Arts), is timed to promote the TV adaptation of his filthy novel The Death of Bunny Munro. It’s a glorious opportunity to revisit his early, intense masterpieces: electric chair confessionals, murderous duets with pop princesses, profane love songs. They’re still in my head, days later. It’s also a reminder that, in a joyfully perverse career, the assertion of his Christian faith has been his most divisive move. Audiences love biblical imagery in rock songs, provided the singer doesn’t actually believe.
Retrospectives generally feature a gallery of talking heads who resemble the Platonic form of comfortable middle age, as if they got wealthy from careers in procurement. Cave’s friends are still the weirdest people at the party. There’s Bella Freud, Wim Wenders, Warren Ellis, who looks like Mandy Patinkin playing an Indian sadhu in a Paul Smith suit. The most rock star guest is arguably the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who speaks about the difference between joy and happiness with piercing insight.
Other contributors can’t offer the same value. Some, such as Flea and Florence Welch, read their favourite lyrics aloud. I am left wondering why they’re all sitting in empty rooms, with objects and furniture in the background covered by sheets. They seem to be surrounded by patient ghosts. This could be an eloquent metaphor, but it also looks as if everyone got the painters in on the same week.
There are strains of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan film, with archival collages of pilgrims, riot police, herds of bison. Veiled World is split into sections with titles such as The Outlaw, The Divine Child and The Prophet, leaning into the archetypal imagery Cave favours. He himself is absent, save for vocal clips, and there’s not too much biography. I found myself craving more footage of the drug-addicted, firebrand Cave, who saw the audience as a hostile force to be conquered. We learn that some of his cooler nicknames include “Evil Jesus of Melbourne” and “King of Berlin”, but not why.
The programme is more interested in the Cave of today: a man of deep compassion, racked by faith and consoled by doubt, who no longer believes in art as the highest power. At school, the punk rebel dreamed of being a guru, reveals his photographer and friend Polly Borland. Cave has grown into his vision, at a cost no one would pay. The death of his teenage son Arthur was a seismic tragedy. The programme tracks its aftermath, including the spectral album Ghosteen, a new dimension of sorrow and communality to his live performances, and his emergence as a self-elected spiritual teacher.
Like many, I’m a devotee of Cave’s advice newsletter, the Red Hand Files, in which the title “agony uncle” has never been better earned. Many of the readers’ letters decry his religiosity, his refusal to be partisan on political issues. His replies are profoundly beautiful and frequently hilarious. I can’t read them in public, as I don’t like having metaphysical epiphanies on the bus or crying next to strangers. He would say both are essential. It’s a shame this part of his portfolio career doesn’t feature in the documentary.
Veiled World is high-minded but struggles with a contradiction. Documentaries are reportage, an attempt to make sense and fix meaning. Grief and God are ineffable subjects that resist being pinned. Details and events are easier to render than interiority. We can’t experience calm or purpose vicariously, but an anecdote about the worst thing you ever did at a party? That’s worth telling.
Cave’s recent work has been about dispelling a myth, namely that the devil has the best tunes. Perhaps the real perversity is in me, and anyone else who misses the scent of sulphur.
