Old devil

Are songs from God? asks Anastasia in Thessaloniki. 

What makes you decide whether a lyric is great or should be dumped cos it’s utter shit, cos, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, you walk a very fine tightrope between the two, my man writes Barry from Leatherhead.

When you reach midlife and are made to truly pause, frozen in horror by a tidal wave of grief of lives ended, personal loss and our Earth relentlessly harmed, when you look inside for surety and solace and all you see is a multitude of selves, how do you know who you are? wonders Rebecca in Wantage.

Why are you such a massive wanker? demands Tim from Sydney.

Most mornings these days Nick Cave wakes with a head full of questions. Turns out that starting the Red Hand Files, a humble ask-me-anything blog was an accidental opening of the floodgates. The messages now torrent into his inbox in their thousands, at all hours, from the lonesome, the confused, the bereaved and the despairing. Somehow, in his seventh decade, he has become a virtual vicar, tending to the woes of his lost sheep. It must do him some good, he thinks, to spend a certain amount of his week visiting the brighter, more compassionate end of his character. 

Today he has no answers. If it’s Halloween 2024 he must be in Belgium, a month into his ecstatic, uncanny European tour for Wild God. This morning, before he heads out onto the spotlight at the Sportspaleis, all he really wants to do is mooch out of his hotel, across Antwerp old town, through the Grosse Markt, and into the gothic Cathedral of Our Lady, so he can genuflect once more before Rubens’ awe-inspiring Descent from the Cross.

He’s brought a friend. His failure at Caulfield Institute of Technology in 1977, flunking out of his art studies in his first year, still rankles, and some part of him feels the need to show off a little, share how hard he’s studied, how much he has learned in the intervening years. The teenage Nick was drawn towards the extravagant, excruciating torture of Grünewald's Crucifixion. In his sixties his tastes have mellowed a little. 

“This Mannerist triptych depicts the dramatic deposition of Jesus from the cross,” he whispers reverently to his companion. He can feel Colin’s didactic tones haunting his voice, but he lets it slide. “The characters in the painting support the pale and lifeless body of Christ with extraordinary tenderness, each carrying Him down from the cross and bearing Him.” 

Though he doesn’t reply, his companion’s eyes are wide, and he gurgles with appreciation. Roman, the first child of his first son, is six months old, and has come to visit his grandpa on tour. This cathedral tour is Nick’s idea of some quality generational bonding time. Nick proudly, carefully, carries him closer to the altar, so he can take in the full glory. 

He wonders if he should show Roman some of his own iconography. Of all this strange tide of work that has poured out of him in the last ten years, some days he’s most proud of his Devils. A perverse admirer of 19th century mantelpiece figurines, during the idle pandemic hours he felt the burning need to bring small ceramic devils into the world, and so the eternal art student spent lockdown moulding clay, heating kilns, driving himself potty in his quest for the perfectly hellish glaze. Not so far from here, in a swanky Brussels gallery, he’s just exhibited 17 of them, scenes from the life of an Old Devil, his very own infernal via dolorosa.

Maybe not yet. Roman seems most interested in the left outer door of the triptych, a bearded, muscle-bound St Christopher struggling to bear the weirdly heavy Christ-child on his shoulders. Nick holds onto Roman as tightly as pale, skinny arms allow.

we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

Since he and Susie first stepped blinking from the grief crater of Arthur’s death in 2015, these modest lines, from a Philip Larkin poem about mangling a hedgehog in a lawnmower, have become a credo of sorts. Maybe this message, of quiet, patient, mutual care, is all he really has to offer to his Red Hand Congregation…

It sometimes feels as though the past decade - the albums, the films, the exhibitions, the conversations, the concerts  - has been a vast collaborative experiment in very public therapy. He can’t deny it. 

Are these latest  shows, with the gospel choir, people weeping in the aisles, waving reverent hosannahs in the moshpit, the healing high after the therapeutic breakthrough? Or is it just a matter of time before grief’s elastic toddler reins pull him smack back to ground zero, the abysmal cliffs at Ovingdean Gap?

He still records there most months back home, sitting at the piano across from Warren, the two of them snuffling, foraging blindly in the dark for a piece for a new soundtrack or a song. He likes to gaze out past the black windmill and St Wulfran’s graveyard to the old, relentless English sea.

Roman burps a little bubble of milk down Nick’s fine grey suit and at the sight of the mock horror dawning on that hangdog face, he giggles, devilishly. Grandpa Cave cracks up into the proud, beaming paternal grin that feels almost second nature these days. His iPhone pings impertinently.

What does it take to be free? wonders Jai in Melbourne.