a life in
Nick Cave Takes Us on a Tour of His Creative Universe
Photographs courtesy Nick Cave.
A decapitated saint. A doodle of a naked woman. A prayer card. This is the cosmic dust drifting across Nick Cave’s creative universe. Over a career spanning more than 40 years, Australia’s high priest of punk has ventured into acting, screenwriting, composing, and even blogging. But as the lead singer for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he has remained, first and foremost, a musician. “When the pressure of songwriting gets too much, I draw a cute animal or a religious icon or a mythological creature or something,” he says. “Or I take a Polaroid or make something out of clay.” The detritus of his creative output is now on display (and available for purchase) at his recently launched online shop, Cave Things. Here, he takes us on a little tour.
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“I inherited my father’s desk when I was a teenager, and have used one desk or another every day since. I am not alone in understanding the sacred dimension of a desk—its generosity. These days, my desk has become a place of feverish industry. I have been hit with a kind of mania for making things—the effects of the pandemic, no doubt—and I am forever writing, drawing, scribbling, designing, sculpting, whatever. It all happens at my desk.”
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“During the pandemic, I have spent time hidden away in the studio of the sculptor Corin Johnson, working on a series of ceramic figures. These figures, religious in nature, are based on the Staffordshire ‘flatbacks’ that were popular in the Victorian era, and were often painted by children in the ‘dark satanic mills.'”
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“Queen Victoria doodled horses, Mark Twain doodled whales, Claude Monet doodled paintbrushes, and I doodle naked women. Mostly, I draw them on hotel stationery. They are a compulsive habit I have had since my school days and I have thousands of them floating around. They have no artistic merit. Rather, they are evidence of a kind of ritualistic and habitual thinking, not dissimilar to the act of writing itself, actually. I feel compelled to draw them.”
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“My wife, Susie [Bick], makes the most beautiful dresses in the world and she also made a wonderful charm bracelet for her label The Vampire’s Wife. The charms were based on my songs—a gold hand, a little electric chair, a ship, a mermaid, a miniature church, a spade, a wild rose, and so on. They caused a near riot amongst my fans, as they were hideously expensive. I am now creating a series of enameled charms—a red hand, a little ghost, a muscle man, and many more to come.”
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“Inspired by the extraordinary admiration and goodwill that Warren [Ellis, a frequent Cave collaborator] has established over his many years in the music business, I have designed a Warren Ellis Pure Exploitation series. Coming soon is the Warren Ellis Pure Exploitation egg cup and the Warren Ellis Pure Exploitation tortoiseshell comb.”
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“Based on the novelty ‘picture disc’ phenomena of the 1970s—I personally owned ‘Pretty Vacant’ by Sex Pistols and ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie—I have designed a series of four discs of tracks from [Cave’s 2020 concert film] Idiot Prayer. I have drawn four cute animals reenacting, in a typically obscure and perplexingly Caveian manner, the essence of the four songs: ‘Euthanasia’: An innocent but doomed lamb. ‘Watching Alice’: A sexualized rabbit. ‘Sad Waters’: A cat stepping into a river. ‘Stranger Than Kindness’: A distressed elephant balancing on a tiny stage (the story of my life). I chose these four songs because they seemed to hold together as a set of love songs, each shot through with its own dark and impossible thread.”
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“My process of lyric writing is as follows: For months, I write down ideas in a notebook with a Bic medium ballpoint pen in black. At some point, the songs begin to reveal themselves, to take some kind of form, which is when I type the new lyrics into my laptop. Here, I begin the long process of working on the words, adding verses, taking them away, and refining the language, until the song arrives at its destination. At this stage, I take one of the yellowing back pages I have cut from old second-hand books, and, on my Olympia typewriter, type out the lyrics. I then glue it into my bespoke notebook, number it, date-stamp it, and sticker it. The song is then ‘officially’ completed. Last year, I lost my beloved Ghosteen notebook with all the scribblings and typed lyrics in it. I have no idea what happened to it. It was very distressing for me at the time. A few months ago, in lockdown, I sat and retyped all the lyrics, date-stamped, stickered, and numbered them, in an attempt to reclaim them. This process reconnected me to the words that I had lost. A number of these pages are now available as handmade reproductions.”
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“My grandmother, long deceased, had a collection of prayer cards. I remember them to be floral arrangements or pleasant scenes of country life, with a small message or prayer. Between writing songs, I painted a series of these lovely little cards, and typed my own words of comfort on them.”
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“I have a thing about Polaroids. I love that they are square. I love how they frame the image. I love that they contain secret coded messages, each with their own riddle trapped within.”
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“This is the first series of the ‘Dread’ Tiles—five tiles, created in quarantine, named as such because of the feeling of quiet hopelessness I felt drawing these cute little animals.”
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“I’ve always had a thing for decapitated saints, hair, and date stamps—I have a thing about things. Living in West Berlin in the mid‐’80s, I spent a lot of time at the flea markets. This notebook holds an image of one of my collages from that time. These pictures were made from blood and hair and glue and found objects, such as pornographic photographs, religious prayer cards, kitsch lenticulars, lyrical ideas, and so on. They were often the springboards for the songs themselves. The pictures came first.”
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“There’s one piece of advice my other gave me some years ago that affected my deeply and was enormous practical value in my life. I can’t tell you how often I have brought it to mind and acted accordingly, and how much strength and moral fortitude it has afforded me. I had been awarded an honorary doctorate by Monash University in Melbourne, and my mother accompanied me to the university to receive it. I was feeling a little intimidated by the whole thing because I was stepping out of my rock ’n’ roll comfort zone into the academic sphere, and the whole affair had me feeling quite uncomfortable. I mentioned this to my mother, and as we stepped out of the car onto the university grounds, she said, ‘Head high and fuck ’em all.’”
