Bingo: On Air Passport: Interview
Faith, Hope and Carnage documents a series of conversations between musician Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan. The long and intimate relationship between the collaborators and Cave’s ease with self-examination have enabled this book to dig much deeper than the standard rock star memoir.
This project was born out of the pandemic. In March 2020 Cave’s world tour was cancelled, and all the work put into preparing his Ghosteen album for live performance had come to nothing, bringing an extraordinary sense of vulnerability, but also a strange freedom to just be, not do. When O’Hagan floated the idea of exploring some of the issues that had arisen during their private phone conversations on the record, Cave agreed, on the condition that the interviews did not simply retread familiar ground.
Grief is a central theme of these conversations. Cave describes himself as defined by the loss of his son, and how being forced to grieve so publicly he had to find a means to articulate what had happened. He talks of the impact of his disrupted personal narrative on his songwriting process, the forms of his songs becoming twisted, entangled, mutilated and fragmented. He mentions, in a passing comment, that he can see his son Arthur’s grave out of the window of the studio.
Cave’s personal theology is another recurring topic. Having included religious themes in his songwriting and prose throughout his career, he sees the struggle with the notion of the divine at the heart of his creativity. He describes Ghosteen as imprinted with the yearning of his and Warren Ellis’s souls, with spirits trapped inside that you can feel on the record. “God is the trauma itself”, where humans are altered or remade at the very limits of suffering. He ponders the transcendence of musical lyrics, where a truthful line continues to collect meaning with repeated performance.
If stories about musicians behaving badly is your thing, you’ll find some of that here. But this is a book for people who want to hear two introspective men digging into the nature of creativity as an expression of the human soul.
I read this book listening to the recent albums it references – Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. This added another layer to my immersion in Cave’s creative process. I’d recommend it as part of the experience.
