Punk rock icon Nick Cave said the way to “f***” with people in 2023 is to “go to church and be a conservative.”
The Australian musician, best known as the frontman of “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,” has opened up about his journey back to his faith, which he describes as conflicting and complicated.
The rockstar told UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers last week that he wasn’t anti-establishment early in his career, as rockstars generally were. Instead, he tried to “irritate” his peers and his audience.
“I came from Australia … I didn’t have that political furry, but I was much more concerned with f***ing with people on a different kind of a level,” he said. “And I was always sort of at odds with my peers, I would say.”
“So, what’s the equivalent today,” Sayers asked Cave. “How do you f*** with people, today?”
“You be a conservative,” the “Red Right Hand” singer quickly responded. “You go to church and be a conservative.”
WATCH:
Nick Cave's early punk music energy was all about "fucking with people," he told me.
Me: "How do you fuck with people in 2023?"
Cave: "You'd go to church and be a conservative."
👇👇👇https://t.co/G6DQquA4cn pic.twitter.com/FU9OmFmoT3
— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) April 11, 2023
“There may now be a conservative edge to things, but that word I would use cautiously,” Cave said about his more recent creativity. “Certainly these days I still get similar delight, which I got in the early days, in sort of f***ing with people to some degree. There is something about living outside the expectations of other people that is energizing.”
During the same interview, Cave discussed self-censorship in our culture and said he feels “a kind of wet blanket has been thrown over art in general, and this is just not good.”
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“What is the wet blanket?” the 65-year-old continued. “Well, a squeamish, censorious, merciless idea that there are certain things that you can get away with saying and certain things that you can’t get away with saying.”
“But I get tired of hearing people say: ‘Well, you can’t say this; I think this, but you can’t say this,'” Cave explained. “That’s reflective of a mood, but I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think there are things that you can’t say. You just need to take the consequences of saying certain sorts of things.”
“Now these consequences are brutal, and merciless, and unjust sometimes, and it’s distressing to see these things happen,” he added.
In 2015, Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, died after falling off a cliff near the family’s home. The tragedy, and other events in Cave’s life, have changed how the songwriter sees the world and humanity.
“Now I see the world in a completely different way, and see human beings in a completely different way,” Cave told UnHerd. “I see the brokenness of human beings, but also the unbelievable value of human beings. This is something that, back then, I could never have imagined I would have felt. I think it has something to do with becoming a more complete person, through a series of things that have happened to me through my life — things that have happened to us all, probably.”