Nick Cave wants to share the “extreme beauty” of the world with his fans through music.
The 66-year-old musician – who suffered the loss of two of his children, Arthur, 15, and Jethro, 31, within the space of seven years – recently released his latest record ‘Wild God’ and hopes that his concerts will help fans to move “in the direction of God”.
He told Variety: “If anything, it’s an attempt to turn people away from an embittered, cynical view of the world. moving in the direction of God, let’s say, rather than in the other direction. It’s somehow, I guess, promoting an idea that that we are of some value as human beings, that the world has some implicit meaning, and that the world is not s*** — it’s beautiful! This has become a deeply controversial position on some level: A lot of people that write in are like, ‘No, you’ve got this wrong. This world is not that way at all, and I’ve arrived personally at this position through being damaged,’ or through a catastrophe or devastation of some kind.
“But I think the cynical view of the world is a sort of luxury that you can afford to have prior to the devastation. And the devastation either breaks you — or it turns you around to look at the world as something of extreme beauty.”
Nick believes that music “isn’t just entertainment” and he loves getting the chance to communicate with his fans
He explained: “I guess the band and I move closer to that [revival] sort of thing all the time. We’ve been making complex records about complex things, but when we get onstage, it does feel like we’re in direct communication — direct communion, I would say — with the audience. It sort of washes away some of that complexity and turns it into much more of a kind of pure emotional uplift.
“I feel that music isn’t just entertainment. It’s possibly the last authentic opportunity for transcendent experience we have left to us in the secular world. I think that music is a moral force for good — that’s embedded within the nature of music itself: It can make things better, so I take that really seriously.”