Nick Cave described his 2016 album, Skeleton Tree, as both prophetic and cursed. Of all the songs on the album, only ‘I Need You’ was written after one of his twin sons died in an accident in 2015 – all the other songs pre-date this tragedy.
It is this song he sings solo at the piano in his most recent tour of his new album, Wild God, tears standing in his eyes. He has said that the new songs need live performance to bring out the meaning in them, and that it is sometimes when on stage that the presence of his lost son feels very close to him. This sense of the prescient in his work can also be felt in his 2004 song, ‘O Children’: “We’re all weeping now, weeping because/ There ain’t nothing we can do to protect you” (Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus).
I will tell you of it, although there’s little use: Nick Cave seems to distil the past decade of both his tragic loss and the grieving process into the song, ‘Long Dark Night’: “But things were not so good, I can’t make light of it/ My poor soul it was having a dark night of it/ A long night, a week, maybe a year.” He suggests how, during mourning, time both collapses and drags cruelly on. In his book of conversations with his friend Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope & Carnage, Cave describes how, “this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation.” He goes on, “But in time they put themselves together, piece by piece” and become “a changed, more complete, more realised person. I think that’s what it is to live, really, to die and be reborn” (FHC, 2022, p. 107). It is this sense of rebirth that is evident in his most recent album.
The new album, Wild God (2024), features motifs of spring and rebirth: frogs, rabbits, horses, dogs, and the generative energy associated with these creatures. In the song ‘Joy’, Cave transitions from mourning to a kind of tentative healing. The song opens, “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head,/ I felt like someone in my family was dead.” He is then visited by the ghost of his son: “Who is it, I cried, what wild ghost is come in agitation?” Like Hamlet, the apparition comes in the dead of night (“it’s half-past midnight! Why disturb me so late?”); only here, there is an inversion as it is the spectral child visiting the father – “A ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head.” Cave calls on the cosmological imagery that characterised his heart-breaking album, Ghosteen (2019). As in the song, ‘Ghosteen Speaks’, the lost child (part-)voices the song. However, this time it is the ghost who tells him that the time of sorrow has passed, declaring, now is the time for joy, accompanied by a “lowing french horn” (Petridis, The Guardian).
Who sat on a narrow bed, this flaming boy: The following song on the album, ‘Final Rescue Attempt’, continues this theme of resurrection. “The last time you came around here, it was to rescue me./ You arrived just in time, with your customary flair.” He continues: “After that, nothing ever really hurt again,/ …not even ordinary pain.” It is perhaps less clear who Cave is addressing here: his son, or perhaps his wife, Susie Cave (who rather brilliantly pointed out that she walks in and out of his songs, [FHC, p. 136]). Perhaps a compound of the two. He concludes: “And my hand, searching for your hand, searching for my hand, searching for your hand, searching for mine…”
In his recent appearance on Desert Island Disks (BBC Radio 4, 26/1/2025), Nick Cave’s book of choice was Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. Towards the end of Collodi’s fairy tale, Pinocchio enters the mouth of the leviathan and meets his estranged father, Geppetto. Nick Cave describes the story as “a very powerful metaphor for the grieving father.” And also crucially states, “Eventually, I found the spirit of my son was ultimately able to release me from this terrible place” (The Red Hand Files, #51). In Faith, Hope & Carnage, he confirms that “Ultimately, [the work] is not saying anything. It is asking for something… Absolution. I am asking to be released from my own personal culpability” (p. 253).
There’s a moment in the penultimate song on the album, ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She is)’, dedicated to his collaborator and sometime-lover, Anita Lane, in which Cave sings, “The country doctor whistles across the meadow.” This is very likely an allusion to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’ (a poet whose work he knows very well by all accounts): “Where can we live but days?”, Larkin asks. “Ah, solving that question/ Brings the priest and the doctor/ In their long coats/ Running over the fields.” Nick Cave resurrects his memory of Lane by placing a voice recording of her on the song, and in his live show, projects a huge video of her dancing at sunset. “How wonderful she was/ How wonderful she is,” he sings. Perhaps the living tense offers some kind of answer to Larkin’s famous atheism or fatalism. Who knows. “In my experience, art does have the ability to save us in so many different ways,” Cave has said. “It can act as a point of salvation because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world.” (FHC, p. 254).
According to Alexis Petridis’ five-star review in The Guardian, “this masterpiece will make you fall back in love with life.” In his most recent album, Wild God, Nick Cave finds a renewed sense of joy and rebirth. And, in the words of the Swedish writer, Torgny Lindgren, he gives a voice to “the children, who had not yet lived their lives.”
References:
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Wild God (Bad Seed Ltd, 2024); Skelton Tree (2016); Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004)
Nick Cave & Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope & Carnage (Canongate, 2022)
The Red Hand Files is where NC answers questions of all kinds from his fans
His Wild God tour (2024-25) continues this summer. I saw the show on Friday 8th November at the O2 Arena in London with the following set list. Needless to say, it was a luminous experience: https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds/2024/the-o2-arena-london-england-33abc8f9.html
This title of this post is from the final song on the album, ‘As the Waters Cover the Sea’. A kind of hymn.
‘Days’ is from Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, (Faber, 1964); the final quotation is from Torgny Lindgren’s novel, The Way of a Serpent (1982; trans. Harvill, 1997). Author photo: St Non’s chapel, west Wales
Benedict Gilbert poems 