Who: Nick Cave, Seán O’Hagan
What: Book signings and solo concerts
Where: The Strand, 92nd St. Y, Kings Theatre, Beacon Theatre
When: Book signings October 5, concerts October 6-8
Why: At the beginning of Faith, Hope and Carnage (Picador, September 19, $20), Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan tells Australian musician, composer, and author Nick Cave, “I’m surprised you agreed to do this given that you haven’t done any interviews for a long time.” Cave replies, “Well, who wants to do an interview? Interviews, in general, suck. Really. They eat you up. I hate them. The whole premise is so demeaning: you have a new album out, or new film to promote, or a book to sell. After a while, you just get worn away by your own story. I guess, at some point, I just realised that doing that kind of interview was of no real benefit to me. It only ever took something away. I always had to recover a bit afterwards. It was like I had to go looking for myself again. So five or so years ago I just gave them up.” O’Hagan asks, “So how do you feel about this undertaking?” Cave answers, “I don’t know. I do like having a conversation. I like to talk, to engage with people. And we’ve always had our big, sprawling conversations, so when you suggested it, I was kind of intrigued to see where it would go. Let’s see, shall we?”
Divided into such chapters as “A Beautiful Kind of Freedom,” “Love and a Certain Dissonance,” “A Radical Intimacy,” “A Sense of Shared Defiance,” and “The Astonishing Idea,” Faith, Hope and Carnage was assembled from forty hours of conversations between Cave and O’Hagan (Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender). The two spoke about his childhood, family, and tragedy; absences, absolution, and addiction; Cave’s bands (the Birthday Party, Grinderman, the Bad Seeds), albums (The Boatman’s Call, Skeleton Tree, Carnage), and books (The Death of Bunny Munro, The Sick Bag Song); the pandemic; the Red Hand Files, where Cave answers one of the hundreds of letters he receives each week from fans; and grief — Cave has suffered immeasurable loss over the last eight years, including the passing of his two sons, his mother, and numerous friends and colleagues. “If this is a book that outlines a dramatic creative and personal transformation in the face of great personal catastrophe, it is also shot through with a sense of life’s precariousness,” O’Hagan writes in the afterword.
Cave will be in New York City this week in support of the paperback edition of the book. He will be at the Strand on October 5 at 11:30 am for a conversation and signing with O’Hagan, followed by a talk and Q&A that night at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall at 7:30. Cave’s Live in North America solo tour — on which he’ll be joined by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood — comes to the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn on October 6 and the Beacon in Manhattan on October 7-8,. I’ve seen him play solo, with the Bad Seeds, with Grinderman, and with Warren Ellis, and his shows are always like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]