Nick Cave - Stranger Than Kindness

What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit. It is the material that gives birth to and nourishes the official work.

By official work I mean the song or the book or the score that is released into the hands of the fans. The fans become its custodians. They own it. Yet beyond the song there is an enormous amount of peripheral stuff drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages, scribblings and drafts which are the secret and unformed property of the artist.

These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script or score along. They are a support system of manic tangential information.

I hope that you find some value in them. To me, these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed work: raw and immediate, but no less compelling.

Nick Cave

STRANGER THAN KINDNESS

NICK CAVE

First published in Great Britain in 2020
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

Developed by Nick Cave and Christina Back

Copyright Nick Cave, 2020
Essay God Is in the House copyright Darcey Steinke, 2020 Contextualisation texts copyright Darcey Steinke and Janine Barrand

The right of Nick Cave, Darcey Steinke and Janine Barrand to be identified as the authors of these works has been asserted by them under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 83885 224 5
eISBN 978 1 83885 225 2

Contents

SHATTERED HISTORY

by Nick Cave

ONE

You are born. You build yourself piece by piece. You construct a narrative. You become an individual, surrounding yourself with all that you love. You are wounded too, sometimes, and left scarred. Yet you become a heroic and unique embodiment of both the things you cherish and the things that cause you pain. As you grow into this living idea, you become instantly recognisable; among the billions of faces in the world, you become that which you think you are. You stand before the world and say, I am here and this is who I am.

TWO

But there is an influence at work. A veiled, magnetic force. An unnamed yearning drawing you toward a seismic event; it has always been there, patiently waiting. This event holds within it a sudden and terrifying truth. You were never the thing that you thought you were. You are an illusion, as the event shatters you into a multitude of pieces.

THREE

The pieces of you spin apart, a million little histories, propelling themselves away at a tremendous rate. They become like the hurtling stars, points of retreating light, separated only by your roaring need and the distant sky itself.

FOUR

You scramble for the pieces of your shattered history. There is a frantic gathering up. You seize the unknowable fragments and begin to put yourself back together again. You reassemble yourself into something that seems absolutely foreign to you, yet fully and instantly recognisable.

FIVE

You stand anew, remade. You have rebuilt yourself. But you are different. You have become a we, and we are each other: a vast community of astonishing potential that holds the sky aloft with our suffering, that keeps the stars in place with our limitless joy, that situates the moon within the reaches of our gratitude, and positions us in the locus of the divine. Together, we are reborn.

Nick Cave as a toddler in Warracknabeal, c. 1960
Photograph by Colin Cave

Colin Cave, c. 1956
Photograph by Ernest Cameron
For further reading

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, 1980 (first published in 1955)
For further reading

Christmas card featuring choir boys of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Wangaratta, 1965
For further reading

Still image from City with a Future Wangaratta, 1965 Directed by Gordon Williams
For further reading

Dawn Cave, 1958
Photographer unknown
For further reading

Letter sent from Nick Cave to his family while in boarding school, 1971

Chris Coyne, John Cocivera, Howard (last name unknown), Phill Calvert and Nick Cave performing at Korowa Anglican Girls School, c. 1975
Photographer unknown
For further reading

Letter from Caulfield Grammar School to Colin Cave, 1975

Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane, Bronwyn Adams, Nauru House, Melbourne, 1977
Photograph by Peter Milne
For further reading

Nick Cave at The Saints concert, Tiger Room, Melbourne, 1977
Photograph by Rennie Ellis
For further reading

Song list, The Boys Next Door, 1978
For further reading

Letter from Nick Cave to Anita Lane, 1980

Nick Cave and Anita Lane, c. 1980
Photographer unknown
For further reading