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Stranger Than Kindness
Come nascono le canzoni di Nick Cave? Un’autobiografia per reperti e immagini dal mondo caotico e allucinato di un grande artista del nostro tempo. Stranger Than Kindness è un viaggio autobiografico all’interno di un bizzarro inventario materiale: quello dei feticci che hanno plasmato e accompagnato la visione musicale, creativa e letteraria di Nick Cave. Troviamo dipinti fatti col sangue, scarabocchi folli, mappe, collage, memorabilia pescati nei mercati delle pulci di Berlino. Testi di canzoni scritti a matita su ritagli di carta sudicia, in stanze d’albergo e notti insonni fatte di eroina e anfetamine. Fotografie che lo ritraggono giovane, bellissimo e oscuro come un angelo dell’apocalisse. Materia fuori controllo in cui passa, come corrente elettrica, tutto il genio ribelle, ambiguo e maniacale di Nick Cave.
276 pages, Paperback
First published March 23, 2020
40 people are currently reading
1184 people want to read
About the author
Nick Cave
96 books1,974 followersNicholas Edward Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and occasional actor. He is best known for his work in the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and his fascination with American music and its roots. He has a reputation, which he disowns, for singing dark, brooding songs which some listeners regard as depressing. His music is characterised by intensity, high energy and a wide variety of influences. He currently lives in Brighton & Hove in England.
Cave released his first book King Ink, in 1988. It is a collection of lyrics and plays, including collaborations with American enfant terrible Lydia Lunch.
While he was based in West Berlin, Cave started working on what was to become his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career. "Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution). A collectors' limited edition of the book appeared in 2007.
Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel according to Mark, published in the UK in 1998. The American publication of the same book contains a foreword by a different author.
Cave released his first book King Ink, in 1988. It is a collection of lyrics and plays, including collaborations with American enfant terrible Lydia Lunch.
While he was based in West Berlin, Cave started working on what was to become his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career. "Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution). A collectors' limited edition of the book appeared in 2007.
Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel according to Mark, published in the UK in 1998. The American publication of the same book contains a foreword by a different author.
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July 8, 2020
CRITIQUE:
Nick Cave Infusion
The advance publicity for this book described it as an autobiography of Nick Cave. While it contains over twice as many images as the earlier book/catalogue, “Nick Cave Stories", Nick seems to have written only five pages of large print, a one-page lyric/poem about his wife, Susie, and a one-page reminiscence of when they first met. However, it's easy to forget that Nick made or wrote (or spoke) almost everything else in the book, especially the hand-written drafts of song lyrics and the artwork with which he surrounded them. Thus, his persona infuses almost the entire work (if not all of the excellent essay by author, Darcey Steinke, which explores resemblances to William Faulkner, William Blake, Wim Wenders, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and holy roller preachers). Paradoxically, the title of the book is the name of a Bad Seeds song written by Anita Lane and Blixa Bargeld, not Nick himself.
Manic Tangential Information
I was already familiar with many of the images from the original book, but what impressed me most and fleshed out the biographical content of the book were the notes in the section called “Contextualisation". Although (like the images) they're not in precise chronological order, they do constitute a helpful narrative of Nick's life and career as a musician. They don't purport to be comprehensive. Since the original book was published, the only more recent images seem to date from 2007-2008, 2011-2014 and 2019, the dates he was working on his second novel and his last four albums.
Nick Cave typing in "20,000 Days on Earth"
Frantic Empathy and the Locus of the Divine
For all this, the sections that Nick wrote are both informative and inspiring in an aphoristic and philosophical (not to mention, spiritual) fashion:
Nick Cave reveals himself, now and then, to be both a saviour and a very naughty boy.
VERSE:
Woke Up This Morning
I woke up this morning
With a sore head,
A full bladder
And an empty bed.
Stranger to Kindness [Haiku]
Tell me I'm dirty,
I'm a stranger to kindness.
You made me this way.
Burning Love [Haiku]
His love was burning
Like some bright erotic star,
Deep inside my skin.
Owed to Deanna [Haiku]
You're such an angel.
We commit another crime,
You're a mystery.
Musical Differences
I used to have some bandmates,
Who played away behind me,
But when we got into smack,
They done turned their backs on me.
SOUNDTRACK:
Nick Cave Infusion
The advance publicity for this book described it as an autobiography of Nick Cave. While it contains over twice as many images as the earlier book/catalogue, “Nick Cave Stories", Nick seems to have written only five pages of large print, a one-page lyric/poem about his wife, Susie, and a one-page reminiscence of when they first met. However, it's easy to forget that Nick made or wrote (or spoke) almost everything else in the book, especially the hand-written drafts of song lyrics and the artwork with which he surrounded them. Thus, his persona infuses almost the entire work (if not all of the excellent essay by author, Darcey Steinke, which explores resemblances to William Faulkner, William Blake, Wim Wenders, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and holy roller preachers). Paradoxically, the title of the book is the name of a Bad Seeds song written by Anita Lane and Blixa Bargeld, not Nick himself.
Manic Tangential Information
I was already familiar with many of the images from the original book, but what impressed me most and fleshed out the biographical content of the book were the notes in the section called “Contextualisation". Although (like the images) they're not in precise chronological order, they do constitute a helpful narrative of Nick's life and career as a musician. They don't purport to be comprehensive. Since the original book was published, the only more recent images seem to date from 2007-2008, 2011-2014 and 2019, the dates he was working on his second novel and his last four albums.
Nick Cave typing in "20,000 Days on Earth"
Frantic Empathy and the Locus of the Divine
For all this, the sections that Nick wrote are both informative and inspiring in an aphoristic and philosophical (not to mention, spiritual) fashion:
"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...They are a support system of manic tangential information...
"I don't see these things as 'art' works at all. They feel to me like fetish objects, or religious artefacts, the terrible residue of an over-stimulated mind...
“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...
“You were never the thing that you thought you were. You are an illusion, as [an] event shatters you into a multitude of pieces...
“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...
“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 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 reveals himself, now and then, to be both a saviour and a very naughty boy.
VERSE:
Woke Up This Morning
I woke up this morning
With a sore head,
A full bladder
And an empty bed.
Stranger to Kindness [Haiku]
Tell me I'm dirty,
I'm a stranger to kindness.
You made me this way.
Burning Love [Haiku]
His love was burning
Like some bright erotic star,
Deep inside my skin.
Owed to Deanna [Haiku]
You're such an angel.
We commit another crime,
You're a mystery.
Musical Differences
I used to have some bandmates,
Who played away behind me,
But when we got into smack,
They done turned their backs on me.
SOUNDTRACK:
May 15, 2021
Nick Cave changed my life when I first discovered him, sometime back in the mid-90s, by which point he'd already built a career spanning decades and the musical landscape I perceived at the time was growing ever more bleaker by the second. Personally, I'm still with him where he said, “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Still, the younger, saltier Cave of that era now seems a far cry removed from the older, more mellowed version of today, and the two of them finally chance to meet within the pages and on the cover of this gorgeously intimate book.
Cataloguing a lifetime's worth of writing, artwork, and various other artifacts from Cave's childhood through this present day, Stranger Than Kindness represents a selection of pieces from the exhibit of the same name, which finally opened last month at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. For those unable to attend, I would highly recommend this book for the insights it provides into the life and works of its subject.
Cataloguing a lifetime's worth of writing, artwork, and various other artifacts from Cave's childhood through this present day, Stranger Than Kindness represents a selection of pieces from the exhibit of the same name, which finally opened last month at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. For those unable to attend, I would highly recommend this book for the insights it provides into the life and works of its subject.
May 6, 2021
This beautifully designed coffee table book is a treasure trove for Cave fans: Accompanying an exhibition in Copenhagen, the book shows photos of Cave artifacts, from handwritten lyrics to notes about his novels, hand-made books, doodles, postcards, a letter from his school headmaster scolding him, religious objects and imagery, things he bought at flea markets that went on to inspire his work, pictures of a young Cave and his family and images of him with Anita Lane, Susie Cave etc. It's wonderful to look at the expensively produced pages until, at the very end, we get little explanations of the things we've seen and what they mean to their owner.
The book also contains a longer text by Darcy Steinke.
You can learn more about "Stranger Than Kindness" in our latest podcast episode (in German, as the book is now available with an extra booklet containing the German translations of the texts).
The book also contains a longer text by Darcy Steinke.
You can learn more about "Stranger Than Kindness" in our latest podcast episode (in German, as the book is now available with an extra booklet containing the German translations of the texts).
December 21, 2020
Nick is my parachute ❤️
April 30, 2020
A beautiful collection of photographs, lyrics, musings, and a fantastic essay on Cave's lyrics which all coalesce into a profound contextualization of the artist without dampening any of the enigmatic nature of his art.
March 14, 2021
Wie gerne würd ich gerade durch die Museumsräume der Nick-Cave-Exhibition in Kopenhagen laufen. Da das zurzeit nicht geht, was bleibt da anderes übrig, als sich in die Welt der Bücher zu flüchten. Dieses Jahr ist im Kiwi Verlag das passende Buch dazu erschienen.
Nick Cave ist als Künstler, als auch als Mensch, schwer einzuordnen. Seine Musik schwangt von schreienden Punk-Songs hin zu melancholischen Balladen mit feinfühligen Texten. Als Mensch wirkt er in Interviews oft wie ein Punk-Intellektueller mit viel Humor, auf der Bühne hingegen ist er eher eine Art Prediger, der seiner Gemeinde vom Glauben überzeugen möchte.
„Stranger than Kindness“ ist Lebenswerk, Biografie, Geschichte und eine Reise durch die kreative Welt von Nick Caves künstlerischer Gedankenwelt. Es enthält Reproduktionen von Originalkunstwerken, handgeschriebene Texte, Fotos, gesammelte persönliche Artefakten und Bilder von selbst gemachten Notizbüchern.
Wie es für Cave so typisch ist, sind die Gegenstände und Fotos voll von mystischen und religiösen Anspielungen, Symbolen, Bibelzitaten und Jesus. Das Buch veranschaulicht auf sehr künstlerische Art und Weise die Verwandlung von der Person Nicholas Edward Cave hin zu dem berühmten Künstler Nick Cave.
Cave ist in meinen Augen ein großartiger Künstler, aber auch ein bisschen verschroben und sehr eigen, deshalb ist dieses Buch auch so speziell und wird garantiert nicht jedem gefallen. Doch jeder, der sich mit dem Kosmos von Cave befassen will, kommt an diesem Buch nicht vorbei.
Eine klare Leseempfehlung!
Note:1
Nick Cave ist als Künstler, als auch als Mensch, schwer einzuordnen. Seine Musik schwangt von schreienden Punk-Songs hin zu melancholischen Balladen mit feinfühligen Texten. Als Mensch wirkt er in Interviews oft wie ein Punk-Intellektueller mit viel Humor, auf der Bühne hingegen ist er eher eine Art Prediger, der seiner Gemeinde vom Glauben überzeugen möchte.
„Stranger than Kindness“ ist Lebenswerk, Biografie, Geschichte und eine Reise durch die kreative Welt von Nick Caves künstlerischer Gedankenwelt. Es enthält Reproduktionen von Originalkunstwerken, handgeschriebene Texte, Fotos, gesammelte persönliche Artefakten und Bilder von selbst gemachten Notizbüchern.
Wie es für Cave so typisch ist, sind die Gegenstände und Fotos voll von mystischen und religiösen Anspielungen, Symbolen, Bibelzitaten und Jesus. Das Buch veranschaulicht auf sehr künstlerische Art und Weise die Verwandlung von der Person Nicholas Edward Cave hin zu dem berühmten Künstler Nick Cave.
Cave ist in meinen Augen ein großartiger Künstler, aber auch ein bisschen verschroben und sehr eigen, deshalb ist dieses Buch auch so speziell und wird garantiert nicht jedem gefallen. Doch jeder, der sich mit dem Kosmos von Cave befassen will, kommt an diesem Buch nicht vorbei.
Eine klare Leseempfehlung!
Note:1
May 19, 2020
“While metal takes on the mask of destroyer, punk is the wailing of the destroyed” 🤘🤘🤘
June 12, 2024
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
October 9, 2023
Grožis 🖤
Tikra puošmena Cave'o fanų altorėliams!
Tikra puošmena Cave'o fanų altorėliams!
March 24, 2020
Really enjoyed it except the essay in the middle.
July 19, 2022
Knyga per fotografijas, užrašinių ir rankų darbo knygų fragmentus (kuriose - reprodukcijos, koliažai, piešiniai ir kt.) leidžianti prisiliesti prie Cave'o kūrybos metodo, kuriame kūryba tampa tarpine terpe (savotišku mąstymo metodu) tekstams ir muzikai gimti:
* "These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song of book or script or score along. They are support system of manic tangential information" (p. not numbered)
* "I don't see these things as "art" works at all. They feel to me like fetish objects, or religious artefacts, the terrible residue of an over-stimulated mind." (p. 262)
* "He has called them [notebooks] 'objects of devotion'. <...> 'My notebooks, which are predominately a collection of failed ideas, nethertheless hold great value to me. They are proof of life, and I am never far from one." (p. 268)
Viskas pateikta su reikiama erdve ir knygos gale tykiai laukiančiais komentarais. Skaitydama pasijaučiau lyg apsilankiusi gerai sukuruotoje parodoje.
Visa puikiai suriša ir papildo Darcey Steinke esė 'God Is in the House' išnarstanti Cave tekstų kontekstus.
* "These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song of book or script or score along. They are support system of manic tangential information" (p. not numbered)
* "I don't see these things as "art" works at all. They feel to me like fetish objects, or religious artefacts, the terrible residue of an over-stimulated mind." (p. 262)
* "He has called them [notebooks] 'objects of devotion'. <...> 'My notebooks, which are predominately a collection of failed ideas, nethertheless hold great value to me. They are proof of life, and I am never far from one." (p. 268)
Viskas pateikta su reikiama erdve ir knygos gale tykiai laukiančiais komentarais. Skaitydama pasijaučiau lyg apsilankiusi gerai sukuruotoje parodoje.
Visa puikiai suriša ir papildo Darcey Steinke esė 'God Is in the House' išnarstanti Cave tekstų kontekstus.
April 17, 2020
Being a die-hard Nick Cave fan it’s pretty well assured that I would like this book. I wish I could make it to the exhibit. Least favorite part was the essay in the middle and the part I liked the best was the explanations at the end of the book.
Want to read
March 22, 2020Nick Cave's inspiration: pictures and notes from his archive
Nick Cave in Yorkstraße, West Berlin, in August, 1985. Photograph: Bleddyn Butcher
A scrapbook of rarely seen photos and sketches traces Nick Cave’s transformation from Aussie teenager into an international artist
by Sean O’Hagan
What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit,” writes Nick Cave in his introduction to Stranger Than Kindness. “It is the material that gives birth to and nourishes the official work.”
That intricate world includes drawings, lists, collages, scribbled notes and lyrics, found photographs and several handmade books, creased and stained, sometimes in his own blood. Therein the sacred and the profane, the biblical and the pornographic, exist side by side as they have done in Cave’s songs for about 40 years of often frantic creativity. There are pin-ups alongside devotional images of saints, sketches of nude female torsos alongside portraits of the madonna, and there are hand-written, home-made dictionaries listing arcane words, such as anchorite (a recluse), and autogamy (self-fertilisation).
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Cave calls it the “peripheral stuff”, which is “the secret and unformed property of the artist”, but here on the page it takes on a life of its own, revealing his often compulsive way of working, as well as his abiding interests and obsessions: desire, faith, sin, despair, redemption, grief, love, and the transformative thrust of language itself.
This is the raw (in every sense of the word) material out of which his songs and stories have emerged. It is also a map – messy and impulsive – of a creative life that for a long time was pursued with a ferociously self-destructive intent, and, latterly, with a singular acceptance and grace.
It begins with a photograph of Cave’s father, Colin, a teacher, who, in one uncharacteristic and transformative act, read aloud to his nine-year-old son the opening paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. “It was the most intimate moment I ever spent with my father,” Cave later said.
Among the other early personal fragments is a letter to Cave’s father from the headmaster of Caulfield grammar school in Melbourne, expressing concern at “aspects of Nick’s attitude and conduct”. It was written in 1975, when Cave was 17. A photograph from that same year shows him in David Bowie-style face paint, with rolled-up jeans and horizontally striped socks, fronting a school band as they perform onstage at Korowa Anglican girls school. Together, these two artefacts signal what is to come, as does a snapshot of a mesmerised teenage Nick Cave in the audience at a gig by the Saints, a Brisbane-based punk band whose punk attitude, he writes, ”changed everything”.
At art school he was part of a social group that included Anita Lane, his soon-to-be girlfriend and artistic collaborator, as well as Rowland S Howard, who would become the first of Cave’s many creative foils when they formed the implosive, fitfully brilliant post-punk group, the Birthday Party.
Interestingly, it is one of Lane’s songs – a favourite of Cave’s – that lends this book its title (he describes it as “an autopsy of the end of a relationship, and an extremely uncomfortable song to sing”). There is melodrama aplenty here, real and imagined. For me, the most totemic objects are the handmade books, which exist in the tradition of the artist’s book as art objects in their own right, but are also slightly outside of it as rawly intimate expressions of Cave’s obsessive nature. As with everything else here, they are not, Cave insists, “to be seen as artworks”, yet they have a definite presence: a ritualistic, almost fetishistic aura that speaks of a creative urge that is as relentless as it is compelling. Likewise, the female strands of hair that he collects and sometimes pastes to his collages.
The book is only a tiny reflection of an exhibition of the same name, which was due to open today at the Royal Library in Copenhagen but has been suspended because of coronavirus. The show comprises artefacts, videos and installations spanning Cave’s childhood to the present and will be rescheduled for later this year.
Several installations merge photographs, films and objects alongside music by Cave’s longtime collaborator, Warren Ellis.
One room is dedicated to his band, the Bad Seeds, with members, past and present, speaking of their experiences on a bank of video screens. A Hallway of Gratitude alludes to Cave’s abiding influences and includes a bust of Elvis hit by lightning, a projection of the poet, John Berryman, reading Dream Song 14 (‘Life, Friends, is Boring’), and a Roman column on which sits a piece of chewing gum discarded by Nina Simone.
Amid the homages and the surreal humour, there are moments of great tenderness, including an enlarged paparazzi shot of Cave and his wife, Susie, on their wedding day. This stolen moment is transformed and rendered hauntingly beautiful by the confetti that falls like snow over their faces. For now, the book must suffice. According to Cave, the artefacts it contains possess “a different creative energy to the formed work: raw and immediate, but no less compelling”.
There’s no arguing with that.
Colin Cave, c1956
Colin Cave
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Photograph: Photograph by Ernest Cameron / Reproduced by kind permission of Dawn Cave
Nick Cave’s father, Colin Cave, was a handsome and ambitious intellectual, who made a deep impression on people wherever he went. Remembered as an inspirational teacher of literature and drama, Colin Cave established the Wangaratta Adult Education Centre, and wrote the introduction to a book about Australia’s legendary bushranger called Ned Kelly: Man or Myth, receiving the Wangaratta Citizen of the Year Award in 1971. Moving to Melbourne with his family, Colin Cave became the director of the Victorian Council of Adult Education in 1972, a position he held until his early death in a car accident in 1979. Throughout his life, Colin Cave shared his love of literature with his children, reading Lolita to Nick, and writing several unpublished manuscripts. Cave was 21 when his father died and he left Melbourne for London shortly afterwards with his band the Birthday Party.
Dawn Cave, 1958
Dawn Cave
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Photograph: Reproduced by kind permission of Dawn Cave
Raised as an Anglican, Nick Cave’s mother, Dawn, is a role model of how to live a kind and generous life. A school librarian first at Wangaratta high school, and then Firbank girls’ school in Melbourne, she fostered the value of education with her students. Along with husband, Colin Cave, she appeared on stage with the Warracknabeal Dramatic Society, and as a violinist played on the track Muddy Water from Kicking Against the Pricks, released by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1986. Dawn Cave encouraged and supported Nick from an early age through piano lessons, choir practice, art classes, appearances at local Eisteddfods and his transition to Caulfield grammar as a boarder. When Cave moved to London in 1980 and then West Berlin in 1982, he and his mother corresponded regularly, their letters keeping them in close contact in between his trips back to Australia. When in Melbourne, Cave lives with his mother, now aged 93, talking, reminiscing and solving the problems of the world.
Rowland S Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane, Bronwyn Adams, Nauru House, Melbourne, 1977
Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane, Bronwyn Adams, Nauru House, Melbourne, 1977 Photograph by Peter Milne. Courtesy of Peter Milne and M.33, Melbourne
Photograph by Peter Milne. Courtesy of Peter Milne and M.33, Melbourne Photograph: Photograph by Peter Milne. Courtesy of Peter Milne and M.33, Melbourne
In 1976, Nick Cave enrolled at Caulfield Technical College to study painting. “All the things I loved,” Cave has written, “found their voice in art school.” After going to a private boys’ high school where he and his friends were regularly called fags, art school thrilled him.
And it radicalised him. He savoured conversations with other students and remembers one young woman who painted detailed mythological paintings only to deface them with angry-looking male genitalia. “I learned not just about art but how to question, how to be,” he said. He was horrified to fail his second year: “All I ever wanted to be was a painter.”
The influence of this intense period of his life resonated further. From his first days in London, writing to his mother about the wonder of visiting the National Gallery, all the way to his room in Berlin, with walls covered with prints of artworks by Piero della Francesca, Matthias Grünewald, Stefan Lochner and El Greco, to his own collages and album covers and his ongoing interest in outsider artist Louis Wain, Cave’s creative life is informed by art.
At Caulfield Cave made lifelong friends and colleagues including the artist Tony Clark, photographers Polly Borland and Peter Milne, and most significantly, his future girlfriend and artistic collaborator, Anita Lane.
Handwritten dictionary of words by Nick Cave
Handwritten dictionary of words by Nick Cave, 1984–85 Gift of Nick Cave, 2006, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne / Dan Magree Photography
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Nick Cave remembers the contact high he got from words even as a child. At 10, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, he thrilled to the lion that waved its tail “spasmodically” and leafing through a detective novel he found the phrase “a wicked little gun”. As Cave created the voice for Euchrid, he would read the dictionary and list words that gave off a sort of vibration. Using these words, he created his own dictionary. “The words I liked were obscene or just plain groovy. I had several of these dictionaries.”
1984–85 Gift of Nick Cave, 2006
Painting entitled Horn of Plenty by Anita Lane, 1977
Painting entitled Horn of Plenty by Anita Lane, 1977 Acrylic paint on canvas Reproduced by kind permission of Anita Lane
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Photograph: Reproduced by kind permission of Anita Lane
This painting of Nick Cave by Anita Lane was done in 1977. Anita once claimed that if Nick was hit by a bus he would be compelled to write about it in his own blood before he died.
Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Despair, by Nick Cave, 1985 (Ink, hair, plastic, paper, metal on paper)
Saint Jude Patron Saint of Despair by Nick Cave, 1985 Ink, hair, plastic, paper, metal on paper Gift of Nick Cave, 2006, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne
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Nick Cave wrote in 2007: ‘I’d bought a complete version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints in the mid-1980s and so I was pretty clued up with the saints and the various things they endured. St Jude was beaten to death with a club and then beheaded in Persia in the first century. He is the patron saint of desperate situations and lost causes and is the Daddy of the Blues. I found the prayer card, or whatever it is, most probably in the flea market in West Berlin, where I found much of my stuff. I’ve stuck some hair onto it because, well, I have a thing about hair and stamped it with the date 1985, because I have a thing about date stamps. So it is, in the end, a rather pleasing conjunction of things I like: decapitated saints, hair and date stamps.”
Extracted from Stranger Than Kindness by Nick Cave, published by Canongate (£35). To order a copy go guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
Stranger Than Kindness – the Nick Cave exhibition will take place at the Royal Library in Copenhagen later this year
Nick Cave in Yorkstraße, West Berlin, in August, 1985. Photograph: Bleddyn Butcher
A scrapbook of rarely seen photos and sketches traces Nick Cave’s transformation from Aussie teenager into an international artist
by Sean O’Hagan
What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit,” writes Nick Cave in his introduction to Stranger Than Kindness. “It is the material that gives birth to and nourishes the official work.”
That intricate world includes drawings, lists, collages, scribbled notes and lyrics, found photographs and several handmade books, creased and stained, sometimes in his own blood. Therein the sacred and the profane, the biblical and the pornographic, exist side by side as they have done in Cave’s songs for about 40 years of often frantic creativity. There are pin-ups alongside devotional images of saints, sketches of nude female torsos alongside portraits of the madonna, and there are hand-written, home-made dictionaries listing arcane words, such as anchorite (a recluse), and autogamy (self-fertilisation).
Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras
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Cave calls it the “peripheral stuff”, which is “the secret and unformed property of the artist”, but here on the page it takes on a life of its own, revealing his often compulsive way of working, as well as his abiding interests and obsessions: desire, faith, sin, despair, redemption, grief, love, and the transformative thrust of language itself.
This is the raw (in every sense of the word) material out of which his songs and stories have emerged. It is also a map – messy and impulsive – of a creative life that for a long time was pursued with a ferociously self-destructive intent, and, latterly, with a singular acceptance and grace.
It begins with a photograph of Cave’s father, Colin, a teacher, who, in one uncharacteristic and transformative act, read aloud to his nine-year-old son the opening paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. “It was the most intimate moment I ever spent with my father,” Cave later said.
Among the other early personal fragments is a letter to Cave’s father from the headmaster of Caulfield grammar school in Melbourne, expressing concern at “aspects of Nick’s attitude and conduct”. It was written in 1975, when Cave was 17. A photograph from that same year shows him in David Bowie-style face paint, with rolled-up jeans and horizontally striped socks, fronting a school band as they perform onstage at Korowa Anglican girls school. Together, these two artefacts signal what is to come, as does a snapshot of a mesmerised teenage Nick Cave in the audience at a gig by the Saints, a Brisbane-based punk band whose punk attitude, he writes, ”changed everything”.
At art school he was part of a social group that included Anita Lane, his soon-to-be girlfriend and artistic collaborator, as well as Rowland S Howard, who would become the first of Cave’s many creative foils when they formed the implosive, fitfully brilliant post-punk group, the Birthday Party.
Interestingly, it is one of Lane’s songs – a favourite of Cave’s – that lends this book its title (he describes it as “an autopsy of the end of a relationship, and an extremely uncomfortable song to sing”). There is melodrama aplenty here, real and imagined. For me, the most totemic objects are the handmade books, which exist in the tradition of the artist’s book as art objects in their own right, but are also slightly outside of it as rawly intimate expressions of Cave’s obsessive nature. As with everything else here, they are not, Cave insists, “to be seen as artworks”, yet they have a definite presence: a ritualistic, almost fetishistic aura that speaks of a creative urge that is as relentless as it is compelling. Likewise, the female strands of hair that he collects and sometimes pastes to his collages.
The book is only a tiny reflection of an exhibition of the same name, which was due to open today at the Royal Library in Copenhagen but has been suspended because of coronavirus. The show comprises artefacts, videos and installations spanning Cave’s childhood to the present and will be rescheduled for later this year.
Several installations merge photographs, films and objects alongside music by Cave’s longtime collaborator, Warren Ellis.
One room is dedicated to his band, the Bad Seeds, with members, past and present, speaking of their experiences on a bank of video screens. A Hallway of Gratitude alludes to Cave’s abiding influences and includes a bust of Elvis hit by lightning, a projection of the poet, John Berryman, reading Dream Song 14 (‘Life, Friends, is Boring’), and a Roman column on which sits a piece of chewing gum discarded by Nina Simone.
Amid the homages and the surreal humour, there are moments of great tenderness, including an enlarged paparazzi shot of Cave and his wife, Susie, on their wedding day. This stolen moment is transformed and rendered hauntingly beautiful by the confetti that falls like snow over their faces. For now, the book must suffice. According to Cave, the artefacts it contains possess “a different creative energy to the formed work: raw and immediate, but no less compelling”.
There’s no arguing with that.
Colin Cave, c1956
Colin Cave
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Photograph: Photograph by Ernest Cameron / Reproduced by kind permission of Dawn Cave
Nick Cave’s father, Colin Cave, was a handsome and ambitious intellectual, who made a deep impression on people wherever he went. Remembered as an inspirational teacher of literature and drama, Colin Cave established the Wangaratta Adult Education Centre, and wrote the introduction to a book about Australia’s legendary bushranger called Ned Kelly: Man or Myth, receiving the Wangaratta Citizen of the Year Award in 1971. Moving to Melbourne with his family, Colin Cave became the director of the Victorian Council of Adult Education in 1972, a position he held until his early death in a car accident in 1979. Throughout his life, Colin Cave shared his love of literature with his children, reading Lolita to Nick, and writing several unpublished manuscripts. Cave was 21 when his father died and he left Melbourne for London shortly afterwards with his band the Birthday Party.
Dawn Cave, 1958
Dawn Cave
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Photograph: Reproduced by kind permission of Dawn Cave
Raised as an Anglican, Nick Cave’s mother, Dawn, is a role model of how to live a kind and generous life. A school librarian first at Wangaratta high school, and then Firbank girls’ school in Melbourne, she fostered the value of education with her students. Along with husband, Colin Cave, she appeared on stage with the Warracknabeal Dramatic Society, and as a violinist played on the track Muddy Water from Kicking Against the Pricks, released by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1986. Dawn Cave encouraged and supported Nick from an early age through piano lessons, choir practice, art classes, appearances at local Eisteddfods and his transition to Caulfield grammar as a boarder. When Cave moved to London in 1980 and then West Berlin in 1982, he and his mother corresponded regularly, their letters keeping them in close contact in between his trips back to Australia. When in Melbourne, Cave lives with his mother, now aged 93, talking, reminiscing and solving the problems of the world.
Rowland S Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane, Bronwyn Adams, Nauru House, Melbourne, 1977
Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane, Bronwyn Adams, Nauru House, Melbourne, 1977 Photograph by Peter Milne. Courtesy of Peter Milne and M.33, Melbourne
Photograph by Peter Milne. Courtesy of Peter Milne and M.33, Melbourne Photograph: Photograph by Peter Milne. Courtesy of Peter Milne and M.33, Melbourne
In 1976, Nick Cave enrolled at Caulfield Technical College to study painting. “All the things I loved,” Cave has written, “found their voice in art school.” After going to a private boys’ high school where he and his friends were regularly called fags, art school thrilled him.
And it radicalised him. He savoured conversations with other students and remembers one young woman who painted detailed mythological paintings only to deface them with angry-looking male genitalia. “I learned not just about art but how to question, how to be,” he said. He was horrified to fail his second year: “All I ever wanted to be was a painter.”
The influence of this intense period of his life resonated further. From his first days in London, writing to his mother about the wonder of visiting the National Gallery, all the way to his room in Berlin, with walls covered with prints of artworks by Piero della Francesca, Matthias Grünewald, Stefan Lochner and El Greco, to his own collages and album covers and his ongoing interest in outsider artist Louis Wain, Cave’s creative life is informed by art.
At Caulfield Cave made lifelong friends and colleagues including the artist Tony Clark, photographers Polly Borland and Peter Milne, and most significantly, his future girlfriend and artistic collaborator, Anita Lane.
Handwritten dictionary of words by Nick Cave
Handwritten dictionary of words by Nick Cave, 1984–85 Gift of Nick Cave, 2006, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne / Dan Magree Photography
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Nick Cave remembers the contact high he got from words even as a child. At 10, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, he thrilled to the lion that waved its tail “spasmodically” and leafing through a detective novel he found the phrase “a wicked little gun”. As Cave created the voice for Euchrid, he would read the dictionary and list words that gave off a sort of vibration. Using these words, he created his own dictionary. “The words I liked were obscene or just plain groovy. I had several of these dictionaries.”
1984–85 Gift of Nick Cave, 2006
Painting entitled Horn of Plenty by Anita Lane, 1977
Painting entitled Horn of Plenty by Anita Lane, 1977 Acrylic paint on canvas Reproduced by kind permission of Anita Lane
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Photograph: Reproduced by kind permission of Anita Lane
This painting of Nick Cave by Anita Lane was done in 1977. Anita once claimed that if Nick was hit by a bus he would be compelled to write about it in his own blood before he died.
Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Despair, by Nick Cave, 1985 (Ink, hair, plastic, paper, metal on paper)
Saint Jude Patron Saint of Despair by Nick Cave, 1985 Ink, hair, plastic, paper, metal on paper Gift of Nick Cave, 2006, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne
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Nick Cave wrote in 2007: ‘I’d bought a complete version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints in the mid-1980s and so I was pretty clued up with the saints and the various things they endured. St Jude was beaten to death with a club and then beheaded in Persia in the first century. He is the patron saint of desperate situations and lost causes and is the Daddy of the Blues. I found the prayer card, or whatever it is, most probably in the flea market in West Berlin, where I found much of my stuff. I’ve stuck some hair onto it because, well, I have a thing about hair and stamped it with the date 1985, because I have a thing about date stamps. So it is, in the end, a rather pleasing conjunction of things I like: decapitated saints, hair and date stamps.”
Extracted from Stranger Than Kindness by Nick Cave, published by Canongate (£35). To order a copy go guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
Stranger Than Kindness – the Nick Cave exhibition will take place at the Royal Library in Copenhagen later this year
October 18, 2021
this book is fantastic as a coffee table book if you are a huge fan of nick cave!!! his collection of art, lyrics and photos somehow tell a lot about nick cave without really saying much …. loved this as a huge nick cave fan!
July 29, 2022
It's Nick Cave, so it's awesome and you should find a copy and buy it and revel in its awesomeness. I have enormous respect for Nick Cave and his artistic genius and intellectual depth, so any book that details aspects of either of these is always going to be part of my library. And one I will return to when needed.
December 18, 2021
Beautiful
August 20, 2022
It’s perfect for what it is. I saw Nick Cave for the second time last week and it was magical, something between a horror movie and a religious ceremony. What a performer, what an artist. The concept is so clear, always been. Not much to read, but much to take in.
November 23, 2020
Nick Cave’s life appears to be focused on using the darkness of his life to find grace. This makes for beautiful songs and a beautiful book.
June 9, 2024
“You reassemble yourself into something that seems absolutely foreign to you, yet fully and instantly recognis-able.”
“For I can see a moment in between
The waking horror and the sleeping dream
Where the world and she are breathless beautiful
Where the world and she are breathless beautiful”
“'man is constantly moving on - he is essentially becoming; he is on the way.
For man to be means to be on the way - he cannot be in any other form, movement is intrinsic to a pilgrim, not yet arrived, regardless of whether he is aware of it or not, whether he accepts it or not.”
“There is no God without human beings; the human imagination makes God. Doubt in our imagined divinity is, in part, what fuels faith.”
“Every angel is the embodiment of a single emotion or impulse. 'The action transcends its physical place, time and individual connection and rises into the angel world: an angel is created.'”
“We are God. We are human. Both at the same time. And this is what makes our position on earth tricky, humorous, beautiful and impossible.”
“For I can see a moment in between
The waking horror and the sleeping dream
Where the world and she are breathless beautiful
Where the world and she are breathless beautiful”
“'man is constantly moving on - he is essentially becoming; he is on the way.
For man to be means to be on the way - he cannot be in any other form, movement is intrinsic to a pilgrim, not yet arrived, regardless of whether he is aware of it or not, whether he accepts it or not.”
“There is no God without human beings; the human imagination makes God. Doubt in our imagined divinity is, in part, what fuels faith.”
“Every angel is the embodiment of a single emotion or impulse. 'The action transcends its physical place, time and individual connection and rises into the angel world: an angel is created.'”
“We are God. We are human. Both at the same time. And this is what makes our position on earth tricky, humorous, beautiful and impossible.”
May 25, 2021
"You seize the unknowable fragments and begin to put yourself back together again".
This is a raw look into the mind and soul of Nick Cave. His music and books have come from some of these moments, these fragments. We see a troubled soul, a larrikin, a dishevelled devil, and a pondering provocoteur. You cannot ignore he has style and grace. It is easy to get carried away with this book and forget this is but a glimpse of an artist at work, and someone willing to feel every emotion, all at once and not at all, simultaneously.Nick Cave isnt a sentimental soul, and I did not get the Impression that this was a lovely trip down memory lane for anyone, but what it does is present visual stories of his creativity: we have already been graced with his lyrics, melodies and words, and this book adds another dimension to his repertoire.
"Everyone who goes on a mission is an angel. The angel in this way of thinking is the imagination itself."
This is a raw look into the mind and soul of Nick Cave. His music and books have come from some of these moments, these fragments. We see a troubled soul, a larrikin, a dishevelled devil, and a pondering provocoteur. You cannot ignore he has style and grace. It is easy to get carried away with this book and forget this is but a glimpse of an artist at work, and someone willing to feel every emotion, all at once and not at all, simultaneously.Nick Cave isnt a sentimental soul, and I did not get the Impression that this was a lovely trip down memory lane for anyone, but what it does is present visual stories of his creativity: we have already been graced with his lyrics, melodies and words, and this book adds another dimension to his repertoire.
"Everyone who goes on a mission is an angel. The angel in this way of thinking is the imagination itself."
July 19, 2020
Packed with images from Cave’s personal collection, this coffee table book is a nice addition to the already groaning music bookshelf. A wee bit low on the word count if you really want to have something to moan about.
Worth buying for the photograph of a young Cave at a Saints gig looking like he’s discovered what he’s going to with the rest of his life.
Worth buying for the photograph of a young Cave at a Saints gig looking like he’s discovered what he’s going to with the rest of his life.
November 15, 2024
A companion piece to an art exhibition about Cave that was held in Copenhagen, I decided to read Stranger Than Kindness to scratch my renewed Nick Cave itch after witnessing his astonishing live show in Manchester last week. The bulk of the book is made up of high-resolution photographs of many of the exhibits – namely handwritten lyrics, fragments of inspiration and other miscellanea that Cave accumulated over the years. Many are fascinating but some are imbued with excess importance by both Cave and his curators; not for nothing is Cave's former girlfriend and collaborator Anita Lane quoted in the book as saying that if "Nick was hit by a bus he would be compelled to write about it in his own blood before he died" (pg. 260).
That said, Nick Cave is evidently an artist of real depth, and this comes out most prominently in the most substantial written aspect of the book: a 14-page essay by Darcey Steinke. This is also fascinating but a bit unfocused; it is heavily-laden with digressions and quotes from other sources which means its rhythm is often interrupted. Nevertheless, it provokes plenty of deep thoughts.
Nick Cave's own written contribution is minimal, amounting to an abstract introductory prose piece and an occasional one-paragraph comment throughout. However, his presence deeply invests these pages, whether that is the brooding, violently-written handwritten notes from his early years or the still-restless hand that contributes the later notes and lyrics. While Stranger Than Kindness is a limited book that is only for the most devoted Nick Cave fans, it does, for those fans, provide the compelling energy that Cave expressly hopes for in his introduction.
That said, Nick Cave is evidently an artist of real depth, and this comes out most prominently in the most substantial written aspect of the book: a 14-page essay by Darcey Steinke. This is also fascinating but a bit unfocused; it is heavily-laden with digressions and quotes from other sources which means its rhythm is often interrupted. Nevertheless, it provokes plenty of deep thoughts.
Nick Cave's own written contribution is minimal, amounting to an abstract introductory prose piece and an occasional one-paragraph comment throughout. However, his presence deeply invests these pages, whether that is the brooding, violently-written handwritten notes from his early years or the still-restless hand that contributes the later notes and lyrics. While Stranger Than Kindness is a limited book that is only for the most devoted Nick Cave fans, it does, for those fans, provide the compelling energy that Cave expressly hopes for in his introduction.
January 27, 2025
“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.” In Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness, released to coincide with the Copenhagen art exhibition of the same name, the neural networks, the emotional and spiritual and intellectual components that inspire and inform Cave’s work are laid bare, open for all to see; an unsurprising development following Cave’s sparser lyrical sound, and his forays into connection with the Red Hand Files and his In Conversation events. After an almost elegiac opening prose-poem, the exhibition begins, illuminated with biographical and contextual notes at the back of the book, interrupted briefly for an extended essay, ‘God Is In The House’ by Darcey Steinke, which situates Cave’s work at the intersection of the rock tradition and the holy rollers, weaving a stunning portrait of Cave, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jesus Christ as united, holy, tragic, human figures. There’s Cave’s artistic creations, often dark and difficult to understand, as well as photographs of him at work, and reproductions of his notebooks, thoughts and lyrics in development. I was especially interested to see some of the sick bags on which Cave wrote ‘The Sick Bag Songs’, his incredible long poem; partly for the insight to his craft, but also for the realisation that Canongate nailed the font and style of the sick bag! Reading this book yesterday felt freeing, like I was stepping into a gallery, the world not falling apart around us; while the exhibition itself has been postponed, I think this book is still enough to crystallise the artist and his work, and to bring people together – spiritually, where it counts most.
March 13, 2021
Impulse buy. On one hand, this is a pretty cool book. Loads of weird Nick Cave pictures and ephemera, not all of it rational. Why include specific pages of a self-created book and not more lyric reprints? These kinds of things kind of bothered me as I read this. In the end, this is really more of an adults only coffee table book. Outside of providing the artifacts, it doesn't seem like Cave had a lot to do with this book. There is a smattering of blurbs and briefly written descriptions, but the one piece of writing - an essay by Darcey Steinke - is kind of a mess. My favorite part was the "Contextualisation" section where each artifact is explained. Super weird, but what can one expect? Definitely worth owning, but for serious fans only.
November 24, 2024
Atlikėjo ir rašytojo Nicko Cave'o daiktų, užrašų ir kitų kūrybai reikšmingų detalių rinkinys su puikiu įžanginiu straipsniu bei įdomiomis minėtų daiktų istorijomis.
Žavus žvilgsnis į tai, kaip vyksta kūrybinis procesas, jo gaivališkumą ir neįprastumą. Žaviuosi žmonėmis, kurie sugeba šiam procesui atsiduoti ir jį sąžiningai sekti, kad ir kur nuvestų.
Labiausiai įsiminę dalykai:
Kad Šv. raštas ir religiniai tekstai gali būti didžiuliu įkvėpimo šaltiniu net jei nesi tikintis.
Kad žmonės bijo savo tamsiosios pusės, laiko ją svetimu dalyku, nors iš tiesų tai neatsiejama mūsų dalis.
O menininko darbas kažkuria prasme yra nueiti į tą tamsą, tada iš jos parsinešti medžiagos ir parodyti bailiems žmogeliams, kad mažiau bijotų – čia jau mano mintis.
Žavus žvilgsnis į tai, kaip vyksta kūrybinis procesas, jo gaivališkumą ir neįprastumą. Žaviuosi žmonėmis, kurie sugeba šiam procesui atsiduoti ir jį sąžiningai sekti, kad ir kur nuvestų.
Labiausiai įsiminę dalykai:
Kad Šv. raštas ir religiniai tekstai gali būti didžiuliu įkvėpimo šaltiniu net jei nesi tikintis.
Kad žmonės bijo savo tamsiosios pusės, laiko ją svetimu dalyku, nors iš tiesų tai neatsiejama mūsų dalis.
O menininko darbas kažkuria prasme yra nueiti į tą tamsą, tada iš jos parsinešti medžiagos ir parodyti bailiems žmogeliams, kad mažiau bijotų – čia jau mano mintis.
February 4, 2023
Incredibly illuminating images at times, but often blank pages or a wallet.
Severely lacking in the quality of essay that one would expect to find as the centerpiece of such a pricey printed work.
This is at best a companion to the Nick Cave discography and docudrama trilogy.
Also one cant go without saying that this is not even really a book about Nick Cave. This is a book about the inspiration spawned by the nurturing love and companionship given by two incredibly gifted women that happen to take the perspective of the back pocket of their more famous friend.
I love Nick Cave but timing and presentation and cost leave more questions than answers with this piece.
December 24, 2024
Caves cut and paste work, as an artist trying to find his form, Cave's scribblings in several notebooks, touching photography from his art school days, and all-round memorabilia of the singer and preacher this man is: where other scrap books of people I love failed me, because they felt like the object of my admiration still was somehow missing from the manyfold scraps and pieces, here it works wonderful, probably because Nick Cave might just be the kind of man to be known via his scrapbook. Especially the facsimiles of the hand-made-single-issue books he produced as an early artist are very interesting. As are notes to some Ghosteen lyrics.
January 4, 2023
This book was created as an accompaniment to an exhibition in Denmark of Nick Cave artifacts and as such the book is mostly comprised of reproductions of those objects (artwork by the artist, notebooks, drafts of lyrics and novels etc.). There are two original written pieces by Nick Cave as well as good essay. The final part of the book contextualizes the items included in the exhibit, which ends up being a bit of a potted biography in itself.
The hardback book is beautifully put together, and for fans of Nick Cave is something you'll dip in and out of for a while.
The hardback book is beautifully put together, and for fans of Nick Cave is something you'll dip in and out of for a while.
June 3, 2021
I love Nick Cave and this book was a gorgeously designed look at a variety of artifacts from his illustrious career but…I wanted more. More of his life in his own words. More photos and anecdotes and stories from the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds. More more more. Okay I’m being ridiculous. This book wasn’t exactly what I expected but will serve as a solid stopgap until the man delivers his definitive autobiography to us.
July 21, 2021
I'd hoped to visit the exhibition in Copenhagen but that fell through, due to Covid. This was my consolation prize and it didn't disappoint.
A coffeetable book to browse and enjoy visually, but also to read bits and pieces occasionally.
Also a conversation piece as it happens, with visitors: bot the fascinated as the repulsed.
A coffeetable book to browse and enjoy visually, but also to read bits and pieces occasionally.
Also a conversation piece as it happens, with visitors: bot the fascinated as the repulsed.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews