Nick Cave, singer and writer
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening. MUSIC PLAYS

© BF-WATCH TV 2021

My castaway this week is the singer and writer Nick Cave. He's one of the most highly regarded storytellers in music today, who's been captivating audiences with compelling narratives and electrifying live performances for over 40 years. He grew up in Wangaratta, Australia, and describes his childhood as idyllic and free-range. When his rebellious teens hit, he was sent to boarding school in Melbourne to straighten him out. He joined a band instead.

In 1980, his search for something bigger, darker and more thrilling brought him to London with a band who renamed themselves The Birthday Party on the plane over.

In those days, he revelled in his outsider status, but as his art and his life progressed, he has ventured beyond the fire and brimstone of his early work, reaching out instead of kicking out. His recent songs, written for his band The Bad Seeds, are about love, loss, faith, fear and hope. Many were recorded in the aftermath of the death of two of his sons and have been among the most lauded of his career.

He says, Nick Cave, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

That was very beautiful. You said it all. Well, hopefully not. I think there's plenty to talk about. So, Nick, your description of songwriting there sounds almost devotional, you know, this act of love that you're sitting down to create something. How do you know when you're onto something? It sounds quite physical. Mostly when I write, it's despairing in the fact that all I'm doing is writing bad stuff. I have endless notebooks which I've told my wife to burn upon my death. LAUGHTER

In case anyone decides that they should look through them and see what kind of writer I actually am. And I write a lot. And within that lot, there are some precious moments that reveal themselves in time, by which I mean that everything I put down on the page looks bad, sounds bad. It's never like, wow.

but certain lines just sit there on the page and they do sort of lift themselves out of the kind of morass of rubbish.

by which I'm saying I do not sit down ever with an idea for a song. This is what I want to write a song about. This is what's concerning me at the moment. I need to write this. I've read this in the newspaper. What a terrible thing. I need to write a song about it. I simply don't write songs in that way. The songs reveal themselves perfectly.

and through time. What about a song like Into My Arms? It's hard to imagine that not fully formed, coming together in that way. Yeah, I mean, that particular song I wrote in... I was actually in rehab. They allow you to go to church, and I'd been to church on a Sunday and I was walking back through the field, back to this terrible place, and the sort of melody came into my head and I sort of ran upstairs and started writing those words down.

A new patient was sharing the room with me who was a junkie in a desperate state who'd come out of the shower and I remember him spraying body links, whatever that stuff was called. Body spray. Body spray all over himself as if this was going to change things in some way. And he said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm writing a song. And he goes, why? What did you say? I'm just like...

I don't know. Anyway, that was the song. That was, you know, I don't believe in an interventionist God and all of that sort of stuff.

From your description of songwriting, though, Nick, I can see it's not something you look forward to. There are other aspects of music that you enjoy more than writing, for sure. How do you approach it? How do you make sure you get it done? The writing? Yeah. Well, first of all, I go to work like everybody else does and it's not up for debate. I approach it in office hours. I always have. I get up and I wear a suit and I find the more...

The more sort of strictures I put on things, the more I kind of hem the creative process in, the better I write. And weirdly, the more my imagination has a certain freedom. You know, I'm envious of people who don't need that. There are people that just wander around the world and ideas fall down from wherever and...

And they sit and they strum a guitar, you know, one day and they write a song and then they carry on living. And I don't I could never work in that way.

Nick, I can't wait to hear the music that you've chosen to take to your data island today. So I think we should dive in with your first track. Tell us what we're going to hear. We're going to listen to Metal Guru. T-Rex is a band that I return to constantly. I think that Mark Bolan was one of the truly great lyric writers. I think he basically invented his own language and

He's not looked upon in the same regard, I think, in that respect to some of the other people from his time. But I think he was the best of the lot. MUSIC PLAYS

T-Rex and Metal Guru. What a song. What a song. I mean, what a start. We are off. We are off. So, Nick Cave, let's go back to the beginning then. You grew up in Wangaratta, Victoria. You are the third of four kids. What were you like when you were little?

Vying for attention. OK, how did you get it? Well, I had two elder brothers and my auntie said when I came out, everyone had to have a stiff drink. That's what she said, which I never quite forgot. But look, I had an amazing childhood in the sense that my mother would just kick the children out of the house in the morning and you come back for dinner. You know, it was in the country, it was in the Australian bush area.

And you just roamed around the town like, you know, from a Spielberg movie or something on your bikes. But, you know, it made me brave. It made me do all sorts of absolutely hair-raising sorts of things as a child. What kind of things? Well, it made me kind of unfearful. I mean, we would go down to the...

And there's a sort of small river underneath with one place you can jump in. And we would listen to the train tracks and hear the train, which was going to come around the corner. And we would run toward the train and leap off.

the train tracks before the train got close to us. So you only had to sort of fall over or whatever. I mean, I don't recommend it. It's not something that I would allow to happen, but it was an entirely different way of raising children back then. So your father, Colin, taught maths and English at the local high school. What did he teach you? He taught me a lot. He was a very loud, gestural person.

knew his poetry, knew his writers, would take books out of my hand that he thought were...

less than and replace them with something that had the same body count, let's say, but was more interesting. What would be a typical swap? Well, I'd be reading some crappy crime novel and he would put Titus Andronicus, let's say, by Shakespeare in my hand because it has, you know, it's a massively bloody play. But I think my father enjoyed taking me to things that were slightly out of order, that I was a little too young for.

to be seen that were kind of offensive, that just sort of shook up what I thought about things. And first of all, when I was quite young, he used to take me to Barry Humphrey, Dame Edna Everidge shows. You know, I was only 12 or something like that. Now, what she's on TV is one thing, but a live show of hers is absolutely outrageous. And I remember just being absolutely entranced. But he also took me to film festivals where there were

Quite adult movies that I saw with him. He read me the first chapter of Lolita and said, this is what literature is all about. It's actually quite emotional for me to talk about this because he was sitting me down and saying, this is what it's about. That idea that art should shake you up and should...

confront you and shock you and offend and all of these sorts of things. And, you know, he wasn't afraid of that in his own approach either because I think he asked you quite a confrontational question when you were just 12 and it was a penny drop moment for you. Would you tell us what happened? Well, you know, I mean, the thing about my father was he was a great teacher, but he also, I think he also wanted to be a writer. And even though he's extraordinarily articulate, I think he only ever,

had his writing in a couple of magazines. They used to print little essays and stuff back then. But he did ask me what I had done to help the world or to save the world. It was some... Was it, what have you done for humanity? Yes, that's right. It was an unbelievably pompous question to ask, like, a 12-year-old who didn't even know what humanity meant. LAUGHTER

You know, and I asked him what he'd done, and he showed me these little bits of writing, and he was very moved by that. That's kind of what he was like. At the dinner table, we would all sit around the dinner table, and he said, OK, what have you done...

today at school and the kids would be like, oh no, whatever. And then he'd go, well, and then he would sort of expand upon his day, right? I'm kind of painting him out to be a complete pain in the ass actually, but it was actually exciting to be in his presence. And it was exciting when he turned his attention onto you. And I

He liked me because I was interested in these matters. It's time for your second disc. What have you chosen? It's called My Father by Nina Simone, and I remember first hearing this. I was driving in a car and this came on, and, you know, I had to pull over and have this moment with this song because it's unbelievably moving.

There's a fundamental truth to the way that she sings that's a giant expansion of the heart when she sings this. My father always promised me We would live in France Holding on the same love

My father, Nina Simone. Nick Cave, your mother Dawn was a librarian at the school where your dad taught. You said she was a strong character and this was very much put to the test when you were 21 and your father was killed in a car crash. It must have been devastating for all of you. How was she able to come back from that? She was extremely warm, extremely loving, but she didn't go in for public displays of grief and...

By that stage, I was in pretty bad condition and not really able to handle this sort of stuff very well. I was, you know, taking a lot of drugs and drinking a lot and felt ill-equipped to deal with my mother's pain. And I regret that. I wish I had been able to talk about this sort of stuff with her, but...

I was just unformed, you know. I was unformed in these matters. To process your own grief at that age, something so terrible happening, must have been almost impossible. Like you say, you're unformed, maybe you don't have the language. I think I was quite immature in the way that I went about things. I don't think I was ever even remotely able to articulate the feelings I felt about my father dying back then. I'm not sure if I ever really worked that out.

I just ran away and went to London and blasted my way through the next 20 years or something like that. I wish I had been more alert to what she was going through. What kind of thing was she going through? Looking back, what are you thinking about? She was a very attractive woman and she got a sort of palsy of the face where she just woke up one morning and half her face had sort of collapsed and just carried on.

Now, if that happened to me, I'd be, you know, I'd have written 20 albums about it. Yeah. But do you know what I mean? You know, and I think because she was like that, we just sort of... Assumed she could do anything. She's just an absolutely amazing woman. You know, I think that there's something about a mother's love. If it is unconditional and it doesn't really... It's not predicated on good behaviour, that's for sure. It's just there. This...

feeling X as a

safety net, you're able to operate in the world in an entirely different way with a confidence that if that safety net wasn't there, it would be a completely different story. So she gave you great freedom in a way because you've said that regardless of what you did, you know, throughout all the years that you were using drugs or when she didn't know where your career was going, all of that. In trouble with the police. I was always in trouble with the police and she just, you know, it was clearly my fault. I

I clearly deserved to be in trouble with the police and she'd just be like, those bloody bastards, those bloody coppers. That sort of mumbling, you know, and I'd be just sitting next to her. On your side to an unreasonable extent. Yes, exactly. So talk me through the change in you then because it's interesting. You know, you had this kind of idyllic Steven Spielberg montage, childhood, free range and were a pretty well-behaved little kid but then, you know, you approach your teens, 11, 12 I think and things start to change. What happened exactly? Yeah.

I don't know, I was just a troublemaker, outspoken in class, talking back all the time. A kind of me against them kind of feeling towards the school in general. That ended up really in me getting kicked out of the school. I mean, it was a terrible situation anyway, because both my parents worked at this school, so...

the headmaster's office was in the in the hallway on the way to the staff room and so I was in constantly sitting in the chair outside the headmaster's office where my mother would walk past or my father would walk past and then there would be the sort of meal in the evening and all of that sort of stuff yeah um so I was quite glad to have gotten kicked out and went to a for one year I was a a

a boarder in a school in Melbourne. I've seen a couple of pictures of you and your early bands at boarding school and, you know, you look like you're out there, you know, making a point, being different, embracing what must have made you different. I think I often got a lot of energy from the general contempt people had for me. You know, look, I was in an all-boys private school for four or five years and

And so I was always pushing against that. I just never really liked to be told what to do and how to behave and what to sing and what to play and all of this sort of stuff. And I think this very much carries on to this day. I find that fundamentally sticks in my craw. That's what my father was teaching me from the very beginning, to be a kind of social adjutant to the culture itself.

Nick, I think we should have some more music. It's your third choice today. What's it going to be? I've got I'm Stranded by the Saints. So they came down from Brisbane with a sound that they'd worked out entirely on their own, which weirdly sort of sat before the punk thing happened in Britain. We're very proud of that aspect of the Saints in Australia. We got there first and they put out I'm Stranded first, right?

If there's one prevailing emotion that came from those live shows, it was complete contempt about everything. And that was really unbelievably exciting. You know, they had it all down. We were just sort of flailing around.

The Saints and I'm Stranded. Nick Cave, you formed your first band while you were still at school. How did you get to be the lead singer? I think I was the only one who would do it. The others played instruments and that was just the obvious choice. Not that I could sing. That seemed at the time to be a mere detail. I had a...

I was happy to stand on stage and give it a go. You went to art school in Melbourne a little later, but you left to focus on the band. By that point, they were called The Boys Next Door. And in 1980, you and the band moved to London. You became the birthday party, I think, on the plane over. And critics described your early gigs as riotous. You said that they were religious in their own way. You incorporated biblical imagery in your songwriting from very early on.

Tell me about your interest in that language, that world, and bringing it into the music. I don't want to get too much into this, but it really goes back to when I was very, very young. My grandmother had a Bible. This was before I could even really read, certainly before I could understand what the Bible was trying to tell me. She had this great big family Bible, which she gave to me, or at least that's what I thought that she did.

And it was just this massive, beautiful thing. I still actually have it, that I would sit there and look at and kind of feel this sort of weird allure about this mysterious book, full of these mysterious stories that I would start to hear when I started going to church. You know, Old Testament stories, terrifying, terrible stories, and these beautiful, strange, haunting New Testament stories.

And I was just always sort of... I always found them compelling. And how did you find living in London back then? We were living in Earls Court in a bedsit. There was...

I don't know how many of us there with our girlfriends and so forth. We were just crammed into this tiny little place. So, yeah, we were very close in that respect. And what about your mum? What was she thinking at this time? Because, as you said, she's always supportive. What did she make of the mayhem that you were causing in Earl's Court and beyond? Well, we downplayed it. She died during Covid and...

When we were going through her things, I found this box that my mother had kept of my letters to my mother from Earl's Court. There were a hundred of them, you know, and they were long. And I mean, if I was getting these letters as a parent, I would freak. You know, there was so I mean, I was desperately trying to hide the situation that I was in, which was pretty dire.

you know, what a good time we're all having over here in London. And also asking them to please write to me. You know, we couldn't afford long distance phone calls or anything like that. So there was a, there were very, there was strangely, weirdly loving, desperate letters from across the sea. But she did come over to sort of see me and that was quite distressing in a way. We were all living in a squat in London.

in Maida Vale and with all the windows kicked out and so forth but we were on a train we were going to visit some distant relative or something like that and I opened up the NME and there was this little ad for the birthday party that had a gig somewhere and my mother saw that and just this sort of look of relief on her face that okay this is actually not just something in my imagination and

So that was a lovely moment. Nick, let's have some more music. Your fourth choice today. What are you taking to the island next? OK, this sounds gloomy. It actually is a little gloomy, this song. But it's called It Serves You Right to Suffer by John Lee Hooker.

I think a friend... No, no, I bought a tape of this particular record from Camden Market just because of the amazing cover. It's got a picture of John Lee Hooker's up close of his face and he looks like he's screaming in agony and it just says, it serves your right to suffer. And I thought, wow, what's that? And played it in the car and it really changed things for me because that first line, it serves your right to suffer...

Serves you right to be alone You're still living the day done Packed its bags and gone Or something like that This desperate line sung to himself And it pointed to a way of singing That you just sort of sat back I hadn't quite worked that out yet But I sing much more like that these days With a lot of sort of things A kind of dark bluesy croon I mean the start of the song's absolutely spine chilling Music

Serve your right to suffer. Serve your right to be alone. Serve your right to suffer. Serve your right to be alone. Because you are still living today.

John Lee Hooker, it serves you right to suffer. Nick Cave, all through the early years of your music career, you were using heroin. How were you able to maintain your life, creativity, touring, everything else? It all takes structure alongside that drug use.

I was a heroin addict for 20 years and 10 of that I was young and out and having a good time and taking drugs and it was all part of that world. The second 10 years was much lonelier, much more isolated, much more despairing, just trying to stop, trying to stop, unable to stop, starting again, all of that. There's just this complete waste of time.

It in no way, I would say, aided my creative potential. I often hear that people won't give up whatever they're doing because they think that they need it to be creative. This is absolutely untrue, I've found at least.

I found once I got rid of the kind of monotony of that particular drug, my life just sprang open like a jack-in-the-box or something like that. Yeah. How many times did you go to rehab? I went about six times to rehab. So it worked on the sixth time? Yeah. But that was a...

That was a whole different set of circumstances happened for me. So why didn't it work until that point? What wasn't in place those, you know, the five times over the, like you say, those ten very difficult years? It's hard to say. You know, it's very difficult. I'm not actually sure, to be honest. There was just an impulse. You know, I would stop for a while and then this voice would start, go on, it's OK, go on.

This would happen and eventually that became overwhelming and I would score and I'd be back to the start again. And so that just went around and around. It was not fun. It was not fun. What was the thing that made the difference, if there was one, a turning point? I met my wife. Susie. Susie. And she was a recovering addict herself and...

I wasn't. And it just didn't work. We loved each other, clearly, but it just didn't work. And she eventually left. And after many months, came back and said, look, you can do what you like. I love you. I'm here. And at that point, I think I just realized that this just isn't going to work and I'm going to screw this whole thing up.

and then went into a rehab in America and got clean and haven't used since. You know, I mean, I had something to come back to. And tell me about that sense of life springing open, that rediscovery of all of these emotions that, you know, you mustn't have been able to feel when you were using. Yeah, I mean, I would always work anyway, right, whether I was using or not. But when you're using heroin, you're not...

fit to work on some level you know I would I mean this is embarrassing to say I mean I would be sit at the typewriter and sort of feel that I'd done a good day's work and then go and and and look at myself in the mirror and I had the the keys of the typewriter imprinted on my forehead you know that I'm just I'm just sort of you know knotted off there and and it's not it is it's

It's just bullshit. And so once I got rid of that aspect, I was just alive to things. I was just alive. To what? To what things? To love and to beauty and to heartbreak. I'm trying not to make this a hallelujah thing.

Yeah, I understand. Because it wasn't. You become alive. And to become alive means you're subject to all sorts of things, good and bad. You become a human being. Nick Cave, it's time for some more music. Your fifth choice today. Tell me about this one. This is Karen Dalton, Something On Your Mind. Beautiful singer. I had this friend, Mick Guyer, who died of cancer 20-something years ago. And he would make these extremely...

beautiful tapes of weird, esoteric, unknown music. And he would educate us. He would send everybody, all the people in the Melbourne scene and all of that sort of stuff, had these tapes from Mick Guyer. And they were full of extraordinary music, jazz, all sorts of blues, country, that really expanded our range of what we would consider acceptable music.

And Karen Dalton was one of those people. When I think of Karen Dalton, I think of driving around Brazil, in Sao Paulo... Where you were living at the time. ..where I was living at the time, with Karen Dalton in my cassette, listening to her over and over again. Once again, this extraordinary voice, racked, tragic. And this particular song, I mean, lyrically it's extraordinary and her version of it, it's mind-blowing. Yesterday, the way you made it was just...

Karen Dalton and Something On Your Mind. Nick Cave, in 2015, your family experienced an unimaginable tragedy. Your 15-year-old son, Arthur, died after accidentally falling off a cliff near Brighton, where you were living. You've described experiencing a rupture that time and memory poured itself into. What was it like?

Are you able to explain what you meant by that? Probably not, or not adequately. You know, I find these things strangely difficult to talk about. I find them easier to write about. It's one of the reasons why I have the red-hand files, or started it up in the first place. So that's your online platform where anybody can write to you and ask a question, and you answer one a week? Yeah, I try my best to... I can't answer them all because hundreds are coming in, but...

I used them to try and articulate the way I was feeling and the way I felt about Arthur's death. There is a kind of river of sadness that runs through the red-hand files that is to do with loss, and I think it's really coloured my way of viewing the world. I'm not sort of deflecting here, but I have someone write in and say and talk about their husband who died. And then you realise that actually the husband's died later

Sorry, actually, sorry. You realize the husband's died like 15 years ago. And this person is writing this letter in and they're still inside this cataclysmic event. And, you know, I think what I really want to try and do is to let people know in some way that it doesn't have to be thus and that there is a world beyond the grief that they feel.

And for you, Nick, you've experienced tremendous pain losing Arthur. And then in 2022, your eldest son, Jethro, also died. He was just 31. But your recent songs do seem to be very interested in questions about hope. You said not long ago, hope is optimism with a broken heart, which I just love. Tell me more about that. I think when I'm talking about hope, I'm also talking about the idea of joy. And for me personally,

perversely, I suppose, joy is in itself a form of suffering in the sense that it understands the mechanics of what it is to be a creature of loss. I think that's basically what happens. It's the sort of terrible secret behind grief and loss is that great joy can come eventually, a joy you've never experienced or experienced

could anticipate when you're fresh to grief, let's say. This sounds completely impossible, but it's not. Susie, my wife, and I have a... There's a lot of joy in our lives. But, you know, I was in a weirdly...

privileged position to do this publicly. A lot of people don't get that opportunity. So tell me about that because, you know, I would have thought in the rawest stages of grief, many people would just, they'd want to pull up the drawbridge, you know, they'd want to retreat from the world and you have so determinedly done the opposite. I haven't had any choice in a way. You know, it became common knowledge and

You know, I would walk, when I started to go outside the house in Brighton, walk out on the street, everyone knew. So I'm sort of walking in to a kind of common concern for me that was really difficult, but also extremely beautiful. And people started to write letters in to my house in Brighton that spoke of their experiences with the same sorts of things.

you know, all of that was very helpful. And I start to understand the sort of fundamentals of these things, of what we are as human beings and how we are connected to one another. And we're connected in all sorts of ways, but we are connected in our loss. It just inspired me in a way that if these people can make me feel that way, maybe I can make other people feel that way. Maybe there is a sort of

a way of learning how to articulate these matters that might be helpful, both to myself, maybe to Susie, and to other people. Nick, it's time for your next track, your sixth selection today. Tell us about this next tune and why you're taking it to the island. This is A Girl From The North Country by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Now, I think I saw this for the first time when Bob Dylan performed this song on The Johnny Cash Show yesterday.

when I was about nine years old in Australia. And I used to watch the Johnny Cash show and there was something about Johnny Cash that really captured me. He was like the first time I'd ever seen the potential of music to be like evil and outlaw and dangerous. He looked like a dangerous guy. He dressed in black and...

He started off the programme going, Hello, I'm Johnny Cash, and then sort of swing around and do that, and there was just this sort of gravity to the man. And he would bring on different guests, and he sang Girl From The North Country with Bob Dylan, who, of course, I'm a massive admirer of, and it's quite a moment. It's a very beautiful duet. MUSIC

See for me if she's wearing a coat so warm To keep her from the howling If you're travelling in the North Country fan When the wind's hit heavy on the border Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, Girl from the North Country

Nick Cave, how much has your attitude to the work that you do creatively changed in recent years? Obviously, life must have changed immeasurably. But when it comes to your work, do you see things differently? Yeah, I do. Once again, this is very much, you know, has a lot to do with Arthur and Jethro too.

You know, I always just thought art was kind of, at the end of the day, everything. I mean, it's a terrible thing to say, but it was always there, it was always reliable, it was just the thing that I did. And, you know, I'd get up in the morning, I'd go into an office and I'd lock the door and I'd work away and sort of, you know, in awe of my own creative potential, let's say. And I think after Arthur died...

I just shut the office and I haven't gone, you know, I just locked it up. It just, I was just repelled by it in some way. It seemed so indulgent.

I still work very, very hard, but I don't see that as the be-all and end-all of everything. I find my responsibility towards my children and my wife and, you know, to be a citizen, a husband. These things are the actual animating force behind or should be the animating force behind our creativeness.

You've said that today you're mostly happy and life is good. I wonder where you find your greatest joy in life today?

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to choose from, actually. You know, I do get it from my family and from my wife. One aspect of my family that it's difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is that I have a little grandson who's like seven months old. Oh, congratulations. No, I mean, this little guy is so gorgeous and it's really, really something. His name's Roman Cave.

What a great name. I mean, destined for big things. What kind of granddad are you? I'm pretty good. No, he's it's it's a it's a very beautiful thing. And and, you know, I also get much pleasure, joy out of my work. You know, it's quite a privilege to go on stage and play to people. I sort of understand that more. Can you imagine a day when you don't do that? I mean, the idea of putting your feet up retirement one day.

Well, I always thought I'd stop doing it when I couldn't do knee drops anymore. Actually, when I look back, I haven't done so many. As long as you feel like you could, if you needed to. I could do, yeah. I can get down. It's getting up that's a little bit harder. Nick, it's time for your next disc, number seven. What are we going to hear?

This is I Am A God by Kanye West. This became, weirdly enough, a kind of family song for us. My kids loved it. Susie loves it. I love it. It's an extremely playful, extremely dark, complex song where on the one hand, Kanye is presenting himself as a god. And then towards the end of the song, he's like screaming in terror that,

It's an unbelievably deep song, in my view. Mostly we would drive to this. Most of these songs, I'm driving in all of these. Perhaps what I should get also on the desert island is a car that I can drive around and listen to these songs. Oh, you've got a little while to think about it. Maybe you can take one. But, yeah, this is a song that I value on a personal level and actually I just think it's a complete amazing work of art. I am a god, I am a god

Kanye West and I Am A God. What a song. It's visceral, isn't it? That puts you in touch with something that you must love about music, that raw energy. Yeah.

Nick Cave, over the years, as well as releasing music, you've published books, you've written screenplays, you've written the libretto for an opera, but you do have another artistic string to your bow that I wanted to ask you about, ceramics. You make these Staffordshire-style figurines. How did you get started and why? Yes, well, I am a legitimate ceramicist. It's good to have one of those on the programme at last. It's been a while. I've noticed.

I collect Staffordshire style figurines, which are little figurines made in the Victorian, mass produced in the Victorian era. And COVID had happened and I had nothing to do and I couldn't go on tour. And I picked up one of these little Staffordshires, which I used to make similar sort of figurines when I was a teenager and looked at it and loved.

I kind of thought I could do that. I don't know why I thought that, but as it turns out, it was a hell of a lot harder than I thought it was. But you have done it. You've made more than one. Yeah, there's 17. My mother loved the little sculptures that I made and to the day she died at 92, she had them around her chair where she would sit. These little things I made as a 15, 14-year-old.

little sad clowns and little screaming pregnant mothers and all sorts of weird little things I made. And on the day that she died, I was booked to go in with the guy who was going to teach me how to do this, a guy called Corin Johnson. And she died. She was in hospital. I couldn't go to Australia because of COVID. And I was ringing up Corin to cancel the day. And Susie was like, what are you doing? And I said, look, mum's died.

I'm just cancelling. And she goes, no, you go and do your work. And I'm like, oh, you know, all right. And went and sat with the clay and just started to make these little things. And really it was something extremely beautiful about just sitting there and poking my fingers into this clay and trying to make some sense out of this basic material and

I mean, it was more than therapeutic. It was a sort of spiritual thing. So I went in every day, nearly for two years, making these, a year and a half, making these little things. Nick, you've been a churchgoer throughout your life. What does attending services mean to you? There have been many year gaps, but I've always returned to church as some sort of way of trying to articulate things

The sort of basic spiritual yearning that I have, I was born with it. The reason why I go to church is because it is a structured, institutional human institution that wraps its arms around certain yearnings and sorrows that I have and makes sense and gives space for them to find themselves in some way.

And I find it extraordinarily moving. That is both true, that is imaginative, and that is participatory. And there's something about that that goes on that I find just a very beautiful thing to do. It's almost time, Nick, to cast you away to your desert island. How will you approach life there? Minimally. I am a minimalist. And my wife, as much as I love her, is a maximalist. And...

Our home is just full of stuff. And the idea of sitting on a desert island with single palm trees is rather attractive to me. So that's appealing. Well, it's appealing except that I'm a very social sort of character. And so I don't think I'd like the sort of solitary nature of it. I mean, I can do being by myself quite well, but I like people.

Well, before we cast you away, we'll let you have one more track to take with you. Your final choice for the island today, Nick Cave. What's it going to be? Morning Dew by Tim Rose. I think it's controversial as to who actually wrote the lyrics to this song, so let's not get into that. But the lyrics are a work of absolute genius and Tim Rose's particular version of this song, which is, in my view, the supreme version of it, is so racked.

and kind of apocalyptic in its delivery. It's just a sensational song. MUSIC PLAYS

Tim Rose and Morning Dew. So Nick Cave, the time has come. I'm going to cast you away to the island. You'll have the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take one other book of your choice. What will it be? I'd take The Adventures of Pinocchio. This book connects to me both as a child. I think I had it read to me as a child, read it to my own children, but it also very much connects to me as an adult. And it's so layered and so human. I'm

often read this and get kind of swept away in it. It's yours. You can take it with you. Can I have that? You can have it, of course. You can also have a luxury item. What will that be? I would have a suit. I'll have a new suit. A new suit, okay. So that I'm appropriately attired when I'm rescued. Your signature look has always been a suit. Do you wear a suit all the time in real life, day to day? Yeah, more or less. What kind of suit would you like for the island?

Just the same one in a dark colour. So you want it even dark on the island? Well, I don't want to get rescued in a camo or an orange suit. I was thinking of like a pale linen for the hot environment. No, a dark suit. And finally, Nick Cave, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves first if you had to? I have a terrible feeling it's I Am A God by Kanye West. LAUGHTER

Why? If I'm to die on the island and there's some music that's sort of ringing around when they find me, that song wouldn't be a bad song to be going on. I think it's a song to God. Nick Cave, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. MUSIC PLAYS

Hello. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Nick. I'm sure he'll look fabulous in his new suit if he's ever rescued. We've cast many singers and songwriters away, including Bono, Guy Garvey and Adele. Nick's fellow Australians, Barry Humphries and Jermaine Greer, are in our archive too. The studio manager for today's programme was Duncan Hannant. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The production coordinator was Susie Roilands.

And the producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be the barrister and writer, Nemini Lethbridge. I do hope you'll join us.

Join me, Rachel Burden, inside Cafe Hope. Thank you so much. Thank you. Radio 4's virtual coffee shop, where guests pop in to tell us what they're doing to make the world a better place. I really believe that food waste and food poverty shouldn't coexist. From those helping feed people to those helping them get out and about. We've now created a scheduled bus service running six days a week.

Hear about the plans, the struggles and the triumphs. We've had a really supportive local community here. A home for people who've dedicated their lives to helping others. The new series of Cafe Hope with me, Rachel Burden, from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.