The songs of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds have long explored religion as a continued struggle between doubt, dogma and belief — and beyond the Holy Bible.
From the tender age of eight, young Nick Cave was a true believer in the possibilities of Christianity. A choirboy who sang in Wangaratta cathedral on Sundays, his faith steadily grew into a more serious sense of devotion and spiritual questioning. But as Cave discovered the new sacrilegious divinity of rock and roll his own music would become more concerned in dancing with the devil; a more urgent faith half-absorbed, half-preached — and lived to the limit.
Grappling with the spiritual uncertainty of religion expressed in the teachings of the original rebel son of Jesus Christ was far more alluring to the young Nick Cave of The Birthday Party than any fixed idea of God. Cave grew into sinner and saint combined; a turbulent communion that marked inner conflict throughout his lyrics. Touched by the metaphorical weight of the Bible as a work of literature, Cave began to read it seriously around the age of twenty-two, searching for the original true stories, fables, and myth to inform his songwriting, leaning upon the passions of good and evil.
Even from the earliest Bad Seeds’ records Cave’s lyrics took their stylistic cue from the ornate flowing verse of the King James bible, such that it became a kind of second language indivisible from his persona. Cave’s use of biblical allegory drew upon a psychic shorthand for extremes of human behavior, marked out by the seven deadly sins—the first true morality tales hardwired into the original Judeo-Christian structure of many Western democratic nations that would become increasingly secular, much to the seeming chagrin of Cave who has repeatedy blamed this cultural shift for an overall decline in social values and a loss of community.
READ MORE – this blog post is extracted from my book – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
The muscle memory of the Bible’s conception of good and evil is a birthright that establishes the moral compass and provided something for Cave to interrogate and occasionally to kick against, overturning the values of his elders masquerading as his betters. Cave being well versed in the Bible was something of an understatement, knowing much of it by heart, his songs and titles mirror and even borrow whole lines, phrases, and commonplace expressions. The Bible became a space of creative antagonism inverting its cliches to drag sin and redemption into a modern context and make the old tales new.
Early Cave biographer, Ian Johnston, records the singer meeting a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the airport in his book, Bad Seed. Standing with what appeared to be his entire worldly possessions, a single dark suit and small briefcase containing only his syringe and cooking kit, and a night-black Bible, Cave was better read in the scripture than the strangers who were trying to convert him. With or without the absolutism of ritual belief Cave found something in it and populates his songs with reimaginings of major biblical characters, least of all with Jesus Christ himself.
HARD-WON KNOWLEDGE
From the start, Cave presents himself as the man who cuts his fingers on the gilt edges of the Bible’s pages; a reminder that the word of the Lord carries much pain, spread across inspiration, retribution, revenge, and regeneration, myriad forces casting a long shadow across his difficult path walked in zigzags of art as life. The vitality and urgency of the Old Testament resonated with Cave; a force as literal as it was metaphorical and allusive. Accordingly, much of the bible’s stories are hidden behind the strength of its bloody and salacious imagery. It often presented a narrow worldview of violence and inevitable doom, which threatened to restrict Cave’s songwriting toward melancholy.
Cave noted a conscious shift in his songwriting around The Boatman’s Call from rereading the gospels, falling in love again with the language of the heart and the noble idea that spiritual goodness is possible in everyone; a concept he played with in the knowing sarcasm of “People Ain’t No Good”, arresting and reversing the view that the collapse of milk and honey into blood and sorrow was the only inevitable truth. Cave actively disrupted this with the love, hope, and optimism of the New Testament and the “seduction of Christianity,” with the abiding power of faith, but turned this inward as creative inspiration to practice his own version of faith without Christian dogma. The New Testament also introduced a more personal revelation for Cave, an awakening to the possibilities of self-transformation, and how this offered the true realization of an open and spiritually-aware path: the state of constant becoming, working toward being a good Christian and more importantly an empathetic human engaged in the world. For Cave this would mean creating art that even in profanity, anger, and nihilism worked toward the glory of God, to become an enervating, enriching force.
At once Cave fully confirmed a transition from the Old Testament to the New, and his writing accordingly shifted from darkness into light, admitting that his work had began to “labor” under the relentless pain and suffering of the darker first half of the Bible. More recently he argues against his past self, claiming that the burning seeds of creation, merged with destruction, had always been there in his music, as they are in the Bible. Life shows us punishment and redemption as two sides of the same coin, embracing the gray area of necessary evils. Cave’s songs remove the expectation of people as being wholly good or ungood; though his songs veer to these extremes, it is the dynamic push and pull that also gives the Bible its visceral tension, reflecting the challenges of real people.
EYE OF A NEEDLE
After the Bible, the book that most confirmed the religious disposition of young Nick Cave was his close reading of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood, alongside John Huston’s near frame-for-frame movie adaptation, it is one of his favorite books. The sardonic gallows humor of serious intent offers a fable-like story he keeps returning to. A stinging rebuke of the long distance traveled between faith, heresy, and false prophets, a kind of pilgrim’s progress for O’Connor’s acerbic antihero, Hazel Motes, we find a character who would not seem out of place in many early Bad Seeds songs, just as Cave himself might have stepped out from the pages of Wise Blood. The book opens with Motes staring down an old lady on a train, returning back to his hometown after a period of service in the military. He suddenly barks at her, calling out her hollow faith like an accusation and a question: “you think you been redeemed.” Immediately after arriving at the station he visits an unattractive, aging prostitute, making himself sick with self-loathing.
In several darkly comic turns Motes finds himself played and let down by everyone he meets from shady car dealers, “blind” lay preachers, and lazy-eyed small-town disciples, . He echoes the lament of Cave’s protagonist Euchrid Eucrow: “Too many Christs and not enough crosses.” Cave too ridicules the role of the anointed preacher, in “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry.” where histrionic reverend waxes lyrical about life beyond death (in heaven) presenting the losing edge of faith as a kind of fervent insanity. Adopting the stance of an outsider to religious orthodoxy, Motes continues his shift away from mainstream society. He recognizes a body of faith without attachment to an overarching figurehead, harboring the desire to establish his own “church of Christ without Christ.” This echoes something of the young Cave’s belief in a God without the chains of Christianity, for spirituality over the rules and conformity of the systems in which organized religion is founded: “I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.”
Like Nietzsche before him, Cave despises a closed, systematic philosophy of highly organized ‘deep’ religion, built on hypocritical moral censure, speaking through Euchrid Eucrow: “Too many Christs and not enough crosses.” As with so many of O’Connor’s characters, Motes’ flaws are laid bare in the dynamic of his psychology, battling with self-contradiction and his naive self-righteousness of the spiritual calling, whether real or imagined. He is, as Yeats might say, overcome with passionate intensity but lacking any true ideas of his own. O’Connor exploited similar grotesques to Cave: the emotionally damaged bearing visible or psychic limps as with the ensemble of “the Carny,” and the masochism of physical aberration of the hunchback in Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche,” later realized in the blinded apostate of Hazel Motes, who becomes his own martyr. Having lost faith in God, humanity, and himself, he can no longer bear witness to continued human corruption that so reflects his own shortcomings. This nihilistic reach overshadows Cave’s songs of people condemned to fate to fulfill their dark natures, the crooked man struggles to walk the straight and narrow path.
O’Connor experienced her own form of physical purgatory, suffering from lupus, an autoimmune disease that mistakenly attacks healthy cells and damages bodily tissue, as in Cave’s songs: physical mutilation, psychological flaws, the trauma of victims, the abuse and scarring of innocence, the struggle to live within the body turned against itself—this is life lived as a trial. Cave’s gallery of disaffected and wonderful freaks must undergo this acid test of experience in a cruel and sometimes savage world. O’Connor practiced what she preached in her writing, finding that it is both sinners and the maligned that are most tested and therefore most beloved by God, causing them to have the greatest need of faith: “Grace changes us and the change is painful.”
Wise Blood is driven by O’Connor’s disdainful attitude for lesser forms of Christianity beneath her own Roman Catholic devotion, casting her own schism between naive commonplace preachers in the shallow waters of Protestantism to the elevated high-minded realm of Catholic tradition’s affirming flame, with its extremes met by the pomp and circumstance of heavy ritual bound to the Pope as God’s representative on earth.
ANGEL AT THE FEAST
Cave would assert his own carnivalesque street preacher vibes as shown on his incantatory performances of “Tupelo” in a whorl of broken-tongue ranting, inciting and inviting the flood as much as he condemns its devastation. Cave would readily adapt and exploit the singular characters of Christianity’s many saints, instant icons tied to fabled origin stories, the superheroes of an era aligned to God but elevated beyond normal men and women. Finding the saints as various and colorful as any cartoon characters, he pored over Butler’s Lives of the Saints, extracting tales of sinners reformed by spiritual awakening, such as the poet John Donne and St. Augustine’s notorious revelation: “Please God, make me good, but not just yet,” a line of black humor that might have been written by Cave himself.
In “Christina the Astonishing” Cave’s voice soars far and wide above a humbled church organ, telling the tale of a young woman about to be buried who suddenly returns to life just after the recital of the Agnus Dei. She rises up to the ceiling, clinging to rafters—the parishioners unsure if she is possessed by a demon or an avenging angel—either way, they are terrified, crossing themselves as protection and apology, confronted by their collective faith shaken to the core.
Driven to near-madness by the earthly sin she sees everywhere that so disgusts her, Christina is transformed into a religious instrument both shocking and enlightening. From her elevated state she looks down and casts judgment upon the gathered mourners who she believes should be seeking their own penitence, not praying for her. Their lack of moral conviction is turned back against them.
An undead folk hero, Christina was later recognized as a saint and became part of the ongoing tradition—an expression of the will of God through a mortal form. Cave exploits the powerful hold of the sacred and profane in his songs, where the rising into sainthood is counterbalanced by the measure of sin and deviance in the world.5 Trading base metals of raw experience he joins a pagan celebration of bodily ecstasy with the contrived temperance of the forbidden. As sex inevitably meets with the demands of falling in and out of love, the forces of lust are delivered as temptation and rejection to become emotional suffering and revenge.
While Cave willfully scratched out a dirty niche of high and low culture in the Bad Seeds’ music, many of his lyrics aspire to touch upon metaphysical concerns and the spiritually sacrosanct. Susie Bick cites the implicit sensuality of the Catholic imagination as an influence in her The Vampire’s Wife fashion line, claiming The Black Narcissus and its tale of a nun’s spiritual corruption by forbidden love as her favorite film. It maintains a religious attitude of dogma and austere glamor, the romantic allure of a heritage built upon the solemnity of ritual, inferring dominance and submission toward a higher power and authority.
THE MEASURE OF SIN
The strict confines of Catholic law and teachings are compounded by abstinence and denial, fasting to feasting. Though Cave himself would reject most formal religious systems, his music takes great zest in interrogating the wielding of faith and the struggle by which we might yield—or not—to it, cycling within most sects of the Christian church, by turns conformist and controlling. Across Christianity the saints performed extreme acts of masochism as worship, carried out in self-harm and sacrifice, as protest and defiance against evil, and to highlight the deeper moral and spiritual flaws of humanity—their outrages a scream at the devil within. In Cave’s songs we feel the same ebb and flow in the “issue” of blood along with the spatter and solar of abject gore. Like the saints, he exploits the energy of erotic charge as much as harrowing body horror.
In “Mercy” Cave uses the examples of John the Baptist, executed by beheading for his beliefs; the licentious image of Saint Sebastian, bound naked to a tree and stuck full of arrows; and of course Jesus nailed to the cross, wearing a crown of thorns and penetrated in the side with the spear of destiny. Doomed to a brand of thwarted heroism and good deeds, the saints are people elevated to a higher calling, the tension and struggle of the physical against the ephemeral. And in our moments of transcending the body humans come to enact a similar extension of the soul, where orgasm, exquisite melancholy, and death might be combined in the grand elevating idea of the petit mort.
As if in tribute to sacred embodiment of human flesh the song “Brompton Oratory” shows Cave attending church service with scripture reading from Luke 24.10 Based in the Knightsbridge area of West London close to where he was living in 1996 Cave would often wander past and sometimes slip into afternoon Mass shortly before going to score heroin. The church would stand as a symbol of abiding faith and worship, a safe harbor in the storm of multiple breakups, and a psychic refuge from the overbearing reality of everyday life. Cave speaks to sipping the holy wine as blood of Christ from the cup; taking the sacrament in his hands he is met with the smell of his lover still wreathed around his fingers, the touch of her lips haunting his. The metaphorical issue of blood becomes a visceral reminder of sexual intimacy: kissing, fellatio, fucking—grounded by the raw fact of experience. Cave’s lyrics also carry the universal nature of the body as both a holy vessel for human spirituality and the form of intimate connection, at once sinful and sacred, the word ‘love’ is made flesh The schism of love, sex, and death would be given shape in the visual interpretations of the Bible in statues, artwork, and iconography that so inspired Cave’s music.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous marble statue The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652) shows the saint experiencing the divine light of God as a golden spear, held by an angel, to be thrust into her real and metaphorical heart. Touched by the arrow of God, she is shocked into radical affirmation of belief. Like Saint Sebastian’s masochistic pose, it is suggestive of both sexual penetration and sacred revelation—Teresa is spiritually pierced by her vision, and we see this in her gaze.
As St. Teresa of Ávila recounted in her autobiography, “all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.” Cave would praise the ecstatic, eroticized language in her collected writings, as her words convey religious union with God, the statue depicting her face again reminds us of the transcendent state of orgasm.
ECSTASY AS ESCAPE
Cave would mark his own unholy transgressions within the artifacts of his early notebooks; half scrawled with song lyrics and bloody junk-sick graffiti, Cave included pasted-in icons of saints and pornographic postcards. In the Straight to You documentary he flicks through the pages of camp erotica such as a woman who is observed urinating. On the facing page Jesus stands at the well with St. Genevieve, then St. Therese de Carmelite next to women being tickled—reveling in the disjunct of shock and awe—with Cave’s creative imagination meeting somewhere in the middle. Much later the photographer Wim Van De Hulst would show Cave the sadomasochistic Catholic aesthetic–inspired work of Joel-Peter Witkin: “I do remember his eyes fell from their sockets.”
Where so many of his songs bear the hallmark of original sin, Cave makes great use of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence and repeats it as both metaphor for the evil of the world and as humanity’s wider fate under God, born to be tried and tested. On “Saint Huck” (1984) Cave shifts the narrative a hundred years into the future and anoints his own noble idiot as a young man ruined by the big city. A sarcastically thwarted believer of the common garden variety the song offers a reimagining of Mark Twain’s bildungsroman The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Cave pushes him toward heavy autobiographical tones of his own descent into the netherworld of Berlin. The shadow figure of Huck is the scapegoat buffoon, both blessed and blighted. Having lost all his money he wanders the streets, from bar to cathouse, starved for food, spiritual guidance, and the milk of human kindness. Huck offers a paradigm for Elvis who became a victim of his own appetites, given over to excess and twinned need between adoring audience and waning star, the idly righteous saint soon capsizes into full-blown sinner.
When asked about the incongruity of writing a song about the Deep South while living in Berlin Cave would note something of Huck’s downward spiral trajectory driving through a long Hamburg street, the notorious ‘Reeperbahn’ “or ‘ripperbahn’, as I prefer to call it.” Full with the shallow glimmer of bars, brothels, and cabaret sex shows Cave suggests that this seedy part of town that so appealed to his own dissolute needs reflected the crisis faced by young Huck, delivered there by the River Elbe before drowning with its filthy undertow.
The song would feature jarring, electrifying guitar from Hugo Race: “With Saint Huck, the bass work was already there when I joined the band, then we added things. The lyrics were rewritten a lot, too. That process of elimination was key to the way we worked.” The song’s irrepressible beat of drums and hammering guitars marks the relentless flow down the dark and increasingly dirty Mississippi River, for poor Huck too mired in self-corruption he must inevitably meet with his own heart of darkness. Trawling along the river as conduit of struggle and shame, Cave makes Euchrid Eucrow bear all the psychic scars of the saint, a thwarted individual seeking redemption through faith, though he presents more as a twisted self-proclaimed prophet extolling the wonder of sin and obedience.
O CHILDREN, COME UNTO ME
Cave drew further inspiration from the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, a Victorian photographer, from a book given to him by Bronwyn Adams of Crime and the City Solution. He noted that Cameron was one of the first people to do “portraits” of biblical figures and events. Imbued with a hazy sense of the past and dressing up her models with costumes and props, the photographs resemble relics from an earlier time. In spite of their wholesome subject matter and their dreamy, sepia soft focus, a knowingly vintage aesthetic.
Cameron’s photographs offer discomforting saccharine visions. She invites a fantasy view that straddles the preeminent reality of sacred truths that to others are mere fiction. Many of the naked child models are visibly frustrated, bored, and indignant at being made to pose, more human than the allegorical figures of perfection they were meant to represent. They become crooked angels with faces made clean, kicking back against the artist’s desire to capture the idealized shot of beauty.
Cave used one of Cameron’s images for the paperback cover of And the Ass Saw the Angel, a book full of broken communities, religious hypocrisy, and mutual self-loathing. Cave throws the cover image at us like a sarcastic parody on the benevolence of a mother’s love. The photograph Venus Chiding Cupid and Depriving Him of His Wings (1872) incidentally satirizes familial comfort and emotional warmth never experienced by Euchrid Eucrow himself. Resembling the angelic cherub figure of Cupid, normally a Roman or Greek god, he is grounded just as Eucrow is born mute, outside of good grace they are forever falling.
RED RIGHT HAND
After carrying the weighty King James pocket Bible over his heart for so long, it would seem inevitable that the Old Testament’s revenge dramas would become transmuted into Cave’s murder ballads of love and loss. His early songs would steadily bend to the perspective that humanity is “pitiful” under God: weak, naturally inferior to his glory, and born to sin. Accepting that in the name of faith and sacrifice God’s hand is as red as any other, Cave was struck by the native cruelty of his love: “What occurred to me was how severely and despotically the God from the Old Testament acts. How he almost curses those people. And it seemed that I adopted that cursing voice in my singing.”
This spirit is reignited on the 2020 track, “Hand of God” with a healthy dose of terror and awe, the image of the sky split like a burning, living wound, God’s will is expressed by reaching down to earth, bringing apocalypse in his wake. In Revelations 1:8 God proclaims: “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” He declares himself the first and last word on the merging of human existence and destruction: “I am the beginning and the end.” Closing the circle on the dichotomy of life and death. We live, and struggle to thrive, only under his forgiveness, or, God is simply a mystical force at play behind the scene, whose power and intent is beyond our comprehension.
In place of deeper understanding, we accept the withering vagueness of the term “omnipotence.” In many religious doctrines God becomes a hidden hand, invisibly moving pieces on a board. Although Cave seems to reject this starkly fatalist view of the “unmoved mover” on “Into My Arms,” denying any belief in an “interventionist god” who holds direct sway over us. Elbow frontman Guy Garvey hears much humor in this line, referring to Cave’s performance as “pure Elvis Presley theology,” his voice falling heavily on the “dah-ling” at the line’s end. It’s a jarring juxtaposition of romance and faith delivered as a half-hearted apology to our need for a firm and sincere stance.
Yet in the same lyrical breath, Cave invokes the power of God to deliver his loved one safely to him, by God’s grace but also shifting away from him. A temporary suspension of disbelief, Cave offers to kneel in worship, a form of spiritual sacrifice, bringing himself low toward supplication. Cave is in awe of God’s influence, though he never fully bends to let himself be broken by it. The song moves upon an “I-Thou” orientation that “invites the listener into its posture of transcendent relation.”
Compare this to the sly wink of “Brompton Oratory” from the same album, where in wilful arrogance Cave declares that neither the devil nor God could bring him to his knees as quickly as the lover who has now forsaken him. It is a jarring clash of loyalties, one which is never fully resolved in Cave’s internal schism between his allegiance to an abiding faith; though not one tied to singular ‘god’ figure, and its very opposite, true romantic love for one person on earth and no other — where perhaps some of his great songs succeed is in embracing the point at which these different versions of love, the holy and the divinely singular, come together and creates sparks, where love becomes transcendent and being with the one you love creates a private heaven on earth.
READ MORE – this blog post is extracted from my book – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
