Nick Cave: My manager was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I’m going into the ceramics business’

The Australian musician Nick Cave is best known for his narrative-driven songs, with lyrics populated by characters from the Old Testament, Greek myth and the American South. A prolific writer and composer, he has released 18 studio albums with his band the Bad Seeds, written an award-winning feature film, scored several movie soundtracks, published two acclaimed novels, and much more. Recently, his popular The Red Hand Files blog has seen him communicate directly with fans who can send in any question they like, from how to deal with grief to whether he likes raisins or not. From the hundreds he receives each week, Cave selects one or two that he replies to.

Born in Warracknabeal, southern Australia, in 1957, Cave briefly studied art in Melbourne before his early band, the renowned post-punk outfit The Birthday Party, took off, taking him to London and then Berlin. The band broke up in the mid 1980s and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds was soon formed, remaining active ever since. Over the years he has worked with some of the most famous names in popular music, from Johnny Cash to Kylie Minogue.

Now, in a somewhat surprising turn, Cave is exhibiting a series of ceramics inspired by Staffordshire flat-back pottery figures, which were popularised in the Victorian period. He began making the figurines during the Covid-19 pandemic, developing a series of 17 hand-painted sculptures that tell the life story of the devil. Cave first exhibited them last year at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and now, in their institutional debut, they are on show at the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands. In lieu of a catalogue, Cave has also written a short story using the ceramics as illustrations. The publication is printed on board, like a children’s book, so “you can wipe off the crushed banana”, he smiles.

The Art Newspaper: What led you to start making these ceramics?

Nick Cave: It felt like something that was sort of brewing for a long time. Or a kind of yearning I had to get back to some sort of visual art that I had abandoned in my early 20s, when I studied at art school. I failed the second year, mostly not to do with my work but to do with my behaviour and not turning up enough.

I’ve collected Staffordshire-style sculptures for years. I just love these things. They’re not expensive works of art; you find them in second-hand shops. I just had them in front of me as I was just sitting at my desk. We sort of grew idle through Covid [and] were allowed to do things that we normally wouldn’t have done. I sat there looking at one of these Staffordshires just thinking, “I can do this.”

I used to make these little figurines out of clay. I made them as a teenager and my mother loved them. They were the first indications that this particular child—I was one of four—had some talent.

Did she keep them?

Yeah. She had them around her. She actually died in Covid. At 92, she still had them around her chair where she used to sit. She loved them. So there was a sentimental tug as well, but mostly it was just that I thought, “Fuck, you know, it can’t be that hard to make one of these things.”

[But] without any interest in getting involved in the art world—I had absolutely no interest in being a musician who suddenly decided that they wanted to become an artist. It’s a terrible, terrible…

There is a bit of a tradition of that, with varying degrees of success.

Yes, exactly, to put it nicely. So I didn’t want to be that person.

Were there other influences on the sculptures, other artists you were thinking about?

There were definitely things that I was looking at, painters I was looking at, especially through the glazing. One was [Edvard] Munch. He had very explicit use of symbolic colour that was almost childlike. Red was violent, green was envy. There are no two ways about it when you look at a Munch painting. And I really wanted every colour that I was using in the glazing process to be symbolic in that very obvious, kind of childlike, way.

Did you approach making the works in the same way you approach songwriting, where you go to an office every day?

Absolutely. I got up every morning, drove to Camberwell [south London] in the morning and worked there for… it ended up taking about two years. My manager was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m going into the ceramics business.” It didn’t seem like the most, from his point of view, sustaining way to spend two years. But anyway, I just got totally swept away with it. It really felt like unfinished business.

You have spoken in the past about the act of performing being an almost transcendental experience with an audience. With music, and with your Red Hand Files, there is a very direct kind of communication with people. I wondered how that differs with these figures.

There’s an aspect to them that is the same. I’ll start from there. And that is that they’re absolutely sincere. They’re not ironic. In my view, they’re not kitsch. They’re, with all sincerity, trying to get to the bottom of this sort of predicament of my life. And it’s a sincere act in that way. There’s no irony to it and this is exactly the same as my concerts. They are what they appear to be: essentially, a sort of life-or-death activity. They are really for me to try and understand what’s gone on in my life.

The devil in your sculpture series is a very human devil, an almost sympathetic kind of figure. You have said you chose the devil because of a particular red glaze that you liked, but it’s also not out of character.

When you make choices about things there are all sorts of things going on. But essentially the initial choice was to use this colour red. I did a series of drawings of a little devil doing different things, and I thought, “Woah, that’s what I can do.” And immediately forgot about [the ceramics] being the spill vases [that I’d first made] and all of that sort of stuff. I just started doing these little characters. It seemed like a sweet idea, I didn’t even know what the devil represented [in this instance]. It was just a little guy with horns, essentially.

Each subsequent figurine that was made creates further meaning. The narrative grows. It felt like the story expanded and then I started to go backwards to his birth. And at the same time, looking at other Staffordshires that sort of suggested a narrative. Look, “Why doesn’t he go to war? I’ll do an equestrian.” A lot of Staffordshires are equestrian; different historical characters riding horses. “I’ll do that.” And so when he’s going off to war, “Why doesn’t he come back from war?” And now the devil’s changed. [After] going happily off to war in a field of flowers, he comes back wading through rivers of blood, a broken sort of individual. So the story just expanded, the meaning grew and it became, essentially, more personal.

The figurine that is most like an existing Staffordshire is the killing of the child. In Staffordshire sculptures there is a genre of them that are religious figurines, telling biblical stories. There is an Abraham killing Isaac story. I thought, “Look, I’ll do that one.” And suddenly that added something to the story that became shockingly self-referencing, because I lost my child.

The whole thing started to have a more mysterious, mystical pull. Then they started to be in order, one after the other. They were trying to make sense of my predicament in a way that I couldn’t make sense of it in my songs, for some reason.

Ultimately, this ended up being something about culpability and forgiveness around the death of my son. That was something that I could never quite get to in my songwriting. To me, these became acutely personal.

Towards the end of the series, the devil is forgiven by the child. Is that important, the act of forgiveness?

I think so. I don’t know how much you want to go into this, but the problem is there is no possibility for any explicit forgiveness in these matters. That’s the problem when you lose someone and you have unfinished business with them, which you always do when you lose someone. That’s the nature of it. I was, I think, able to express my sadness around this and to create a figurine where I am forgiven, where the little boy leans down and the old man is lying washed up somewhere and the little boy is reaching out in forgiveness. And this is a really beautiful, important thing for me to meditate on.

That’s what I meant by these things being a life-or-death thing. I don’t mean that lightly. Art for me is a way, in songwriting, of being able to articulate the terms of my life in a way that I literally have no idea [how to] outside of art. I don’t know what’s going on.

This [making ceramics] is very similar. The difference is that I can stand in front of these things, look at them, see them, think about them. There’s a to-and-froing, there’s an exchange between them. [Whereas] songs are these abstract, invisible things.

[The British artist] Thomas Houseago, a dear friend of mine, always said that [sculptures] just stand there and people stand in front of them and they’re kind of unprotected. People stand in front of them and have their opinions and say things about them and they just have to sort of stand there and take it, right? And these little figurines feel very vulnerable to me. If someone doesn’t like them... it’s personal. Whereas if someone doesn’t like my songs, I literally couldn’t care less.

Biography

Born: 1957 Warracknabeal, Australia

Lives and works: London

Education: 1976 Caulfield Institute of Technology, Melbourne (dropped out to pursue music)

Key shows: 2024 Museum Voorlinden; 2024 Xavier Hufkens; 2022 Sara Hildén
Art Museum

• Nick Cave—The Devil: A Life, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, until 16 March