Stranger Than Kindness

Nick Cave

Description

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERStranger Than Kindness is a journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller and cultural icon Nick Cave. This highly collectable book invites the reader into the innermost core of the creative process and paves the way for an entirely new and intimate meeting with the artist, presenting Cave's life, work and inspiration and exploring his many real and imagined universes. It features full colour reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs and collected personal artefacts along with commentary and meditations from Nick Cave, Janine Barrand and Darcey Steinke. Stranger Than Kindness asks what shapes our lives and makes us who we are, and celebrates the curiosity and power of the creative spirit. The book has been developed and curated by Nick Cave in collaboration with Christina Back. The images were selected from 'Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition', opening at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen in June 2020.

Sujets

• Musician

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838852252
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 33 Mo

Extrait

What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit. It is the material that gives birth to and nourishes the official work.
By official work I mean the song or the book or the score that is released into the hands of the fans. The fans become its custodians. They own it. Yet beyond the song there is an enormous amount of peripheral stuff – drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages, scribblings and drafts – which are the secret and unformed property of the artist.
These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script or score along. They are a support system of manic tangential information.
I hope that you find some value in them. To me, these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed work: raw and immediate, but no less compelling.
Nick Cave
STRANGER THAN KINDNESS
NICK CAVE
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Developed by Nick Cave and Christina Back
Copyright © Nick Cave, 2020 Essay ‘God Is in the House’ copyright © Darcey Steinke, 2020 Contextualisation texts copyright © Darcey Steinke and Janine Barrand
The right of Nick Cave, Darcey Steinke and Janine Barrand to be identified as the authors of these works has been asserted by them under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 224 5 eISBN 978 1 83885 225 2
Contents
SHATTERED HISTORY
NICK CAVE
GOD IS IN THE HOUSE
DARCEY STEINKE
CONTEXTUALISATION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SHATTERED HISTORY
by Nick Cave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn Cave, 1958 Photographer unknown For further reading here

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

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

Letter from Caulfield Grammar School to Colin Cave, 1975

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

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

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

Letter from Nick Cave to Anita Lane, 1980

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

List by Nick Cave, c. 1978 For further reading here

Shopping list by Nick Cave, early 1980s For further reading here

Painting entitled Horn of Plenty by Anita Lane, 1977 For further reading here

Script for A Sea Adventure by Nick Cave, 1980

Song lyrics for ‘Happy Birthday’ by Nick Cave, 1980 First released as a free giveaway single at The Boys Next Door’s farewell concert in 1980 For further reading here

Wallet owned by Nick Cave, c. 1985


Lists by Nick Cave, c. 1979


Still image from the music video for ‘Nick the Stripper’, 1981 Directed by Paul Goldman For further reading here

Lyric for Prayers On Fire by Nick Cave, c. 1981 Featured on the artwork for Prayers on Fire by The Birthday Party, 1981

Design sketch for The Bad Seed by Nick Cave, 1982–83 For further reading here

Song lyrics for ‘Wild World’ by Nick Cave, 1982–83 Released on The Bad Seed by The Birthday Party, 1983

Song lyrics for ‘Dead Joe’ by Nick Cave and Anita Lane, 1982 Released on Junkyard by The Birthday Party , 1982

Song lyrics for ‘Sonny’s Burning’ by Nick Cave, 1982 Released on The Bad Seed by The Birthday Party, 1983

Song lyrics for ‘Swampland’ by Nick Cave, 1983 Released on Mutiny! by The Birthday Party , 1983

Song lyrics for ‘Jennifer’s Veil’ by Nick Cave, 1983 Released on Mutiny! by The Birthday Party, 1983
GOD IS IN THE HOUSE
by Darcey Steinke
I — Pilgrims
Twenty years ago, I lived for a year in a house across from William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi. My office was in the attic, a room bigger than my whole apartment in Brooklyn. My desk sat in front of a window and at intervals ladybugs with rust backs and black spots streamed out of the window frame. They’d gather in a shifting pile and then crawl out across the glass onto the green vine wallpaper. I often thought, by the way they swooped and curved, that they might form letters, then words and finally a sentence from a wild god.
This never happened. Instead I watched Spanish moss hanging like long scarves from the giant cedar in my yard and, behind the tree on the road, buses filled with senior citizens come to tour Faulkner’s Greek Revival house in Bailey’s Woods. Sometimes the pilgrims were from other countries: busloads of Irish and French people on vacation. I watched them de-bus, walk the driveway covered in small blonde stones, pass the boxwood hedge maze and the giant magnolias with their thick, shiny leaves and creamy-petalled flowers. Inside they’d find portraits of Faulkner’s ancestors as well as dark wooden Victorian furniture. In the writer’s office they’d gape at the outline for A Fable written directly on the walls and Faulkner’s Underwood typewriter sitting next to a tin of pipe tobacco on his desk. I most cherished the items and details that brought Faulkner back to scruffy life: a crappy plastic shoe rack beside his bed and, in the kitchen, pencilled phone numbers written around the black rotary phone.
Every night at twilight, I walked with my three-year-old daughter over to Rowan Oak. She would chase rabbits around the boxwoods and, as it got darker, try to catch fireflies. Sometimes we’d find offerings on the steps: a red rose, a white rose, a pair of fake false teeth, a tiny plastic coffin.
The pilgrims came in every season. Most compelling to me were not the busloads of people but the seekers who came on foot, alone or in pairs. I assumed they’d travelled to Oxford by Greyhound bus and walked all the way from the bus station across town. Some were in ordinary clothes but the majority of them, and this at first surprised me, wore black. I would look up from my legal pad to find a tall young man in a black velvet jacket, tight black trousers and knee-high black lace-up boots. I remember a girl in black leather trousers, a blouse with large bell sleeves, a black ribbon around her neck. Another young woman wore black lace gloves to her elbows, a long black dress and Doc Martens.
‘I OFTEN THOUGHT, BY THE WAY THEY SWOOPED AND CURVED, THAT THEY MIGHT FORM LETTERS, THEN WORDS AND FINALLY A SENTENCE FROM A WILD GOD’
Of all the young pilgrims I saw that year the one who most stays in my mind is a Japanese boy in black high-top tennis shoes, black jeans and a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds t-shirt. He walked fast and with a look of stricken anticipation. I had the feeling his journey had been arduous and that his longing was close to overwhelming him.
I didn’t see the boy leave Rowan Oak; I’d had to pick up my daughter at pre-school, grade papers, make our dinner. When we walked over later in the near dark we found on the steps, in the usual offering spot, a copy of Nick Cave’s novel And the Ass Saw the Angel in Japanese.
I have spent a lot of time in the intervening years thinking of those black-clad kids, moving diligently and with joy under the draped moss, past banks of kudzu toward their particular mecca. I understand why they were drawn to Ro