‘Loss is a thing that we become’: Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’

On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with one line: ski-jump nose, Sesame Street eyebrows and a swept-back bob of jet-black hair like Wednesday Addams after Uncle Fester chopped off her pigtails for a prank. And always, always immaculately tailored. In the new book Faith, Hope and Carnage, an edited collection of interviews with the writer Seán O’Hagan, he tells the story of getting busted by the New York cops after scoring heroin in Alphabet City wearing a ‘lime-green three-piece suit’.

We meet early afternoon in an old-school Italian restaurant round the corner from his west London home. Cave is suited and booted as ever: not dandyism, he says, so much as ‘a sort of symbol of respect for the work at hand – which might be life’. He adds drily: ‘My mother used to say she insisted on always changing her underwear in case she had a car accident. I don’t want to go out wearing… lycra.’

I raise with him that idea of a persona – and wonder if it’s something that suits him  or that traps him; whether it’s a version of himself or an escape from himself.