Wild God, Wild Twin

‘Devil in Remorse’ by Nick Cave, courtesy Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels

Nick Cave used to make Staffordshire-style figurines as a child in Australia, which his mother kept on display throughout her life; he began to craft them again a few years ago, during the pandemic lock-down, creating an impressive set of seventeen figures of a devil which were intended to reflect the traditional Catholic ‘Stations of the Cross’. Some look lonely and bereft. ‘He’s forgiven in the end’, Cave explained. ‘There are obvious parallels to my own life, but this was not something I set out to do. It was something that unfolded’. Religious themes and overtones are not unusual in his work. ‘All my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit’, he has said. ‘To me, personally, this place feels charged, creative, and full of potential’. On his latest record, ‘Wild God’, the yearning has become more pronounced, perhaps because he continues to grapple with overwhelming grief, occasioned by the passing of two of his children. Although originally conceived as a tribute to joy, ‘Wild God’ became something more complex, as haunted as healed, suggesting that happiness and sorrow aren’t mutually exclusive, and that joy has to be earned.

Cave has become much more emotionally accessible than he was; since the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, he has channeled the process of grieving into something unusually participatory. On his ‘Red Hand Files’ website, as well as in a sequence of live public conversations, he has responded directly to fans’ questions, which are often about their own personal problems; in concert, the frequently confrontational performances of the past have, it seems, become opportunities for creating positive interactions with audiences and for shared catharsis. In a book of interviews, Faith, Hope, and Carnage, he has talked eloquently about grief and its effects, as well as his conviction that by discussing it publicly, working out ‘a way to speak about my own catastrophe’, he can help not only himself but other people. His articulate and considered accounts of the connections between grief, pain, and creativity are formidable, and Cave comes across as someone possessed of a rare and slightly intimidating mixture of humility and pride. Cave’s story is at times performative, suffused with religiosity that is almost Baroque, and yet it is also affectionate, reflective of a change from viewing the world with ‘some form of disdain’ to a compassionate attitude of empathy and grace. ‘Despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is, and how degraded the world has become’, he says, ‘it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it’.

Jeff Young and Nick Cave have much in common - especially emotional intensity and an attraction to the dark side of life - but Young’s deep feelings, like his modesty, are entirely secular. Wild Twin, a new companion to Young’s memoir, Ghost Town, is haunted, but while the benign spectre at the heart of the earlier book was his mother, Wild Twin is imbued with the spirit of his late father, whose quiet comment, when told of his son’s impulsive plan to give up his job and hitch-hike to Paris from home in Liverpool, was ‘That’s a silly thing to do’. Young had taken a stifling clerical assistant job with the local council after leaving school, and music, beer, and dope were his refuge when he wasn’t immersed in writings by Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, or watching French New Wave films. He longed to wander the streets of Paris like Sartre, Miller, Burroughs, and Beckett, to drink absinthe and write poetry, to leave everything he knew behind, to embrace all that Bohemian life had to offer.

One day in the early 1970s, accompanied by Stan, his friend and fellow Beat aspirant, Young took the train and boat to Ostend, but Stan soon became homesick and turned back, having already posted home his cowboy boots. Young carried on alone, hitching through Belgium towards Paris, feeling lonely, fearful, and occasionally elated. He tasted dropout life in the French capital, but it wasn’t long before he returned to Liverpool. A while later, still yearning and rudderless, he met an unconventional young woman, Becks, who looked like ‘a punk Elizabeth Taylor’, loved drinking, and was an accomplished shoplifter. They decided to bum around Europe together and, more by chance than design, ended up in Amsterdam, where they lived among squatters, anarchists, marginals, exiles, and hippies, many of them strange or memorable. They worked illegally in bars, collected beer bottles for small change, pilfered bicycles, had them stolen, and scavenged for furniture. Young learnt what it was like to live on the ragged edges of society.

The third part of ‘Wild Twin’ is set in Liverpool several decades later. His father was by then very ill; Young and his sister Kathryn looked after him in the family house which was full of memories that were beyond the grasp of their aged father yet vivid, real, and nurturing for Jeff. This section of the book is grueling, but the poignant writing movingly describes Young’s realisation that he is finally where he belongs:

The place I wanted to be when I left home was a place where I had no past. No ancestors, no memory. Dislocation from the familiar. Absence. Erasure. The opposite of the way I think and feel now that I’m in my sixties – the past, my ancestors, memory are the centre of my being. I always had a notion that I had a wild twin, a version of myself that lived just beyond the edge of convention, of common sense and safety. If I went hitchhiking to Paris – or elsewhere, there’s always an elsewhere – I might meet him or become him, and my life would be transformed. Drifting around Europe wasn’t anything to do with finding myself. It was more about losing myself, getting lost, disappearing.

For further exploration:

An exhibition Of Nick Cave’s sculpture: https://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibitions/the-devil-a-life

A review of ‘Faith, Hope, and Carnage’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/28/faith-hope-and-carnage-by-nick-cave-and-sean-ohagan-review-towards-grace

Nick Cave’s ‘Wild God’ (full album): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIN5F5UNw5E

‘Wild God’ review: https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/22/nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-wild-god-review

A conversation with Jeff Young: https://ymliverpool.com/52165-2/52165

Image on index page: ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ by William Blake

Hippies sleeping on Dam Square, Amsterdam, 1969