Nick Cave: ‘It was very difficult to be anything other than a grieving father’

telegraph.co.uk:

his audience that stands somewhere between worship and intimacy. Singing songs of dread and redemption, tragedy and hope, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Lucifer and an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Cave had worked the length of the platform set in front of the stage, reaching out to the sea of hands outstretched towards him, pausing to kneel, to touch and to grasp as if giving benediction.But now, with one jump he disappeared from view, his progress discernible only by the wave-like movement of the sea of bodies around him, until suddenly rising above them, like a phoenix rising from the flame, held aloft by the crowd.

Cave was singing Ghosteen Speaks, a song from the album Ghosteen that he recorded in the wake of the devastating accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur, who fell 60ft from a cliff in Ovingdean, Brighton, in July 2015, having taken LSD for the first time with a friend.

It is an album that Cave has described as an attempt to ‘contact the dead’.The song is a lament, sung against a gentle swirl of electronic sound. ‘I am beside you, I am beside you/Look for me, look for me.’ Cave is the most literate of songwriters, and his lyrics are often elliptical, elusive.