Until very recently, nobody much cared about Nick Cave’s political opinions, including Cave himself. For most of his career, which began in Melbourne in the late 70s, he was too entrenched in the badlands of his imagination to be one of those musicians to whom journalists turned for a righteous line on an election or a war. He has never written a protest song nor aligned himself with a cause. Since 2018, he has sometimes discussed cultural politics in The Red Hand Files, his online project answering questions from fans, but it is just one part of a mix which spans grief, literature and the end of the world. Faith, Hope and Carnage, his recent bestselling book of conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan, delves deep into life, death, God and art but features just one brief exchange about cancel culture. (He’s against it.)
Lately, however, there has been growing chatter about whether or not the 65-year-old is that rare beast in music, a conservative, and what exactly that would mean. His statements tend to be long on principles, especially his opposition to censorship, but short on details. In the book he says he is “temperamentally” conservative and “that’s always been the case” – he was even a “conservative heroin addict”. Speculation about Cave’s leanings came to a head last month when he expressed his intention to attend King Charles’s coronation, due to his fascination with the spectacular and bizarre, and caused a social-media ruckus. A lot of people now seem invested in overstating Cave’s conservatism for a range of reasons, which prove the old line that the right looks for converts while the left looks for heretics.
The merest hint of conservatism in pop music tends to inspire the heebie-jeebies. Just ask Kate Bush, whose enthusiasm for a female prime minister in 2016 sparked a ridiculous fuss about her alleged Tory sympathies, which she later denied. Cave has not expressed enthusiasm for Rishi Sunak or Brexit. He has not endorsed a far-right politician, as Morrissey has, nor praised Trump, like John Lydon, nor has he been poisoned by defensiveness. Notwithstanding a memorable 2009 broadside by Australian critic Anwen Crawford, which accused him of misogyny and snobbery, Cave has never fallen prey to a blacklist. On the contrary, he is more widely beloved now than ever.
Cave’s new willingness to discuss anything and everything flows from his experience of being shattered and remade by the catastrophic loss of his teenage son Arthur in 2015. The same transformation that made his songs more emotionally raw and his live shows more spiritually elevating has turned this former heroin-addicted hellraiser into a freewheeling sage, whose candid navigation of grief has been a comfort and an inspiration to countless people. God, whose presence in Cave’s songs was always ambiguous, has entered the room in a big way (the singer has chatted to the current and former archbishops of Canterbury), although he vacillates over whether to identify as a Christian. He has loosely defined his religiosity as a “deep inclusion in the human predicament … and an understanding of our vulnerability”, which is something an atheist might also feel.
The nature of his conservatism is equally slippery. The glibbest explanation, offered to UnHerd, is that it is a way to “fuck with people”. But that doesn’t align with his claim elsewhere to have outgrown his youthful role as “a living shit-post”. Cave recently told an audience at the Hay festival that he had “a conservative temperament”, which is to say “conservative with a small c”. He is “cautious about the idea of progress”. He is certainly no revolutionary. His conservatism seems to belong to the classic vintage of philosophers who believed that humanity was fundamentally messy and broken, and regarded all quests for perfection with fierce suspicion. His hero Leonard Cohen thought that, too.
Cave’s most consistent belief seems to be his romantic commitment to artistic freedom as a hallowed state free from the judgments of politics. In the past, he has rejected the BDS campaign’s calls to boycott Israel, denounced the removal of a homophobic slur from the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and opposed boycotting the works of art by people who have done terrible things.
These are not unusual positions. As the cultural discourse has become more prescriptive over the past decade, the likes of St Vincent and the 1975’s Matty Healy have expressed similar frustrations about red lines and “cancellations”, in line with Cave’s comment that we should not “eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them”. Many musicians maintain that playing to Israeli fans is not an endorsement of the Israeli government. Most artists have a genuine, if sometimes naive, belief that art can transcend politics. And they do not enjoy following rules.
Of course, it is not that simple. Cave has described cancel culture as “mercy’s antithesis”, but mercy is not uncomplicated either. He says in his book, “I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering”, but surely the pain and crushed opportunities of victims of abuse are not less interesting or deserving of compassion than the abuser’s demons. And while there is certainly a dogmatic, puritanical streak on the left – what Cave calls “a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue” – the excesses of those who call out prejudice and abuse are still qualitatively different from actual prejudice and abuse. Sometimes that annoying activist might be right and that artist you love might be wrong. Sometimes freedoms clash.
As Claire Dederer demonstrates in her new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about whether it is OK to love art by morally dubious artists, these are thorny issues that cannot be resolved solely by odes to the wonder and mystery of creativity. The idea that art is inviolable can become dogma, too. When Cave claimed that replacing one word in Fairytale of New York made it “a song that has lost its truth, its honour and integrity”, he sounded uncharacteristically hyperbolic. Can a song that great really be destroyed by a single word? Is there not a hint there of the “doctrinal sureness” he despises?
Still, Cave has little in common with modern conservatism, from which the small c has been completely expunged. The dominant tone in 2023 is ugly, aggressive and paranoid, jangling with apocalyptic conspiracy theories about the “woke mind virus”, and shrill with dog-whistles about the urgent need to protect “our values” from immigrants, students, LGBTQ+ people and so on. The spirit-shrivelling authoritarian worldview manifested at the National Conservatism conference, in the rightwing press or at every level of the Trumpian Republican party (whose presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis just expressed his desire to “destroy leftism”) is the politics of fear.
Cave’s path, by contrast, has led away from darkness and anger. His expansive curiosity, generosity of spirit and active sense of humour are alien to this bully-boy conservatism. It is funny how a man who used to paint the extremes of human experience in the lurid colours of apocalypse has wound up preaching moderation and doubt to the extent that one old-school fan accused him of turning into a “Hallmark card hippie”.
His depiction of “woke culture” as a rigidly intolerant pseudo-religion may be something of a straw man that does not represent the views of most progressives (who presumably constitute the bulk of Cave’s fanbase), but he takes care to clarify that he bristles at the methods rather than the values. One cannot imagine DeSantis writing: “Compassion is the primary experience – the heart event – out of which emerges the genius and generosity of the imagination.”
Fans would be foolish to expect orthodox positions from an artist who has eschewed them since day one. If there is uncertainty about Cave’s politics, then it is because he shares it. In an entertaining recent instalment of the Red Hand Files, Alister from Auckland asks: “Where do you sit politically. I can never work it out. You seem all over the bloody place.” Cave cheerfully recalls an exasperated O’Hagan calling him a “centrist” who blows “whichever way the wind goes”. Cave does not really disagree: “I am simply not certain about things, except perhaps this – on those rare occasions when I am irrevocably convinced of my own position and have that surge of righteousness … I am often plain wrong.”
Long may he remain in that fluid, questioning place. If his compassion were someday to become more selective, or provocation an end in itself, then that would be not just a disappointment – but a betrayal of the man he seeks to be.
• This article was amended on 6 June 2023. An earlier version referred to Cave as having boycotted Russia, which is not the case.
