Nick Cave Talks Grief, Joy, and Wild God

Nick Cave doesn’t get enough credit for being funny. To explain to me why his Australian accent is still so strong despite his having left the country in 1980, he begins doing an impression of his wild-haired musical partner Warren Ellis. “I just have a Warren accent,” he says, grinning. “I spend a lot of time with him and he’s like”—Cave shifts gears—“Aw fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that and this cunt!” It’s as accurate as if they were blood family, spoken in the voice he hears when Ellis talks incessantly about documentaries he watched the night before—the kind of one-sided transmit-only conversations that Cave believes could be helped along by holding up little paddles occasionally that say either WOW or NO WAY or UH HUH. He adds with love that this is an endearing thing about Ellis. Everyone’s aware of it: watch One More Time With Feeling, the 2016 Andrew Dominik film documenting the recording of the Bad Seeds' sixteenth studio album, Skeleton Tree. Observe how Ellis rarely gets to the end of whatever it is he’s saying. His audio just gets faded down.