Nick Cave has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Songwriter, musician and novelist
Australia · b. 1957
Australian songwriter and frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. His albums include The Boatman's Call, Push the Sky Away and Ghosteen, and he has written two novels and several screenplays. Since 2018 he has answered readers' questions in an online newsletter, The Red Hand Files.
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I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.
Recorded Lauren Laverne, BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs source
As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.
Recorded Jai, The Red Hand Files, Issue #302, 28 October 2024 source
Many creative people, especially the young, may feel their chaotic or disordered relationship with the world is indispensable to their creative freedom. The more anarchic, the better! However, after considerable fieldwork in this area, I have yet to find it so. I have come to understand that the muscle of the imagination is strengthened through resistance, discipline and order.
Recorded Jai, The Red Hand Files, Issue #302, 28 October 2024 source
The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor. […] As anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
Recorded NPR, NPR broadcast interview, September 2014, 16 September 2014 source
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