His North American tour with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, who plays synthesizer and violin, wound up last weekend with two shows at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts, and though the songs - mostly from his last two albums, Ghosteen and Carnage - were as dark, tortured and full of Old Testament-like fire and brimstone as usual, Cave seemed exceptionally upbeat, joking with Ellis (something of a comic himself) and even finding time to talk of how much he loves Fairmount bagels and Liberty cream cheese. Photo by Dave Sidaway / Montreal GazetteĬave said later he is more engaged in art than ever and has many projects on the go, but has realized the importance of things outside art, like wife Susie Bick, his family, his friends. Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition is a fascinating exploration of the intense singer’s oeuvre. He was referring to the death of his son and how it wrenched him out of that self-centredness. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. And that has required me to make a different form of music.” But there’s something that happened beyond my control, that happens when you walk through that door.

The older music … the associations, the people in (the band) The Bad Seeds.

To sit here now, there’s a weirdly disconnected feeling toward this. Then you go through that door (which leads to the rest of the exhibition, looking at his more recent life) and everything changes. “I didn’t realize it until this time walking through it, but this is representative of an artistic self-absorption, without paying much attention to anything else. “It’s strange for me to walk through this exhibition because it shows very clearly the life of a very self-absorbed creative person who’s had a series of violent ruptures in my life and this particular room is like the end of something,” Cave said. The comment reflected Cave’s dry sense of humour.Ĭave spoke about how fans love to be in this room, but said he has mixed feelings about the re-creation of the office, which has hundreds of his books, old manual typewriters, a turntable (with a Leonard Cohen record on it), posters and two pianos. In other words, we didn’t really get the answer to that central question. “Mostly this is just piles and piles of rubbish that (curator) Christina (Back) and her team have sifted through and radically edited and found good stuff,” Cave said.

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Stranger than kindness by nick cave