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Nick Cave has said that he turned down Morrissey’s request to appear on a new song in 2024, claiming that the former Smiths frontman wanted him to sing “an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written”.
In response to a fan question on his Red Hand Files site about his relationship with the singer, Cave said that “although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn’t my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve.”
The Guardian has contacted representatives for Morrissey for comment.
In 2019, Cave said: “Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.” A year later, he called cancel culture “bad religion run amuck”.
In 2024, he clarified in an interview with the Observer that he was “totally down” with social justice but didn’t “agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people.
“There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”
In addition to the lyrical content of Morrissey’s proposed collaboration, he said, “while the song he sent was quite lovely, it began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro”.
Cave said that the two of them had never met, “which is probably why I like him. He is undeniably a complex and divisive figure, someone who takes more than a little pleasure in pissing people off. As enjoyable as some may find this, it holds little interest for me, but for the fact that Morrissey is probably the best lyricist of his generation – certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle.”
Answering a further question about the state of yearning, Cave said that “certain music” can fill the void that he described as “the essence of being human … a sense of incompleteness, of abandonment, a feeling of something lacking”.
“We feel complete when we listen to music we love, while being guided towards the goodness of things,” Cave wrote. “I find that Morrissey’s music, regardless of how jaundiced and disaffected the songs may sometimes seem, does precisely that – ushers us toward what is true.”
Answering one final fan question about what he was currently listening to, Cave namechecked the New York punk-funk noise band YHWH Nailgun, whose debut album 45 Pounds has been hailed as one of the year’s best, and who, Cave wrote, “in their own purifying way, do all of the above, pointing us to the heavens by going all the way down. Completely awesome.”
Cave has used his Red Hand Files site to communicate directly with fans since 2018. “Over the years, the Red Hand Files has burst the boundaries of its original concept to become a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency,” he wrote on the site.
Cave is currently on a solo tour of Europe that concludes in Luxembourg in September. His most recent album with the Bad Seeds, Wild God, was released in March 2024.
Morrissey has not released an album since 2020’s I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. He has claimed that a follow-up album, Bonfire of Teenagers, was “gagged” and prevented from release as a result of “idiot culture” after he left his US label, Capitol, in 2022. He has called it “the best album of my life”.
