Stranger than kindness

This exhaustive catalog, published to accompany an exhibition currently up at the Black Diamond in Copenhagen, showcases the ephemera, aka, "the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure," behind the art of Nick Cave, frontman of The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, and author of several novels. The items here--found objects, flea-market discoveries, handmade books, doodles of naked women, lyrics scribbled on airplane sick bags, locks of hair, photographs, drawings, and lists--are the detritus of a singular personality and serve to chronicle the life and career of Cave as he has evolved from choirboy to glam rocker on to goth, post punk, and the still-vital artist he is today. Cave's outsize image--his jet-black hair, eyeliner, and emaciated appearance, evokes a prophet from the old testament or a fire-and-brimstone tent revivalist, and is at once frightening and sensual, sinful yet seeking transcendence and redemption. Darcey Steinke, in an essay, compares Cave's prose to Faulkner's in its ability to "blend the earthly and the heavenly," suffering and rebirth. Powerful and idiosyncratic, these artifacts possess a transgressive beauty that contribute to Cave's persona.

Songwriter Cave compiles an assortment of his personal "peripheral stuff--drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages, scribblings and drafts which are the secret and unformed property of the artist" in this fascinating look at the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his music. Cave's band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, recorded 17 albums after it was formed in 1983 and dabbled with alternative rock, experimental rock, art rock, post-punk, and gothic rock. The music's evolution is given plenty of context by the ephemera included (also the focus of a 2020 exhibition at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, Denmark), among it more than 200 illustrations, a set of introductory notes by Cave reflecting on his process ("You are born. You build yourself piece by piece. You construct a narrative"), and family photos from the 1970s and '80s. There are some truly stellar images, like the perfectly preserved scrap of paper on which he wrote the lyrics to his smash hit "Wild World" in 1982 and photographs of the handmade notebooks in which he wrote songs. This offering sheds new light on the complexity of Cave's process and the range of disparate materials that can trigger an artist's creativity. Cave's fans will not want to miss this. (Mar.)