"Devouring the new Nick Cave documentary on Sky, I am reminded how critics go wild for arty musicians who constantly change direction and dabble in everything. This is its own kind of myth. I know plenty of artists who keep moving one week they're sewing fish scales on to jackets, the next they're painting mirrors or putting seahorses in samovars. The problem is, no one cares."
"If poet and ceramicist Nick Cave didn't also write classic songs, he'd just be a local weirdo. I definitely wouldn't buy a hardcover transcription of conversations he'd had with a mate about God. I'm glad I did, though. The documentary, Nick Cave's Veiled World (Saturday 6 December, 9pm, Sky Arts), is timed to promote the TV adaptation of his filthy novel The Death of Bunny Munro."
"It's also a reminder that, in a joyfully perverse career, the assertion of his Christian faith has been his most divisive move. Audiences love biblical imagery in rock songs, provided the singer doesn't actually believe. Retrospectives generally feature a gallery of talking heads who resemble the Platonic form of comfortable middle age, as if they got wealthy from careers in procurement."
Nick Cave combines provocative musical masterpieces with eclectic visual and craft experiments that often go unnoticed without his songwriting legacy. The Sky documentary coincides with the TV adaptation of The Death of Bunny Munro and revisits intense early work: electric chair confessionals, murderous duets, and profane love songs. His outspoken Christian faith has been divisive, contrasting with audiences' appetite for biblical imagery so long as performers are not genuine believers. Retrospectives include both idiosyncratic friends and clichéd talking-head contributors, with Rowan Williams offering unusually piercing theological insight.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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