SZEPS WORLD TOUR - NICK CAVE on Faith, Melancholy, & Stardom
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nick Cave is one of Australia’s biggest musical exports. But after forty years as a rockstar - and the death of two sons - he's become something else: A unofficial poet laureate and philosopher king through his online letters project, The Red Hand files.
Nick sat down with Josh in London on the Szeps Live World Tour to discuss songwriting, grief, faith... and, as a bonus, to critique some of Josh's recent episodes.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Giday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and to our final episode in the iconic Zepz Live Around the World podcast Marathon, where we've been hopscotching the globe, sitting down with some of the most interesting people we could find in the biggest global capitals. If you have missed any of the past, |
| 0:25.4 | oh, I don't know, eight to ten episodes, then go back and check them out. There is not a single one I wouldn't wholeheartedly recommend. The tour has been a wild success, thanks to our guests |
| 0:30.6 | and to Substack, and to you for bearing with us over this exciting period. Today's guest is an icon |
| 0:37.0 | of Australia, the UK and the globe, Nick Cave. |
| 0:40.8 | He founded the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds back in the early 80s. It's one of the most |
| 0:45.6 | enduring and influential bands of the past four decades. But Nick is also a novelist and a screenwriter |
| 0:51.6 | and a film score composer whose life has been marked by tragedy |
| 0:56.8 | in the sense of he had to endure the deaths of two sons. |
| 1:02.2 | And that profoundly shaped his experience of grief and faith and love. |
| 1:07.9 | He started a blog called The Red Hand Files, which he describes as a strange exercise |
| 1:12.7 | in communal vulnerability and transparency, where his fans could submit questions, not just about |
| 1:19.1 | his music and his creativity, but about life and God and the universe and the purpose of everything. |
| 1:24.2 | He has received over 100,000 questions, and it's an amazing read. He's an |
| 1:29.1 | amazing mind. We sat down in London to discuss artificial intelligence and human creativity. |
| 1:34.5 | We got straight into it discussing religion and faith and grief and why melancholy is an integral |
| 1:40.4 | part of the human experience. He had just heard the most recent episode which had dropped, which was with Sarah |
| 1:46.1 | Hayder, an ex-Muslim, former atheist activist. |
| 1:50.0 | And that is a great episode as well. |
| 1:52.1 | Because we talk about it for the first 10 minutes in relation to Nick's own sense of |
| 1:56.7 | the divine, it may be interesting to go back and listen to that right now. |
| 1:59.9 | It's not like you won't understand this conversation without having heard it, but he sort of takes issue with |
| 2:06.0 | my identification as a capital A atheist, and we get into interesting territory. I hope you love |
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