Nick Cave on being a centrist: “I just don’t really know about anything for sure”
04.04.2023 - 18:45
/ nme.com
Nick Cave has opened up about holding centrist political views, saying that he doesn’t “really know about anything for sure”.In the latest post on his Red Hand Files Q&A website, the Bad Seeds frontman responded to a fan, Daphne, who asked him if he liked raisins.She said: “I feel like I don’t ever know what I want or what to think and how I am just always confused about things, and I suppose hating raisins has been a pretty consistent thing in my life and in that sense I guess I should be grateful for it. And maybe try to like them in that way.”Another follower, Alister, submitted the question: “Where do you sit politically[?] I can never work it out.
You seem all over the bloody place.”In response, Cave – who has previously spoken about his aversion to bringing politics into his lyrics – wrote: “There is much in your letters that resonates with me, and that is the raisin why I am writing to you.“Daphne, you seem to hold a position, or rather a non-position, on things that is, in a way, similar to mine. I guess we inhabit a particular space within the world, you and I, somewhere in the midst of things, somewhere in the centre.”He continued: “Séan O’Hagan, my dear friend, and co-author of the publishing sensation, [Cave’s 2022 memoir] Faith, Hope and Carnage, said to me this morning, ‘You centrists are the worst.
You don’t know where you stand. You’re like fucking leaves in the wind,’ by which I think he meant that I had no conviction, which is to some degree true.“It is often the case with us songwriter types because we have found that a more inquiring, more expansive, less-entrenched position serves us better in the pursuit of the illusive but beautiful idea.“In the centre we feel freer, less restricted, less
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