Nick Cave Shares His Unique Pre-Show Rituals

Nick Cave doesn’t half-ass anything. Especially not his songs or the way he takes the stage.

In a new post on his fan Q&A site The Red Hand Files, the Bad Seeds frontman cracked open his creative process, revealing both the agony of songwriting and the quiet, deeply personal ritual he performs before each gig.

Finishing songs, Cave says, isn’t a question of discipline—it’s a matter of honour. “I must see this idea through to the end,” he writes. “It’s the least I can do.” The hardest part, he says, isn’t finishing—it’s when the idea hasn’t landed yet. That “agonising” wait for inspiration is something he still hasn’t figured out, even decades into his career.

Still, there’s a kind of faith that keeps him showing up. “Whatever force leaves these occasional gifts at my doorstep knows I won’t abandon the idea. I won’t say ‘screw it.’” That commitment, Cave says, is probably why the songs keep coming.

And before he brings them to life on stage, that’s where things get even heavier.

Cave revealed that before every performance, he spends 15 minutes in total silence, calling on the dead—his son Arthur “for his joyfulness,” his other son Jethro “for his anarchic spirit,” his father, mother, and long-lost friends and collaborators like Shane MacGowan, Anita Lane, Rowland S. Howard, and Tracy Pew.

Each one, Cave says, carries a trait he needs. “I appeal to these individuals much like a devout person might petition the saints,” he writes. “I feel a deep spiritual empowerment, so that when I take to the stage, I am carried along by this unearthly fraternity.”

He’s even added an old schoolmate, David “Dud” Green, to the mix—tasking him with remembering “those loved but unremembered, the forgotten living, while they are still with us.”

Cave’s communion with the past isn’t nostalgia—it’s fuel. The ghosts don’t haunt him; they hold him up. And in a world of bullshit algorithms and content churn, Cave’s still chasing something sacred. That alone deserves volume.