The Veiled World of Nick Cave: The Star-Studded Story of How Sometimes the Devil Doesn’t Have the Best Melodies | television

DWatching Nick Cave’s new documentary on Sky, I’m reminded of how critics skewer towards meddlesome musicians who constantly change direction and dabble in everything. This is its own kind of myth. I know a lot of artists who keep moving – one week they’re sewing fish scales onto jackets, the next they’re painting mirrors or putting seahorses in a samovar. The problem is that no one cares. If poet and potter Nick Cave didn’t write classic songs too, he’d just be a local weirdo. I certainly wouldn’t buy a hardcover copy of Conversations He Had with a Colleague About God. I’m glad I did, though.

Nick Cave’s Veiled World documentary (Saturday 6 December, 9pm, Sky Arts), has been timed to promote the TV series adaptation of his sordid novel The Death of Bunny Munro. It’s a great opportunity to revisit his early, intense masterpieces: electric chair confessions, killer duets with pop princesses, and otherworldly love songs. They’re still in my head, days later. It’s also a reminder that, in his straying career, asserting his Christian faith was his most divisive move. Audiences love biblical images in rock songs, provided the singer doesn’t already believe it.

Retrospectives generally feature a gallery of talking heads resembling the platonic ideal of comfortable middle age, as if they got rich from jobs in procurement. The cave friends are still the weirdest people at the party. There’s Bella Freud, Wim Wenders, and Warren Ellis, who looks like Mandy Patinkin playing an Indian monk in a Paul Smith suit. Arguably the most rock-star guest is former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who talks about the difference between joy and happiness with keen insight.

Other shareholders cannot provide the same value. Some, like Flea, Flea and Florence Welch, read their favorite words aloud. I wonder why they are all sitting in empty rooms, with the objects and furniture in the background covered with blankets. They seem to be surrounded by sick ghosts. This may be an eloquent metaphor, but it also seems as if everyone got their animators in the same week.

There are strains of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan film, with archival sets of pilgrims, riot police, and bison herds. The World of the Veil is divided into sections with titles such as Outlaw, Divine Child, and Prophet, focusing on the archetypal images favored by Cave. He himself is absent, except for audio clips, and there is not much biographical information. I found myself longing for more takes on the drug-addicted, controversial Cave, who saw the public as a hostile force to be overcome. We know that some of his cool nicknames include ‘Punk Jesus from Melbourne’ and ‘King of Berlin’, but that’s not why.

The program is more concerned with today’s Cave: a man of deep compassion, torn by faith and comforted by doubt, who no longer believes in art as the supreme power. At school, the punk rebel dreamed of becoming a teacher, his photographer and friend Polly Borland reveals. The cave has evolved into his vision, at a cost no one will pay. The death of his teenage son Arthur was a seismic tragedy. The show traces his influence, including the spectral album Ghosteen, a new dimension of grief and connection in his live shows, and his emergence as a self-elected spiritual guru.

Like many, I’m a huge fan of Cave’s advice newsletter, Red Hand Files, for which he has never earned the nickname “Uncle Doom.” Many readers’ letters condemn him and his refusal to be partisan on political issues. His responses are very sweet and often funny. I can’t read it in public, because I don’t like seeing metaphysical epiphanies on the bus or crying next to strangers. He will say both are necessary. It’s a shame that this part of his professional portfolio doesn’t appear in the documentary.

The world of veiled women has a lofty mentality, but it suffers from contradiction. Documentaries are reportage, an attempt to understand and establish meaning. Grief and God are indescribable themes that resist fixation. Displaying details and events is easier than displaying internal details. We can’t experience calm or purpose vicariously, but an anecdote about the worst thing you did at a party? This is worth saying.

Cave’s latest work has been about dispelling the myth that the devil has the best tunes. Perhaps the real perversion is in me, and in everyone else, who misses the smell of sulfur.