Nick Cave has admonished his fans for being too cynical about the world and believing that progress rather than conservatism is the answer.
The Australian singer, whose songs include Red Right Hand, said that he was happy to be considered a rare example of a conservative musician.
Speaking at Hay Festival, he said that too many people were agitating for change for its own sake.
“I have these days what I would call a conservative temperament,” he said. “I believe that we need to be cautious about the idea of progress. I just see things moving very rapidly and a whole lot of different things worry me a lot, like AI [artificial intelligence].”
Cave, 65, who has had a career renaissance with his band, the Bad Seeds, said that he was a small-c conservative rather than a supporter of a party.
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He said that he had an understanding of “what it is to lose something” in the name of progress and how hard it was to get it back.
“I don’t think that progress is, in itself, good,” he said. “I’m not against progress and I think there are huge problems in the world that we really need to deal with . . . but the idea that everything is systemically f***ed as the only way of seeing the world is deeply demoralising to us as a society.”
He said that his website, The Red Hand Files, which he uses to talk to fans, was full of people bemoaning the state of the world. “[The idea that] human beings are corrupt, personally I find this not only wrong but disturbing and it’s becoming a problem,” he said.
Cave, who was interviewed on stage by the journalist Sean O’Hagan, agreed that cynicism was linked to a decline in religion. “I think we got rid of religion, essentially, which may or may not be a good thing, but there’s a vacuum that we created that we don’t really know what to do with,” he said. “And I think that it’s been filled with people trying to find spiritualness in the wrong things, like politics for example.”
He also described meeting Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and said that they “got on really well”.
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“He wanted to talk about poetry and I wanted to talk about religion. He wanted to get off religion and get on to poetry,” he said.
