Nick Cave and Giovanni Lindo Ferretti

Some lives run alongside each other, twisting and coiling through nearly identical folds, and yet they never meet. There was a moment when these two came this close to crossing: 1982, West Berlin. A singer-songwriter from Melbourne had tried and failed to break through in London and was now looking for a new path in the German city; that same year, in that same place, an ex-psychiatric nurse from the province of Reggio Emilia arrived by hitchhiking and decided to become a musician, after living through that Berlin. This close: Giovanni Lindo Ferretti passed through the Risiko, the club where Blixa Bargeld worked, the gothic voice fronting one of the greatest German experimental rock bands, Einstürzende Neubauten. The following year Blixa would become the guitarist in Nick Cave's new band, the Bad Seeds, with whom the Australian would find his adult voice. At the Risiko, Ferretti and Cave came within one degree of separation.

From that first missed encounter, the two went their separate ways, down rough and uneven roads. Their careers moved within the rupture that post-punk had driven into pop music. Post-punk set out to put mainstream classic rock‘n’roll on trial, condemning it as a now-hollow shell of spectacle - all sequins, leather trousers and teased hair - stripped of any countercultural substance. People like Nick Cave and Giovanni Lindo Ferretti rejected the rocker archetype and its cursus honorum: from radio hits to sold-out stadiums and straight on to global stardom, and yes, the odd stumble with drugs and alcohol, but nothing beyond tabloid gossip; ending up like a king with a wife and kids in a villa, charity donations, and secret training sessions in the park to get back in shape for the next reunion tour. That wasn't what kids like Cave and Ferretti were after. They rediscovered the urgency to write without divertissement, but to set to poetry and sound a vision of the world - however bleak, twisted and hopelessly un-radio-friendly.

These intentions produced artists whose lives and careers ran off the rails of expectation. So Cave, after his depraved beginnings amid the graceless cacophonies of Birthday Party, took on the role of a storyteller - though of tales somewhere between noir and thriller, packed with disturbing, grotesque detail. Gradually, those stories veered more and more toward mournful ballads yearning for redemption, echoing the bare, pure songs of Leonard Cohen, until reaching the mystical rarefaction of the last three albums with Warren Ellis and of the most recent, “Wild God”, whose closing moments seem to take on the tones of the vision of God in the thirty-third canto of Paradiso.

Ferretti, on the other hand, created with Zamboni and co. a kind of “pro-Soviet punk”, dressing its ideological framework in a bizarre Eastern European kitsch - thanks to the theatrical presences of Danilo Fatur and Annarella Giudici - and later in German new wave, American proto-punk and British dark wave. Yet without ever coming across as provincial clones of some English or American band; rather, a provincial Italian band, in the same way that writing “CCCP” like that is provincial, the way a militant student in Bologna might pronounce it. Provincial and proud of it, yet at the same time straining outward, to the point of twisting pop songs and traditional ballroom dance and feeding them to punk.

After 1992 they carried on, but under the name CSI (Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti), as if to keep a record in the name itself that the Berlin Wall had fallen. And like the socio-economic climate, their sound too grew more austere. They became the beacon of the Italian indie-rock scene, but then, in 1998, after a final live show recorded in a church and dedicated to Beppe Fenoglio, they broke up. While the group went on to schedule frequent reunions and shows, Ferretti instead sought other, less worldly reasons to make music. In the 2000s Ferretti began writing litanies with a religious flavour, which he sang under the tellingly named project: PGR (Per Grazia Ricevuta).

The twists and turns have been wildly different, but the trajectory is similar. Transgression, pain, conversion, union with God.

Now in old age - Cave 66, Ferretti 70 - their lives seem once again as close as they were that time in Berlin in '82. But today, miles apart: Nick Cave on the Brighton seafront, among the piers and the cracked plaster of the hotels, suspended like ghosts in the mist rising off the water; Ferretti in the stone farmhouse where he was born, in Cerreto Alpi, 960 metres up in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, with his stable and the horses he trains to take the occasional visitor out for a ride in the mountains. Out of time, both have passed from the fury of transgression to quiet contemplation, to faith. Both have gone on to write books about their experiences of “conversion”: Nick Cave's long, intimate conversation with journalist Sean O'Hagan, “Faith, Hope and Carnage”; and that unhurried confession (later delivered in barely a whisper during public readings in Cerreto) that is “Óra: difendi, conserva, prega”. Both men passed through perdition in their youth to arrive at religion in old age. But looking closely, the Christian turn was already implicit in their starting points. Their eyes were always fixed on the same thing: the Absolute beyond the grey of the everyday.

Mercy

Nick Cave arrived at a conversation with God by starting from the starkest repudiation of the kingdom of heaven. Back in the days of the Birthday Party, the band Cave started out with, he sang of a Mutiny In Heaven. He recoiled in horror at the hallucinated vision of rats in Paradise, repeating as if gripped by a demonic tarantism: "If this is Heaven I'm bailin' out!". And the cacophonous screech of Rowland Howard's guitar tore down every bridge to bliss or eternity. Hell wasn't the bogeyman of some future sentence, it was already right there, on stage. The recent documentary about the band shows as much - titled, fittingly, "Mutiny In Heaven". On certain nights, Cave staged nothing but violence, directed as much at the world as at himself, abandoning any last instinct of self-preservation. He would ask for drugs to be thrown up on stage, and often got them; he'd try to strangle fans in the front rows with his microphone cable. He redefined the very threshold of what counts as a rock show: it isn't one, really, unless a police cordon is needed between the band and the crowd. And yet even back then, the ferocity, the malnutrition and the heroin didn't conceal an interest in the Bible and Christianity, however diseased in character: "Prayers On Fire" was the title of the debut, and as Cave explained in a 1996 BBC interview, "all I had to do was get up on stage and let the curse of God roar through me. Floods, fires and frogs would leap out of my throat. God wasn't just speaking to me, but through me. And his breath stank".

The literary touchstones are Poe and the whole Gothic tradition, LeFanu, and Southern writers like O'Connor and Faulkner. But Cave's lyrics don't just toy with the gloomy and the sinister, because within them lies the prophetic solemnity of Milton's Apocalypses... or of Scripture itself. Especially the Old Testament. Cave's voice, from the start as much as now, has always been streaked with a restless, Augustinian, Lutheran religiosity, one that stares down the inescapable mystery of sin; that takes on the corrupt, rotten nature of man, crooked timber that cannot be made straight, because deep in his heart the seeds of evil have already been planted. The Bad Seeds.

But this stance doesn't lead into the abyss of damnation. Cave's stories are shot through with an anguished need for mercy. A need that is often frustrated, as in his harrowing debut novel, "And the Ass Saw the Angel", in which a deaf-mute boy, loathed and abused by a community of religious fanatics in rural America, seems to draw down the wrath and punishments of a cruel God, and everything and everyone who brings him peace is trampled underfoot. A need that, in certain inexplicable cases, is instead answered by Grace: so it is on "Tender Prey", a harrowing record, caught between the man condemned to the electric chair in "The Mercy Seat", the heroin addict enslaved to the substance in "Sunday's Slave", the raped and murdered woman at the center of "Sugar Sugar Sugar". But at the close, almost as if answering the prayer of John the Baptist imprisoned in the title track ⟦Q1⟧, the sky opens up. ⟦Q2⟧, the languid joy of a harmonica. Light filters gently through.

By the time God returned to whisper in Nick Cave's ear, there were no more foul curses, only Grace and redemption. His heroin addiction reaches its peak and Cave ends up in rehab. There he works on "The Boatman's Call". Once, for Cave, the king of heaven had been Elvis, as he sang in "Tupelo"; now it's the boatman, the fisher of men. The gem of the record is "Into My Arms": "I wrote that song on my bed in the dorm at the rehab centre" - he recounts in "Faith, Hope and Carnage" - "On Sundays, if you wanted, they'd let you go to church. And the melody came to me as I was walking through the fields, on my way back from church". In the song he says he doesn't believe in an interventionist God. Cave's God is something to surrender to, a liberating and so be it. In the book he says: "I'm not at peace, but happiness isn't the most important thing to me. What matters is feeling that things make sense".

Feeling that something holds the pieces together becomes imperative when they scatter and fragment: in 2015 Arthur, Cave's fifteen-year-old son, dies falling from a cliff after taking LSD. In 2022, having processed that grief, he loses his elder son Jethro too, before his time, dead at 31 in circumstances that were never made public, after a history of drug addiction and schizophrenia. Genuine pain changes everything. Rage and hatred lose all their allure in his eyes; in fact they come to seem repulsive in their own way; he sheds those feelings, as if peeling off a layer of skin. "The young Nick Cave" - he explains again in "Faith, Hope and Carnage" - "could afford to despise the world because he had no idea what was coming. Now I understand that contempt and resentment toward the world was a kind of luxury and indulgence, even a vanity. He had no idea how precious life is, how fragile. He had no idea how hard, yet how essential, it is to love the world and treat it with grace".

With a five-year plan, stability

The arc of Giovanni Lindo Ferretti has also reoriented its priorities. Granted, in his case there's the added factor of politics. But Ferretti has always lived that dimension on an existential plane, the same plane as Nick Cave. One could see it differently, of course, and brand his support for conservative and reactionary positions - complete with an endorsement of Giorgia Meloni - as a cultural betrayal, a about-face on his highest ideals. But Ferretti is more faithful to the line than he might appear on the surface. The art of CCCP first, then of CSI and PGR, is united by a rejection of modernity and of the bastions of technology, progress and individualism. Soviet rigor and steel, the world beyond the Iron Curtain, stand as the alternative to the Decline of the West. There, Ferretti sees, with a romantic gaze, some vague notion of "solidarity" - not so much as a political ideal, but simply as human warmth, something to set against the chill of the fetishistic relations between commodities. But there's more. The oversized apparatus of bureaucracy is a reassuring web of rules and constraints that keep lives anchored, in contrast to the thinning of communal bonds prevailing in West Berlin, and its nihilistic outcomes.

Qua e di là dal muro l'Europa persa e in trance

In Alexander-Platz come in piazza del Duomo

Europa persa in trance ultimamente

I miei amici anche, i miei amici anche

Sotto la N.A.T.O. e il patto di Varsavia

Provate a rifugiarvi sotto il Patto di Varsavia

Con un piano quinquennale, la stabilità

(CCCP, "Live In Pankow")

Once again, what matters is the feeling of having a direction, and that things make sense. It's the same feeling that fuels Ferretti's infatuation with the Islamic world: "Punk Islam" is fervor of faith, shared purpose, sacredness; everything that stands starkly opposed to a way of living life with no direction at all, save for the one dictated by the dazzle of consumerism's glitter. So the sounds and themes of Islam, together with the Soviets and — as a hint of choices yet to come — Catholic iconography, merge into the geographic utopia of Eurasia, printed on the back cover of "Socialismo e barbarie".

But the day comes when Ferretti understands there was no need to go so far to climb over the wall, especially after the wall has fallen, and there's no longer any "beyond" the wall. It's enough to go back to the place where his family had lived for generations, where his grandmother told her rosary beads while stroking his head as a child. "I had to accept the guilty verdict," he writes in "Óra. Difendi, conserva, prega" — "vanity, everything is vanity in my days. There was truth in my days as a child. My hand in my grandmother's hand. In my hands now only dust, and stickiness." Then a pleural tumor creeps in, along with the sense of having squandered his life, enslaved to seasonal fashions and to the brash march of a youthful ideology of liberation that — paradoxically — in the name of freedom also uprooted every real social bond.

Ferretti goes back to live in the family home in Cerreto, after having it renovated. There's still a priest in the village, don Guiscardo. Ferretti lays out all his problems and doubts to him. Don Guiscardo replies that there isn't much to discuss. That every day, not just Sunday, there is mass. And then the feast days throughout the year. There's no more anxiety, and time becomes natural and liturgical again. He writes in "Óra": "It is in the order of things. To live, to die in due time."

Idiot Prayer

This ritual religiosity, abandoned by the rest of our world, is also professed by Cave. Again in "Faith, Hope and Carnage": "The word spiritual is a bit amorphous for my taste. Religious, on the other hand, is more specific, maybe even more conservative, it shares more with tradition."

The act of worship where the lives of Cave and Ferretti intersect today is prayer. Ferretti recounts having stopped praying as an act of liberation, to break free of family conditioning, to embody the ideals of the progressive culture that was redefining the world. To feel part of the change and swept up by the new, between political demonstrations marking the days and concerts marking the nights. Not only did he stop praying, he started cursing God, to give weight to his convictions, and kept at it for years without a second thought. Then he stopped to think about it, and found himself having to quit out of shame. "I don't know when I started praying again," he says. "I just did it, because it made my heart swell."

On the Red Hand Files, the site where he answers fans' questions directly, Cave talks about prayer as an act that asks something of us while also giving a great deal back. It requires that we approach it empty of pretense and falsehood, and contemplate what fulfills us. In return, if we approach with grace, we receive the manifestation of our fundamental needs. Nick also says that all of this holds the same value inside and outside the bounds of religious practice; that there is the same chance of getting an answer to one's prayers whether God exists or not. Because in believing and praying, one doesn't so much encounter an external agent as encounter oneself. Theirs is a kind of Pascal's wager, or the Idiot Prayer that gives Cave's song its title.

Ferretti writes: "I've learned that if I step into a Romanesque church or a Gothic cathedral, I'll feel better afterward, regardless."

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