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Nick Cave is a rock and roll legend. If you don’t know him from the decades he’s spent fronting his band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, you may recognize his haunting baritone from the theme song of Peaky Blinders.
He’s also a novelist, screenwriter, and voracious reader. And when Old School host Shilo Brooks invited him to select a favorite book to discuss, Cave chose an Italian children’s tale, which also happens to be one of the best-selling and most widely translated books ever written.
Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio tells the story of a puppet carved from wood by a poor carpenter, Geppetto. Pinocchio is a disobedient, lazy, mischievous rascal, who gets entangled in all kinds of misadventures, led astray by temptations and deceitful characters. Ultimately, he redeems himself and becomes—spoiler alert—a real boy.
Unlike the Disney adaptation, Collodi’s novel is dark, brimming with poverty, violence, and existential peril. And Cave found solace in the book during a dark period of his own life, following the sudden death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015.
In their conversation, Cave and Brooks discuss how the story helped him process his grief. They also explore how transgression and disobedience shape character, how art thrives in defiance of conformity, and more. You can watch the full episode on Youtube, or listen on Apple or Spotify below. The below excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Why does Pinocchio want to be a real boy?:
Nick Cave: As a child, I found myself understanding the Pinocchio character quite well. He’s a lazy, mendacious, work-shy, incorrigible little guy. But he wants to be good. He has the best intentions. This is the comic engine that runs through this beautiful book. He always wants to be good, but he’s a puppet to his appetites. He’s always drawn away by some dangerous adventure. And I really related to that.
Why does he want to become a boy? I guess that no one wants to have their strings pulled. We want to be able to, you know, have our own lives and our own agency and not to be the puppet of our more base desires. And that’s the other beautiful thing I think about. What’s so endearing about this puppet-boy is that he’s unformed. He’s an unformed thing. He hasn’t truly become a human being in the way that young people are unformed and require adventure before they become wholly real, complete human beings.
The difference between the book and the Disney movie:
Shilo Brooks: Collodi’s Pinocchio from The Adventures of Pinocchio is different from the Walt Disney version. . . . There’s a sense in which he’s almost mean. There’s a scene in the book where his father, Geppetto, who wants to educate him, sells his coat in order to buy Pinocchio a spelling book. And Pinocchio then sells the book in order to enter the marionette theater.
NC: I mean, I love the Disney adaption of Pinocchio. And it is quite dark in its way, but not remotely like The Adventures of Pinocchio, the Collodi book. It’s not a world where there is a series of adventures. It’s a world that is trying to kill Pinocchio constantly. They’re trying to drown him, to skin him, to fry him, to boil him. He’s eaten by a giant shark, he’s stabbed by assassins, he’s hung by his neck. It’s a book of completely perilous adventures, one after the other. And within that, Pinocchio is incorrigible.
SB: And through these adventures, he seems to receive some kind of education that points him in the direction of what’s good.
NC: It’s his disobedience that makes him a man. And that says something about virtuousness. That there is something widening to the personality about transgression, and something perhaps narrowing to the personality about virtuousness, where you just obey, obey, obey.
SB: I agree in whole with what you say about the connection between transgression and the creative spirit. One of the things I see in my own students, especially teaching at an elite college, is that they all come having lives that have been shaped to get them into that college since kindergarten. I always tell them, “You need some rough edges. You’re not interesting. In fact, you’re boring because all you’ve ever done has been shaped to achieve this particular moment and admission to this university.” And I do find that people who have lived lives of adventure have some more substance to them, some depth of soul.
The father-son relationship and Nick’s grief for his son:
NC: There is this subterranean grief underneath this story that is reflected in Pinocchio’s longing for his father. Geppetto has been walking the world looking for the boy. He can’t find him in all of Europe, and he’s crossing an ocean to go to the New World. It’s an extraordinarily moving account. And eventually, he finds him, in the belly of the beast, where Geppetto has been for two years. He’s living inside a shark. And this shark to me represents Satan or hell.
I find that on a personal level, the idea of the father searching for his son, and the lost son saving the father, was deeply personal to me. I read this book a lot around the death of my son. The idea that the missing child ends up being able to save the grieving father, who’s been sitting in the belly of the beast on his own, became extraordinarily moving to me. It’s an inversion of the way it should be. The absent child returns to basically parent the parent.
SB: Is it seeing that joy, what Geppetto feels when he sees the joy in that boy’s face, that saves him? Or that saves you, imagining the spirit of the child?
NC: It’s very difficult to talk about in a way. I think that Geppetto is in a dark place because of the absence of the child. And that child finds a way back to the father and becomes the father’s protector. And I understand that very well. That an absence can have its own saving presence.
Boredom’s role in creativity and Nick’s songwriting process:
SB: What do you see this book saying about creativity? You have created a lot in your life. Where does it come from?
NC: Artists have very different ways to approach things. For me personally, it is about practical application. You sit each day in preparation for the idea, and the rest is pretty much left up to the gods. You hone your skills so that you can do the best job when the idea arrives. But that initial little epiphany you might have is the great mystery and the great beauty of being a creative spirit. The thing I’ve noticed is that the epiphany sits adjacent to boredom. The boredom is a necessary part of creation itself. And to be creative, you simply need to be alert to what’s going on. Where the ideas come from, I wish I knew. I’d visit there more often.
SB: Do you feel the relationship to your creations in the same way that Geppetto feels the relationship to his creation? In other words: He’s a father to it. I was thinking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was reading this. Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, creates this monster, and then there’s this whole novel about his complex relationship to this monster, who sees Victor as a father. As somebody who’s put a lot of songs out into the world, that take on a life of their own, that other people hear and attribute meaning to that’s not the meaning that you had when you wrote it, do you feel a relationship to your creations that’s complicated like Geppetto’s?
NC: Of the good songs that I write, there is an ongoing relationship with them for sure, if they’re good and they haven’t just sort of died a few days after birth. There’s a conversation that continues each time you sing them. People ask: Why have you chosen these particular songs from all the songs that you’ve written, that you come back to again and again? That is because they have the capacity to present themselves in different ways to you each time. And there is an ongoing revealing of the meaning of the complexity of the song that goes on throughout the life of that song. Sometimes they stop revealing anything, and I put them away. It’s more a kind of shimmering soul feeling rather than you actually understand what these things actually mean. You pray to God it actually means something. But the meaning is a secondary next step from original creation. And I find that the songs, if they’re good, reveal that meaning over many years. They have the capacity to do that now. And I think that that’s what Pinocchio has done for me.
IS it a children’s book?
Fairy tales are certainly not “children’s literature,” contrary to convention. (Tolkien was emphatic.)
So…
The Little House series. Not only did I learn so much, but my parents and I travelled to all the home sites. I became involved with Laurapalooza the academic conference, and this internal auditor became the LP22 chair, omg. I have made friendships that I know will last the rest of my life.