All Points East – Nick Cave & Friends

Arch lyricist and iconoclast Nick Cave is playing All Points East festival with his expert musical collaborators the Bad Seeds.

A mini-festival of sorts the line up features:
Michael Kiwanuka, Sleaford Mods, Aldous Harding, Anna Calvi, Tinariwen, Jehnny Beth and more.

All of whom have show a particularly artisanal love of songwriting as an artform as a pure expression that does something more than live as product. Which connects it to the material (instruments and words) rather than sales and people… though they’ve all been successful.

Nick Cave, perhaps fictitiously on his songwriting;

“My process of lyric writing is as follows: For months, I write down ideas in a notebook with a Bic medium ballpoint pen in black. At some point, the songs begin to reveal themselves, to take some kind of form, which is when I type the new lyrics into my laptop. Here, I begin the long process of working on the words, adding verses, taking them away, and refining the language, until the song arrives at its destination. At this stage, I take one of the yellowing back pages I have cut from old second-hand books, and, on my Olympia typewriter, type out the lyrics. I then glue it into my bespoke notebook, number it, date-stamp it, and sticker it. The song is then ‘officially’ completed. Last year, I lost my beloved Ghosteen notebook with all the scribblings and typed lyrics in it. I have no idea what happened to it. It was very distressing for me at the time. A few months ago, in lockdown, I sat and retyped all the lyrics, date-stamped, stickered, and numbered them, in an attempt to reclaim them. This process reconnected me to the words that I had lost. A number of these pages are now available as handmade reproductions.” (From interview magazine)