"There's something about being open and vulnerable that is conversely very powerful, maybe even transformative"

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to any fan of Nick Cave - and especially any regular reader of his site The Red Hand Files - that he should be an eloquent interviewee on difficult, heavy subjects. And yet this excerpt from new book Faith, Hope And Carnage, published today by Canongate, is astonishing even by his standards.

In it, Cave talks to journalist/friend Sean O'Hagan about the tragic death of his son Arthur, the "terrible beauty of grief", the creative/healing process, the nature of religion and the fact that songs can be mystifyingly and disturbingly prescient - "little dangerous bombs of truth".

One revelation that caught me off-guard was that 2019's Ghosteen - an incredible album that Cave describes as an attempt to communicate with Arthur, "to not just articulate the loss but to make contact in some kind of way, maybe in the same way as we pray" - was recorded at the Malibu studio owned by Chris Martin. I never thought I'd be grateful to the Coldplay frontman for services to music, but there you are.