20,000 Days of Nick Cave

I don't know very much about Nick Cave. He is an Australian musician famous for being in a couple of bands, his emotionally raw, obsessive lyrics, he is the front man of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a band formed in the 1980s but really I have never connected with him.

My boyfriend lent me an album of his and to be honest it felt like a good melody spoilt by that drunk guy in the pub who puts on the jukebox and ruins your favourite song. His lyrics never seem clever enough for the intensity of his voice and yet I feel like I am missing the point to his songs, some hidden meaning that I am not hipster enough to understand. So why did I go and see the premiere of 20,000 Days on Earth at the Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House, a film about Nick Cave and his life?

Well, Nick Cave is from Brighton, near where I live, my boyfriend likes him and I was trying to be nice, and there wasn't anything else I really wanted to see at Somerset House this year. Everyone loves Sense and Sensibility but I don't want to see it again and I'd cry all the way through ET.


So I unpacked my three picnic blankets and my extensive feast of Sainsburys food and we settled down under a marginally threatening sky and prayed it wouldn't rain. It didn't. Just before it got dark we were graced with an impressive rainbow doming the entire venue and Somerset House flashed with coloured lights and booming music as the screen came to life. The film was excellent, so much more accessible than Cave's music. It was perfectly shot as a documentary, never dwelling on sections of Cave's life for too long, it flipped from scene to scene through psychedelic music and graphic speed. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the co-writers and directors, did a fantastic job and Cave was interesting and succinct. He talked about life and his family in a way I could understand. I got the impression that he always felt lonely and was desperately searching for more, people maybe, in the form of fame and yet he loves his family. He is obviously extremely proud of his wife and his children and really, he is just an ordinary dad deep down.


The film, being warm enough, having a good spread of food and it not raining all contributed to a great evening out under the stars. The perfect way to celebrate my graduation in MA History of Art from the Courtauld, housed in Somerset House.