2026-10-16
3 分钟Welcome to Desert Island Discs Postcards.
I'm Lauren Laverne.
We've cast away thousands of people to our imaginary desert island, among them many singers.
This week's last postcard is penned by singer-songwriter Nick Cave.
Huge hits have flowed from his pen, including Into My Arms, Red Right Hand and Where the Wild Roses Grow.
When I spoke to him in 2025, however,
he was keen to disabuse anyone of the notion that writing songs comes easily to him.
Mostly when I write, it's despairing in the fact that all I'm doing is writing bad stuff.
I have endless notebooks which I've told my wife to burn upon my death in case anyone decides
that they should look through them and see what kind of writer I actually am.
And I write a lot, and within that lot there are some precious moments
that reveal themselves in time, by which I mean that everything I've put down on the page looks bad.
Sounds bad.
It's never like, wow.
But certain lines just sit there on the page and they do sort of lift themselves
out of the kind of morass of rubbish.
By which I'm saying I do not sit down ever with an idea for a song.
This is what I want to write a song about.
This is what's concerning me at the moment.
I need to write this.