Every morning Nick Cave jumps in a lake. “I’m one of those wacky wild swimmers,” he says. “Rain or shine, summer or winter, regardless of what country I’m in, I try and find someplace.
” To justify the appeal, he draws on nature writer Roger Deakin’s description, that “you jump in with all your devils and leap out a giggling idiot”. “I highly recommend it,” Cave continues. “If you’re the kind of person that wakes up feeling a little despondent, go and jump into freezing water.
It’s so fucking catastrophic to your nervous system that it recalibrates everything. It’s amazing.” Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter This is not what people expect from Nick Cave.
From raw post-punk roots he has grown into an icon of gothic otherworldliness, a modern-day prophet, with songs about love, loss and redemption delivered with a voice that sounds like it holds the wisdom of the world. “I’m not trying to work out the meaning of life or anything,” Cave says. “Explaining a song is generally a bit of a dead end in an interview,” he adds, shifting a flower vase sitting on the table between us, meaning I can’t hide my notepad full of questions about songs.
“I find it’s very difficult to do without doing a disservice to the song itself.” Nick Cave meets Big Issue in the anteroom of a boutique West London hotel, near where he lives with his wife, fashion designer Su.