Nick Cave gives teenager advice on love and heartbreak

"To love is your primary human function"

Nick Cave has given advice to teenager on love and heartbreak.

In his latest edition of The Red Hand Files, in which Cave responds to fans who send in him questions, Cave gives advice to one teenager called Mauro, as well as another fan called Jenny.

Mauro asked Cave: “I’m 17 years old, what can you tell me about love?” while Jenny asked: “How do I not have my heart broken?”

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In response, Cave told the pair that “to resist love and inoculate yourself against heartbreak is to reject life itself, for to love is your primary human function. It is your duty to love in whatever way you can, and to move boldly into that love — deeply, dangerously and recklessly — and restore the world with your awe and wonder.

“This world is in urgent need — desperate, crucial need — and is crying out for love, your love. It cannot survive without it.”

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis performing live in Paris
Nick Cave performing live in Paris CREDIT: Wolff – Patrick/Redferns

He also said: “To love the world is a participatory and reciprocal action — for what you give to the world, the world returns to you, many fold, and you will live days of love that will make your head spin, that you will treasure for all time.

“You will discover that love, radical love, is a kind of supercharged aliveness, and all that is of true value in the world is animated by it. And, yes, heartache awaits love’s end, but you find in time that this too is a gift — this little death — from which you are reborn, time and again. I have only one piece of advice for you both, and it is the very best that I can give. Love. The world is waiting.”

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Earlier this week, Cave and Warren Ellis shared their new track ‘Les Cerfs’, which was taken from the pair’s original score to the forthcoming film La Panthère Des Neiges (also known as The Velvet Queen).

Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier’s film is set in the Tibetan highlands, and follows nature photographer Munier as he guides the writer Sylvain Tesson “on his quest to document the infamously elusive snow leopard”.

The score for La Panthère Des Neiges will be released via Invada Records and Lakeshore Records digitally today (December 17), and is described as “one of Ellis and Cave’s most heartfelt and haunting film projects”.

A release date for La Panthère Des Neiges in the UK has yet to be set, though the film will be released in the US on December 22.

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