In an interview he conducted in May on the anniversary of his son Jethro’s death, which aired in a 30-minute Australian program on Monday evening, Nick Cave described how the deaths of two of his four sons had led him to prioritize his role as “father, husband and man of the world” over “the idea of being an artist.”
“For most of my life I was just impressed by my own genius, you know, I had an office where I sat and wrote every day and everything else that happened in my life was secondary,” Cave told Leigh Sales, presenter of ABC’s “Australian Story.”
“It just completely collapsed and I just saw the folly of it, the kind of shameful complacency of the whole thing.”
Grief has significantly influenced Cave’s work and public appearance since his 15-year-old son Arthur, one of his twin sons with wife Susie Cave, died in a fall from a cliff near Brighton in July 2015. In 2022, Cave announced that his eldest son Jethro Lazenby had also died at the age of 31, shortly after being found guilty of assaulting his mother.
During the interview, which spanned Cave’s entire career, from Cave’s childhood in Wangaratta, Victoria, to his collaboration with Kylie Minogue in 1995, Cave revealed to Sales that the session took place on the second anniversary of Lazenby’s death.
“I understood the process because I had been through it,” he said of grief. “There is the initial catastrophic event that we eventually absorb or rearrange so that as we grow older we become creatures of loss.
“But that’s part of our fundamental structure as human beings. We are things that get lost. And that’s not a tragic element of our lives, but rather a deepening element that gives our lives incredible meaning.”
A visibly surprised Sales apologized for the timing of the interview on the anniversary.
“It’s not your fault,” Cave replied. “When I do interviews, I always end up at this point.”
Cave also explained how his relationship with the public evolved after Arthur’s death. His website, the Red Hand Files, still receives “hundreds and hundreds of letters” each week, all of which Cave reads before publishing responses to a select handful each month.
“It was also a kind of lifeline for me, reaching out and picking up these people. It just allowed me to stay open to the world instead of closing myself off,” he said.
“There’s something very special about the Red Hand Files because it’s a great privilege to receive these letters from people. It’s a bizarre opportunity for people to indulge their grief to some extent.”
Cave, who will release a new Bad Seeds album called “Wild God” later this month, announced via the website in May that he had become a grandfather when his second son Luke, born to Cave’s first wife Viviane Carneiro, welcomed a son.
Cave told Sales he hoped to be the “grandfather who sits in the armchair, says inappropriate things and has a terrible influence on everyone the child secretly loves except him.”
