Nick Cave opens up about how the death of his two sons completely collapsed his view of the world, his family and his career.
“For most of my life I was just sort of in awe of my own genius, you know, and I had an office and would sit there and write every day and whatever else happened in my life was peripheral,” the Bad Seeds frontman said in an interview with Leigh Sales for ABC’s Australian Story.
“This just collapsed completely and I just saw the folly of that, the kind of disgraceful self-indulgence of the whole thing.”
Cave lost his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, after he fell from a cliff in Brighton. Seven years later, Cave had to announce the death of his other son, 31-year-old Jethro Lazenby, who had just been released from Australian prison after assaulting his mother Viviane Carneiro.
Cave revealed that the ABC interview was actually taking place on the anniversary of the death of Lazenby.
When Sales apologised for the unfortunate timing, Cave replied “It’s not your fault. for me when I do interviews, it just very quickly lands back at this place.”
The Experience of Grief
Speaking on his experience of grief after the death of his second son, the now 66-year-old said that he had “an understanding of the process, because I’d been through it already,”
“There is the initial cataclysmic event that we eventually absorb or rearrange ourselves so that we become creatures of loss as we get older.”
“But this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings. We are things of loss. And this is not a tragic element to our lives but rather a deepening element that brings incredible meaning into our life.”
Turning to Religion
Cave mentioned how the death of his first son Arthur had opened his eyes to religion: “I was drug addicted for a couple of decades, and had a great interest in this sort of stuff, but no need for it.”
“And I think after Arthur died, not immediately, but, it’s been quite a while now but rather than feeling anger towards that sort of stuff or rejecting that sort of stuff, I felt a slow movement towards a religious life that I’ve found extremely helpful.”
Prioritising Family
The iconic musician spoke about how his grief reminded him of his duties as a father and husband, something he had begun to neglect in his career.
“Mostly, I had responsibilities to other people, it wasn’t just me, it was an honouring of the people that had actually died for one thing and I had my wife to look after, who was going through… mothers, who’ve lost children go through something different, it’s a different thing than a father that’s lost a child. It’s a different calibre of suffering, it’s a sort of hell unto itself.”
“And the idea that I would go off and become a junkie again, or whatever, was clearly a bad idea. And there were the other children too, so it just wasn’t something that crossed my mind.”
The Red Hand Files
Cave also spoke about the “hundred and hundreds of letters” that came through his website ,The Red Hand Files, after his sons died. He told Sales that he had read each and every one of them.
“It was also a kind of lifeline for me that reached out and collected up these people. It’s something that’s just allowed me to remain open to the world rather than shut down,” the American musician said.
“There’s a great beauty in the Red Hand Files that, you know, it’s an extreme privilege to be receiving these letters from people. It’s this bizarre opportunity for people to indulge to some degree in their grief.”
Cave recently revealed via his website that he had recently become a grandfather after his second son Luke welcomed a baby boy into the world.
Cave told Sales that he hopes to be the “grandfather that sits in the armchair and says inappropriate things and has a terrible influence over everybody but the child secretly loves.”
Bad Seeds are set to release their new album ‘Wild God’ later this month.
