‘No longer in awe of my own genius’: Nick Cave talks about how he changed after sons’ deaths

Nick Cave has described how the deaths of two of his four sons have made him prioritise being “a father and a husband and a kind of person of the world” over “the concept of being an artist” in an interview conducted in May on the anniversary of his son Jethro’s death, and aired in a 30-minute Australian broadcast on Monday night.

“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,” Cave told ABC’s Australian Story presenter Leigh Sales.

“This just collapsed completely and I just saw the folly of that, the kind of disgraceful self-indulgence of the whole thing.”

Grief has been a defining influence in Cave’s work and public persona since his 15-year-old son Arthur, one of his twin sons with wife Susie Cave, died after falling 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, not long after he was found guilty of unlawful assault for physically attacking his mother.

During the career-spanning interview, which ranged from Cave’s childhood in Wangaratta, Victoria, to his 1995 collaboration with Kylie Minogue, Cave revealed to Sales that the session was taking place on the second anniversary of Lazenby’s death.

“I had an understanding of the process, because I’d been through it already,” he said of grieving. “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.”

A visibly surprised Sales apologised for the timing of the interview on the anniversary.

‘It’s not your fault,” Cave replied. “For me when I do interviews, it just very quickly lands back at this place.”

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 posting answers to a select handful each month.

“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,” he 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, who will release a new Bad Seeds album named Wild God later this month, revealed 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 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.”