Nick Cave says the death of his sons made him realise art is not ‘everything’
Australian artist said he has, at times, felt ‘repelled’ by work since the deaths of two of his children
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Your support makes all the difference.Nick Cave has told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that he felt “repelled” by his work following the death of his two sons and that his wife and family are now his main responsibility.
The 67-year-old Australian musician spoke to Lauren Laverne on the popular radio show, where he revealed his new outlook on life.
Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur, died in 2015 after falling from a cliff in Brighton. In 2022, Cave’s eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, died in Melbourne aged 31.
Speaking to Laverne, the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds said that their deaths have influenced his new attitude towards his work and his family. “It has a lot to do with Arthur and Jethro,” he said. “I always just thought art was, kind of at the end of the day, everything.
“I mean, it’s a terrible thing to say, but it was, it was always there. It was always reliable.”
Cave admitted that after Arthur’s death, he shut his office and hasn’t gone back, adding: “I was just repelled by it in some way. It seems so indulgent.”
The “Into My Arms” musician, who released the critically acclaimed album Wild God in 2024, said that he still works “very, very hard” but that he no longer sees it as the “be-all and end-all of everything”.
He also said that the most satisfaction that he now gets is “from my family and from my wife”, adding: “One aspect of my family that it’s difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is, is that I have a little grandson who’s like, seven months old.”
The musician’s two surviving sons are Luke, born in 1991, and Earl, twin of Arthur.
Cave, who has previously said that singing about rage “lost its allure” after the death of his sons, explained in a 2024 interview for ABC’s Australian Story that his experience of grief made him feel more connected to others.
“Rather than making me bitter, it did the opposite in some way. It made me much more connected to people in general,” he said.
“There is the initial cataclysmic event [where] we eventually rearrange ourselves so that we become creatures of loss as we get older, [and] this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings.
“We are things of loss. This is not a tragic element to our lives but rather a deepening that brings incredible meaning”.
Cave had previously told The Guardian that he was “forced to grieve publicly” following the death of Arthur.