Nick Cave found work ‘repellent’ after tragic death of his young son

Nick Cave has openly explained how the tragic deaths of his two sons caused him to find work repulsive, admitting that it seemed “indulgent” to put music to use.

The Australian musician, who is the composer of Red Right Hand, the soundtrack to Peaky Blinders, lost two of his children in seven years. In 2015, tragedy struck when his son Arthur fell from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton, aged just 15.

Then, in 2022, Nick’s 31-year-old son Jethro Lazenby passed away days after he was released on bail after attacking his mother. The model, actor and photographer, who only learned that Cave was his father when he was eight years old, had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Since moving from Brighton to Los Angeles, Cave has since explained how he realized how quickly his grief following the sons’ deaths would be expressed publicly. The songwriter has another son, Earl, with his wife Susie, as well as a son, Luke, with his first wife Viviane Carneiro.

Speaking on Desert Island Discs with Lauren Laverne: “I haven’t had any choice in a way. It became common knowledge, when I started to go outside the house in Brighton, everyone knew. People began to write me letters in my Brighton home telling me about their experiences with the same issues. We are related by our loss, and it just served as inspiration for me to think that if these people could make me feel this way, I might as well.

The frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds said: “It has a lot to do with Arthur and Jethro… It has a lot to do with… 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”.

He continued: “And I think after Arthur died, I just shut the office, and I haven’t gone, I just locked it up. It simply turned me off in some way. It seems so indulgent. Although I still put in a lot of effort, I don’t think that’s the end all. I find my responsibility towards my children and my wife and to be a citizen, a husband, these things are the actual animating force behind our creativeness”.

During the interview, Cave reflected on how he handled his father’s death, who passed away when he was just 19 in a car accident. Confessing he used drugs to deal with the realities of losing his father, Cave told Lauren: “I was taking a lot of drugs, drinking a lot and felt ill-equipped to deal with my mother’s pain. I regret that… I was uninformed in these matters.

“I think my approach to things was quite immature. I don’t believe I ever had the ability to express the emotions I had when my father passed away in those days. I just flew away to London and blasted my way through the next 20 years, not sure if I’ve ever managed to figure that out.

Cave describes his 20 years as a heroin addict in the open interview, with isolation and his determination to stop them for the final 10 years. He added:” It in no way aided my creative potential. People frequently claim that they must be creative in order to continue doing what they are doing. This is absolutely untrue, I found at least. My life just opened up like a jack in the box once I stopped being so consumed by that drug.

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Source: Mirror