Nick Cave lost two sons. Grief transformed him forever

When Nick Cave was with his post-punk band The Birthday Party in the late '70s and early '80s, he developed a reputation for being a confrontational performer who intimidated and antagonized his audience.

"I was just kind of like that," the Australian musician tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "Fighty, nasty, angry little guy with nothing to be angry about. Actually, had a lovely childhood, but had a sort of default setting of contempt for everything. Young people tend to have that."

Looking back, Cave says he developed some of his "violent feelings towards the world" as a result of his first significant experience with grief at 19: the sudden death of his father in a car collision.

Though he eventually grew out of his youthful contempt, Cave threw himself into his work, remaining completely consumed by his creative pursuits for much of his career. That didn't change until he experienced the devastating loss of 15-year-old son, Arthur, in 2015.

"Up until my son dying, I actually thought that what I did creatively was the most important thing of my life," he says. "This was the fundamental reason why I was put on this world — and that completely collapsed when my son died…. The grief process, as slow and as sort of tortured as it originally was, had a massive effect on how I ended up seeing the world."

Cave recalls being "completely mad with grief" following the death of his teenage son. Though he and his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released their 16th studio album, Skeleton Tree, in the aftermath of that loss, he says he was in no condition to be doing anything.

"The thing that I know is that you don't know anything when something like that happens to you," he says. "You can even be articulate about things, you can even write and stuff like that, but you're literally a crazy person."

Unlike when his father died, Arthur's death profoundly changed Cave in an entirely different way. Sadly, in 2022, his oldest son, Jethro, also died unexpectedly at 31.

"There has been a kind of transformation, I think, to be able to see, ultimately, that the world is a good place," Cave says. "That the world fundamentally tilts towards goodness."

We are all, essentially, creatures of loss.- Nick Cave

In 2018, Cave started his project The Red Hand Files, which invites his fans to write to him with their questions. He says he receives hundreds of letters a day, many of which are incredibly vulnerable, soul-searching and grief-ridden.

"It's unbelievably moving and The Red Hand Files had a huge effect on changing my view of the way the world actually is," he tells Power. "We are all, essentially, creatures of loss."

With his sensitive, empathetic and thoughtful responses to his fans, Cave is a far cry from the angry young man he once was.

"I feel that the idea of touring now is more a form of duty, of something that I feel is sort of valuable on some level," he says. "I think that there is a possibility through music to offer people a transcendent experience…. I hope these ideas sort of leak out in the world, as something that I learned through the death of my child. That the death of my child has some — it's a terrifying thing to say — some value."

The full interview with Nick Cave is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Nick Cave produced by Lise Hosein.