Nick Cave says he was ‘forced to grieve publicly’ after death of son Arthur
Nick Cave has reflected on the grief he experienced following the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, who died in 2015 after falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton.
The Australian musician, who is known for exploring themes of loss, death and grief in his work, shared Arthur with his wife, Susie.
Arthur suffered a fatal brain injury after falling from a cliff onto the overpass of Ovingdean Gap in Brighton on 14 July 2015, after taking LSD for the first time with a friend. The cause of death was listed as “multiple traumatic injuries due to a fall from a height”.
Soon after Arthur’s death, Cave and his family temporarily moved to Los Angeles, after finding it too difficult to live “just down the road from where it happened”.
However, he told The Guardian in an interview this week that he found the public nature of the tragedy prevented him from withdrawing from the world entirely, and that he instead had to confront his grief head-on.
“I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough,” Cave, 66, said. “It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”
In the same interview, Cave said he had been overwhelmed by the messages of love and support he received in the wake of his son’s death.
“I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing,” he explained. “And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me.”
He continued: “I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”
Cave’s son Jethro, whom he shared with model Beau Lazenby and with whom he had a complex relationship, died aged 31 in 2022.
In a letter to a fan posted from his Red Hand Files website last year, Cave said he abandoned the “rage” he was previously known for in his music following Arthur’s death.
The fan’s message asked: “When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass.”
“I changed,” Cave responded. “For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie. Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings were like old dead skins that I shed. They were their own kind of puke.”
He added: “Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something, had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that other thing over there, and making sure that everybody around me knew it, not just knew, but felt it too, contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others, well, this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb.”
Cave is currently preparing for a new exhibition of his sculptures, Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life, which will be held at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May.
