Nick Cave said the death of two of his sons “fundamentally changed” the way he saw the world. The 66-year-old said he was now “less precious about my own place in the world” and added that his music had become braver as a result. Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from Ovingdean cliffs in 2015, while his eldest son Jethro died aged 31 in 2022.
Speaking in The Big Issue today, Cave said: “We change, sometimes multiple times, shattered by events . “This can fundamentally change the way that you perceive the world and the way you behave. “I think that happened to me to some degree, made me a little less precious about my own place in the world.
The worst had happened. It maybe made me a little braver about things.” Cave and his family previously lived in Brighton before the death of his son Arthur in 2015.
The 15-year-old fell from cliffs in Ovingdean having taken LSD for the first time. Cave, 66, said last week that he moved away from Brighton as he was “triggered too much” by living so close to where his son died. The Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds frontman later lost his eldest son Jethro, 31, in 2022.
In his extended interview with The Big Issue he went on to speak about the song O Children, first released in 2007, which is still his most-listened to song on Spotify. The Australian said he wrote the song about not being “able to protect my children”, and added that the song was still relevant today. He added: “I wrote (O Children) 22 years ago watching my children when they were little, playing in a playground.
“I wrote about this f*****-up world we were creating and that we had no way of protecting our children from. That seemed relevant when it came out but it’s always found its theme. “From a personal level, I was not able to protect my children.
Today too, children are dying everywhere in their thousands. And it asks the same question – what kind of a world are we creating for our children?” Nick Cave’s interview is available in The Big Issue from today..
