Nick Cave: 'The worst happened. It maybe made me a little braver'

Nick Cave has declared his music “braver” after the deaths of two of his four sons, speaking in a new interview published in today’s Big Issue (Monday 19 August).

“We change; sometimes multiple times, shattered by events,” Cave reflects. His 15-year-old son Arthur died in a cliff jumping accident in Brighton back in 2015, while his eldest son Jethro passed away aged 31 in 2022. “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 reflects on the song O Children, first released in 2007 and still his most-listened song on Spotify. Many will recognise it from a poignant scene in the seventh Harry Potter film, where Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Hermione (Emma Watson) dance to the track at their lowest ebb.

“I wrote [O Children] 22 years ago watching my children when they were little playing in a playground. I wrote about this fucked-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?”

As Cave changes, so does the world around him – often at a startling pace. “I don’t know what the tech world has up its sleeve,” he tells the Big Issue. “I tried Suno, the song generator thing. And the song was fine. In two or five years it’s going to be amazing. Without a doubt eventually you’ll be able to make a Nick Cave song that’s as good if not better than I can do myself. But it will have no intrinsic meaning.

“Sometimes I see evidence to suggest that people don’t really care about these sorts of things and the idea of the artistic struggle may just be a kind of artistic indulgence. But I care. I also understand that I’m just some old guy crying in the wilderness about this stuff.”

How about social media, with Elon Musk’s X dominating recent headlines? “[Social media] represents a binary, polarised, this-side-that-side situation and I just don’t think that’s the way things actually are,” Cave says. “Most people don’t really know, including myself, and sit somewhere in the middle. If there’s one thing I fight for, it’s the right to be wrong about things.”

All this means he’s reluctant to be drawn on the UK’s recent general election or politics. “I am not politically affiliated in that way I’m sorry to say. I hardly see any real significant difference between these parties anyway – I might be wrong there.”

The extent of Cave’s political engagement, he tells the Big Issue, is to “glance at the newspapers just to see if someone’s made a decision where the world’s going to end”.

Read the full interview with Nick Cave in this week’s Big Issue, out now. Find your local vendor to buy a copy, or subscribe online, at bigissue.com.

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