Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Press Release

“The worst had happened. It maybe made me a little braver about things.” Nick Cave talks loss, social media and AI with the Big Issue

Inside the Big Issue

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 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?”

Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty

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 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.

Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty

READER-SUPPORTED SINCE 1991

Reader-supported journalism that doesn’t just report problems, it helps solve them.

Recommended for you

View all
New way for Big Issue vendors to take cashless payments up for prestigious award
Big Issue vendor with the fumopay QR code
Our vendors

New way for Big Issue vendors to take cashless payments up for prestigious award

Big Issue vendor Alfie Brew bounces back after being hit by a car
Big Issue vendor Alfie Brew stands outside Coop in Exeter, his pitch.
Press Release

Big Issue vendor Alfie Brew bounces back after being hit by a car

Big Issue Impact Advisory appoints Sasha Afanasieva as new MD
Big Issue Impact new MD Sasha Afanasieva.
Press Release

Big Issue Impact Advisory appoints Sasha Afanasieva as new MD

Big Issue and Lenovo partner to support digital access for UK social enterprises
Jack from Neuropool, Lord Bird founder of the Big Issue, Ruth from DWRM. Image Credit - Sophie Okonkwo.
Digital inclusion

Big Issue and Lenovo partner to support digital access for UK social enterprises