Nick Cave says ‘rage lost its allure’ after son’s death

Nick Cave has said that he lost his “rage, anger, and hatred” after the death of his son.

While responding to a fan’s note in his Red Hand Files newsletter, the 65-year-old singer said that “things changed after my first son died”.

The fan’s message read: “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.”

Cave replied to the note, saying: “ I changed. 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.

“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,” he added.

Cave admitted that losing his son felt like coming face-to-face with “actual devastation” and said he “felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it – this terrible, beautiful world – instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it”.

Cave’s son Arthur died after falling from a cliff in Sussex. He was 15 years old.

Although first aid was carried out at the scene, Cave’s son later died from his injuries in the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.

Cave’s elder son Jethro Lazenby also died in 2022.