Nick Cave tours the world tirelessly, the Australian musician was last seen in Germany in the summer of 2022. His son Jethro Lazenby only died in May at the age of 31, the second loss of a child after the death of his son Arthur in 2015. In a Interview with the “New York Times” Cave now said that it was the concerts and the contact with fans that helped him through the grief.
“The concern of the audience saved me,” Cave said. “The fans have helped me a lot and when I play now I feel like I’m giving something back.” It’s hard to talk about Jethro’s death. “But the concerts themselves and this act of mutual support save me. People ask me how can you go on tour? But for me it’s the other way around. How could I not do it?
Shared grief helped Nick Cave
“After Arthur died, I was in the darkest place imaginable,” says Cave. But the contact with the people who shared their own grief experiences helped him and his wife Susie. “Susie and I kind of managed to pull ourselves out of there, and — I know that sounds cheesy — that had something to do with the reaction I got from people who wrote to me and said, ‘this happened to me, and that’s what.’ happens to you, and that’s what can happen. That really moved me.”
Nick Cave’s confrontation with Arthur’s death is also at the center of the book “Faith, Hope and Carnage”, which will be released in English on September 20th. The book is based on extensive interviews with Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan. The interviews took place before Jethro’s death, so this is not discussed there yet. The German translation will appear on November 3, 2022 under the title “Faith, Hope and Carnage”.
Also released this year is the documentary This Much I Know To Be True, which chronicles the close musical partnership between Cave and longtime Bad Seeds member Warren Ellis.
Nick Cave’s son Arthur died in an accident in 2015 at the age of 15 when he fell off a cliff. Cave dedicated the albums “Skeleton Tree” and “Ghosteen” to him. The documentary “One More Time With Feeling” (2016), which shows the recording process of “Skeleton Tree”, also addresses Cave’s mourning process after Arthur’s death in detail. Jethro Lazenby died in May 2022 at the age of 31, a cause of death was not disclosed. He is said to have suffered from schizophrenia and was in prison shortly before his death.
+++ This article first appeared on rollingstone.de +++