Legendary Australian musician Nick Cave has given a heartbreaking new interview about the deaths of two of his children, saying that as their father he can’t help but feel a sense of “culpability” in their tragic fates.
Cave’s son Arthur died aged in 2015 aged just 15 from a tragic cliff fall near the family’s home in seaside Brighton, England after he had taken LSD.
Seven years later, another of Cave’s sons, former runway model Jethro Lazenby, died at the age of 31, just two days after he’d been released from prison in Melbourne. He’d been in jail for a month after assaulting his mother.
In a moving new interview with The Guardian, Cave talks about his new exhibition of ceramic sculptures, and reveals that they “tell a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”
That confession prompts the journalist to ask if Cave “feels culpable” in the death of his sons.
“I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die,” Cave says.
“Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”
Lazenby was found dead inside the Coburg Motor Inn in Melbourne’s north in May 2022, days after being released from prison over the assault of his mother, Beau Lazenby.
Cave has two other sons: Luke, who was born 10 days after his half-brother Jethro to Cave’s then-wife, Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro. Luke was born in Brazil before moving to the UK, where he now works as the frontman for alternative band Cavey.
And Arthur’s twin brother Earl is now 23, with a burgeoning acting career in films like The End of the F***ing World, Days of the Bagnold Summer and True History of the Kelly Gang.
After relationships with Lane, Carneiro and fellow musician PJ Harvey, Nick Cave settled down with model Susie Bick in 1997 and the couple wed two years later.
In a 2017 interview about her fashion label – aptly titled The Vampire’s Wife – Bick said that her creativity had been a way for her to deal with her grief.
“I’ve always wanted to make beautiful things, but at the same time it’s about not wanting to be a victim of what happened to Arthur, not wanting to be paralysed for the rest of my life. And of course wanting to show Earl the best way I can survive this. We had to keep it together for him and not let him feel scared he was losing his parents,” she said.