Nick Cave Will Take a Selfie With You, if You Insist Nick Cave Will Take a Selfie With You, if You Insist
The New York Times
Back out on the road, and after working through his extreme grief, the longtime rocker is connecting with more fans than ever.
On a bright and chilly fall afternoon in Dublin, the Australian musician Nick Cave strode down a wide street across from St. Stephen’s Green on his way to a knitwear shop.
Once among the most combative, aggressively antisocial artists on the planet, Mr. Cave has, in recent years, taken on a new and surprising role as a goth grief counselor. On his website, the Red Hand Files, Mr. Cave writes often astonishingly vulnerable responses to questions from readers about faith, love and — frequently — devastating, inconsolable loss. In a recent appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Mr. Cave spent more time discussing the transformative power of devastation than the particulars of his new album. In recent years, a number of magazine pieces and podcast appearances have covered similar ground.
When asked if he found himself besieged in the grocery store these days by people who, rather than hounding him for an autograph, want to share their most painful moments, he said, “That does happen.”
But on this sunny Irish afternoon, the Dubliners encountered by Mr. Cave, with his swoop of black hair and decked out in one of his signature bespoke suits, were giddy in the usual way of fans who spot a rock star in the wild: smiling, waving, asking to take selfies with him.
“I’m here for a scarf!” Mr. Cave announced as we entered Cleo, the traditional Irish woolens shop raved about by the bassist Colin Greenwood, sometimes of Radiohead, but currently an adopted member of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which Mr. Cave has led since 1983. The musicians were in the Irish capital for two sold-out shows at the 3Arena, at the end of a European leg of a tour that will bring them to America in April. Mr. Cave moved briskly through the shop to a section in the back, quickly selected a simple black scarf and went to pay, adding a stuffed animal for his first grandchild, born earlier this year.
Mr. Cave, who is 67, has fathered four sons: twins, Arthur and Earl, with his wife, the model and fashion designer Susie Cave, and Luke and Jethro from previous relationships. In 2015, Arthur, then 15 years old, died after falling from a cliff near the family home in Brighton, England. In 2022, Jethro also died (his cause of death was not disclosed). Mr. Cave started the Red Hand Files in part to process Arthur’s death. He has said that loss now defines him, that he sees grief as a universal language connecting all people and that walking through it has made him a bolder artist. “There’s an understanding that we are all creatures of loss,” he said. “That we’re all in the same boat, in some way, that what happened to me is not special.”
