‘Stupefyingly spectacular’: Why Nick Cave is attending the coronation

London: Nick Cave is no monarchist. Nor, he says, is he an ardent republican.

“What I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age,” Cave says.

Nick Cave says he’s “not a monarchist” nor an “ardent republican”, but described the coronation as “the most important historical event in the UK of our age.”Credit: AP

“Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.”

The veteran Australian singer-songwriter, synonymous for his five decades with the Bad Seeds, has written to some of his incredulous fans, telling them why he’s attending the coronation service of King Charles III on Saturday.

Cave, who has lived in Britain since the 1980s, is among a select group of prominent Australians to be invited to attend the service alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is a music fan who loves a selfie with his favourite musos.

A poet, screenwriter, composer and occasional actor, Cave said he felt the need to explain his thinking on his personal blog, The Red Hand Files, after fans asked: “Why the f--- are you going to the King’s coronation?”

“I once met the late Queen at an event at Buckingham Palace for ‘Aspirational Australians living in the UK’ (or something like that),” the 65-year-old wrote on Tuesday.

“It was a mostly awkward affair, but the Queen herself, dressed in a salmon-coloured twin-set, seemed almost extraterrestrial and was the most charismatic woman I have ever met.

“Maybe it was the lighting, but she actually glowed. As I told my mother – who was the same age as the Queen and, like the Queen, died in her nineties – about that day, her old eyes filled with tears.”

Cave said, to his own bafflement, that he found himself weeping during the Queen’s funeral last year when he watched, on television, her coffin being stripped of the crown, orb and sceptre and lowered through the floor of St George’s Chapel.

“I guess what I am trying to say is that, beyond the interminable but necessary debates about the abolition of the monarchy, I hold an inexplicable emotional attachment to the royals – the strangeness of them, the deeply eccentric nature of the whole affair that so perfectly reflects the unique weirdness of Britain itself,” he wrote.

“I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring.”

Nick Cave, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Matildas captain Sam Kerr will be among the Australian delegation at the coronation.Credit: Shakespeare

Launched in September 2018, the site is essentially a public forum, where Cave answers questions from fans. Interestingly, most of those questions are not about creativity or music. He has used the Q&A format to weigh in on thorny issues, including censorship, where last year he denounced the removal by the BBC of a homophobic slur from The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s Fairytale of New York, calling it a “[mutilation of] an artefact of immense cultural value.”

Cave, who was raised in regional Victoria before completing his schooling in suburban Melbourne, has suffered deep personal trauma during the past decade, losing two sons in tragic circumstances.

In May, he publicly announced the death of his oldest son, Jethro, 31, who had a successful modelling career and was based in Melbourne.

It followed the death in 2015 of another son, Arthur, who was 15 when he fell from a cliff near their home in Brighton, on the British south coast. Cave has two other sons: Arthur’s twin, Earl, and Luke.

In the past year, he has opened up about his journey to faith, telling UnHerd in a recent interview the way to rebel in 2023 was to “go to church and be a conservative.”

Having been famously anti-establishment in his early career, he has transformed over the years from a counter-culture icon and said he “delights in f---ing with people.”

“And as for what the young Nick Cave would have thought – well, the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and like many young people, mostly demented, so I’m a little cautious around using him as a benchmark for what I should or should not do,” he wrote. “He was cute though, I’ll give him that. Deranged, but cute.”

He said with all that in mind, he was looking forward to going to the coronation.

“I think I’ll wear a suit.”

Australians at the King’s coronation

The following prominent Australians will be among the Australian delegation at the coronation.

• Sam Kerr OAM: Matildas soccer captain, Olympian and Australia’s all-time leading goal-scorer.
• Leanne Benjamin AM OBE: A principal ballet dancer for the Royal Ballet for 21 years. Also patron of the Tait Memorial Trust, an annual award given in her name to support young Australian and New Zealand dancers to train in the UK.
• Nick Cave AO: Singer, songwriter, actor, novelist and screenwriter, and a major contributor to Australian music, culture and heritage both at home and abroad.
• Jasmine Coe: A Wiradjuri-British artist and the creator and curator of Coe Gallery, the first and only Aboriginal-owned art gallery in the UK.
• Adam Hills MBE: A comedian, presenter, writer and disability rights advocate known as the host of Spicks and Specks and for his talk show, The Last Leg.
• Daniel Nour: The founder of Street Side Medics, a not-for-profit, GP-led mobile medical service for people experiencing homelessness. He is also the 2022, Young Australian of the Year.
• Yasmin Poole: A public speaker, board director and youth advocate who is currently a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a non-executive Board Director of OzHarvest and YWCA Australia.
• Emily Regan: A London-based nurse who worked for the UK’s National Health Service during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Minette Salmon: A PhD student in genomic medicine and statistics at Balliol College, Oxford. She is studying at Oxford under the prestigious Wellcome Trust Studentship, and was the 2019 Charles Perkins Scholar.
• Claire Spencer AM: An arts leader and the inaugural CEO of the Barbican Centre in London.
• Merryn Voysey: Associate professor of statistics in vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group, which helped to develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. She as named Australian of the Year in the UK in 2022.
• Corporal Daniel Keighran VC: A Victoria Cross recipient following his actions during the Battle of Derapet in Afghanistan in 2010. He was the third soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia and the first member of the Royal Australian Regiment to receive the country’s highest military honour.
• Richard Joyes CV: Recipient of the Cross of Valour in 2003 for his courageous efforts following the 2002 Bali bombing. He is the fifth recipient of the Cross of Valour.
• Yvonne Kenny: One of the most distinguished sopranos of her generation, she performed with the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from 1975 to 1994. She is currently chair of the Australia Music Foundation UK.

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