‘Awestruck’: Nick Cave reveals strange, weird, moving Coronation

‘Prince of Darkness’ Nick Cave has spoken about the ‘unbelievably conflicted” Australians at the coronation of King Charles III.

Musician Nick Cave has revealed an intimate look inside the coronation of King Charles III and the “unbelievably conflicted” indigenous Australians.

One of 14 “notable Australians” at Westminster Abbey, Cave said in a new interview he accepted the invitation out of “curiosity” but ended up “awestruck”.

Nick Cave was one of 14 Australians invited to the King’s coronation. Picture: Getty Images

“I went along to the coronation entirely out of curiosity and found the whole thing to be acutely interesting, to say the least,” Cave said in an interview with the UK’s Chanel 4 News.

“Because I thought I would feel things when I went to the coronation, but I didn’t know I would feel them in such an extreme way.

“They were conflicted feelings, you know. Sometimes I felt extremely bored, other times completely awestruck by the event, extremely moved by the music — Zadok the Priest [by Handel] was something from outer space — kind of amused by what was going on, angered by what was going on, so it brought up a lot of different things.”

Cave sat between a fiercely monarchist Tory political who gave him a blow-by-blow commentary on the ceremony, and an indigenous Australian artist who was “unbelievably conflicted” about attending the coronation.

“A deeply conflicted person who was I thought brave enough to go along and be part of the Australian delegation,” he said. “So it was a strange and moving event in many different ways.”

While Cave did not mention the person by name, Wiradjuri-British artist Jasmine Coe was among the Australians invited to the coronation. Coe opened the first Aboriginal-owned art gallery in the UK and has exhibited in more than 20 exhibitions worldwide.

Cave has previously defended his decision to attend the coronation on his blog, The Red Hand Files, where he said he’s neither a monarchist nor a 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,” he wrote.

“I once met the late Queen at an event at Buckingham Palace for ‘Aspirational Australians living in the UK’ (or something like that).

Jasmine Coe and Nick Cave attend the Coronation of King Charles III. Picture: Getty Images

“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.”

In his latest interview, Cave spoke of his surprise at tearing up while watching the funeral of the late monarch.

“I think these sort of things for me, and other people too, we’re not grieving for the Queen as such, but rather these deeply sad events all of our griefs collect,” he said.

“And the lowering of the coffin into the ground I found deeply moving. Unexpectedly so, actually, I was just kind of half watching the funeral … and I found that stripping of the coffin, of the orb and the sceptre and so forth, and putting on the alter, and the body descending into the ground, I found that unbearably moving.”

Cave said he was not surprised that his support, or at least lack of denunciation, come into conflict with modern audiences, adding he followed in the footsteps of other Aussie heretics like the late Barry Humphries.

“Nothing much has changed. When I came out of Australia my heroes were very much the people who have in their way caused trouble all their lives,” he said.

“There was a generation of chaos makers that came out of Australia that was one generation older than me. Like Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer and David Williamson the playwright, and Brett Whitley the painter.

“These sorts of people were the scallywags of the Australian culture, that were chafing at the conservativeness of Australian culture.

“They were always to me the people that I revered and had a huge influence on the way I went about things. And they were troublemakers and they were always saying things that got them into trouble. Barry Humphries to the end, literally.”

“And that was the sacred duty to offend, and that for me is bred into the bone,” Cave said.