‘I was weeping’: Nick Cave defends shock Coronation invite

Australia’s dark prince of rock Nick Cave has defended his decision to attend the Coronation after fans were left baffled.

Australia’s dark prince of rock Nick Cave has defended accepting the invitation to attend the Coronation because of his “inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals.”

Cave took to his Red Hand Files newsletter to answer disbelieving fans from Australia and the UK who asked “Why the f**k are you going to the King’s coronation?”

The dapper rock legend, who is always attired in a tailored suit, jokingly said his response to fans who had asked the question would be a “quick one because I’ve got to work out what I am going to wear to the Coronation.”

Cave, who has lived in the UK since the 1980s and is one of the 14 prominent Australians invited to represent the country at Saturday’s ceremony.

Nick Cave has explained why he will attend the Coronation after fans were left baffled. Picture: AFP

He declared he was not a monarchist, royalist or “ardent republican for that matter.”

“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.

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

Cave, who is not only loved by fans for his music but his emotional and often deeply personal blogs and other writings, shared how affected he was by a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and how much that meant to his mother Dawn who passed away in 2020 at 93.

He wryly described the occasion as “Aspirational Australians living in the UK’ (or something like that)” as 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,” Cave wrote.

“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.”

Nick Cave with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The songwriter said he was moved to tears during one particularly poignant moment of the Queen’s funeral.

“When I watched the Queen’s funeral on the television last year I found, to my bafflement, that I was weeping myself as the coffin was stripped of the crown, orb and sceptre and lowered through the floor of St. George’s Chapel,” he wrote.

As both religious and majestic symbolism have peppered his lyrics over decades of songwriting, it should be unsurprising that Cave is attracted to the “stupefyingly spectacular” of Royal pomp and pageantry.

“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.”

Cave signed off confirming he will wear a suit to the occasion.

Originally published as ‘I was weeping’: Nick Cave defends shock Coronation invite