Why son’s death brought Nick Cave back to church

In a conversation with a former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Australian singer-songwriter discusses reconnecting with his faith, finding it ‘useful’ in navigating grief.

Nick Cave, pictured in August last year, says he no longer feels the ‘sudden cold panic’ he once did at church. Picture: AFP

Nick Cave has returned to church.

The Australian singer-songwriter says that he no longer feels the “sudden cold panic” he once did at church and that he has found practising religion “useful” in navigating his grief.

In a sprawling conversation at a church in Central London, with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for The Times, Cave touched on grief, religion, creativity, and his latest book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, which he co-authored with journalist Seán O’Hagan — who was raised a Roman Catholic but is no longer practising.

Williams wrote that he could think of few books that had “brought home more completely the way in which grief and creativity work together,” than Faith, Hope and Carnage.

“The book also reveals the way in which faith, without ever giving a plain, comforting answer, offers resources to look at what is terrible without despair or evasion.”

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

For Cave, the book was his way of collecting his “scattered fragments of my thinking about religion together”. He says that the book gave him “the privilege” to talk openly about his faith, “and to be taken seriously”.

He told Williams that after its publication, he returned to church.

For Cave, who admits to have “not been a particularly spiritual person”, the church is a place that brings “in all the spirits of the one’s you’ve lost” and allows people to “breathe momentary life into the one you love”.

His religious wellspring is Arthur, Cave’s 15-year-old son, who died in 2015 after falling from a sea cliff near his family’s home in Brighton. Cave suffered another tragedy in May last year, when his eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, died age 30, just days after he was released on bail from a Melbourne jail.

Cave says that Arthur’s death made him a more “complete, fully realised person.”

“I am part of a vast river of suffering,” he told Williams. “It was shocking to find that my own tragedy was ‘ordinary’ on some level. And I felt a part of something.” He said that somebody once called it ‘the club no one wants to be in’.

Arthur Cave, his dad Nick and twin brother, Earl.

“I found for the first time that I started to become a more complete, fully realised person, as opposed to a personality that was partially formed and fragmented.”

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams

Cave told Williams that “on a societal level things are worse since the pandemic,” but that he has noticed that, in its aftermath, the people around him have begun to explore the Christian faith more seriously.

“It’s words like worship, gratitude, devotion, grace — these words make many people feel deeply uncomfortable, but they are at the heart of it all.”

During the conversation, Cave elaborated on a passage in his book that described how his 2019 album Ghosteen was an attempt to “make space” for his son Arthur, in the period after his death.

He says that he was “trying to find a place Arthur could inhabit. A place where his spirit could reside”. He says that now, instead of finding a space “for” Arthur in his work, he looks to find a space “around” him — a way to “incorporate his absence and indeed his presence into my work”.