Australian musician Nick Cave says he will retire from music when he is physically incapable of suddenly falling to his knees while on stage. The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds frontman, 67, has tour dates upcoming in North America from April to May this year, and released an album, Wild God, in August 2024.
Cave told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme: “I always thought I’d stop doing it when I couldn’t do knee drops anymore. Actually, when I look back, I haven’t done something (in a while)… I could do (them), I can get down. It’s getting up. It’s a little bit harder.”.
He also told the programme that he has become less work-obsessed following the death of his sons – 15-year-old Arthur died in a cliff-jumping accident in 2015 in Brighton and his eldest son Jethro died aged 31 in Melbourne in 2022.Cave said: “It has a lot to do with Arthur and Jethro… I always just thought art was, kind of at the end of the day, everything. I mean, it’s a terrible thing to say, but it was, it was always there. It was always reliable.
“It was just the thing that I did. And I’d get up in the morning, I’d go into an office and I’d lock the door and I’d work away and sort of, you know, in awe of my own creative potential, let’s say. And I think after Arthur died, I just shut the office, and I haven’t gone, I just locked it up. I was just repelled by it in some way. It seems so indulgent.
“I still work very, very hard, but I don’t see that as the be-all and end-all of everything that I find my responsibility towards my children and my wife, and to be a citizen, a husband, these things are the actual animating force behind, or should be the animating force behind our creativeness”.
