Nick Cave: I’ll retire when I can’t do knee drops anymore

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”.

However, he also said joy in his life comes “from my family and from my wife, one aspect of my family that it’s difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is that I have a little grandson who’s like, seven months old”.

Cave previously shared that his family, including fashion designer wife Susie and Arthur’s twin brother, moved to Los Angeles from the UK because they were “triggered too much” by living just down the road from where his son died.

He also discussed his heroin addiction, saying when he got clean, he “was just alive to what, to what things to love, and to beauty and to heartbreak”.

Cave added: “I’m trying not to make this a hallelujah moment because it wasn’t, you become alive and to become alive means you’re subject to all sorts of things, good and bad, (rather) you’ve become a human being.”

He has another child, Domina actor Earl, with Susie, and also has a son, Luke, with his first wife Viviane Carneiro.

Listen to Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.