Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds played Primavera Sound Festival on Saturday (June 4) and dedicated a song to Cave’s two sons.
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Before performing “I Need You”, from 2016’s Skeleton Tree, Nick Cave told the crowd “This is a song I want to dedicate to my two boys, Luke and Earl. They’re probably over there waiting for Bauhaus to begin.”
“Hang on, is my hair alright,” he joked after the emotional performance, before performing “Waiting For You” from 2019’s Ghosteen.
The show was only the second gig Nick Cave has played since the death of his son Jethro Lazenby, after The Bad Seeds headlined Northside Festival earlier this week. Jethro passed away at the start of May at the age of 31. Another of Cave’s sons, Arthur, died in 2015.
Following the death of Jethro, Cave shared a thank-you note to fans.
“I have no question for you today,” Teresa from Australia wrote to Cave, via his The Red Hand Files blog. “I just wanted to send my heartfelt condolences on the tragic loss of Jethro. All I can do is offer the collective love of all who read your letters. Much love to you and all your family.”
Cave responded: “Dear Teresa. Thank you for your letter. Many others have written to me about Jethro, sending condolences and kind words. These letters are a great source of comfort and I’d like to thank all of you for your support.”
In 2019, Cave spoke about how he coped with the loss of Arthur.
“For us, grief became a way of life, an approach to living, where we learned to yield to the uncertainty of the world, whilst maintaining a stance of defiance to its indifference. We surrendered to something over which we had no control, but which we refused to take lying down,” he wrote.
“Grief became both an act of submission and of resistance — a place of acute vulnerability where, over time, we developed a heightened sense of the brittleness of existence. Eventually, this awareness of life’s fragility led us back to the world, transformed.”
This Much I Know To Be True, which was in cinemas for one night only on May 11, is a documentary-meets-performance film that centres on the creative relationship between Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, and looks at the creation of their most recent albums Ghosteen and CARNAGE.