Nick Cave knows it’s kind of weird how much he likes the royals
Nick Cave admits to “an inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals” ahead of attending King Charles' coronation
Aux News Nick Cave
Nick Cave got credit recently for his eloquent dismissal of art generated by artificial intelligence, and now he is cashing some of that credit in to defend the British monarchy. It’s not that he’s a monarchist, per se, it’s that he has “an inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals.” He likes the royal family in a cool, alternative way, not in a bowing-and-scraping-to-your-colonial-overlords kind of way. So relax about it, alright?
The musician explains these complicated feelings in an entry of his blog The Red Hand Files, in which he addresses the question, “Why the fuck are you going to the coronation?” The answer is that he is not “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,” unlike those plebeian critics plaguing his inbox.
Cave professes himself drawn to “the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring,” descriptors that apparently encompass the royal family. While he lays it on thick about the strangeness and eccentricity of the entire institution, he also proclaims Queen Elizabeth II “the most charismatic woman I have ever met.” The recollection of his encounter with the late monarch moved his mother to tears, and hey, who among us doesn’t have a soft spot for some vaguely cringe-inducing special interest of our mom?
Confronted with the specter of the disapproval of his younger self, the Australian artist points out that “the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and like many young people, mostly demented, so I’m a little cautious around using him as a benchmark for what I should or should not do.” All this to say, yes, Nick Cave is happily attending the coronation of King Charles, so leave him alone about it!
27 Comments
I guess if there actually is a “cool way” to like the royal family, Nick Cave would be the one to know what it is.
“The young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young up to his eyeballs in heroin most of the time.”
That picture anyway does look like if heroin became a sentient being.
No, you’re thinking of Iggy Pop.
Yeah, him too.
Well, he pretty strongly resembles Iggy Pop in that photo.
I dunno, I lost a bit of respect for him when he started bitching about “cancel culture” and “wokeness”.
Same. His Red Hand Files post about “cancel culture” was facile and naïve.
Anyone else here have ‘Red Right Hand’ quantum-entangled with ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ by ZZ Top?
Oh … my … GOD! You’re totally right; “Every girl’s crazy bout his red right hand”. Shit, now I can’t unhear it.
Welcome >:D
Or alternately, “You’re all microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan, designed and directed by a sharp-dressed man.”
Hysterical.
I was fine with his grumpy answer of “I’m curious, back off”, until he got to the point of claiming the coronation “will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age”. Is he still referring to the £100m “aren’t we awesome” celebration for a family of outdated figureheads? If correct that’s a pretty damning prediction of irrelevance for modern Great Britain.
I think I get where he’s going with that, but yeah, it isn’t even the most important historical event in the UK of the last five years.
Exactly. Like, you were invited to a big party. It’s okay to go for that reason alone. You don’t have to make it more ideologically grandiose than it actually is, which is none.
I don’t know where you’ve been for the last sixty odd years but the UK has been irrelevant since the Suez Crisis.
Is it because he also looks a lil inbred?
“what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age”Hm. Not joining the EU? Not leaving the EU? Not the pandemic? Not getting a PM of Indian descent? Those are ones I can think of off the top of my head and I’m not even British. Is installing a new pointless figurehead really that significant?
I think Elizabeth was around so fucking long that people assume a coronation is a once in a lifetime event. But Charles has looked like he’s about to keel over for the past 25 years, and on top of that, now he’s the only thing standing between William and the throne.
Yeah he’s…not in great shape.
He’ll die even faster if he insists on sticking with homeopathic medicine.
This reminds me of the episode of Would I Lie to You? filmed on the day of Prince William’s marriage, where Lee Mack tries to convince David Mitchell he’s passed up a royal invite to attend the show’s (presumably) regularly scheduled taping. There’s a moment when it seems like Mitchell might actually believe it’s true, and care—but as is often the case, it’s pretty hard to say. I actually suspect he’s one of thew few celebrities who might turn down such an invite (in part because I seem to recall him insisting on another occasion that he’d only ever been to one concert in his life), but anyway, I wouldn’t hold it against anyone for going. Even if Cave is overstating the importance, here, it is pretty exciting.
I watch a lot of UK panel shows, and one thing that is weird to me is how many comedians who are clearly very intelligent people are still, to some degree, in awe of the monarchy. It will come up that someone met Charles at some event or that someone got an MBE or something like that, and most of the rest will sound very impressed or jealous, and they’ll be almost giddy talking about the royals. As someone who is absolutely repulsed by the very idea of hereditary aristocracy, I find it depressing, but I guess if you grow up there it kind of permeates society, and you’ve spent your whole life thinking that lords and ladies are a big deal, and nothing is a bigger deal than the monarch.
I hear ya—but I swear, it can be kind of cute! I used to smile whenever Richard Osman would suck up to Elizabeth II—“We love the queen,” he would often say on Pointless (she was apparently a regular viewer). Granted, his tone was some kind of a cross between sarcasm and baby talk when he did it, so maybe he was half-kidding, but whatever.
If they replaced God Save the King with Red Right Hand I’d become an Anglophile.
File under: Great Artist Who Should Stick To Expressing Himself Through Art.