Nick Cave picks his Desert Island Discs

Brighton musician Nick Cave said that he would retire from music when he was physically incapable of suddenly falling to his knees while on stage.

The 67-year-old artist, who fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is due to tour North America in April and May, having released his latest album, Wild God, last August.

Cave told Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4: “I always thought I’d stop doing it when I couldn’t do knee drops any more.

“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 had become less work-obsessed after the death of two of his sons.

Fifteen-year-old Arthur died in a fall from a cliff-top in Brighton in an accident in 2015 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 … 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.”

He also said that joy in his life came “from my family and from my wife”.

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

He also discussed his heroin addiction, saying that 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.

To find out which songs he picked, find the programme on BBC iPlayer.