Nick Cave has spoken out about his decision to attend King Charles III’s coronation at the weekend.
On Saturday, the Bad Seeds frontman will be part of the Australian delegation when King Charles is crowned, alongside footballer Sam Kerr and comedian Adam Hills.
In the latest instalment of his newsletter The Red Hand Files, the musician revealed that he’s had several messages from fans both in the UK and Australia questioning why he’d want to be part of the event.
“Why the fuck are you going to the King’s coronation?” one Australian fan bluntly asked, while another questioned: “I see that you will be attending the coronation as part of the Australian delegation. Are you a Monarchist? Why go?”
“The coronation. Seriously????” a third Australian fan simply said, while a fourth message from a Brit read: “Nick Cave going to the coronation??! What would the young Nick Cave have thought of that?!”
Nick has now shared an open response to his fans on his website.
“I’ll make this a quick one because I’ve got to work out what I am going to wear to the coronation,” he joked, before insisting: “I am not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist, nor am I an ardent republican for that matter.
“What I am also not is 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.”
“Not just the most important,” he pointed out. “But the strangest, the weirdest.”
Nick went on to share his own account of meeting the late Queen Elizabeth II at what he described as an event “for ’Aspirational Australians living in the UK (or something like that)”.
“It was a mostly awkward affair,” he recalled. “But the Queen herself, dressed in a salmon coloured twin-set, seemed almost extraterrestrial and was the most charismatic woman I have ever met.
“Maybe it was the lighting, but she actually glowed. As I told my mother – who was the same age as the Queen and, like the Queen, died in her nineties – about that day, her old eyes filled with tears.
“When I watched the Queen’s funeral on the television last year I found, to my bafflement, that I was weeping myself as the coffin was stripped of the crown, orb and sceptre and lowered through the floor of St. George’s Chapel.
“I guess what I am trying to say is that, beyond the interminable but necessary debates about the abolition of the monarchy, I hold an inexplicable emotional attachment to the royals – the strangeness of them, the deeply eccentric nature of the whole affair that so perfectly reflects the unique weirdness of Britain itself. I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring.”
He concluded: “And as for what the young Nick Cave would have thought – well, 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.
“He was cute though, I’ll give him that. Deranged, but cute. So, with all that in mind, I am looking forward to going to the coronation. I think I’ll wear a suit.”
Nick has used his The Red Hand Files newsletter to address fans publicly on a number of occasions.
This included updating fans following the death of his son in 2022, as well as revealing a rather unlikely connection to one of last year’s more divisive Love Island contestants.