Nick Cave has mentioned his resolution to attend King Charles’ coronation this month after being criticised for the selection.
Addressing the invitation on his weblog The Red Hand Files forward of the coronation, Cave responded to followers who appeared confused at his resolution to attend, with one writing: “What would the young Nick Cave have thought of that?!”
After defending the choice, Cave has now spoken to NME in regards to the response to his resolution, and that followers have disowned him due to it.
“I don’t want to get into this at all, but I just had a guy write into the Red Hand Files,” Cave started. “He said, ‘I’m a longtime fan, I love your work, and it gives me great sadness to pack it all up in a box and take it down to the secondhand shop because I can no longer listen to you because you went to the coronation.”
He added: “It just feels to me that the wrongs get less and less and less. It’s not like I’m a fucking fascist, child-molesting whatever. I just think the wrongs get less and whatever.”
Asked whether or not he loved himself on the coronation, Cave advised NME: “I’m not talking about that!” including: “It was acutely interesting… and extremely British.”
Going on to debate taking others’ recommendation, together with followers who write to him on his e-newsletter, Cave added: “That’s essentially what The Red Hand Files is – it’s people writing in and me going, ‘Woah’. They write in and say, ‘You think you can call yourself an anti-monarchist and still go to the coronation?’ Then occasionally, you get a really reasoned response that makes you think it’s teaching you something.”
He added: “In amongst that, nevertheless, you get all of the shrill self-piteous superior screeds which can be written round this type of stuff which can be very tough to learn and are written like somebody in a pub shouting at you.
“They seem to me to have jumped straight off social media onto my Red Hand Files – that are usually free of that sort of thing. Usually what people write in with is very beautiful, then occasionally things turn very nasty for a week or two, then it calms back down.”
Defending his resolution to attend the occasion in his preliminary Red Hand Files entry, Cave advised the fan in query: “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, but the strangest, the weirdest.”
The musician then went on to recall as soon as assembly the late Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, which he described as a “mostly awkward affair”, however that the Queen herself “seemed almost extraterrestrial and was the most charismatic woman I have ever met”.