Cave at the Coronation

16 May 2023

Strange things happen at Coronations. All sorts of people turn up. Maybe not all, but you know what I mean. Kings, of course, prime ministers, talk show hosts, dames, duke, pop stars and bishops. People mingle. The photographers snap. There were the beautiful juxtapositions in dress as representatives of various states processed into Westminster Abbey. Prince Harry had to be snapped as alone, but he kept talking to the second-row royals around him.

An image that caught my eye in the days after the Coronation was of Rowan Williams, erstwhile Archbishop of Canterbury and Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge, walking in alongside Nick Cave, rock star and writer. Coincidental mingling? At first I thought, maybe. I knew Cave grappled in his life and work with religious themes. Peter Conrad wrote beautifully about this years ago.

I put the two names together in a google search and there appeared an article from The Times, Nick Cave: my son’s death brought me back to church. A picture of Cave and Williams amongst the pews accompanied the piece, written by Williams. On some level it is publicity for a book of conversations between Cave and music journalist Sean O’Hagan, and picks up on his agony aunt style blog, The Red Hand Files.

In the blog Cave answers question from people and in answer to the question, ‘Why the fuck are you going to the King’s coronation?’, he responds:

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…I’m drawn to that kind of thing- the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefying spectacular, the awe-inspiring.

Since the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur in 2015 after falling from a cliff, Cave has engaged in a new way with religious practice. Williams says: ‘He has been drawn back to some sense of belonging within the battered, inarticulate and compromised community that is the Church.’ This isn’t a full ecclesiology, but it goes a long way.

It seems that something of what Cave has been grappling with as he has incorporated the absence and presence of his son in his life and work,

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Cave at the Coronation

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