Nick Cave says Queen Elizabeth was “the most charismatic woman I have ever met”
In the latest edition of his newsletter The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave has defended his decision to attend King Charles III’s coronation. He also named the late Queen Elizabeth II as “the most charismatic woman I have ever met”.
Cave responded to four fans who wrote to him, demanding an explanation for his plans to be present at the forthcoming coronation on May 6th. The Australian musician declared he’s “not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist, nor am I an ardent republican” but described the event as “the most important historical event in the UK of our age.”
He also recalled: “I once met the late Queen at an event at Buckingham Palace for ‘Aspirational Australians living in the UK’ (or something like that). It was a mostly awkward affair, 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”.
He added: “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.”
Meanwhile, in a recent interview with Unherd, Cave conceded that his classic song ‘Stagger Lee’ is “highly problematic”. The Bad Seeds leader said: “This is a famous Bad Seeds song, and it’s offensive on many, many levels. I won’t go through all the different sorts of people that it offends, but it’s pretty much everybody. It’s a highly problematic song. It is sort of spoken-sung over this crawling, predatory music.”
He continued: “But in all my days of playing ‘Stagger Lee’, and that’s hundreds of times of looking out into the audience, I have never seen anybody looking askance or offended at it. They’re just swept up within the music itself. So all sorts of things can be said in music and art that’s problematic, but at the same time just hugely enjoyable.”
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