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Nick Cave has said he has accepted an invitation to attend the coronation because he was not so “ideologically captured” that he would refuse an opportunity to attend “the strangest, the weirdest... historical event in the U.K. of our age.”
The musician was responding to questions sent into his website, the Red Hand Files, after it was revealed that he was to be part of the Australian delegation. One fan succinctly asked: “Why the fuck are you going to the king’s coronation?”
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Cave wrote: “I’ll make this a quick one because I’ve got to work out what I am going to wear to the coronation.
“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 U.K. of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.”
Cave went on to recount a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, saying: “I once met the late queen at an event at Buckingham Palace for ‘Aspirational Australians living in the U.K.’ (or something like that). It was a mostly awkward affair, but the queen herself, dressed in a salmon colored 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.”
Cave added that he himself was moved to tears when watching Elizabeth’s funeral last year.
He said: “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 scepter 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.”
In response to another correspondent who asked what “the young Nick Cave” would have thought of his attendance Cave wrote: “The young Nick Cave [was]... 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 concluded the post by saying, “With all that in mind, I am looking forward to going the coronation. I think I’ll wear a suit.”
