What Happened to Nick Cave's Sons? The Musician Suffered Two Unthinkable Tragedies

Australian musician Nick Cave first introduced his notable baritone voice to audiences in the early '70s. He made a name for himself in Melboure's post-punk scene with his theatrical goth-rock band Birthday Party before he established Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1984. They would go on to release 17 studio albums and become one of the most influential groups in alternative rock.

But in his personal life, Nick has endured unthinkable tragedy. Below, we take a look at what happened to two of Nick's sons, who died far too young and changed their father's world forever.

Nick married his first wife, Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro, in 1990. They welcomed a son named Luke the following year.

But Nick had another son who was also born in 1991 (just days before Luke) named Jethro, whom he'd had with a woman named Beau Lazenby. It's unclear if and when Nick and Beau had a relationship.

Nick and Viviane divorced in 1996, and a year later, Nick met a British model named Susie Bick. They got married in 1999, and they welcomed twin boys named Arthur and Earl in 2000.

Sadly, in July 2015, when Arthur was 15 years old, he fell off a cliff in Brighton, the British seaside town where Nick and Susie were raising their twins. Arthur died from from multiple head injuries. One of Arthur's friends said during an inquest that they had both taken LSD before the horrible accident.

The tragedy did not end there. In May 2022, Jethro was found dead at age 30. His cause of death wasn't revealed, but Jethro's on-and-off girlfriend Danica Conwell told the Daily Mail that she believed he didn't take his own life, but rather that he died from heroin.

Jethro worked as a model and actor. He'd reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he claimed that he didn't meet his dad until he was 7 or 8. He'd also been involved in a series of domestic violence incidents: He was accused of several attacks on his then-girlfriend in 2018, and was also accused of attacking his mother in March 2022.

In an August 2024 interview with Australia's ABC, Nick said that the monumental loss of his sons completely shifted his outlook on life, making him want to focus on being "a father and a husband and a kind of person of the world" instead of "the concept of being an artist."

"For most of my life I was just sort of in awe of my own genius, you know, and I had an office and would sit there and write every day and whatever else happened in my life was peripheral," he said, adding: "This just collapsed completely and I just saw the folly of that, the kind of disgraceful self-indulgence of the whole thing."

Nick said that after Arthur's death, he began receiving letters from people all over the world via his website, The Red Hand Files. He still gets lots of letters to this day and he posts answers to some of them every month. Nick said the website has served as "a kind of lifeline for [him]" that "allowed [him] to remain open to the world rather than shut down."

The musician is also celebrating having become a grandfather for the first time in May 2024, when his son Luke welcomed a baby boy. Nick told ABC that he aspires to be the "grandfather that sits in the armchair and says inappropriate things and has a terrible influence over everybody but the child secretly loves."