Fresh tragedy for rock star Nick Cave as second son dies two days after leaving jail
rOCK star Nick Cave was mourning the death of his eldest son last night – almost seven years after losing his youngest in a cliff fall.
Jethro Lazenby, 31, died two days after being released from prison after admitting assaulting his mother.
Cave, 64, confirmed the news in a statement yesterday, but declined to go into details. The cause of death is not known.
The Australian musician and composer, best known as the frontman of the alternative rock act Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, said: ‘With much sadness, I can confirm that my son, Jethro, has passed away. We would be grateful for family privacy at this time.’
mr Lazenby, a model who lived in melbourne, Australia, had been released from prison on bail last Thursday after being jailed for assaulting his mother, Beau, during a row over cigarettes.
miss Lazenby, who had a relationship
‘You will be less of a risk to your mother’
with Cave in the early Nineties, had found her son at her front door in melbourne just after midnight on march 7, and let him stay the night.
The next morning they argued and mr Lazenby kneed her in the face, causing bleeding and bruising.
magistrate donna Bakos ordered him to undergo substance abuse treatment and avoid contact with his mother for two years. She told him: ‘It’s very, very important that your path to rehabilitation will be a much more positive one, and therefore you will be less of a risk to the community at large and in particular to your mother.’
mr Lazenby, who had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had been due to return to melbourne magistrates’ Court next month to face further charges, including stealing from a convenience store, and to be sentenced for the assault.
He had previously been jailed in 2018 for unlawful assault after he attacked his then girlfriend.
despite using his father’s surname to drive his own modelling career, mr Lazenby had revealed
he didn’t actually meet Cave until he was seven. In 2008, Cave said it was his ‘eternal regret’ that he had not made contact with his son in those early years, adding: ‘Now I have a great relationship with him.’
He was born in 1991, ten days before Cave’s second son Luke was born to his first wife Viviane Carneiro in Brazil, where the couple lived at the time.
Cave went on to have twins earl, now 21, and Arthur with his second wife Susie Bick, a model and dress designer.
But tragedy struck in July 2015 when Arthur fell down a 60ft cliff near the family home in Brighton while hallucinating after taking LSd. An inquest heard that the 15-year-old, who had also taken cannabis, was left in a state of confusion and distress after taking LSd with a friend several hours earlier.
motorists on the nearby coast road watched helplessly as he staggered barefoot along the cliff top, but were unable to reach him before he climbed over a fence and plummeted to the bottom of Ovingdean Gap, near the family home in Brighton.
Cave talked later of the ‘vastness’ of his grief, and said he felt Arthur with him all the time, adding: ‘I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there.’
Following Arthur’s death the couple moved to Los Angeles, saying: ‘Brighton had just become too sad.’
But explaining why they came back, he said: ‘We did, however, return once we realised that, regardless of where we lived, we just took our sadness with us.’
Cave, dubbed rock music’s Prince of darkness, found fame in the Seventies as the frontman of The Birthday Party.
His 2000 duet with former lover Kylie minogue, Where The Wild roses Grow, became one of the Bad Seeds’ most commercially successful recordings.
He is also a novelist, actor, screenwriter and director.
‘We just took our sadness with us’