Nick Cave defends decision to accept ‘historic’ invitation
MUSICIAN Nick Cave has been chosen as one of 14 “outstanding Australians” to be invited to the Coronation.
The Bad Seeds star, 65, will be joined by Adam Hills, the comedian and host of Channel 4’s The Last Leg, among those representing Australia’s finest at Westminster Abbey on Saturday.
The delegation will be led by Anthony Albanese, the Left-wing prime minister who was elected last year but has ruled out a referendum on Australia becoming a republic in his first term.
Each Commonwealth country was invited to nominate people who have made notable contributions to their nation in the fields of art, sport, defence, medicine, academia and business.
Other Australians in the Abbey will be a nurse, an opera singer, a PHD student at Oxford University and a scientist who helped develop the Oxford-astrazeneca Covid vaccine.
Cave defended his decision to attend the Coronation to fans who questioned it, saying he had an “inexplicable emotional attachment” to the Royal family.
Writing in his newsletter, the Red Hand Files, in reply to letters from three Australians and one British fan, he said: “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.”
Cave also wrote about meeting the late Queen during an event at Buckingham Palace, describing her as “almost extraterrestrial” and “the most charismatic woman I have ever met”.
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 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.”