Awkward moment Leigh Sales is forced to apologise to Nick Cave for overstepping the mark – as emotional music legend opens up on losing his two sons

Leigh Sales has issued an awkward apology to Nick Cave during an emotional interview after the Aussie music icon spoke about his eldest son on the anniversary of his death. 

The uncomfortable situation unfolded when the veteran ABC presenter was interviewing the 66-year-old rock legend for an episode of Australian Story, which aired on Monday night. 

Cave was discussing the heartache of losing his eldest son Jethro, 31, in May 2022, when he revealed the episode was being filmed on the two year anniversary of his death.

Jethro, who had schizophrenia and battled drug addiction, died in Melbourne two days after he was released from jail.

He died seven years after the Australian-born Bad Seeds frontman lost a younger son, Arthur, 15. 

‘Today is the anniversary of Jethro’s death,’ Cave explained.

Sales immediately apologised over the unfortunate timing.  

‘I’m sorry that this interview has landed on the anniversary of your son’s death,’ she said. 

Cave said the difficulty in doing sit-down interviews was the conversation quickly turns to his sons. 

‘It’s odd that we’re jumping straight into this and I just… it’s not your fault,’ Cave replied. 

Cave spoke about the grief of losing Arthur as the father-of-four discussed how he was able to overcome his grief. 

Arthur took LSD for the first time before he plunged 60ft from a cliff near his home in Brighton, England in 2015.

‘I had an understanding of the process because I’d been through it already,’ Cave said. 

‘There is the initial cataclysmic event that we eventually absorb or rearrange ourselves so that we become creatures of loss,’ he said. 

Despite the personal tragedies, he was able to find a different outlook on life that has enabled him to see the world differently.

‘I mean this is quite a complicated thing, but the sort of void that was left, there was a kind of rushing in of meaning that came into that void in all sorts of different ways,’ Cave said. 

‘[It] allowed me to see the world in a different way [and] allowed me to be much more compassionate towards the human predicament’. 

Cave said it was a ‘counterfactual response’ that made him less embittered. 

Veteran ABC presenter Leigh Sales (pictured), who interviewed Cave as part an episode for the ABC’s Australian Story program, immediately apologised over the unfortunate timing

‘It did the opposite… it made me much more connected to people in general,’ he said. 

Cave also revealed how he turned to his Christian faith, which he had cultivated during his younger years after becoming consumed by his ‘own genius’. 

‘I always had a religious temperament, even as a child, but no need for it…I was sort of drug addicted for a couple of decades,’ he said. 

‘I think after Arthur died, rather than feeling anger towards that sort of stuff or rejecting that sort of stuff, I’ve felt a slow movement towards a religious life’.

‘I’ve found [that] extremely helpful and kind of widening thing that’s happened in my life’. 

Jethro (pictured right), who battled drug addiction, died in Melbourne in 2022 two days after he was released from jail (pictured left Nick Cave)

Cave went on to disclose that even though he ‘lives in a rock and roll world’, he no longer struggles with drugs and alcohol. 

‘I’m not tempted to return to that way of life,’ he said. 

Cave said the ‘art trounces everything’ no longer applies to him after the death of Arthur and Jethro. 

‘I just sort of saw the folly of that and the kind of disgraceful self-indulgence of the whole thing, it just…my priorities changed,’ he said. 

‘I’m a father and I’m a husband and a kind of person of the world, these things are much more important to me than the concept of being an ‘artist’.’

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