Nick Cave knows it’s kind of weird how much he likes the royals

Nick Cave got credit recently for his eloquent dismissal of art generated by artificial intelligence, and now he is cashing some of that credit in to defend the British monarchy. It’s not that he’s a monarchist, per se, it’s that he has “an inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals.” He likes the royal family in a cool, alternative way, not in a bowing-and-scraping-to-your-colonial-overlords kind of way. So relax about it, alright?

The musician explains these complicated feelings in an entry of his blog The Red Hand Files, in which he addresses the question, “Why the fuck are you going to the coronation?” The answer is that he is not “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,” unlike those plebeian critics plaguing his inbox.

Cave professes himself drawn to “the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring,” descriptors that apparently encompass the royal family. While he lays it on thick about the strangeness and eccentricity of the entire institution, he also proclaims Queen Elizabeth II “the most charismatic woman I have ever met.” The recollection of his encounter with the late monarch moved his mother to tears, and hey, who among us doesn’t have a soft spot for some vaguely cringe-inducing special interest of our mom?

Confronted with the specter of the disapproval of his younger self, the Australian artist points out that “the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and 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.” All this to say, yes, Nick Cave is happily attending the coronation of King Charles, so leave him alone about it!