Nick Cave has offered invaluable advice on coming to terms with ageing, after being asked by a fan for his “perspective on getting old”.
Nick Cave took to his Red Hand Files website to respond to a question from a fan named Remko from Lanaken, Belgium. “I’m struggling a bit with the fact I’m turning 40 in a week,” Remko wrote. “Some people say ‘You’re in the brightest part of your life’, others say you are an ‘old man’. What is your perspective on getting old?”
Cave responded in the most stoic, Cave-y way imaginable. “My advice to you is to grow a porn star moustache and learn the electric guitar — it worked for me — and try to hang in there until you’re 60,” he wrote.
“Then you’ll find you don’t have to worry about what people say anymore and, as a consequence, life becomes a whole lot more interesting.”
Cave, who is 63, went on to detail his experience entering his autumn years. “Entering your 60s brings with it a warm and fuzzy feeling of freedom through redundancy, through obsolescence, through living outside of the conversation and forever existing on the wrong end of the stick,” he said.
“What a relief it is to be that mad, embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, a product of his age, with his loopy ideas about free speech and freedom of expression, with his love of beauty, of humour, chaos, provocation and outrage, of conversation and debate, his adoration of art without dogma, his impatience with the morally obvious, his belief in universal compassion, forgiveness and mercy, in nuance and the shadows, in neutrality and in humanity — ah, beautiful humanity — and in God too, who he thanks for letting him, in these dementing times, be old.”
Back in April, Nick Cave penned an emotional tribute to his late The Birthday Party bandmember Anita Lane.
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