Brighton — Nick Cave's long-time home

Nick Cave has lived in Brighton since the 1990s, making the coastal city his primary home for more than three decades — longer than he has lived anywhere else. Brighton has become so associated with him that it is difficult now to think of the city without him, or of him without it: the Regency seafront, the Lanes, the darkness at the edge of the British seaside resort that has always been part of Brighton's character alongside the amusements. Cave arrived in Brighton as a man still associated with the controlled chaos of the Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds years, and stayed long enough for the city to become the setting for both his greatest personal tragedy and his most intimate creative work.

His son Arthur Cave died in Brighton in July 2015, falling from a cliff on the city's eastern edge at the age of fifteen. The event, and Cave's response to it — the album Skeleton Tree, recorded in the immediate aftermath; the documentary One More Time with Feeling, which captured the recording; the subsequent Ghosteen — constitute the most sustained and artistically serious engagement with grief in Cave's body of work. Brighton is the landscape of those records even when it is not explicitly named: the sea, the cliffs, the particular English coastal light.

The Red Hand Files — Cave's long-running practice of answering questions from fans in extended written responses, begun in 2018 — have been composed largely in Brighton, and give an unusually direct window into his relationship with the city and with the domestic life he has built there. Brighton itself is a city with a long association with artistic and counter-cultural communities, and Cave's presence there for thirty years has been part of that tradition without being reducible to it. He lives there; it is where he works.