A couple of decades ago, Nick Cave offered his opinion of the state of music at the time in an interview, taking unexpected aim at another band. “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always ‘The Red Hot Chili Peppers.’” The statement sparked an expectedly emotional reaction from Chili Peppers bassist Flea at the time: “It only hurt my feelings for a second because my love for his music is bigger than all that shit, and if he thinks my band is lame then that’s OK,” the bassist was reported as saying. In recent years, though, the snipe has become a well-traveled meme.
Cave addressed the ubiquity of the diss in his open-forum fan Q&A, The Red Hand Files, on Wednesday. “About twenty-five years ago, I made an offhand and somewhat uncharitable remark about the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he wrote. “There was no malice intended; it was just the sort of obnoxious thing I would say back then to piss people off. I was a troublemaker, a shit-stirrer, feeling most at ease in the role of a societal irritant.” He went on to say that he believed that was a trait among Australians of his age. (Note that Flea, who is five years younger than Cave, was born in the same Australian state of Victoria.)
The Bad Seeds leader wrote that he found Flea’s even-keeled response to the quip moving and even “classy.” “Flea was a human being of an entirely different calibre, indeed, of a higher order,” Cave wrote.
Flea would later collaborate with the singer-songwriter, helping the Bad Seeds frontman to assemble a youth choir for a 2013 appearance at Coachella and joined Cave and his right-hand man Warren Ellis for a performance of “We No Who U R” in Los Angeles in 2022. Cave wrote that they also have plans to work together again.
“Last week, Flea sent me a song and asked if I’d like to add some vocals,” Cave wrote. “It was for a ‘trumpet record’ that he is making. It is not for me to divulge what the song was, only that it is a song I cherish more than most, with arguably the greatest lyric ever written, a song of such esteem that I would never have dared to sing it had Flea not asked me to.” They recorded the song, which Cave describes as “a beautiful conversation between Flea’s trumpet and my voice,” last week. He wrote that he saw it as a “form of a reconciliation and an apology.” (Cave also shared a second-hand story about Flea smooth-talking a bear in the wild that should be read to believed — or not.)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will kick off the North American leg of their Wild God tour next month. St. Vincent will support the first two dates in Boston and Brooklyn.
While on a European leg of the Wild God tour last fall, Cave told Rolling Stone how performing songs from the album felt more invigorating live than when he recorded them. “It’s like the songs hadn’t arrived yet on the record, but they do when they get onstage, and these songs are just epic, like gloriously grandiose in a way that only the Bad Seeds can do,” he said. “It’s incredibly emotional. It’s quite something for us to arrive at this point so early on in a tour. Usually, it takes a few gigs to sort of work stuff out, but this is really encouraging.”
