Nick Cave to quit UK after being consumed by ‘feeding frenzy’ of grief over his son’s death

Nick Cave has said a “feeding frenzy” of grief over the death of his son has forced him to move to the US.

Cave, 59, is leaving his home in Brighton, which he shares with his wife Susie Bick, to start afresh in Los Angeles.

The couple lost their son Arthur after he fell from a cliff after taking LSD in July 2015. The 15-year-old suffered “unsurvivable head injuries” when he plunged 60 feet at Ovingdean Gap bypass near Brighton, East Sussex.

The Bad Seeds frontman said he can no longer live in the seaside town as the memories are too painful.

“Grief and illness and tiredness feed off each other in a kind of feeding frenzy,” he told GQ. “Mostly, we just find it too difficult to live here.”

Cave said he and his family have tried to live as normal life as possible, but that it has become “too intense”.

He continued: “I don't know how to say this really. Everyone here has just been so great, and that's in a way half the problem. When I go out in Brighton these days, there's a sort of feeling that we're all in this together.

“And it's just a little bit too intense for me. It's too many memories, really. We've really tried. But it's just beyond us, in a way, to remain.”

Cave opened up about the “catastrophic” loss of his son in his concert film, One More Time with Feeling.

He said: “Most of us don’t want to change, really. I mean, why should we?

“But what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that you just change? You change from the known person to an unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognise the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.”