Nick Cave has "feelings of culpability" over the deaths of his sons.

The 66-year-old rock star lost his son Jethro at the age of 31 in May 2022 and endured another tragedy in July that year when his son Arthur, then 15, suffered a fatal brain injury after falling off a cliff and was found to have been taking LSD.

Asked if he feels culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death, Nick told The Guardian: "There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

The 'Where the Wild Roses Grow' singer - who also has Luke, 32, with first wife Viviane Carneiro in 1991 and then had Jethro with Beau Lazenby but also has Earl, 23, with current wife Susie - added that "regardless" of things that have happened, parents who lose a child always feel a certain kind of culpability because the "one thing" a parent is supposed to do in life is "protect" their child.

He said: "What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.

"I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die. Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children."