Inside Nick Cave’s tragic life haunted by teen’s horror 60ft cliff plunge, fatal car crash and son’s jail ordeal

IT’S heartbreaking enough to lose one child, but a second of Nick Cave’s sons has now tragically died suddenly, just days after leaving prison.

Nick’s model and actor son Jethro Lazenby died aged 31 – just seven years after his 15-year-old half-brother died in a cliff fall.

PANick Cave has had a very tragic life, filled with heartbreak[/caption]

His son Jethro has died at the age of 31Getty Images – Getty

In a statement today, Nick said: “With much sadness, I can confirm that my son, Jethro, has passed away.

“We would be grateful for family privacy at this time.”

But the devastating news follows a long line of tragedies for the 64-year-old musician, who also lost his dad in a car crash when he was just 19 years old.

Dad’s car crash

Nick was first hit with tragedy when he was just 19 years old – and his estranged father died in a car crash.

At the time of Colin Cave’s accident, Nick was in jail thanks to a burglary charge, and his mother was bailing him out at the police station. 

And sadly, Nick and his dad, who struggled to get along, were never able to build their relationship back up before his death.

Nick has found the incident difficult to talk about in the years since, and has been known to ask journalists to “just Google it.” 

Perhaps not coincidentally, Nick dropped out of art school shortly after, and he decided to move from Australia to the UK with his first band Birthday Party. 

Surviving heroin addiction

GettyNick credits Narcotics Anonymous for surviving heroin addiction[/caption]

Nick soon developed a heroin addiction, and, when Birthday Party split in 1983, his bandmates didn’t have anything nice to say about him.

According to notes of a reporter from those days, “The consensus was that he was a vaguely psychotic drunken f****d-up drug addict, deceiving himself with vain delusions of glory.”

And, in 1988, he physically attacked a Guardian journalist who tried to get him to talk about his addictions and partying. 

However, even then, Nick was aware of the harm he was doing to himself by taking heroin.

He said: “I can’t help it that I take this particular drug.

“I mean, it is that evil and insidious and it does worm its way into your life and it’s very difficult to get it out again. Never have I spoken about it in any other way.” 

Nick eventually conquered his addiction after a couple of stints in rehab, and though he says that getting clean killed his creativity for a good seven months, he says he wouldn’t have survived had he not gone to Narcotics Anonymous.

Writing on his website, Red Hand Files, after he was asked for advice by a fan called Evan, who is a recovering heroin addict, he said: “Personally, I have a lot of time for Narcotics Anonymous, but I do understand your resistance to the idea. I was the same.

“In my heart I never really got it — never felt the same connection other people seemed to have. I always felt outside the idea, looking in. I could never fully commit.

“However, I think it would be fair to say if it weren’t for NA I probably wouldn’t have survived my heroin addiction.

“Narcotics Anonymous was this thing, steady and ever-present, that just never ever went away, a place I could come crawling back to, again and again, year after year, and be accepted and welcomed, welcomed back in.

“In this respect I owe Narcotics Anonymous my life. When no one else would have me, Narcotics Anonymous always would.”

Son’s LSD death

PA:Press AssociationOne of Nick’s other four sons, Arthur, also suddenly died in 2015[/caption]

In 1990, Nick moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he married his first wife, Viviane. They had their first son, Luke, a year later, but divorced in 1996.

The same year Luke was born, Nick had his second child, Jethro, with another woman, Beau Lazenby, who raised him in Australia.

Jethro had a strained relationship with his dad, who kept out of his life during his early years, but after finally meeting, Nick said they built up a “great relationship”.

In 1997, Nick met model Susie Bick. They married and had twin sons, Arthur and Earl, but tragedy was to hit yet again.

In 2015, Nick and his family were informed by police that Arthur had died in Ovingdean, East Sussex. 

The 15-year-old suffered fatal head injuries after experimenting with LSD and later, after becoming paranoid and hallucinating fell 60ft off a cliff. 

Witnesses said they saw Arthur “staggering” shortly before his death.

In a statement at the time, Nick said: “He was our beautiful, happy loving boy.”

‘Spent year near son’s grave’

Getty – ContributorNick says he spent a year near his son’s grave[/caption]

In the wake of Arthur’s death, Nick penned the track Heart That Kills You, which he said explained his decision to move from Brighton to Los Angeles, US.

The area “became too sad” for the musician and his wife Susie, but later, they moved back to London, where they started to find peace.

Last year, he told NME: “We realised that, regardless of where we lived, we just took our sadness with us.”

Nick kept a low-profile while he grieved, and instead channelled his heartache.

He added: “The ‘forgetting’ aspect of grieving is something that is only just starting to come to light because, well, it is hard to remember not remembering something.

“It seems I lost a year, more or less, where we did six film scores in a row, in the little studio we use in Ovingdean, overlooking the churchyard where Arthur is buried.”