Two decades ago, Nick Cave infamously had this to say about the Red Hot Chili Peppers: “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the f**k is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

Now, he's collaborating with the band's bassist Flea on a trumpet record. Cave unveiled this news while also reflecting on his past remarks—and Flea as a person—in a recent Q&A on his Red Hand Files website.

“About twenty-five years ago, I made an offhand and somewhat uncharitable remark about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was no malice intended, it was just the sort of obnoxious thing I would say back then to piss people off,” Cave wrote. “I was a troublemaker, a s**t-stirrer, feeling most at ease in the role of a societal irritant. Perhaps it’s an Australian trait among people of my generation, I don’t know, but that comment has followed me around for the last quarter-century. But the most interesting aspect of all this is not what I said about the Chili Peppers, but rather the response from Flea, their bass player.”

Flea responded to Cave's comments on RHCP's website back in 2006, writing: “For a second that hurt my feelings because I love Nick Cave. I have all of his records. I don’t care if Nick Cave hates my band because his music means everything to me because he is one of my favorite songwriters and singers and musicians of all time. I love all the incarnations of the Bad Seeds. But it only hurt my feelings for a second because my love is bigger than all that s**t, and if he thinks my band is lame that’s OK.”

The singer-songwriter touched on this in his blog post. “Flea expressed how hurt he felt by my remark, but went on to say, in great detail, that he loved my music regardless," he summarized. “He wrote a profoundly generous and open-hearted love letter to Nick Cave. I remember being genuinely moved by his words and thinking what a classy guy Flea was, and feeling on some subterranean level that I was unable to fully grasp at that point in my life, that Flea was a human being of an entirely different calibre, indeed, of a higher order.”

He recalled how he'd see Flea backstage at festivals he and RHCP were both playing and how “there was a presence to Flea that felt genuine and oddly affecting.”

And then he revealed that they worked on a song together. “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,” Cave gushed. “I went into the studio on Wednesday and recorded my vocals. The track emerged as a beautiful conversation between Flea’s trumpet and my voice, filled with yearning and love, the song transcending its individual parts and becoming a slowly evolving cosmic dance, in the form of a reconciliation and an apology.”

Flea and Cave actually shared the stage together in 2022, when the bassist helped perform the Bad Seeds' 2012 track "We No Who U R" during a show in Los Angeles.

Temple