Nick Cave Sings on New Flea Album Despite Famously Bashing RHCP

Flea is working on a new album, and he asked Nick Cave to sing on it, which might be surprising to some folks. Why? Because Cave once bashed the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The brutal slam Cave delivered on the Chili Peppers happened over two decades ago. Per Rolling Stone, Cave once said in response to being asked about the state of music, "I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always 'The Red Hot Chili Peppers.'"

As far as biting remarks go, that one draws some metaphorical blood. However, Cave addressed his comment via his "Red Hand Files" fan forum saying, in part, "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 sh-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."

Cave continued, "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. On Facebook, Flea expressed how hurt he felt by my remark, but went on to say, in great detail, that he loved my music regardless. 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."

Cave explained that Flea reached out to him recently to record vocals on what Cave referred to as a "trumpet record." (Flea began playing the trumpet when he was a child.) While he didn't offer up any major details about the song, he said it featured "arguably the greatest lyric ever written" and he "would never have dared to sing it had Flea not asked me to."

So, what did we learn? Cave and Flea both seem like pretty solid dudes, and we're now dying to know what on Earth this "greatest lyric ever written" is!