Nick Cave

Nicholas Edward Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, writer and actor who fronts the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Known for his baritone voice, Cave's music is characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love, and violence.

Born and raised in rural Victoria, Cave studied art in Melbourne before fronting the Birthday Party, one of the city's leading post-punk bands, in the late 1970s. In 1980, the band moved to London, England. Disillusioned by their stay there, they evolved towards a darker and more challenging sound that helped inspire gothic rock, and they acquired a reputation as "the most violent live band in the world". Cave became recognised for his confrontational performances, his shock of black hair and pale, emaciated look. The band broke up soon after relocating to West Berlin in 1982. The following year, Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, later described as one of rock's "most redoubtable, enduring" bands. Much of their early material is set in a mythic American Deep South, drawing on spirituals and Delta blues, while Cave's preoccupation with Old Testament notions of good versus evil culminated in what has been called his signature song, "The Mercy Seat" (1988), and in his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). In 1988, he appeared in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, an Australian prison film which he both co-wrote and scored.

The 1990s saw Cave move between São Paulo and England, and find inspiration in the New Testament. He went on to achieve mainstream success with quieter, piano-driven ballads, notably the Kylie Minogue duet "Where the Wild Roses Grow" (1996), and "Into My Arms" (1997). Turning increasingly to film in the 2000s, Cave wrote the Australian Western The Proposition (2005), also composing its soundtrack with frequent collaborator Warren Ellis. The pair's film score credits include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The Road (2009) and Hell or High Water (2016). Their garage rock side project Grinderman has released two studio albums since 2006. In 2009, he released his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, and starred in the semi-fictional "day in the life" film 20,000 Days on Earth (2014). His more recent musical work features ambient and electronic elements, as well as increasingly abstract lyrics, informed in part by grief over his son Arthur's 2015 death, which is explored in the documentary One More Time with Feeling (2016) and the Bad Seeds' 2019 album Ghosteen. The band's 18th and latest album, Wild God, was released in 2024.

Since 2018, Cave has maintained The Red Hand Files, a newsletter he uses to respond to questions from fans. He has collaborated with the likes of Johnny Cash, Shane MacGowan and ex-partner PJ Harvey. His songs have also been covered by a wide range of artists, including Cash ("The Mercy Seat"), Metallica ("Loverman") and Snoop Dogg ("Red Right Hand"). He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2007, and he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017.

Nicholas Edward Cave was born on 22 September 1957 in Warracknabeal, a country town in the Australian state of Victoria, to Dawn Cave (née Treadwell) and Colin Frank Cave. He has two older brothers, Tim (born 1952) and Peter (born 1954), and a younger sister, Julie (born 1959). As a child, he lived in Warracknabeal and then Wangaratta in rural Victoria.

His father taught English and mathematics at the local technical school; his mother was a librarian at the high school that Cave attended. From an early age, Cave's father read him literary classics, such as Crime and Punishment (1866) and Lolita (1955), and also organised the first symposium on the Australian bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly, with whom Cave was enamoured as a child. Through his older brother, Cave became a fan of British progressive rock bands such as King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, while a childhood girlfriend introduced him to the Canadian folk artist Leonard Cohen, who he later described as "the greatest songwriter of them all".

When Cave was nine he joined the choir of Wangaratta's Holy Trinity Cathedral. At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School, and sent by his parents to Melbourne to become a boarder and later day student at Caulfield Grammar School. His family moved to Melbourne the following year, settling in the suburb of Murrumbeena. After his secondary schooling, Cave studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology in 1976, but dropped out the following year to pursue music. He also began using heroin around the time that he left art school.

Cave attended his first music concert at Melbourne's Festival Hall. The bill consisted of the English rock bands Manfred Mann, Deep Purple and Free. Cave recalled: "I remember sitting there and feeling physically the sound going through me." In early 1977, he saw the Australian punk rock bands Radio Birdman and the Saints live for the first time. Cave was particularly inspired by the show of the latter band, saying that he left the venue "a different person."

Cave was 19 when his father was killed in a car collision; his mother told him of his father's death while she was bailing him out of a St Kilda police station where he was being held on a charge of burglary. He would later recall that his father "died at a point in my life when I was most confused" and that "the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose".

In 1973, Cave founded a band with fellow students at Caulfield Grammar. With Cave as lead vocalist, the band included Mick Harvey (guitar), Phill Calvert (drums), John Cochivera (guitar), Brett Purcell (bass guitar), and Chris Coyne (saxophone). Their repertoire consisted of cover versions of songs by Lou Reed, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music and Alex Harvey, among others. Later, the line-up slimmed down to four members including Cave's friend Tracy Pew on bass guitar. In 1977, after leaving school, they adopted the name the Boys Next Door and began playing predominantly original punk rock material. Guitarist, songwriter and ex-Young Charlatans member Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978.

The Boys Next Door emerged as the linchpin of the Melbourne post-punk scene in the late 1970s, securing a residency at St Kilda's Crystal Ballroom venue, where they attracted a cult following. They played hundreds of live shows in Australia and toured interstate before changing their name to the Birthday Party in 1980 and moving to London, England. Cave's girlfriend and muse Anita Lane accompanied the band. They struggled initially with financial instability and limited connections, and grew to detest London and much of its music scene, which Cave later described as "dead, ... we felt really ripped off, robbed". He did however greatly admire the Pop Group, and the Birthday Party shared a mutual affinity with the Fall.

By the end of their first year in London, the Birthday Party had gained notoriety for their aggressive, confrontational live shows and Cave's unhinged stage presence, with him shrieking, bellowing and throwing himself about the stage, backed up by harsh pounding rock music laced with guitar feedback. Drawing on Old Testament imagery, Cave's lyrics frequently revolved around sin, debauchery and damnation. The band found a champion in prominent radio DJ and taste-maker John Peel, and went on to record four Peel Sessions.

Cave's droll sense of humour and penchant for parody is evident in many of the band's songs, including "Nick the Stripper" and "King Ink". "Release the Bats", one of the band's most famous songs and John Peel's single of the year in 1981, was intended as an over-the-top "piss-take" on gothic rock, and a "direct attack" on the "stock gothic associations that less informed critics were wont to make". Ironically, it became highly influential on the genre, giving rise to a new generation of bands in England.

The Birthday Party relocated to West Berlin in 1982. After establishing a cult following in Europe, Australia and the United States, they disbanded in the following year.

The band with Cave as their lead vocalist has released eighteen studio albums. Pitchfork calls the group one of rock's "most enduring, redoubtable" bands, with an accomplished discography. Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequent histrionics. Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey wrote: "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk."

Reviewing the band's fourteenth studio album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008), NME used the phrase "gothic psycho-sexual apocalypse" to describe the "menace" present in the lyrics of the title track. Their most recent work, Wild God, was released in August 2024.

In a September 2013 interview, Cave explained that he returned to using a typewriter for songwriting after his experience with their twelfth studio album Nocturama (2003), as he "could walk in on a bad day and hit 'delete' and that was the end of it". Cave believes that he lost valuable work due to a "bad day".

In 2006, Cave formed Grinderman with himself on vocals, guitar, organ and piano, Warren Ellis (tenor guitar, electric mandolin, violin, viola, guitar, backing vocals), Martyn P. Casey (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Jim Sclavunos (drums, percussion, backing vocals). The alternative rock outfit was formed as "a way to escape the weight of the Bad Seeds". The band's name was inspired by a Memphis Slim song, "Grinder Man Blues", which Cave is noted to have started singing during one of the band's early rehearsal sessions. The band's debut studio album, Grinderman, was released in 2007 to positive reviews and the band's second and final studio album, Grinderman 2, was released in 2010 to a similar reception.