Nick Cave

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nick Cave is an Australian singer whose first famous band earned a reputation as “the most violent live band in the world.” That sounds like the biography of a man who burns out young. Instead, he spent the following decades writing novels and film scripts, composing soundtracks, and answering questions from strangers in a newsletter. His baritone voice and his obsessions with death, religion, love and violence stayed constant while almost everything around them changed. How does a boy from a country town become a figure of menace on stage and later a writer of quiet piano ballads? Why does he keep returning to God, even while admitting he doubts? And what happens to a songwriter who has built a career on mortality when real loss arrives at his own door?

  2393

• 2. A Boyhood in Victoria

  ›

  Nicholas Edward Cave was born on the 22nd of September 1957 in Warracknabeal, a country town in the Australian state of Victoria. His parents were Dawn Cave, born Treadwell, and Colin Frank Cave. He had two older brothers, Tim and Peter, and a younger sister, Julie. The family lived in Warracknabeal and then in Wangaratta.

  Books were part of the household. His father taught English and mathematics at the local technical school, and his mother was a librarian at the high school Cave attended. His father read him literary classics such as Crime and Punishment and Lolita. He also organised the first symposium on Ned Kelly, the Australian bushranger and outlaw who enchanted the young Cave.

  Music reached him through other people. An older brother introduced him to British progressive bands including King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. A childhood girlfriend played him the Canadian folk artist Leonard Cohen, whom Cave later called “the greatest songwriter of them all.” At nine he joined the choir of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Wangaratta.

  At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School. His parents sent him to Melbourne, first as a boarder and later as a day student at Caulfield Grammar School. The rest of the family moved to the suburb of Murrumbeena the following year. In 1976 he began studying painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology, but he dropped out in 1977 to pursue music. Around the time he left art school, he also began using heroin.

  Cave was 19 when his father was killed in a car collision. His mother broke the news while bailing him out of a St Kilda police station, where he was being held on a burglary charge. He later said his father “died at a point in my life when I was most confused.” He also said 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.”

  His first concert, at Melbourne’s Festival Hall, featured Manfred Mann, Deep Purple and Free. He remembered sitting there and “feeling physically the sound going through me.” In early 1977 he saw the Australian punk bands Radio Birdman and the Saints for the first time. After the Saints show, he said, he left the venue “a different person.”

  79101113

• 3. The Birthday Party

  ›

  In 1973, Cave and fellow students at Caulfield Grammar formed a band with himself as lead vocalist. The early lineup included Mick Harvey and John Cochivera on guitar, Phill Calvert on drums, Brett Purcell on bass and Chris Coyne on saxophone. They played cover versions of Lou Reed, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music and Alex Harvey. Later the group slimmed to four members, with Cave’s friend Tracy Pew on bass.

  In 1977 they left school and took the name the Boys Next Door, playing mostly original punk songs. Rowland S. Howard, a guitarist and songwriter who had played in the Young Charlatans, joined in 1978. The band became the linchpin of Melbourne’s late-1970s post-punk scene. They held a residency at the Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda, played hundreds of shows, and gathered a cult following.

  In 1980 they changed their name to the Birthday Party and moved to London. Cave’s girlfriend and muse, Anita Lane, went with them. Money was scarce and connections were few, and the band came to detest the city. Cave later called the London scene “dead,... we felt really ripped off, robbed.” They did admire the Pop Group, and they felt a kinship with the Fall.

  Within a year, the Birthday Party had gained notoriety for confrontational shows. Cave shrieked, bellowed and threw himself around the stage, while harsh pounding music laced with guitar feedback roared behind him. People remembered his shock of black hair and his pale, emaciated look. His lyrics borrowed Old Testament imagery and circled around sin, debauchery and damnation. The radio taste-maker John Peel championed them, and they recorded four Peel Sessions.

  Humour ran through the songs as well, including “Nick the Stripper” and “King Ink.” “Release the Bats” was John Peel’s single of the year in 1981. Cave meant it as an exaggerated parody of gothic rock and a direct attack on the lazy labels that less informed critics attached to the band. Ironically, it became highly influential on the genre and helped inspire a new generation of bands in England.

  The Birthday Party relocated to West Berlin in 1982. They had built a cult following in Europe, Australia and the United States by the time they broke up the next year. The band Cave formed afterward would last far longer.

  2122232425

• 4. The Bad Seeds

  ›

  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have released eighteen studio albums, the latest being Wild God in August 2024. Pitchfork calls the group one of rock’s “most enduring, redoubtable” bands. Their sound shifts considerably from record to record. The constant is an unpolished blend of genres, with song structures that serve as vehicles for Cave’s virtuosic and frequently theatrical delivery.

  The early material is set in a mythic American Deep South and draws on spirituals and Delta blues. Cave’s preoccupation with Old Testament ideas of good versus evil culminated in “The Mercy Seat,” released in 1988 and often called his signature song. Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey described a “bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk.”

  The 1990s brought a change of address and of mood. Cave moved between São Paulo and England and found fresh inspiration in the New Testament. Quieter, piano-driven ballads followed, and “Into My Arms” in 1997 helped bring him mainstream success. By 2008, the album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! was its own kind of storm. NME used the phrase “gothic psycho-sexual apocalypse” for the menace in its title track.

  Later albums moved toward ambient and electronic textures, with increasingly abstract lyrics. Along the way Cave changed how he writes. In a September 2013 interview he explained that after making Nocturama in 2003, the band’s twelfth album, he went back to a typewriter. On a computer, he said, he could walk in on a bad day and hit delete, and that was the end of it. He believes he lost valuable work that way.

  35262732

• 5. Partners in Song

  ›

  Grinderman took shape in 2006, with Cave on vocals, guitar, organ and piano. Warren Ellis played tenor guitar, electric mandolin, violin and viola, Martyn P. Casey played bass, and Jim Sclavunos played drums. Cave described the group as a way to escape the weight of the Bad Seeds. Its name came from the Memphis Slim song “Grinder Man Blues,” which Cave started singing during an early rehearsal.

  Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream sang backing vocals and played percussion at Grinderman’s first public show, at All Tomorrow’s Parties in April 2007. The debut album, Grinderman, came out in 2007, and Grinderman 2 followed in 2010. Both drew positive reviews. After a set at the Meredith Music Festival in December 2011, Cave announced the band was over. In 2013 Grinderman and the Bad Seeds both played Coachella.

  Johnny Cash was a lifelong hero. Cave covered Cash’s “The Singer” on Kicking Against the Pricks in 1986. Cash returned the favour in 2000 by recording “The Mercy Seat” on American III: Solitary Man. Cave then wrote liner notes for a Cash compilation released around the singer’s 70th birthday. He later sang a duet of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” on American IV: The Man Comes Around in 2002, Cash’s final studio album. Cave’s song “Let the Bells Ring” is a tribute to Cash after his death.

  Murder Ballads in 1996 paired Cave with two very different partners. “Where the Wild Roses Grow” was a duet with Kylie Minogue, and “Henry Lee” was a duet with PJ Harvey. Elsewhere he played with Shane MacGowan on “Death Is Not the End” and “What a Wonderful World,” and recorded a version of MacGowan’s “Rainy Night in Soho.” In 2004 he co-wrote and produced three songs on Marianne Faithfull’s album Before the Poison, with the Bad Seeds playing on all of them.

  Cave also wrote for the opera house. He supplied the libretto for Shell Shock by the Belgian composer Nicholas Lens, which premiered in Brussels on the 24th of October 2014. In 2020 he wrote the libretto for L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S, another Lens chamber opera, released by Deutsche Grammophon.

  Not every collaboration began warmly. In 2004 Cave said that whenever he heard something dreadful on a stereo, it was always the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their bassist, Flea, a fan of Cave, wrote that it had hurt him. In 2025 Cave apologised, calling it an offhand and uncharitable remark, and announced he would appear on Flea’s 2026 solo debut, Honora.

  2930314554

• 6. Screen and Page

  ›

  John Hillcoat’s The Proposition premiered in October 2005, and it launched Cave’s partnership with Warren Ellis. Cave wrote the screenplay, a tale of bushrangers in the Australian outback in the late 19th century. It was filmed in Queensland in 2004, and the two men recorded its largely ambient soundtrack. The Independent called the film “peerless” and “a star-studded and uncompromisingly violent outlaw film.”

  Storytelling, Cave said in 2013, went back as far as he could remember. As a child he shared a bedroom with his sister, and every night she asked him to tell her a story. Writing a script, he said, suddenly felt like making up one big story.

  More scores followed. In 2007 Cave and Ellis composed the music for Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Cave also appears in it, singing “The Ballad of Jesse James.” His son Luke joined him on one soundtrack song, playing the triangle. Hillcoat’s The Road came in 2009, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father and son struggling to survive after an apocalypse.

  In 2011 Cave and Ellis reunited with Hillcoat for Lawless, released in 2012. Cave wrote the screenplay from Matt Bondurant’s novel The Wettest County in the World, set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia. Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf starred. Hell or High Water arrived in 2016, then Wind River and War Machine in 2017. The pair also scored documentaries, including West of Memphis, and wrote music for Vesturport theatre productions of Woyzeck, The Metamorphosis and Faust.

  Not every project reached an audience. At the request of his friend Russell Crowe, Cave wrote a script for a proposed Gladiator sequel, and the studio rejected it. In February 2010 it was announced that Andy Serkis and Cave would make a motion-capture film of The Threepenny Opera. As of November 2024, it had not been made.

  Cave’s songs have travelled through film and television on their own. German director Wim Wenders gave him his first film appearance in Wings of Desire in 1987, where Cave and the Bad Seeds play a concert in Berlin. “Red Right Hand” turned up in Scream and its sequels, and it became the theme of Peaky Blinders. Cillian Murphy said in 2019 that Cave personally approved the use after watching a pre-screening. In 2025 Cave sang a song he co-wrote over the closing credits of the film Train Dreams.

  The printed word came early in his career. King Ink, in 1988, collected lyrics and plays, some written with Lydia Lunch. His debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, grew out of his time in West Berlin and was published in 1989. Its narrator is haunted by a girl named Lucy and hunted like an animal. The same themes and Southern speech patterns appear in the song “Swampland.” Time Out named the novel its book of the year in 1990.

  The Death of Bunny Munro appeared on the 8th of September 2009 from HarperCollins. It follows a sex-addicted salesman and began life as a screenplay Cave planned to write for Hillcoat. It was also released as a binaural audiobook and an iPhone app. A television series with Matt Smith followed in 2025. Cave published The Sick Bag Song in 2015. In 2022 came Faith, Hope, and Carnage, assembled from phone conversations with the Irish writer Sean O’Hagan during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  Since 2018 Cave has run The Red Hand Files, where fans send questions and he answers on art, religion, current affairs and music. It grew out of In Conversation, a series of live talks where audiences could ask him anything. The Guardian praised it as “a shelter from the online storm free of discord and conspiracies.” In January 2023 a fan sent him a song written by ChatGPT in the style of Nick Cave. He replied that songwriting is “a blood and guts business” that requires his humanness, and he called the song “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.”

  5962646587

• 7. Grief and Belief

  ›

  Susie Bick, an English model, married Cave in 1999, and their twin sons, Arthur and Earl, were born in London in 2000. The boys grew up in Brighton. Bick appears on the cover of Cave’s album Push the Sky Away. On the 14th of July 2015-15-year-old Arthur fell from a cliff at Ovingdean, near Brighton, and died from his injuries. An inquest found that he had taken LSD before the fall, and the coroner ruled the death an accident.

  The documentary One More Time with Feeling, in 2016, explored what the death did to Cave and his family. The album Ghosteen followed in 2019. Cave left Brighton because it felt “too sad,” then came back once the family realised that, wherever they lived, they would take their sadness with them. He has written that the song “Heart That Kills You” speaks to this. In May 2022 another son, Jethro, died at 31. Jethro had been born in 1991, ten days before Luke, and grew up in Melbourne with his mother, Beau Lazenby.

  Cave has spoken openly about the heroin he began using as a young man. In June 2023, on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Archbishop Interview with Justin Welby, he said he was addicted for 20 years. The first decade was a shambles, he admitted. In the second, he took the drug in the morning and the evening and was able to write during the day. On his blog he has also described practising Transcendental Meditation, saying that from the first time he meditated, he stopped fearing the end of the world.

  In July 1996 Cave wrote a radio essay for the BBC, “The Flesh Made Word,” about his relationship with Christianity. It was later printed in King Ink II. He reads the Bible avidly, and in 1998 he wrote the foreword to a Canongate edition of the Gospel According to Mark. In his recorded lectures on songwriting he said any true love song is a song for God. He credits the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old Testament to the New.

  His beliefs resist tidy labels. In 2009 he answered “No” when asked about a personal god. In 2010 he said he is not religious or a Christian but reserves the right to believe in the possibility of a god. Speaking to Jarvis Cocker that same year, he said, “I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.” By 2023 he described himself as not a Christian but someone who acts like one, and he regularly attends church.

  Doubt, he decided, is a strength. He once saw his wavering as a failure, because an atheist inside him always won the argument with logic. Now he says, “I think doubt is an essential part of belief.” In 2025 he said he regularly worships at a 900-year-old Anglican church in London. He enjoys its solemn liturgy “with no guitars. Thank God.”

  1932106693

• 8. Convictions and Honours

  ›

  In November 2017, the British musicians Brian Eno and Roger Waters urged Cave to cancel two concerts in Tel Aviv, Israel. He declined. He called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement “cowardly and shameful” and wrote an open letter to Eno explaining his position. In 2024 a musician asked on The Red Hand Files whether to boycott The Great Escape Festival over its ties to Barclays. Cave’s one-word answer was “play.”

  Free expression is a thread through his public statements. In 2019 he defended Morrissey after the singer’s controversial political remarks led some record stores to refuse his album California Son. Cave argued that Morrissey’s opinions should be challenged while his music was allowed to live on, because “we are all conflicted individuals.” At the Hay Festival in 2023 he argued that audiences should not “eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them.”

  He has also taken stands on the other side of some debates. In October 2022 he wrote that he was “in awe of their courage” in praising the protesters in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini. On his blog he said he loves his trans fans and wishes them dignity and freedom from violence. He also criticised what he calls woke culture, saying he is repelled by its lack of humility.

  When the New Statesman described him as right-wing in 2023, he disputed the label. He called himself “conservative with a small c” and said he worries about how quickly things are changing, including artificial intelligence. He linked that temperament to losing two of his sons. Loss, he said, teaches how hard it is to get something back.

  The recognition has been wide. In 2010 NME ranked Cave the 19th greatest living lyricist, and Flea called him the greatest living songwriter in 2011. The vocalist David Yow of Scratch Acid and the Jesus Lizard said that for a long time he tried to sound like Birthday Party Nick Cave. Scholars have written whole collections of essays on him, and Carl Lavery spoke of a “burgeoning field of Cave studies.”

  He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2007 and named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017. He holds honorary degrees from Monash University, the University of Dundee and the University of Brighton, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. When MTV Europe nominated him for Best Male Artist in 1996, he asked for the nomination to be withdrawn because he disliked the competitive nature of such awards. In 2025 France made him a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.

  859089699