The Good Son
From his early days as the punk-haired vocalist with The Birthday Party, right through to his current position as one of the leading song-writers of our generation, Nick Cave has always garnered a devoted fanbase and cult following. Cave is the son of an English teacher, a strong influence on his skills as a song-writer, but an influence he was not prepared to acknowledge until much later into his career. Initially, it was rebellion that fuelled the adolescent Cave, and he formed The Boys Next Door with schoolmates Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard, Tracey Pew and Phil Calvert. Shortly after recording tracks for Australia's Mushroom Records, they mutated into The Birthday Party, a frazzled, sludgy blues-rock post-punk group, the likes of which we will never see again. The Birthday Party arrived in London in 1980 expecting to find a vibrant music scene they could feel some sort of association with; for UK indie music fans, they were an enigma, but the band were disappointed with the state of the post-punk scene. They spewed out an all too brief series of raw and abrasive albums, which remains a surprise given the levels of substance abuse taking place by the band. By their final album (Junkyard), they had kicked out the lightweight drummer Calvert, and Magazine bassist Barry Adamson guested on a number of tracks. Ditching their UK label 4AD after their penultimate EP, The Birthday Party released their final songs on the 'Mutiny' EP via Mute. The EP saw them enlisting the studio expertise of Neubauten's non-guitarist Blixa Bargeld. The Birthday Party then split, but Cave was to remain inactive for only a short time, guesting on tracks by German reprobates Die Haut and performing with Jim 'Foetus' Thirlwell and Lydia Lunch.
Although his songs with The Birthday Party exuded a confidence and originality few post-punks were capable of, Cave realised his true song-writing potential with The Bad Seeds. In many respects a vehicle for Cave's own musical interests, The Bad Seeds were more than just a backing group. From their earliest incarnation of Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Hugo Race and Barry Adamson, through to the swelled seven-piece of recent years, The Bad Seeds have coloured and moulded Cave's unique lyrics with the appropriate swathes of tenderness and terror. Early tracks such as 'Saint Huck' (from From Her To Eternity) were informed by the early God-fearing blues of Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson, while over time Cave has begun to show more and more of his true musical influences - the dark country of Johnny Cash, the songbooks of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, through sadness, bitterness, religion and love.
Unfairly lumped in with the Goth movement following the critically-acclaimed Tender Prey album, Cave has striven to avoid such easy classification. His songs combine the rawest, most familiar of human emotions, the terror and the madness and the fraility and unfairness of love. Albums such as Henry's Dream and Let Love In balanced love and lust with imaginitive narrative and a capacity to tell a story in that oft-forgotten way, the drunk leaning up against the bar embellishing the story as he progresses. The breadth of his experience has driven his song writing, having survived drug addiction, arrest and divorce. The Cave of recent albums has drawn much more on the tender side of human experience, but he is still capable of getting whipped up into a rage from time to time. There is also an undeniable humour to his song-writing, an element which prevented the potentially controversial Murder Ballads album from being greeted with a hostile reaction. Let it be not forgotten also that Cave was partly responsible for the reinvention of Kylie Minogue, on the Murder Ballads track 'Where The Wild Roses Grow', a move which also brought Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' work in to the public conscience for perhaps the first time.
Thus far, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have released 12 albums, one live collection and a best of. Cave has also worked on several soundtracks (including providing a new version of 'Red Right Hand' for Scream 3), recorded tracks with ex-girlfriend Anita Lane and Barry Adamson and curated the Meltdown festival at London's Royal Festival Hall which saw him rubbing shoulders with another of his musical inspirations, the late Nina Simone. In a measure of his importance, and to complete something of a circle, Johnny Cash recorded a version of 'The Mercy Seat' for one of his American Songbook albums; Cave returned the favour by duetting with Cash on the mournful 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', from Cash's final album. Cave, in a further act of homage, recently appeared in Brighton performing songs by Leonard Cohen accompanied by Jarvis Cocker, Rufus Wainright and Laurie Anderson.
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds released a new double album - Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus - on 27 September, and this was followed by a short tour. Reviews of the album, and the 11 November date at London's Carling Brixton Academy are available here.
