Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds 'Jack The Ripper'
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds feat. Rowland S. Howard 'Nick The Stripper'
[V/A 'Viva Eight!' album | NME | 1992]
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds were featured on the NME's 1992 Viva! Eight double CD compilation in conjunction with the Spastics Society. Two Cave tracks recorded at London's Town & Country Club in September 1992 are included - a ferocious, venom-filled 'Jack The Ripper' and a version of Cave and Mick Harvey's former band The Birthday Party's seminal 'Nick The Stripper', featuring fellow BP man Rowland S. Howard playing his highly distinctive guitar part.

Nick Cave 'Disco 2000'
[Pulp 'Bad Cover Version' single CD 2 | Island / Universal | 2002]
Despite appearing on a Pulp single, Jarvis Cocker and co do not appear on this track. Nick Cave singing one of my generation's most memorable anthems does seem highly absurd, and there is something creepy about Cave singing 'You were the first girl at school to get breasts,' but his version - delivered in waltz time with a band of tight session musicians - changes the track into a mournfully tender ballad only distantly connected to Cocker's original. Cave's No More Shall We Part-style higher octave singing is warm and enveloping. Bad cover version? Not here.

Johnny Cash & Nick Cave 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry'
[Johnny Cash 'The Man Comes Around' album | American / UMG | 2003]
'The difference between Johnny Cash and me is that he's great and I'm not. Deep in my heart I know that,' stated Cave - wrongly - in the third edition of Loose Lips Sink Ships magazine. This sensational maudlin rendition of Willie Nelson's trundling ballad is more than just a duet - it is (musically) father and son, the inspiration and the inspired, and it is a stroke of some genius to hear the hitherto only dreamt-of pairing harmonising toward the track's close. 'He makes Nick Cave sound good,' claimed my ever-doubting wife, but the truth is, their voices are so similar one cannot easily differentiate on the final chorus.