Nick Cave

NICK CAVE
 
 
Nick Cave  (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor, best known as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  Referred to as rock music’s “Prince of Darkness”, Cave’s music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences, and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence.  NME called him “the grand lord of gothic lushness”.  After the break up of the Birthday Party, Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1983, releasing its debut album the following year.  Cave formed the garage rock group Grinderman in 2006, which has since released two albums.  Cave’s songs have been covered by a wide range of artists, including Johnny Cash, Metallica and Arctic Monkeys.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 

 

 

Nick Cave is described by Allmusic as “one of the finest songwriters of the post-punk era, whose hybrid of blues, gospel, and rock complemented his dark, literary style and baritone vocals”.  After fronting a band called the Birthday Party in about 1980Nick Cave assembled a band as a sort of post-punk super-group; and this band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds has released 15 albums in the 30 years since. 

 

The album that I have, Tender Prey (1988) is their sixth album.  I was introduced to Nick Cave through the video for the opening track on this album, “The Mercy Seat” that I saw several times on the MTV late show 120 Minutes.  After a mostly mumbled introduction, the song is primarily the chorus repeated powerfully with savvy lyric changes; but I would have enjoyed the song if it extended to twice its 7-minute length.  The other songs on the album build on this novel take on religion.  

 

Ned Raggett in Allmusic has unending praise for this song:  “The album boldly starts out with an undisputed [Nick] Cave masterpiece – ‘The Mercy Seat’, a chilling self-portrait of a prisoner about to be executed that compares the electric chair with the throne of God.  Queasy strings from a Gini Ball-led trio and Mick Harvey’s spectral piano snake through a rising roar of electric sound – a common musical approach from many earlier [Bad] Seeds songs, but never so gut-wrenching as here.  Cave’s own performance is the perfect icing on the cake, commanding and powerful, excellently capturing the blend of crazed fear and righteousness in the lyrics.” 

 

*       *       * 

 

 

 

A film featuring Nick Cave recently premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.  Called 20,000 Days on Earth, it portrays a 24-hour period in Cave’s life (fictionalized).  The film won two awards at the Festival and was praised by the Jury as “being arguably the most exciting film in competition. . . .  This is documentary storytelling at its most visionary and mind-blowing”.  

 

The title is taken from a calculation that Nick Cave made of the number of days in his life to that time.  I have a financial calculator that I use in my work which counts the number of days between two given dates.  I had hoped to mark my own 20,000th day, but I missed it.  

 

(November 2014)

 

*       *       *

 

Items:    Nick Cave 

 

Last edited: March 22, 2021