NICK CAVE (A personal catharsis) (2025)

Taking on writing this somewhat huge piece for LTW in October 2018 was something of a personal breakthrough as I’d just come out of a period of non-writing after losing my partner Helen after looking after her for a couple of years. The colossal bender that followed landed me in hospital but coming out I moved back in with my mum and picked up my quill again. Cave’s music had often been a brilliant mirror, inspiration or comfort since witnessing the Birthday Party knocked my socks off in the early 80s. I interviewed him several times and even got up to some recreational no good but was very happy to see him come out the other side and become, to my mind, the UK’s finest songwriter and wordsmith. Helen loved the music he made with the awesome Bad Seeds too, Skeleton Tree the last one we listened to together. An extra twist was provided by Marianne Faithfull becoming a close friend after I put together a piece for MOJO about the making of her Negative Capability masterpiece as Helen faded then departed. Nick and Warren Ellis both gave her invaluable input and inspiration, as related in this piece. I’ll soon be entering my fourth year sober, now addicted to writing so I owe Nick for that one too.

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"This thing we call The Bad Seeds now seems even more than the sum of its parts. The band has come to feel like its own living entity that swells and contracts in accordance to the demands of which album, which tour," says Australian writer Gerard Elson in his introduction to the sumptuous book accompanying Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014).

Who'd have thought thirty-five years ago that Nick Cave would be regularly feted as this country's greatest living songwriter, accompanied by the ever-evolving gang of disparate musical sidekicks called The Bad Seeds? Maybe only those who saw something supernaturally special in the death crash carnage-monger who'd just joined long-time cohort Mick Harvey in the ejector seat from the tumultuous Birthday Party. Facing down addictions, doomed love affairs and more addictions, it seemed Cave and his ultra-sensitive perpetual supernova of a band could saunter through any saloon doors life threw at them and make the room go silent. When battered with the ultimate tragedy of losing one of his sons, Cave channelled his grief into making Skeleton Tree, the brutally raw confessional that towered as 2017's most movingly harrowing but beautiful statement.

Yet thirty-five years ago, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds were still coalescing like a black ectoplasm rising from the swampland to the sky, cutting a lean, psychotic/romantic swathe through comedy post-punk trends like synth-pop and goth as Cave commenced his transition from demented junk-poet fronting the pyrotechnic ferocity of the Birthday Party to today's master lyricist leading the coolest band on the planet.

The Birthday Party were, without doubt, the most ferociously psychotic display of dysfunctional madness to ever flame on in a stage or studio. They didn't just teeter on the abyss but burst up out of it like a fairground cannonball, dripping with black slime and foetid malevolence, reeking of hard drugs, bloody death and murder. Fortunately, Cave was already eloquent enough a writer to report on what it was like down there.

This vivid propensity to spew out evocative prose and poetry was the key to Cave's evolution from testifying kamikaze hair-ball to the 21st century's disciplined genius craftsman, still taking that edgy, loose-limbed hip-swagger across the world's stages to play his latest ballad or broadside honed in a studio with whoever constitutes that album's Bad Seeds. Even in 2018 with, as Cave puts it, a different person inhabiting "this old skin", he's still instantly recognisable from those early days when chaos ruled on the verge of meltdown. Grief is the baddest motherfucker of all to deal with, and Cave has done it by sensitively using his artistic genius to channel it into something positive.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds today are a changed beast, irrevocably wounded (most recently further embattled by the loss of long-time keyboard player Conway Savage), yet they continue to enthral their enormous devoted following on tours, now sending them home on the gentle majesty of the title track from Skeleton Tree.

As displayed so magnificently on Lovely Creatures, this arc that curled out of the Birthday Party's wreckage in 1984 into the original Bad Seeds’ spirit-savaging deep south moonshine serenades then on into innovatory greatness didn't rest on just Cave's ever-maturing voice or finer-tuned lyrical genius. His band's perfect framing of each album has played a major part in his journey, seeing them transform from last gang in town to quietly conspiring gentlemen's club, now with a beautiful madman at the wheel in the shape of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis. Taking the reins as "musical director" from Mick Harvey in 2009, Ellis is on a never-ending quest to take the band outside any comfort zones that may threaten its ongoing evolution. Or as he puts it, "I'll have this arsenal of things to fuck shit up," As seen on 2016's profoundly moving One More Time With Feeling film, Ellis was the respectful dynamo behind Cave getting to realise the sepulchral elegance and wracked soul-baring of Skeleton Tree, as ever reliant on a band tuned in with telepathic sympathy to whatever sonic static was crackling from the extreme emotions at the core of the album.

And then they did it live, as evidenced on the Distant Sky EP accompanying the film of the same name capturing an utterly triumphant Copenhagen show in October 2017.

So how did this all happen? Starting life as the Boys Next Door in Cave and Mick Harvey's native Melbourne in 1975, the Birthday Party hit London in 1980 because, as Cave said, “We wanted to stir things up, to make things happen." Starting on the toilet circuit, the Birthday Party's primeval onslaught hit like a post-apocalyptic mating of Beefheart’s Magic Band and the Stooges, a confrontational musical blood-bath of grotesque proportions.

My first meeting with the Birthday Party was unsettling but compelling. Cave, late bass giant Tracy Pew and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey obviously didn't take to strangers from the press but ice was broken that had happily melted by the time I started seeing Nick frequently at niteries such as the Batcave and Some Bizarre HQ on St Anne's Court where the Bad Seeds would record much of their debut album, From Her To Eternity.

The Birthday Party had just returned from recording Mutiny!, their awesomely cacophonous swansong, at Berlin's Hansa Ton studio. In a catalogue of pure evil, this is the one that walks away with the warthog's hacked-off penis. Daniel Miller's Mute was now in the picture and, learning the band was about to split, he suggested Cave fly solo. During Mutiny! sessions, they'd been joined by Einsturzende Neubauten founder Blixa Bargeld, who contributed his inimitable guitar necrophilia, machine-like drones courtesy of the extra untunable string nailed to his guitar. Nick asked him and Mick Harvey if they'd like to start a band, also bringing in former Magazine-Visage bassist Barry Adamson. Tracks started appearing; eventually including rollicking debris river song 'Saint Huck', funereal 'A Box For Black Paul', voyeur-numbering title track (Blixa sounding like a rusty engine) and rumblingly ominous version of Leonard Cohen's 'Avalanche'.

Mick Harvey was the modest organisational and musical pillar who managed to channel whatever madness was encircling his old school-friend and keep things going off the rails. “When we went in the studio we had absolutely no idea what we were going to do,” admitted Cave.

Back at London’s Trident Studios in March, Blixa returned and they completed From Her To Eternity, plus both sides of the Bad Seeds’ first (non-album) – single, Elvis’s ‘In The Ghetto’ and ‘The Moon Is In The Gutter’.

“I’m not really sure what Nick had in mind then,” Mick Harvey told me when he was remastering the Bad Seeds catalogue in 2009. “He just wanted to get started and see what might happen if he started recording. The end of 1983 was a funny sort of hybrid crossover point. We’d recorded side two of From Her to Eternity and did these gigs in Australia. We were shuddering into action, then we went back to England and did the four songs on side one so there was obviously the intention to record an album in there somewhere.”

Now calling themselves Nick Cave and the Cavemen, the group made their London debut at Brixton’s Fridge in April 1984, where I remember being mesmerised by the molten power and Satanic cabaret boiling off the stage through mainly new songs, apart from 'Mutiny...' and Screamin’ Jay’s 'I Put A Spell on You'.

The Firstborn Is Dead, the first album recorded as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (now Cave, Harvey, Bargeld and Adamson, Race having returned to Australia) saw the band producing themselves with engineer Flood at Hansa studios in Berlin, where Cave had relocated to spark off its unbridled artistic underground. Embarking on his first novel, Cave started creating a fearful world centred around the Southern badlands, imbued with the dark spirit of the blues.

The album title refers to Elvis Presley’s still-born twin brother Jesse Garon with epic opener and first single ‘Tupelo’ loosely based on ‘Tupelo Blues’, John Lee Hooker's account of 1936’s great Mississippi flood and setting their birth against Biblical fire and brimstone with spaghetti western atmosphere. Arcane blues spectres riddle tracks like ‘The Black Crow King’ (mocking Cave’s unwanted goth royalty status) and grinding ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson’ concerning the country blues legend who met a mysterious death in 1929. The supercharged rewrite of Dylan’s ‘Wanted Man’ – previously tackled by Johnny Cash on San Quentin – held up the album’s release date until June 1985 while they waited for the composer’s permission to change the lyrics.

Cave later dismissed the album as “my fucked-up attempt at a blues record”, although Harvey added, “The idea was to make a blues album which wasn’t a blues album; which tried to get to the core of the idea of the blues without using traditional forms.”

1986’s Kicking Against The Pricks looked to cover versions, including blues, Johnny Cash, gospel, Glen Campbell MOR, 60s pop and the Velvet Underground, Billy Roberts’ ‘Hey Joe’ kicking the door open to murder ballads.

Gaining drummer Thomas Wydler from Berlin’s Die Haut, who Cave met when he sang on 1982’s Burning The Ice album, the band started recording the previous December at Melbourne’s A.A.V. studios with former Birthday Party engineer Tony Cohen, continuing at the city’s Richmond Recorders through January..

First single 'The Singer' saw Cave reinterpreting Johnny Cash’s 'The Folk Singer' with deep, twanging menace (Cash is represented again on 'Muddy Water' from 1979’s Silver). Others include Jim Webb’s 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix' milked for its pathos, fellow Aussies the Seekers homaged into desolation on 'The Carnival Is Over', Tom Jones’ 'Weeping Annaleah' and Gene Pitney's 'Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart'. “We completely jettisoned everything that happened in the Birthday Party,” says Harvey. “That was now dust. By the end of The Birthday Party I don’t think Nick really understood the music we were making any more. The Birthday Party was not about a particular type of sound, it was really about a kind of attitude. The path of the first (Bad Seeds) albums seems to be Nick trying to find what music he was interested in.He still hadn’t quite worked it out by the end of that so decided to do a blues album and see what happened then. He was writing his book, which was the excuse for wanting to do a covers album but now I think it was him wanting to indulge in and touch on all the things that were actually the important kinds of music that he was interested in so he could engage with them and work out what they meant. Kicking Against The Pricks was part of a process of Nick finding the type of music he wanted to play."

During July and August the Bad Seeds were back at Hansa recording Your Funeral, My Trial, named after a Sonny Boy Williamson song and emerging in November 1986 as two 12-inch EPs. Adamson only appears on two tracks, escaping the billowing drug-fuelled craziness to pursue a solo career but Cave’s increasingly unshackled muse was on a feverish heroin roll, ejaculating delights like the throbbing ‘Hard On For Love’, oddly disturbing ‘Stranger Than Kindness’ and nightmare waltz of ‘The Carny’ (as performed in Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire), along with a howlingly dramatic take on Tim Rose’s desperate jail lament ‘Long Time Man’.

Damaged narcotic ballads ‘Sad Waters’ (nodding at Tom Jones' ‘Green Grass Of Home’) and the deliriously beautiful title track rank among his best, Cave wrenching every syllable from his charred soul. “I must’ve written about twenty or so verses of ‘Your Funeral, My Trial’,” he told me, “but that’s the way I write songs; where so much goes into one idea, then it’s pruned down into three verses.”

“Somehow there was a freeing up of what was possible,” said Mick Harvey. “Certainly, our sense of what we were trying to do or what was possible with the Bad Seeds gelled with that album. We felt we’d found a way forward that we could keep working with. Your Funeral… gave us a template to work on. The first three albums were Nick trying to find his path. I think he found it on this one.”

August 1987 saw tortuous sessions commence for Tender Prey, Cave’s most difficultly-achieved, smack-ravaged and on-the-brink album (and many people’s favourite!). It did get off to a ferociously intense start with ‘The Mercy Seat’, for many Cave's greatest song as it reaches into the scrambled mind of someone doomed to fry in the electric chair. Cave got the notion to create its seething tension from the claustrophobic ghetto darkness of Suicide's 'Harlem', going on to perform the song in several different styles (In 2000 Cave received the accolade of Johnny Cash covering the song on American III: Solitary Man, and the pair duetted on Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ for 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around). Other highlights included the demonic garage-pop of ‘Deanna’ (ironically built on the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ‘Oh Happy Day’), snarlingly-depraved ‘Sugar Sugar Sugar’, ‘Mercy’’s pleading despair inspired by John The Baptist and pure gospel optimism of live set closer ‘New Morning’ suggesting the sun was gonna shine some day. First pressings in September ‘88 included four spookily electronica-draped spoken word tracks trailering upcoming novel And The Ass Saw The Angel on a 12-inch EP.

“Things were fucked,” Nick told me when I visited him, finding him newly clean of drugs in New York in October 1988. “I wasn't really up to scratch. It's a very confused, scattered record.” Harvey calls it “the all-around-the-world heroin album! The gigantic trail of destruction through half a dozen different studios and four different cities with absolute disaster that ended up all cobbled together on an album.”

"It was simple,’ Cave explained. “If I’d gone on like that I would have died. I didn’t have any sudden urge to clean up. It was forced on me, but I’m glad I did. I’m quite amazed at myself really. I was clinging on by the skin of my teeth.”

He talked about ‘The Mercy Seat’. “I don’t really like to analyse them but basically that song is talking about judgement and working on three different levels: divine judgement, social judgement and one’s own personal concepts of what’s good and what’s evil. The bit that interests me most is the actual spoken stuff: this guy who’s by himself all the time is putting his own perceptions of what’s good and evil on inanimate things until he’s looking at his own hands, calling one good and one evil and actually passing judgement on things around him.”

Cave had two books coming out; a collection of lyrics, poems and short stories called King Ink and that first novel And The Ass Saw The Angel, which concerned simple teenage mute Euchrid Eucrow, who's built a sanctum in the swamps to escape small-town bullies. "Writing that book was a perfect kind of escape from a lot of personal problems I wasn’t really dealing with. I just used to lock myself away for days. The book starts off at an all-time low and sinks from there! A lot of that sort of stuff I have got out of my system now.”

He also glimpsed his own future when he said, in that time-honoured fashion of freshly cleaned up junkies needing new addictions, “Basically I’m a workaholic. I’m only really happy when I’m working. Although on one hand it’s the hardest stuff to do, it’s the nitty gritty work that I’m most happy being involved in, where I’m actually there writing a song or writing prose or working in the studio. It’s the selling of these products that I find the most taxing.”

The Bad Seeds were filmed on tour in the US for The Road To God Knows Where rockumentary, then played four gigs in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Cave hooked up with fashion stylist Viviane Carneiro. Deciding to move there, Cave wrote his next album in these idyllic surroundings, where it was also recorded (mixed in Berlin as the wall came down). The Good Son displayed a lighter tone, starting with Portuguese protestant hymn ‘Foi No Cruz’, continuing with ‘The Weeping Song’ depicting family breakup, casting Blixa as father and Nick as son, and ‘The Ship Song’ floated in as his first classic love ballad.

The relationship with Viviane was faltering when Cave returned to London in ’92. Inspired by Sao Paulo street buskers, Cave wanted a raw, high-energy acoustic album. For the first time the group, who’d lost Kid Congo but gained bassist Martyn Casey (in addition to Conway Savage) hired a producer. David Briggs had worked with Neil Young and polished tracks with an AOR sheen, leaving the disgruntled band remixing the album with Tony Cohen, throwing up gems including ‘Jack The Ripper’ and ‘When I First Came To Town’. First single ‘Straight To You’ unveiled the Bad Seeds’ take on widescreen power ballads. Released in May, Henry’s Dream became their first top 30 album.

That same year, Cave (showing how booze must’ve replaced smack) recorded an EP with Shane McGowan including their take on Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’, Nick crooning Shane's ‘Rainy Night In Soho’ and Shane lunging at Cave’s ‘Lucy’ ballad from The Good Son. September ‘93 saw the Live Seeds album doing “justice” to the catalogue.

Relationship with Viviane finished, Cave exorcised his emotions on Let Love In. While Harvey loved it, declaring. “All albums had been leading up to Let Love In, which is almost like the perfect consummation of what could be there,” Cave described it as “a nice, funny, comic, eccentric little record…And a cathartic record as well…I really didn't want to have anything more to do with examining my problems.”

Recorded in London and Melbourne and released in ’94, it became their biggest seller to date, reaching number 12 after being spearheaded by the thunderous widescreen dynamite of first single ‘Do You Love Me?’. Scorching second single ‘Loverman’ was joined on the album by sad but soaring ‘Nobody's Baby Now’, anti-US ‘Janglin’ Jack’, dolefully funny ‘Lay Me Low’ and bell-tolled Morricone spaghetti slither ‘Red Right Hand’, a Bad Seeds signature song after gracing Scream movies, Hellboy and an X-Files anthology. The idea for Murder Ballads came while mixing Let Love In in Australia after Cave belted out thirty verses of massacre epic ‘O'Malleys Bar’ on the piano. Blixa suggested expanding the idea, also enthused over when the Bad Seeds shared a Dutch festival bill with the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce.

Rather than cover existing slaughter standards, Cave set himself the “academic exercise” of composing songs with licence to kill, coming up with what he liked to call his “novelty record”, boasting a body count of 64.

The exception was bar-slaying chestnut ‘Stagger Lee’, covered many times since Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 version but Cave’s X-rated outlaw swagger made it his own. According to Cave, the album was intended to sort out the men from the boys: “I don't want to be very popular, so we tried to make a record which would turn a lot of people off us…more for our fans, who would appreciate it, than for the masses. I thought the masses would hate it.” However, released in February ‘96, Murder Ballads became his biggest-seller yet, reaching number eight - helped by his duet with Kylie Minogue on ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’ becoming a top ten hit. Cave described duetting with his petite fellow Aussie as, “one of the highlights of my career…It’s a dream I’ve had for many years.”

“Murder Ballads is a kind of punctuation mark for that whole era we’d completed with Let Love In,” said Mick Harvey. “It was like a freewheeling, open kind of project that opened up this weird thing for Nick to enter which was much more highly-personalised.”

The album marked the entry of drummer-percussionist Jim Sclavunos, veteran mainstay of the New York post-punk scene who’d played with Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth and the Cramps.

At the same time as Murder Ballads, Cave was already working on watershed masterpiece The Boatman's Call; set in motion when he duetted with P.J. Harvey on Murder Ballads’ ‘Henry Lee’ and they embarked on a brief fling. He wrote at the piano, reflecting on love lost (the end of his marriage) and gained; the relationship with Polly, who Cave serenades then reflects upon losing with bottomless melancholy. His soul-baring lyrics (delivered in a rich baritone) and ornate poignancy of the sublimely stark backdrops (inspired by John Betjeman, Samuel Barber and minimalist devotional music of Estonian composer Avro Part) cast a spell unlike anything he had done before on ‘Brompton Oratory’ ‘(Are You) The One I’ve Been Waiting For’, ‘People Ain't No Good’ (licensed for Shrek II) and ‘Into My Arms’ (which Cave played at his friend Michael Hutchence’s funeral at Sydney’s St Andrew’s Cathedral that November; He’s his daughter’s godfather).

While, true to form, Cave downplayed the album (“I was making a big heroic melodrama out of a bog-standard rejection by a woman”), Mick Harvey saw it as another giant step. “Nick had just had a lot of personal upheavals and pretty much decided he wanted to do a highly-personalised record. Looking back, it probably should have been a solo album. We knew that at the time. I remember him asking me, ‘Is everyone gonna be there in the studio?’ It threw up a whole new kind of challenge: can the Bad Seeds know when not to play things? I think the band came through with flying colours! People stepped back and Nick really took charge on that record. He’s kind of, to some degree, continued since. The albums up until now involved the group very highly. I don’t think people realised how deeply involved and important to the sound of the whole thing the band was and still is.”

Crucially, the album saw the arrival of Dirty Three violinist/multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, who would become Cave’s main musical foil within the band and on outside projects the following decade. Ferociously talented and deliciously unhinged, Warren could fill two giant footprints left by departing collaborators Harvey (musically stoic) and Bargeld (fearlessly edgy), his way with sounds that really shouldn't be there but somehow worked helping reboot the Bad Seeds’ ever-evolving sonic smorgasbord somewhere else again.

Cave said goodbye to heroin and booze in 1999 after meeting model Susie Bick, getting married and seeing his twins Arthur and Earl born. Settling in Hove, his lifestyle solidified at getting up early to go to his office and write until six o’clock. That June, he curated the annual Meltdown festival at the Royal Festival Hall, his diverse bill including Nina Simone, Arvo Part and Barry Humphries’ Sir Les Patterson. In 2000, Cave released a CD-book containing two lectures: The Flesh Made Word and The Secret Life Of The Love Song. Produced at Abbey Road by Tony Cohen, 2001’s No More Shall We Part was a gentler work inspired by new loves in his life, Ellis and Harvey intricately arranging strings while folkie-vets Kate and Anna McGarrigle sang backing vocals. Trailered by single, ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’, its lustrous ballads included small town America-lambasting ‘God Is In The House’, ‘Sweetheart Come’ and unspeakably gorgeous ‘Love Letter’. Second single was the weightier ‘Fifteen Foot Of Pure White Snow’.

In 2003, Blixa left the Bad Seeds to concentrate on Neubauten, his always tangible edge missing from that year’s Nocturama, which Harvey described as deliberately lightweight (except riotous fourteen minute closer ‘Baby I’m On Fire’). “The last couple of albums with Blixa got a bit difficult,” recalled Mick Harvey. “It was a shame him leaving because he could always add something really interesting in the studio.”

February 2003’s Nocturama ploughed a pleasant bed of downtempo melancholy, still dealing with familiar themes on ‘Dead Man in My Bed’ and pastoral single ‘He Wants You’. The more rousing first single, ‘Bring It On’, featured vocals from Chris Bailey of Australia’s legendary Saints, one of Cave’s pivotal early inspirations. “Nocturama marks the end of that series of highly-personalised albums from The Boatman’s Call; a lot of small, personal-type things, simplified down from the previous two albums. If people think it’s a lightweight album then they’re agreeing with what we set out to achieve. Nick had reached a point where he was just tired of everything being taken so seriously all the time and just needed a break. He wanted to go into a studio for a week and record a bunch of songs, which is what we did. It was done that way quite deliberately, so wasn’t a great, major work. In some ways I think Nick was saying goodbye to that stuff.”

Blixa’s departure was now seen as “an enormous freeing thing” as Harvey moved to guitar and Gallon Drunk’s James Johnston joined on keyboards, changing “the whole chemistry of the band” while allowing “basic rock ‘n’ roll-type things…It just opened things up.” In Spring 2004, Cave, Casey, Ellis and Sclavunos spent time writing in Paris before “cathartic” recording sessions that produced a double album’s worth of “big songs about big things” in ten days at Paris's venerable Ferber Studios. Electrified by a spirit of no-holds-barred invention and Cave grabbing the moment, the Bad Seeds rejoiced in a torrent of uplifting power and confidence to go anywhere they chose. Each album of The Lyre Of Orpheus/Abattoir Blues flaunted a different mood - Wydler driving the mellowed outings of the former and Sclavunos driving the heavier Abattoir Blues. The Bad Seeds’ supercharged next phase bust out on expansive productions such as ‘There She Goes My Beautiful World’, 'O Children' and ‘Get Ready For Love’, which feature the London Community Gospel Choir to spectacular effect. Cave is on top lyrical form, whether tackling the state of the world on ‘Hiding All Away’ or lamenting the loss of Johnny Cash on ‘Let the Bells Ring’. Released to huge critical acclaim in September 2004, the album reached eleven and scooped awards.

“I think Nick just didn’t really know what to do next!” Harvey told me. “Then it really went off. That was fantastic, another kind of experience. I think this might be a bridging album in the long run too.” The following March saw the release of B Sides And Rarities, Harvey’s presenting intriguing demos, curios, out-takes and rarities from his archive.

That year also saw Cave co-write and produce three songs on Marianne Faithfull’s haunted and often cathartic Before The Poison, accompanied by Bad Seeds Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos, who, in retrospect, were laying a template for Grinderman on the ribald squall of 'Desperanto'. Co-producing with Hal Willner, Cave also supplied elegiac music to 'Crazy Love' and the eerie 'There Is A Ghost'.

“Nick wanted to make a really dark record – and we’re particularly good at that!" Marianne told me in 2011. "The way to make your life okay is to bring it into the work. Making this album was actually a very happy experience."

“I remember we were doing demos for a couple of songs Nick had written that were eventually on Before the Poison,” recalls Warren Ellis. “That morning we were in this tiny little place the size of a shoebox in the suburbs. They said someone was coming in to do some vocals in the afternoon. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming; when she walked in the people there were like ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Marianne came in, met everybody and sat down on a milk crate with a cushion on it in the hallway and then just started to sing. I had the cans on and remember it was such an extraordinary moment when her voice appeared in the headphones. I remember doing a thing with Bryan Ferry once and he started singing and I had the headphones on. I just went ‘Wow’. The same with Nick when I first started working with him. When you hear these great voices appear in the cans for the first time that you’ve only ever heard on record, they are real moments that you can treasure.”

It was the start of the beautiful relationship that continues today.

In 2006, Cave saw his first script turned into The Proposition, an “elemental story of family conflict and primal violence” set at the end of the bushranger era in 1888, directed by John Hillcoat and starring Ray Winston, Emily Watson, Guy Pearce and John Hurt. Cave and Ellis contributed the atmospheric soundtrack, repeating the exercise in 2007 with their evocative score for Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, in which Cave makes a cameo singing in the saloon. Cave and Ellis would continue to compose soundtracks, their experiments often feeding into Bad Seeds albums.

About to turn fifty in 2007, Cave grew a moustache, picked up an electric guitar and revelled in the unholy pressure valve uproar of Grinderman with Sclavunos, Casey and Ellis, who had a blast letting loose, referencing obsessions from the Stooges to On The Corner-period Miles Davis. Named after a Memphis Slim song, Grinderman uncorked 2007’s fabulous self-titled debut album, which included hilarious aging-anthem ‘No Pussy Blues’ single, followed by another untamed electric storm on 2010’s Grinderman 2.

Grinderman’s unfettered energy inevitably impacted on next Bad Seeds album, DIG, LAZARUS DIG!!!, described by Cave as “a haemorrhaging of words and ideas”. Another riveting progression, the original aim was the “extremely raucous acoustic” approach stifled at birth on Henry’s Dream. This provided the bedrock over which the Bad Seeds catapulted vibrant electric surges and sonorous atmospherics, straddling a kaleidoscopic array of moods. Of the latter's coruscating string-abuse, Warren Ellis proudly declared, "I was playing a viola that I managed to get to sound like a garbage compactor." His way with weird drone loops and noise are all over the album’s scabrous hip-huggers, such as ‘More News From Nowhere’ and ‘Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)’, even ethereal ballads ‘Night of The Lotus Eaters’ and ‘Jesus of The Moon’.

Jim Sclavunos told me at the time, “We’ve never rested on our laurels and don’t like to repeat ourselves. As soon as one record’s done we’re bursting to start the next one. Thematic and stylish threads can be traced from album to album, but there’s also an ongoing compulsion to shift direction, try new things, say things differently. I think it’s helped keep us on track, enabled us to progress and mutate in ways that keeps the band vital, and warded off infection from anything too arbitrary or contrived.”

Often, while nostrils flare, lips are parted in a sly grin at the humour that peppers Cave's lyrics on tracks such as 'We Call Upon The Author' and churning title track that plants the biblical hero in modern New York City. I suggested the Bad Seeds’ innate humour is often overlooked, to which Jim replied, “I’ve heard rumour of a misguided minority of philistines evidently so hard of hearing that they think the Bad Seeds are a) a goth band and b) a gang of po-faced chums churning out album after album of miserabilist anthems. …Nick is one of the funniest guys I know, but he almost never cracks a smile. We’re obviously not the Bonzo Dog Band, so it may take a bit of digging to pick up on the humour in his lyrics.”

In 2009, Mick Harvey, last original Bad Seed, left the band, his parting shot remastering the catalogue until then in 5.1 surround sound with bonus tracks and accompanying short films by Bad Seeds video directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

2010 saw Cave’s darkly humorous second novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro, which “traces the fortunes of one man and his son on a road trip around the English South coast following the suicide of his wife".

2013’s Push The Sky Away showed another sea-change as Cave, Ellis and the band rode in perfect sync on cooling the bombast to forge a subtler, more spectral sound. Produced by Nick Launay at a 19^th century mansion studio in southern France, Cave’s modern fables were inspired by his Brighton home and weird internet tales. He continued to explore love songs as a fine art. As the Bad Seeds spun translucent gossamer backdrops with bespoke subtlety throughout, so Cave’s matured and marinated voice rose to new areas of expression, from the wracked croak of big bang-inspired epic ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ (namechecking Robert Johnson, Lucifer and Hannah Montana) to the climactic spiritual orgasm of ‘Jubilee Street’ in perhaps an ultimate distillation of the band’s controlled-explosion dynamic (Nobody else could declare "I'm flying, I'm vibrating; Look at me now" as a hook). Closing with the title track’s sepulchral Casio organ whisper, Push The Sky Away defied age, gravity and convention with a fresh supernatural power, much gained by leaping into unknown voids with Ellis the gleeful ringleader.

As he put it, “Whatever the song needs is what you do. You go in there serving the song, rather than yourself. You can also go in there with an idea of trying to do something different; not wilful but because it’s required of you to look elsewhere; because you don’t want the record to sound like the one before. You’re always trying to look outside of that or throw a quiet challenge at yourself to get up to it in a different way.”

That year saw the famous Glastonbury appearance where the Bad Seeds claimed the festival with a shattering 'Stagger Lee' allowing Cave to walk on outstretched hands. Cave and his band were on top of the world...until that terrible day in July 2015 when son Arthur fell to his death off a cliff near the family home. Suddenly, Nick and Susie’s life was turned inside out, painted black by the kind of unimaginable tragedy it’s hard for anyone else to grasp. Nothing could ever be the same again. Cave dealt with his grief through his music. The Lovely Creatures set was put on hold and, as he says in his epilogue, “it became a matter of great urgency to make a new record.” He now felt like another person, “in a strange, raw and different present” as Warren Ellis stepped up to lead the Bad Seeds in sculpting a brave eulogy and astonishing monument; a work of harrowing, stunning beauty universally hailed as Cave’s masterpiece (even if all he needed was his own personal exorcism). With typical modesty and discretion, Warren says, "I didn’t do anything about Skeleton Tree because there was nothing I had to say and if there’s anything to be said he would say it when he was ready because the nature of that album was very much on his terms and it still is.”

After having to face my own grief after losing my beloved soul mate, I often turned to Skeleton Tree to see how it could be done (Sorry but there’s no way I can talk about the album without mentioning how I came to appreciate it now). I also thought of Bowie’s Blackstar. Both albums deal with death; Bowie making sure he left this planet with the biggest bang, Cave working through the loss of his son with quiet, moving dignity; a means to survive. As he says in One More Time With Feeling, the remarkable film produced by Andrew Dominik so he could avoid facing promotional press queries), the tragedy had irrevocably changed him as a person. And as he sings in the unbearably raw and poignant ‘I Need You’, “nothing really matters when you lose the one you love”.

So all normal rules about words and music have to be suspended when listening to this astonishing album. Although created from a place as black as the album’s cover, by the stunning ‘Distant Sky’s’ time-stopping duet with soprano Else Torp and the closing title track, he can manage a twinge of optimism as he quietly sings “it’s alright now”.

The next project Cave faced was Marianne Faithfull's Negative Capability, which Warren was co-producing with Rob Ellis (no relation). Cave had contributed ‘Late Victorian Holocaust’ and co-written ‘Deep Water’ for Marianne’s 2014 album Give My Love To London, and Warren and Jim Sclavunos played on it, but Negative Capability was always going to be another very special album, again way beyond the mundane rock norm as the lady battled her own pain to reflect on her remarkable life, losing loved ones, loneliness and love.

This time, Cave co-wrote ‘The Gypsy Faerie Queen’ with Marianne and joined the sessions at Le Frette studio, Paris, singing backing vocals and playing piano. “It’s a little miracle really,” said a delighted Marianne as she prepared to record earlier this year. “I asked him if he would put the music to it and he wrote back saying, ‘I’m so busy, I can’t do anything.’ I wrote back and said, ‘I understand, sorry to bother you, please don’t worry about it’. And then, suddenly I got the song. He just wrote back, ‘Thank you so much for understanding; here is the song’. And it’s just gorgeous. Then he came and joined the band. If there’s one person I can depend on it’s Nick Cave.”

Now having to deal with the passing of Conway Savage too, Cave and Ellis will be thinking about the next Bad Seeds album – revealed in Lovely Creatures to be the third part of the trilogy made up by the previous two. As the Distant Sky footage shows, the Bad Seeds have never sounded better.

Maybe Warren Ellis summed up the current state of the union best when he told me after finishing the Faithfull album, “It feels the more records I do now, the more they’re like…unforgettable.

“Nick has been in it for such a long time now; by any career standards. I went to see the remastered Wings of Desire last night. I remember when it came out thirty years ago, which is kind of amazing - wow, thirty years! Watching ‘From Her To Eternity’ and thinking ‘How many times have we played that song?’ That song’s thirty-five years ago, before my time. I remember when it hit my orbit, it was like ‘Jesus’. It’s amazing the kind of life a thing can have.”