Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

"Nick Cave must have lost his mind". That, more or less, was the average fan reaction to news of a duet between the brooding King Ink and his fellow countrywoman Kylie Minogue, platinum-selling dancing queen and regular fixture of the mainstream charts' upper reaches. A reaction not much softened by the (undeniable) quality of the result, "Where The Wild Roses Grow", a ballad of limpid melodic elegance destined to win over countless listeners who had no idea the Bard of Melbourne even existed. A betrayal, then? Not at all. If anything, it was a ploy to make possible a new, daring project from the former post-punk shaman of Birthday Party. A record dripping with blood. Literally.

Blood-red duets

"Murder Ballads" came about as the ideal home for two songs without a fixed abode. "I've always liked writing story-songs, especially about murder - Cave would explain when presenting the album - About three years ago, I'd written 'O'Malley's Bar', which runs almost 15 minutes, and 'Song Of Joy', which goes past 6. Both were too long and too disturbing for any other record of ours. So we decided to make one where those two songs could feel at home, and we built it around the theme of murder". Not a provocative whim, then, but the natural outcome of a path that had seen the zombie of Melbourne's basement clubs turn into a mature, refined songwriter, equally at ease moving between rock, blues and gospel through a songbook steeped in literary references. His story-songs, often centred on themes of guilt, violence and redemption, thus converge into a single, coherent narrative body, reviving an age-old strand of Anglo-Saxon folk, that of the murder ballads, sung tales of murder, revenge and passions gone bloody. Songs that, for centuries, have handed down crime reports by turning them into popular myth, often adopting the point of view of the killer or the victim without passing explicit judgment. A format that all the greats have tackled at one point or another, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen.

Cave recognises in that tradition - to which we've dedicated an extensive feature on these pages - a deep kinship with his own songwriting, and decides to build around it a rigorous concept album, steeped in the dichotomy of eros & thanatos, with the steady contribution of the Bad Seeds and a string of guests who amplify its symbolic reach.

But that's certainly not exactly what record executives were hoping for to cement the success of an album like "Let Love In" (1994), which, thanks in part to the splendid single "Do You Love Me?", had considerably widened the Australian songwriter's audience. Enter, then, the idea of the duet with Kylie Minogue, in yet another take on the "Beauty and the Beast" model that, ever since the days of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, has never failed to work.

Purity and damnation: this is the hidden connection Cave was interested in exploring through the interweaving of his dark timbre with the voice of the Australian pop star. Over the slow waltz tempo of "Where The Wild Roses Grow", the fatal encounter between Elisa Day and her lover-turned-executioner unfolds to the tolling of bells and piano, orchestrating dramatic tension through the alternating perspectives of the two protagonists. And guilt takes on the shape of an ineluctable drive toward the annihilation of beauty.

On the second day he came with a single red rose

Said: “Will you give me your loss and your sorrow?”

I nodded my head, as I lay on the bed

He said: “If I show you the roses, will you follow?”

"Where The Wild Roses Grow" contains all the fundamental tópoi of the murder ballad: first-person narration, a reportage-like tone, the passionate backdrop of the crime. The violence never explodes but thickens with sinister calm, making the ending all the more disturbing: slow, delicate arpeggios, an aching melody and a circular structure that leads the listener toward a conclusion already written. The lyrics unfold as an alternating dialogue between the young woman whose "lips [are] the colour of the roses that grew down the river, all bloody and wild" and her cruel lover, up to the final revelation of the crime on the riverbank. Cave sings in a calm, almost confidential tone, while Minogue, a modern-day Ophelia, lends the character of Elisa Day a fragile, luminous voice. In the final verse Cave closes the circle, attempting to justify his own actions with a laconic "All beauty must die", before laying a rose on the lips of the now lifeless girl, sealing a ritual of dark, deliberate theatricality. Also unforgettable is the memorable video, directed by Rocky Schenck, in which Kylie appears as Elizabeth Siddal in John Everett Millais's famous painting.

The roots of "Where The Wild Roses Grow", on the other hand, lie in an older song, "The Willow Garden" (or "Down In The Willow Garden"), chosen not by chance as the single's B-side. It tells of the murder of a girl named Rose Connelly, along a riverbank lined with willows.

This is certainly a track that carries Cave beyond the natural boundaries of his art, earning him a wave of huge success, complete with appearances on Top of the Pops and a nomination for Best Male Artist at the MTV Awards. He would sum up the whole affair in his own way: "I was aware that people would go and buy the album, listen to it and wonder 'why the hell did I buy this?'. Because Kylie's song wasn't really representative of what the record actually sounded like. It's fun to experience this kind of success, I'm not worried about it. I would be if I saw it as the future direction of my music, but that's not going to happen. I'll go back to making the small, strange records that a tiny number of people still buy". And regarding the unlikely partnership with Kylie, he would admit: "It was a miracle that she agreed to do that song, I don't think her management were too happy about it. We were just a bunch of junkies sitting around in the studio, and she walked in full of life, love and good will. It was so different having someone like that around for a few months...". Surprisingly, one of showbiz's oddest relationships would also spring up between the two fellow Australians, a sort of bond between older brother and younger sister, two souls who, however different, remain tied to this day by an inexplicable thread of complicity. Beautiful and moving, in this respect, is the scene in the Cave documentary "20,000 Days On Earth" (2014), in which we witness a conversation between the two, with him driving the car and her sitting in the back seat.

But another duet on the album would also get people talking, even the tabloids, since the bond between the two performers would continue for some time beyond the recording studio as well. Because the mournful ballad "Henry Lee" would prove to be a genuine case of love at first sight for Cave. All because of the "girl with the coldest hands and the warmest lips I have ever known". A girl from Dorset named Polly Jean Harvey, at the time fresh off the success of "To Bring You My Love", which had rightfully catapulted her into the pantheon of 90s rock. A natural, intense chemistry arises between the two, palpable even in the video showing them recounting the deeds of the unfortunate Henry Lee, killed in revenge by the pregnant woman who loved him and whom he had spurned to stay faithful to the "girl I have in that merry green land". A traditional ballad, born in medieval times in the British Isles under the title "Young Hunting", first recorded by folksinger Dick Justice in 1930. A single take was all it took for the spark to ignite. "There was nothing rehearsed, except for the fact that PJ and I were sitting on this two-seater sofa", Cave would recall, "we didn't know each other well and this thing happened right while we were shooting the video. There was a certain awkwardness, and then afterwards...". But what matters most is above all the final result: another splendid ballad, melodic and evocative, built on spare arrangements and played out through the harmonious contrast between the two voices, which chase each other in a dynamic of desire and rejection that spills over into violence, without ever losing the sing-song, surreally childlike tonality of the ballad, masterfully carried home by PJ Harvey ("Get down, get down, little Henry Lee, and stay all night with me, you won't find a girl in this damn world, that will compare with me, and the wind did howl and the wind did blow…").

In any case, the two duets would remain the album's crucial drawing power, cementing it as Nick Cave's definitive bestseller, with over a million copies sold and a Gold Disc in the UK.

Between folk and true crime

Then there's the criminal diptych — "O'Malley's Bar"/"Song Of Joy" — around which the album was built. The first is where it all began: written during the sessions for "Henry's Dream" (1992), it's the chronicle of a devastating bar massacre, driven by a relentless off-beat rhythm, punctuated by percussive breaks, free-jazz piano phrasing and R&B organ accents. Almost a Tarantino-esque short film, with its 14 minutes of violence and unbearable tension, masterfully handled by Cave in the role of the psychopathic killer, who gradually reveals his brutal deeds with black humour ("when I shot him point blank he looked so beatific/ I felt full of light and grace, it must have been the way the sun hit the angle of his face").

Following roughly the same musical blueprint is the aching "Song Of Joy", chosen to open the whole collection. Once again it is Cave who personally stages a disturbing, horror-tinged crescendo: the initial love story between the doctor-narrator and the radiant Joy soon turns toxic when she falls into depression ("She grew so sad and lonely/ Became Joy in name only"), with the dark tone of the music and Nick's sepulchral voice foreshadowing the grim ending: the discovery of the woman and her children stabbed to death, in a finale set ablaze by razor-sharp guitar slashes, unsettling choirs and horror-movie ambient effects. Worthy of a thriller screenplay, meanwhile, is the lyric, in which the manhunt for the killer ("They never caught the man/ In my house he wrote 'His red right hand' That, I'm told is from Paradise Lost") intertwines with self-references (the "Red Right Hand" from "Let Love In", later the theme tune of the series "Peaky Blinders") and a twist that casts suspicion on the narrator himself ("I drift from land to land… The sun to me is dark/ And silent as the moon").

Also structured as a crescendo of sordid violence is the story of the femicide of the "Lovely Creature", an adorable girl with green gloves and ribbons in her hair, led by the hand by a man on a long walk over seas and mountains, from which only he will return ("When I got home, my lovely creature/ She was no longer with me"). Another grim nursery-rhyme-like tune with an almost "western" feel, between a driving rhythm and howling wind, with Cave's voice seeming to rise from the black bottom of a well, set against a sweet female backing chorus.

Things won't go any better for the unfortunate Mary Bellows of "The Kindness Of Strangers", "handcuffed to the bed with a rag in her mouth and a bullet in her head" courtesy of one Richard Slade. The song, a slowed-down blues built like a sixties ballad, sums up well the spirit of the album: melancholic, catchy melodies acting as counterpoint to stories of brutal violence, such as the murder of this young woman from Arkansas, whose dream of seeing the sea will be crowned just before she's killed by a squalid character met on the road: the sudden eruption of Mary's crying, in the fifth verse, as Cave recites the lyric with visible emotion, chills the blood, producing another sharp, unsettling emotional shift. Roles are reversed in "Crow Jane", where hazy jazz-lounge atmospheres in the style of late-period Doors frame the saga of a woman who picks up a Smith & Wesson to avenge the traumas she's suffered.

"Stagger Lee", on the other hand, refers to a historical figure from American blues folklore dating back to 1895, drawing in particular on a transcription of the story found in the 1976 book "The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler". Cave brings back the cruel African-American pimp in 1932, who, dumped by his woman, bursts into a bar and sets off a senseless massacre. He turns him into a grotesque incarnation of evil, amplifying his brutality to the point of caricature. Musically, it's a return to the demonic fury of the early days, thanks to an obsessive groove in which the pounding bass and piano and Warren Ellis's possessed violin support Cave's theatrical delivery. This time the language turns explicit and aggressive, and the violence is shown in all its horror. The gunshots that close the track have an almost cinematic function, marking one of the album's most extreme peaks. Because "Stagger Lee" isn't seeking empathy, confronting the listener with a character who embodies evil through and through.

An opposite approach guides "The Curse Of Millhaven". Here Cave adopts the point of view of a young murderess, fifteen-year-old Loretta/Lottie, who sets fire to a shantytown neighbourhood. A massacre narrated in a storytelling register that is nonetheless almost apathetic and detached, while the melody echoes that of "Henry Lee", albeit sped up and distorted, taking on an almost macabre nursery-rhyme quality. The contrast between the musical flow and the chilling sequence of murders described produces a disturbing effect, revealing an emotional void that is perhaps even more unsettling than the explicit brutality of other tracks.

Death is not the end

Having closed this catalogue of horrors with a chilling tally of seven male killers, three female killers and sixty-six victims spread across ten tracks, the closing choral gospel of "Death Is Not The End" (a cover of a Bob Dylan song) sounds almost like a faint ray of light: the only song in which nobody dies, described by Cave as an ironic punctuation mark to close the record. Joining him on vocals, we again find the voices of PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue, along with Shane McGowan of The Pogues, Anita Lane and Blixa Bargeld. A cabaret-like, sarcastically reassuring epilogue, set in illusory contrast to everything that came before it.

But right after the trail of blood left by "Murder Ballads", Cave would embrace an increasingly stripped-down, reflective and spiritual songwriting style, drawing on the “ballads of redemption” of Leonard Cohen and seeking comfort in Christianity. The sacrilegious shaman of his early days, in short, would turn into a quiet preacher. So, on the album “The Boatman’s Call”, the man who once recognized only the “King of Heaven” born in Tupelo — that is, Elvis Presley — would urge listeners to heed the call of Jesus “The Boatman”, the man of the boat, who invites mankind toward consolation.

Thirty years on from its release, “Murder Ballads” remains one of the decisive turning points in the career of Nick Cave. A record that cements his status as a “total” storyteller, capable of using the song as a complex literary form, ranging from traditional folk to the suggestions of Edgar Allan Poe, from the Romantic poetry of John Keats to the demonic novels of Cormac McCarthy and quotations from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, not to mention a pronounced cinematic quality. Nor should we forget the crucial contribution of a handful of top-class musicians, such as Mick Harvey, tackling guitar, Hammond and organ, a beefed-up rhythm section (Sclavunos, Wydler and Casey), and a young Warren Ellis, who was soon to carve out the immortal “Ocean Songs” by Dirty Three with his violin.

Listening back today to these ten deadly vignettes means plunging once again into the ravines of the soul, and reckoning with them. Because, as Friedrich Nietzsche warns, “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”.

Contributions by Gabriele Benzing (“Where The Wild Roses Grow”)

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30/04/2026