The story

The career of Nick Cave is littered with episodes that veer between the grotesque and the legendary. His life, marked by excess, downfalls and resurrections, often seems to have been written by one of the characters in his own songs: restless, hungry for life and drawn to the abyss. "I've spent much of my life banging my head against other people's lack of imagination," he once recalled. "But as a songwriter I feel obliged to move toward uncertainty and embrace what I don't know, because that's where the real meaning of things lies."

Some of the most curious episodes scattered throughout his biography were the focus of a series of conversations with Warren Ellis and Mick Harvey, his most trusted travelling companions, held in 2021 for the release of the compilation titled "B-Sides & Rarities Part II".

Nick Cave and Mick Harvey, former member of the Bad Seeds and of Birthday Party, asked each other in particular what their favourite memory was among the many from their long history together. And Cave answered without hesitation, citing the incredible episode that took place in New York in October 1986, when he was arrested while looking for heroin in Alphabet City and, locked up in a cell, was unable to make it onstage for a concert organised with the Bad Seeds.

"I got arrested in New York right after arriving from Iceland, and they threw me in jail for two days," Cave recounted. "We were staying at the Iroquois Hotel, but when they asked if I wanted to make my phone call I couldn't remember the hotel's name. It's a complicated name, and in there, surrounded by twenty other criminals, it really wasn't the best moment to rack my brain. So I never managed to let the band know."

So Harvey, when Cave failed to show up, cancelled the date and began a frantic search: "I called every hospital and police station in New York until I found him in jail," he recalls. "When he came to get me he had a carton of cigarettes with him," Cave adds. "It was the thing I wanted most in the world at that moment. I'm still grateful to him for that."

The experience, besides becoming one of the many legends of his myth, also taught him a small lesson in survival. "In the cell someone asked me: 'Hey man, got a cigarette?' and I offered him one. Shortly after, another inmate pulled me aside and told me: 'You must never give them away. You have to sell them, otherwise nobody will respect you.' So I started charging a dollar a cigarette, and within a few hours I'd become the king of my cell."

Harvey collaborated with both the Birthday Party and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds until his departure from the group in 2009.

This is certainly not the only case in which the Bard of Melbourne had to reckon with the prison system. In London in 1988, for example, he was arrested for heroin possession and was legally forced into detox as the only alternative to jail. He flew to São Paulo, to a private clinic, and then stayed for a while in Brazil with model Viviane Carneiro, with whom he had his first son, Luke. And that was the start of another tormented chapter in his odyssey.

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20/02/2026