Nick Cave

In the mid-Nineties, right at the height of her definitive breakthrough, PJ Harvey was also at the center of a famous artistic and romantic relationship with Nick Cave. The Australian singer-songwriter, thirteen years her senior, was already a cult figure thanks to his time with The Birthday Party and the early Bad Seeds albums. When the two met, Cave was living through one of the most fortunate periods of his career, but also one of the hardest on a personal level, marked by drug addiction. Yet it was precisely in that turbulent season that the Bard of Melbourne would reach the peak success of his career, thanks to his collection “Murder Ballads”. It included that very aching ballad, “Henry Lee”, which had marked his meeting with Polly Jean, “the girl with the coldest hands and the warmest lips I ever knew”, as he famously put it.

The Dorset singer-songwriter had just come off the success of “To Bring You My Love”, which had rightfully catapulted her into the pantheon of 90s rock. Between the two a natural, intense chemistry was born, palpable even in the video that shows them intent on recounting the deeds of the unfortunate Henry Lee, killed in revenge by the pregnant woman who loved him, whom he had spurned to remain faithful to the “girl I have in that merry green land”. It's a traditional ballad, born in medieval times in the British Isles under the title “Young Hunting”, first recorded by folksinger Dick Justice in 1930. It only took a single take 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 making the video. There was a certain awkwardness, and then afterwards…”

In 2019, Cave returned to discuss that relationship on the pages of his blog “The Red Hand Files”, recounting the end of the affair with great candor. “The truth is I didn't leave PJ Harvey: PJ Harvey left me,” he wrote. He then recalled the phone call he received at his Notting Hill flat, when Polly Jean Harvey told him, in just a few words, that it was all over. “I asked her why, and she simply replied: ‘It's over’. I was so taken aback that I nearly dropped the syringe I was holding,” he recounted with bitter irony.
Looking back on that period, Cave admitted that drugs played a significant part in the breakup, alongside other factors. “Deep down I suspected that drugs were an issue between us, but there was more to it than that. I still had to figure out the meaning of monogamy, Polly probably had her own struggles, but I think in the end we were simply two extremely creative people too wrapped up in ourselves to truly manage to share the same space. We were like two identical suitcases lost on a conveyor belt that leads nowhere.”
Yet out of that pain came one of the most celebrated albums of his career, “The Boatman's Call” (1997). Cave explained that the breakup gave him the energy to confront, for the first time, deeply personal themes. “The breakup filled me with an almost manic energy, which gave me the courage to write openly about common human experiences, like heartbreak. Up until then I had always preferred to hide my emotions behind characters and fictional stories.”

Despite the end of their relationship, Harvey has continued to hold deep artistic admiration for Cave. In June 2016, as a guest on the radio show “Start Making Sense”, hosted by Savages' Jehnny Beth on Beats 1, the British musician was invited to pick some of her favourite songs. Among tracks by Captain Beefheart and John Jacob Niles, she also found room for her favourite song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Against all expectations, Harvey didn't pick a track from “The Boatman's Call”, nor “Henry Lee”, the famous duet she recorded with Cave for the album “Murder Ballads”. Her favourite, she revealed, was instead “From Her To Eternity”, the intense, abrasive title track of the Bad Seeds' 1984 debut, a sort of tabula rasa where Delta and Mississippi blues live again through the shapes of a frozen, modern rock, where the percussion of a post-industrial hell and the beat of plantation work songs become an indistinguishable whole. In the song that gives the album its title — a pun on the novel/film of the same name — mournful piano phrases fuel a claustrophobic atmosphere, while Cave's sobbing vocal instills a deep sense of desolation and unhappiness. A perfect fusion of post-punk tension, blues and emotional obsession that still stands today as one of the most visceral statements of the early phase of Nick Cave's career.

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09/07/2026