Nick Cave - Rock's Bad Seed

Long black hair, gaunt face, a dark and deep gaze: Nick Cave even has the physical traits of the accursed poet. And his vast repertoire is no different: despair, horror and death chase each other through sick, obsessive songs, always pervaded by a yearning for redemption. The vampiric image that's been stitched onto him, however, has long become a burden for him: "Go ahead and call me gloomy and desperate, but believe me, I do everything I can to escape this myth," he pleaded in an interview some years ago. And judging by his most recent work, he can hardly be blamed.

A River in Melbourne

It's the fate of contrarian artists like Cave to be misunderstood. But ambiguity, between good and evil, life and death, madness and lucidity, has always marked the work of the "bard of Melbourne". Yes, Melbourne, Australia. It's here that young Nick, son of a middle-class family, sketched out his first artistic attempts: "At school I wrote terrible poems. Then I learned a couple of chords on the piano. The result was some of the worst songs in the world". Nick Cave has never been gentle with himself. Like the time he said: "Technically and lyrically, my work has always stayed chained to the same bowl of vomit". That was twelve years ago, the darkest period of his odyssey: "I've always been drawn to destructive forces," he says. "In Melbourne, a river divides the city: on one side the university, the residential neighborhoods; on the other, the area of junkies and prostitutes. I used to hang out in the latter". At 19, his first experience with heroin: "Taking it," he recalls, "was like drinking a cup of tea in the morning, like sitting in an armchair and putting your feet up: the feeling of being home. Unfortunately, it stops being that... Now it's under control, though the idea of starting again still lingers in the darkest part of my mind".

Nick Cave is the most significant singer-songwriter of the Nineties, because unlike his peers he manages to go deeper. He can explore the abysses of the mind, right at the edge of — and often beyond — madness. He can terrify and illuminate, unsettle and move you. Yet his debut had been pure cacophony, with The Boys Next Door, a mediocre punk band influenced by the English sounds of the late Seventies. But already with the Birthday Party (led by Rowland Howard on guitar, and Mick Harvey on piano and drums), Cave was setting Melbourne's basements on fire. The music changed too: punk gave way to a dramatic electro-blues liturgy that at times bordered on the most spectral gospel. A repertoire poised between the depraved rock of the Stooges and the claustrophobic psychodramas of PIL, the boozy blues of Tom Waits and the irreverent art-rock of Captain Beefheart.

Birthday Party (1980) is an unsettling tableau of ungainly, cacophonous sounds that, besides the influences already mentioned, calls to mind the most dissonant punk of the Pop Group and the "modern dance" of Pere Ubu. The single "Mr. Clarinet", also pressed in Britain by the legendary 4AD, is a melodrama set to syncopated, mechanical rhythms; "Friend Catcher" is a showcase for Cave's raw, depraved singing, while "Riddle House" introduces the horns that would become another defining feature of their sound.

With the Birthday Party, Cave landed in London, where his outrageous, violent performances immediately caused a sensation. The single "Release The Bats" preceded the release of their second album, put out by 4AD, Prayers On Fire (1981), which more clearly defined the substance of their beastly dark-blues.

The gothic aesthetic of the era also comes through in the cover art, with a blurred image recalling the one already used by Siouxsie And The Banshees on "Kaleidoscope". Musically, though, Cave and co. throw themselves into rampages of unheard-of ferocity, such as the opening "Zoo Music Girl", in which a background organ is literally torn apart by Howard's searing guitar distortion, Phil Calvert's tribal percussion and Cave's brutal vocals. The frantic pace continues on the morbid electro-blues of "Cry", where the obsessively repeated line ("no fish can swim") and the constant rhythmic swells build toward a white-hot finale, in which Cave bursts out with the senseless cry "Fish cry!!".

The shaman from Melbourne even goes so far as to celebrate himself in that sort of self-parody that is "Nick The Stripper", with a powerful rhythm section barely disturbed by the eerie hiss of the horns, and a tortured guitar arpeggio-phrase-solo framed by classical-sounding strings. With the grotesque "Capers" and the noir spoken-word of "Just You And Me", we instead find ourselves in the territory of the hallucinated cabaret of Virgin Prunes. The frenzied funk of "Dead Song", the near-country with gothic overtones of "Ho-Ho" and the abrasive blues of "King Ink" finally offer a clearer glimpse of the later turns Cave's solo career would take. Lit up by a fervid creative streak, the record is a small, dark masterpiece of new wave and launches Nick "The Ripper" Cave and his foul crew to the forefront of the global underground scene.

Even darker and more delirious is Junkyard (1982), which also grew out of Cave's experience sharing the stage with another damned soul of rock, Lydia Lunch. The hysterical title track is almost a demonstration of the vocal power the Australian bard had developed, while the voodoobilly of "Dead Joe" is further proof of the band's now-tight chemistry, with Howard unleashing a metallic, searing guitar against a rhythm section throwing out a string of disorienting time changes. Rounding out the picture are the new, booze-soaked funk raid of "Big-Jesus-Trash-Can" and the melodramatic performance of "She's Hit".

Before splitting up and partly morphing into the Bad Seeds, the Birthday Party released a couple of EPs in 1983, both still ablaze with pure madness. On the first, titled The Bad Seed, the standout is the anguished delirium of "Wild World", which, turned into one of his terrifying crescendos, would become one of Cave's live staples. On the second, Mutiny (1983), the highlights are above all the spectral litany of "Jennifer's Veil" and the noise-drenched hallucination of "Mutiny In Heaven". From the ashes of the glorious Birthday Party — as mentioned — came the "Bad Seeds" (a reference to a passage in the Psalms about innate cruelty), the great outfit led by guitarist Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten) who would accompany Nick Cave throughout his long solo career. An adventure that would begin, right away, in the most devastating fashion.

The voice of the apocalypse

An apocalyptic mood pervades From Her To Eternity (1984), Cave's solo debut, in a feverish procession of werewolves and punk orgies, psychotic delirium and the spasms of a dying man. All of it made even more striking by a deep, unsettling baritone voice. The album opens with a cover of a song by his "mentor" Leonard Cohen, "Avalanche", disfigured into a dark-hued ballad: the drums' march that is at once martial and funereal accompanies the feverish dialogue between bass and guitar, over which Cave's Mephistophelian voice rises. "In The Ghetto" is instead a tribute to his other guiding light, Elvis Presley, also radically reworked, thanks above all to Bargeld's guitar, which mimics strings with slide playing. Across the six minutes of "Cabin Fever", Cave becomes a kind of ghost of Captain Ahab aboard a drifting vessel: it's another delirium, soaring on a terrifying crescendo. An even more direct reference appears in "Saint Huck", where Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn takes on Faulknerian darkness, becoming a "saint" and martyr, just like Elvis ("Saint Huck-Saint Elvis"). The end of the Birthday Party is marked by the grotesque requiem of "A Box For Black Paul", while Cave's passion for the American South is distilled into the mournful ode of "Well of Misery", dedicated to the enslaved workers of Alabama's cotton plantations. But the record's true masterpiece is probably the title track, "From Her To Eternity": a pun on the novel/film of the same name, in which the piano's mournful phrases fuel a claustrophobic mood, while Cave's sobbing vocal instills a deep sense of desolation and misery.

The America of the Deep South and the frontier — the America of mad preachers, desperados and papier-mâché myths — is instead the absolute protagonist of the second album, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985).

Still backed by the Bad Seeds, now joined by English bassist Barry Adamson, Cave renews his love for Elvis, going so far as to elevate him to the status of a messiah, a rock transfiguration of Jesus, on the stormy "Tupelo", another "sick" nursery rhyme in his own peculiar style. But it's also the album in which Cave proclaims his love for the rural blues of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson (to whom the eponymous track is dedicated). A blues that culminates in the handclapping of the psychotic "Black Crow King" and in the searing "Knockin' On Joe", built around a fine harmonica-piano dialogue and dedicated to a lifer taking refuge in the memory of the woman he loves.

The grim "Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree", the story of a man whose self-destructive love for a little girl drives him to wish she would never grow up, foreshadows the murder ballads of a few years later. Finally, there's also room for another cover, this time of Bob Dylan's "Wanted Man".

Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) is Cave's slap in the face to music critics and his detractors: they, after all, are the "pricks" to be "kicked against"... A double album, eclectic and chaotic, it largely rests on reworkings of classics from the American pop-rock tradition. Particularly striking (and hallucinatory) are the covers of John Lee Hooker's "I'm Gonna Kill That Woman", the only echo of the early blues sound, and the Hendrix classic "Hey Joe", while "All Tomorrow's Parties" manages to be almost as bleak as the original, by Velvet Underground. The heartfelt tribute to the great Johnny Cash is handled through an entire triptych: the dark "The Singer" and the two spirituals/gospel numbers "Jesus Met The Woman At the Well" and "Long Black Veil". Cave digs into the roots of American popular music, extracting its black heart, its darkest, most tormented soul. The record, however, abandons the fevered blues of his first two albums, veering instead toward a form of noir singer-songwriting more in line with the direction Cave's career would later take. For many early fans, it was a small "betrayal".

Born out of the merging of two EPs and a critical phase in the history of the Bad Seeds (with Adamson gone and new arrivals in the form of German pianist Thomas Wolf and American guitarist Kid "Congo" Powers, formerly of Cramps and Gun Club), Your Funeral, My Trial (1986) is inevitably a transitional record. Its merits, however, are certainly greater than those critics granted it at the time. This is due above all to the dark, decadent spell that pervades it, the product of Flood's production and the morbid nights the ensemble spent in Berlin. Particularly outstanding is a trio of chilling ballads: the acoustic "Sad Waters", the sickly "Stranger Than Kindness" and the funereal title track. But the record's real tour de force is the grotesque cabaret of "The Carny", with an exhausting spoken performance by Cave wrapped in obsessive atmospheres, almost a "gothic" version of the Morricone sound. The lyrics are also worth noting, telling the dark tale of a carnival huckster, accompanied by an old nag and a retinue of freaks, dwarves and assorted monsters: “E mentre la compagnia lasciava la valle/ per risalire l’altopiano/ La pioggia batteva il crinale, batteva il prato/ E il tumulo/ Finché nulla rimase, nulla di nulla/ Tranne il corpo di Dolore/ che si rialzò in tempo/ per fluttuare sulla superficie di quel suolo corroso/ E una moltitudine di corvi si mise a volare in cerchio/ Prima uno, poi gli altri planarono lugubremente”. "The Carny" is one of Cave's great masterpieces: it would be the track chosen a year later by Wim Wenders for his film "Wings of Desire". The more vehement side of the Australian bard comes to the fore in the rampages of "Jack's Shadow", "Hard On For Love" and "She Fell Away", while his more romantic side pours itself out in the passionate rendition of Tim Rose's "Long Time Man". Meanwhile, Cave was going through a deep personal crisis, which also led to a chaotic handling of his artistic career. The projects he worked on were constantly interrupted, many shows ended in brawls, and his life in Berlin grew ever more dissolute and devastating, above all because of his heroin addiction. An annus terribilis that would culminate in his arrest in London for possession of 0.884 grams of heroin.

Yet out of this enormous knot of suffering came an extraordinary record, Tender Prey (1988), which marks, almost paradoxically, one of the high points of his career. A single song would be enough to justify the word "masterpiece": "The Mercy Seat", the chair on which the condemned sit before execution. It's one of his most apocalyptic, gripping songs, with an obsessively repeated rhythmic phrase that keeps expanding until it takes on the cadence of a terrifying crescendo. Cave sings with the despair of a heretic burning at the stake, just as the head of the man about to sit in that damned chair is indeed burning: “Into the mercy seat I climb/ My head is shaved, my head is wired/ And the mercy seat is waiting/ And I think my head is burning”. Gruesome details, for a song that alone would be worth an entire songwriting career: epic, wrenching, immense.

The theme of damnation as predestination hangs morbidly over the whole album: in the dark ballad "Up Jumped the Devil", the devil's companion must flee forever; in the mournful "Mercy", St. John the Baptist must reckon with imprisonment and death; in the subdued "Sunday's Slave", the heroin addict is condemned to an eternal slavery to drugs; in the Walpurgis-night ritual of "Sugar Sugar Sugar", the protagonist is destined to be raped and killed; and the fate of the two wandering criminals celebrated to a garage-rock beat in "Deanna" is hardly any better.

Through these mists of bleak desolation, however, a few rays of sunlight manage to filter in, a faint longing for peace and redemption, albeit expressed in the quasi-religious litanies of a feverish preacher, as in "City Of Refuge" and the closing, almost optimistic "New Morning". The Bad Seeds are at the peak of their form, playing with demonic fervour and matching Cave's unsettling baritone to perfection.

Brazil, love and ruins

New York, Berlin, London: these are the cities Cave has loved most. But it's São Paulo, Brazil, that left him the deepest wounds. And it's an air thick with aching saudade that permeates another masterpiece of his output, The Good Son (1990). The slow, serene, resigned melody of "Foi Na Cruz" is the prelude to a constant alternation between restless, unstable atmospheres and slow, solemn ballads. A perfect example of all this is the title track, a long, schizophrenic delirium in which Cave follows a neurotic, anguish-laden crescendo with gospel choruses and gorgeous symphonic openings. "Sorrow's Child" is a ballad charged with an arcane, mysterious allure: Cave's cavernous, lugubrious singing here reaches the peak of its powerful, terrible intensity.

Carried along by a languid, hypnotic bossa nova rhythm, "The Weeping Song" unfolds as a duet between Bargeld and Cave, playing a father and a son respectively as they watch in bewilderment while everyone around them succumbs to despair. It's a sinister, menacing track, perhaps the darkest and most pessimistic moment on the record, the complete opposite of the following "Ship Song", an elegant ballad with an almost fairy-tale quality. Another abrupt change of register arrives with "The Hammer Song", a piece the Bad Seeds colour by turns with western and noir tones, exotic and apocalyptic, while Cave dusts off his old guise as the demon-possessed preacher for the occasion.

"Lament", on the other hand, goes back to wrapping the listener in languid symphonic openings and seductive melodies, in a classic, if not downright retro, style of great refinement. The sweeping spiritual of "The Witness Song" precedes the wonderful nocturnal melancholy of "Lucy", a song of love and pain that fades into a dreamlike coda, closing the album on romantic, forlorn notes.

It's a brutally devastated Brazil, sunk into its favelas and stalked by death squads, that forms the backdrop to "Papa Won't Leave You Henry", the standout track on the following album, Henry's Dream (1992). Behind the seemingly consoling title and the lullaby cadences lies one of Cave's most apocalyptic nightmares, with Cave as ever a compelling narrator, here backed by a neurasthenic, crescendo-driven string section and an insistent gospel choir. On the whole, though, it's a more subdued album, in which Cave largely recycles the key genres of his repertoire (blues, folk, gospel, rock), cloaking them in the Bad Seeds' by-now well-honed "dark" sound (with Harvey replacing the departing Powers on guitar).

Worth mentioning, in any case, are at least four other tracks: "John's Finn Wife", one of the typical murder ballads Cave would devote an entire album to three years later (its protagonist a man willing to kill rather than lose his wife to "John Finn the madman"); the subdued dirge of "Brother, My Cup Is Empty", disfigured by Cave's scream in the final explosion; the solemn "Christina The Astonishing", with a melodicism of almost religious intensity; and the romantic litany of "Straight To You", sung in a funereal register with organ accompaniment.

São Paulo, Brazil again, a land of poetry and bitter feelings: it's here that Nick met his muse, the designer Viviane Carneiro, by whom he would have a son and suffer excruciating heartbreak. "You were the punishment for my sins," he would cry out in "Let Love In". And again: “Una volta arrivò una tempesta sotto forma di ragazza/ fece a pezzi il mio mondo…/ e a volte giurerei di sentire ancora il suo ululato/ attraverso le macerie”, he would reaffirm in the aching "Ain't gonna rain anymore". These are two tracks from Let Love In (1994), the album that turned him from cult artist into rock star, thanks to the gorgeous piano ballad of the single "Do You Love Me?" (about a boy's violent sexual awakening in a cinema), but also to the feral, Robert Johnson-style blues of "Loverman" and the two blistering anti-American invectives of "Jangling Jack" (the sad fate of an Englishman shot dead in a US bar) and "Red Light Hand" (a j'accuse against religious preachers), both delivered by Cave with a wicked swagger worthy of his early days.

Gothic, poetry and she-devils

"Everything leads back to Edgar Allan Poe," Allen Ginsberg once said. He was referring to Baudelaire, Burroughs, and, in music, Dylan. Today, in rock, it's precisely Cave who, with his obsessive ballads, his funereal poems and the sickly hues of his theatre, has translated into music the damned spirit of the father of Gothic literature. But the literary references aren't limited to Poe and the whole Gothic tradition, from LeFanu to Faulkner. Cave's verses evoke Milton's apocalypses, Keats's delicate despair, Blake's prophecies, Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the majesty of Scripture. But it's also love — a harrowing, atrocious, mad love — that defines his stories. Stories that aren't expressed only in song form. In 1988 Cave published his first novel, "And the Ass Saw the Angel", inspired by the Bible and by the Southern Gothic fiction of Faulkner and O'Connor. The book was also released on CD by Mute Records, with Cave's reading of excerpts from the novel accompanied by music from Mick Harvey and Ed Clayton Jones, in a Sydney Theatre Company production.

The Australian singer-songwriter has also taken part in literary events, such as the "Festivaletteratura" in Mantua. Indeed, Cave is first and foremost a poet: "I don't know whether the rupture television has created in the language of communication can be healed," he observes. "People are robbed of lyrical language, of imagination. But if there's even a single hope of returning to a culture of intensity, we have to try: Poe, Eliot, Dickinson, it doesn't matter who. We need to shed light on poetry, because poetry calls for light, even if, deep down, the best poetry is always the poetry of darkness."

It thus seems something of an affront that the album conceived by Hal Willner featuring Poe's poems recited by various musicians is missing precisely Cave's dark voice. A voice that continues to enchant audiences worldwide, who savour with passion his bleak, grieving songbook, punctuated by his characteristic (and terrifying) fits, which plunge into visceral gospel and frenzied blues. As if the impeccable crooner in his dark suit, capable of moving audiences with melodies of an antique flavour, were suddenly repossessed by the demon that has marked his life. A "demon" Cave has also brought to the big screen. Playing himself, he appeared in Wim Wenders's film "Wings of Desire". He then played a psychotic inmate in John Hillcoat's "Ghosts... of the Civil Dead", for which he also co-wrote the screenplay. And a memorable video saw him star in a deliriously strange version of the Louis Armstrong classic "What A Wonderful World", alongside his hard-drinking friend Shane MacGowan (ex-Pogues). More recently, he appeared as H. G. Wells in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain".

Before breaking through worldwide, Nick Cave lived for a long time in obscurity. For many, his name was tied to a Cars video in which singer Ric Ocasek plastered posters for Cave's concerts everywhere. Then came an unforeseen wave of success. But the bard of Melbourne has always remained a prickly, introverted figure. He refused to attend the MTV Music Awards. In fact, he even asked to be withdrawn from the nominations, because his music "doesn't want to compete with anyone." His relationship with the press and the public has also been a difficult one — a public that nonetheless idolises him and even worries about his health. "Don't smoke, it's bad for you," one audience member shouted at him during the Mantua show. In response, he got a puff of smoke blown at him and an obscene gesture; but that was probably exactly what he expected. During his concerts, it's impossible to look away from this gangly storyteller, who covers his piano in ash and scraps of notes. His shows, in fact, carry a hypnotic power that goes well beyond the songs, managing to sustain a thriller-like tension even in their softest moments.

Ever unpredictable, then, this bard of the apocalypse, locked in perpetual conflict between an obsession with everything vile and diseased and a desperate yearning for redemption. And that conflict has also marked his relationship with women — a relationship that, in the hallucinated fervour of his verses, has translated into a gallery of fatal prostitutes, wicked wives, she-devils. As in his Murder Ballads (1996), "murder ballads" with an unsettling body count: seven male killers, three female killers and sixty-six victims. True to a theme typical of Anglo-Saxon folk, it's one of his most successful albums (roughly a million copies sold) and the high-water mark of his passion for the thriller. The protagonists? They're enchanting victims, like Elisa Day, killed by her first lover (played by pop star Kylie Minogue in the magical waltz-time duet "Where The Wild Roses Grow"), or Mary Bellows, handcuffed to the bed with a bullet in her head. But there are also ruthless killers, like the spurned lover of "Henry Lee", voiced by English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. Or like fifteen-year-old Lottie in "The Curse Of The Millhaven", who sets fire to a shantytown, killing twenty children.

The demonic fury of his golden years, however, resurfaces (almost) only in the theatrical “Stagger Lee” (which, thanks also to the violin of Warren Ellis, would become a live staple); for the rest, Cave skillfully slips into the role of the noir narrator, the wicked storyteller, though in “O'Malley's Bar” he even becomes long-winded, recounting assorted murders and crimes for a full 15 minutes. After so much cruelty, the choral finale of “Death Is Not The End” (a Bob Dylan cover) sounds almost like a grim consolation. Too much hatred? In an interview with Melody Maker, Nick Cave would even go so far as to apologize: “I know I've misrepresented women in my songs and misrepresented my feelings toward them. I invented a type of woman to use for artistic purposes, to offload my negative feelings. I feel I have to apologize. There was a perverse vindictiveness in a lot of what I wrote: I did it only to hurt people.”

Overall, Murder Ballads is one of his most enjoyable and accessible records, though certainly not among his very best in terms of originality and pathos.

Redemption

The “mea culpa” over misogyny shouldn't come as a surprise: this is, after all, an unusually reflective Cave stepping into the new century. A Cave who draws on the “songs of redemption” of Leonard Cohen and seeks comfort in Christianity. The sacrilegious shaman of his early years, in other words, is turning into a quiet preacher. So, on the album The Boatman's Call, the man who once sang of the “King of Heaven” born in Tupelo, namely Elvis Presley, now urges listeners to heed the call of Jesus “the boatman,” who offers consolation among men. “Love and theology are the only themes that interest me,” he said in a recent interview. “My responsibilities as an artist are to sing and play the piano; the rest is up to God.” Not bad, as an act of faith, for a damned soul... A Christian Cave, then, but not a believer in the strict sense. “I don't believe in an interventionist God,” he clarifies in the tender ballad “Into My Arms.” “For Cave, human love is great, but it fades away. God is great and reliable, but doesn't exist, or, if he does, does nothing to prove his power,” writes Phil Sutcliffe in the British monthly “Q.”

Before the turning point, the Melbourne rocker had come close to joining rock's pantheon of “burned-out lives.” In 1988 he entered a clinic to detox from heroin. And the stint at the austere Broadway Lodge Clinic, necessary to avoid a heavy criminal sentence following his arrest in London, also marked the beginning of a new, more mature phase of his odyssey.

While the dark and restless world of the Australian songwriter was being gathered into the double compilation CD

The Best of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (sixteen hits, plus six tracks recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall in London), his music was undergoing a slow transformation. Nick Cave seems to have definitively abandoned the excess and punk fury of his early years in favor of a far softer, more measured and austere songwriting style. That's the feeling that also comes through on his 2001 album, No More Shall We Part. A record both severe and tender at once, twelve tracks that try to weave together the threads of Cave's most recent work, seeking common ground between the solemn ballads of “The Boatman's Call” (1997), the scent of love and death in Murder Ballads (1996), and the visceral rage of betrayed love in Let Love In (1994).

Musically, the formula behind No More Shall We Part comes from a remarkable blend: the poignant violin flourishes of Dirty Three's Warren Ellis (“Oh My Lord,” “Sweetheart Come”), the depth of the vocal harmonies by Kate and Anna McGarrigle (“Hallelujah,” “Love Letter,” “Gates to the Garden”), the sober, disciplined restraint of Blixa Bargeld's and Mick Harvey's guitars — the Bad Seeds, Cave's longtime band — the tumultuous piano crescendos (“Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow”), along with the Australian singer-songwriter's own trademark vocal intensity. The rage, the raw and violent tones of earlier work, seem to have settled into an austere restraint, though no less dramatic for it. Especially since the harshness of the lyrics remains, blending restless religiosity with earthly despair.

The journey of No More Shall We Part begins with the single “As I Sat Sadly by Her Side,” a tender ballad sung by Cave in an unusually soft, melancholy register, continuing with the aching title track for piano and voice, before moving onto a more overtly religious path with songs like “Hallelujah,” “God Is in the House” and “Oh My Lord.” But beneath the ashes of apparent calm, the punk fervor of his early years still burns. A fervor that sets “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow” ablaze. The gentler feelings take over instead on tracks like “Sweetheart Come” (accompanied by piano and violin), “The Sorrowful Wife,” and that “Love Letter” which feels less like a love letter and more like a prayer. But the melancholy returns to sting on the closing “Darker with the Day,” where the lonely lover's spirit grows darker as the day unfolds before his eyes.

No More Shall We Part stands as fresh testimony to Cave's religious unease, but also to his loneliness, his search for love, and his moments of despair.

Nick Cave is by now a “classic,” much like his own models always were: Cohen, Dylan, Waits, Cale, Beefheart. He's a seasoned rocker who has made good use of the lessons learned from the dark, biblical and mythical world he inhabited for years: “A mythological world in which I could fully live, and in which good and evil never met.” It should come as no surprise, then, to see the former showman of the Australian punk cellars strolling down Portobello Road in London, holding the hand of little Luke, his son from his relationship with Viviane Carneiro. With the bacchanals of youth behind him, it's now time for self-irony: “The advantage of getting older is that you no longer have to hang out with young people,” he mockingly remarked.

In 2003 Cave released Nocturama, which, however, fell considerably short of expectations. Recorded in just one week at his home studio, SingSing in Melbourne, alongside Nick Launey, the producer from the Birthday Party era, the album was meant to be the first piece of a trilogy marking a return to the musical simplicity of his early days. A laudable intention, but one not matched, at least in this case, by the final result. The haste with which the record was conceived comes through clearly, as does the Australian songwriter's newfound inner balance: every track on this “pacified” Cave makes you miss the torments that once gave rise to so many masterpieces.

Among the ballads, none lives up to his usual standard; the best is perhaps “Rock of Gibraltar”: certainly not “Bring It On,” the lead single, almost a pop song, pleasant but weak and uninspired, even in its use of guest Chris Bailey; and there are only scattered moments that dust off his “cursed” storyteller flair (“Dead Man in My Bed”) or allow the Bad Seeds to show off their full talent and enviable chemistry (the lengthy closing jam “Babe I'm on Fire”).

The 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is a more ambitious project, though not always backed by adequate inspiration in the songwriting. Backing Cave are the trusty Bad Seeds (here a seven-piece lineup, but without Blixa Bargeld) plus Warren Ellis on violin, mandolin, flute and bouzouki. “Get Ready for Love” is an impetuous rocker, lifted by the female voices of the London Community Gospel Choir. “Cannibal's Hymn” is a rock ballad in defense of art's redemptive powers, its rhythm marked by a swaying, restrained guitar. “Hiding All Away” is “Murder Ballads” fired off alongside Robert Johnson and Mick Jagger in the sacred fire of noise-blues, the lustful, bewitching celebration of sin. “Nature Boy,” the first single taken from the album, is the sunny side of the coin, with “Bring It On” on the flip side: a blend that echoes the never-shallow catchiness of R.E.M.. “Fable of the Brown Ape” closes the first act of the record by telling a story, ultimately the same one that opens “The Lyre of Orpheus,” a sadistic and cursed reinterpretation of the ancient Greek myth set to a hypnotic, swirling swing. “O Children” unleashes the same universal disillusionment as “Sorrow's Child” and the cosmic lament of “Weeping Song,” in a crystalline ballad in Cave's latter-day style.

In between, a set of convincing tracks: words tumbling like acrobats over the notes in “Messiah Ward,” the mesmerism of “Abattoir Blues,” the pastoral “Breathless,” the stumbling, epic “Easy Money,” the dazzling “Supernaturally.” There are, however, a few lapses in inspiration (“There She Goes, My Beautiful World”), an occasional friction between the poetry of the lyrics and a certain predictability in the music (“Let the Bells Ring,” dedicated to Johnny Cash), and here and there an overuse of choral elements, which, rather than providing counterpoint to Cave's voice, seem to take it over.

Grinderman: back to basics

The Grinderman project has often been billed as Nick Cave's new incarnation, a return to his roots, to the glory days of the Birthday Party, and so on. In reality, Grinderman, while showing real signs of renewed vitality, stays well clear of those old glories.

Trimming the Bad Seeds orchestra down to a quartet – and shutting the essential Mick Harvey out of the creative core – clearly benefited the final result: little piano, plenty of guitar oddities or (above all) electrified, distorted, effects-laden violin, and, more than anything, an overall leanness. There's equally no doubt that this more frivolous, less filtered approach to the material produced songs of real stature, far scrappier, tighter, more concise and more immediate than usual.

The only caveat is that roughly 25 years have passed since the era when Nick Cave's musical excesses were the fruit of pure youthful recklessness and nerve; today, even in his most furious moments, craft and an enviable clarity of purpose tend to win out. "Get It On" grabs onto a scorching, repetitive guitar skeleton and kicks off the tracklist in style; "No Pussy Blues" is a worthy companion, pressing forward and shaking things up; "Electric Alice" and "Grinderman" put the rock game on hold and impose an unsettling pause – with a Cave as solemn as we hadn't heard in a long while.

Then comes a rock/soul jolt with "Depth Charge Ethel", an agitated, restless track launched by a biting two-note distorted organ riff.

After that, a run of songs closer to recent Cave. "Go Tell the Women" and "I Don't Need You (To Set Me Free)" both revolve around bass riffs, the first bare-bones and almost soulful, the second more muscular and dominated by strings. "Honey Bee" is built on the same gripping formula as "Ethel", with organ jabs and other bursts of electricity raining down everywhere. And as if stepping off a rollercoaster, we get the calm interlude of "Man In The Moon", the murkiness of "When My Love Comes Down" and the big rock finale of "Love Bomb", with the electrified violin once again stealing the show.

No "return to roots", then: all things considered, Grinderman is simply a leaner, cheekier, more effective version of latter-day Bad Seeds.

With Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!! in 2008, by contrast, Cave the songwriter returns in full force, backed as ever by the Bad Seeds, with a new solo album. It's a collection of cinematic, atmospheric songs, even leaner in their creative liberties.

If the title track's average register sounds like a sophisticated, good-natured parody of the Troggs' "Wild Thing", "Albert Goes West" apes the rowdiest kind of pub-rock. The other detours along the way, "Moonland" chief among them, linger over soul-percussive grooves and a smooth, desert-crooner vocal. "We Call Upon The Author", meanwhile, ventures a motorik beat crackling with electric shocks and a swaying little organ, a delirious refrain cut through by near-industrial-hip-hop breaks reminiscent of Dalek.

Cave regains control of things on songs like "Hold On To Yourself", one of his most moralistic, splitting the difference between a dark, swampy tone, noisy instrumental surges and a depressed vocal, and "Jesus Of The Moon", buoyed by a watery glissando undercurrent. The lengthy "More News From Nowhere", taking shape from an ethereal, reverb-soaked loop, a gait recalling metaphysical U2 circa "The Joshua Tree", and a choral motif that opens up heartfelt feeling, ends up becoming a sprawling, Dylan-esque indictment in disguise, sustained and renewed by the rhythm section and by misleading harmonies. "Today's Lesson" lays out collective fervour and a melodic declamation, but tends to blow apart under the push of Ellis's disorienting loops, while "Night Of The Lotus Eaters" opens with an industrial-tinged riff and Cave's whispers converging into an icy multi-voice refrain, crescendoing attacks, piercing screeches and silent percussion of various kinds. Finally, it settles into a sort of austere divertissement surrounded by guitars, choruses and a distorted chorus ("Lie Down Here", a power-ballad that stands as his own personal peace of mind).

Shrewd in its atmospheres, spicy in its moves, it's a record that only truly shines in patches.

On 10 September 2010, the second instalment from Cave's new band, Grinderman 2, was released in Italy. Far removed from the rawer, more grating blues of the previous record, the album stands out for its maturity, even though the urge to improvise is still plain to hear ("Evil", "When My Baby Comes", "Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man"). With tracks that could have leapt straight out of the early Rolling Stones' repertoire ("Places Of Montezuma") and others that are decidedly more evocative ("What I Know" and "When My Baby Comes", a cross between "The Night Of The Lotus Eaters" and "Iron Man"), "Grinderman 2" is remarkable for the way Cave, for more than thirty years now, has (almost) never let us down, constantly renewing himself without ever needing to reinvent himself.

The record nonetheless stays true to the project's founding principles: the animal nature within man (the debut's cover depicted a monkey masturbating, while this record's shows a snarling, fanged wolf prowling menacingly through a living room) and the blues understood as the divine big bang of all music ("Kitchenette").

Meanwhile, other projects keep crowding the life of the Australian artist, who, starting out with film scores, has gone on to become a fully-fledged writer, poet, storyteller, screenwriter, even collaborating on theatre work.

For classic Cave, the one backed by his trusty Bad Seeds (who lose Mick Harvey but regain Adamson), we have to wait until early 2013. Push The Sky Away is thus an extremely subdued, backward-looking record, a rarefied endpoint in his trajectory, with moments of restraint ("We No Who U R") that sit at the geometric opposite extreme from his Birthday Party beginnings. The production, too, sheds the last apocalyptic gasps of its predecessor and of Grinderman, moving from surgical, stereophonic expressionism towards a far more overtly Spectorian tone, closer to that of commercial productions.

The Age of Grief

In 2015 his young son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near Brighton while under the influence of hallucinogens.

The resulting work, Skeleton Tree (2016), is certainly born of that tragedy, but rather than a true concept album it's a coherent para-musical translation of it, built on silence and rarefaction. On a more personal level, it's a dedication to his own being, a test of how those murder ballads change when aimed – for once – at himself, instead of parables of the dispossessed.

Technically speaking, it's an album that completes the process of shedding the visceral intensity of his early work, a process also pushed forward by the none-too-convincing predecessor album. Rhetoric, of course, also comes to his aid: Cave sings through tears and presses the synthesizer keys as if it were a pipe organ on "I Need You", and on "Jesus Alone" he sinks one of his declaimed rosaries into a cold pool of strings and feedback. What follows are even more leaden, shadowed, almost hollowed-out tracks ("Magneto", "Girl In Amber", "Distant Sky"), as joyous as epitaphs. The sound of the Bad Seeds nearly disappears, or rather coagulates into the semi-electronic ectoplasm of factotum Warren Ellis. It's the sound of a burnt-out star: the dark undertow feared throughout all his roaring years is a shock in reverse, a private dismay that borders on embarrassment.

The documentary on the making of the album, "One More Time With Feeling" (2016), directed by Andrew Dominik, premiered exclusively at the 73rd Venice Film Festival.

Cave's new album is released in full, free streaming on the evening of October 3rd. A migrant spirit, his loved ones around him, and a cover art far removed from the absolute, impenetrable black of its predecessor Skeleton Tree. Rarely is the line between Life and Art as thin as it is with Nick Cave: boundaries and structures torn down over the years, especially in his famous live shows and in his recent conversations with the audience. A lived, private experience capable of carving every branch of the Skeleton Tree and its companion documentary "One More Time With Feeling", and which now animates the sonic landscapes of the double album Ghosteen (2019), also tied to the tragic death of his son Arthur. But while on Skeleton Tree we were hurled into the Abyss, now – while still coming to terms with grief – Cave manages to raise his gaze toward the Light above.

Cave has for some time been fixated on the towering late-period work of Scott Walker and once again dismantles the song form. Guitars, drums and refrains are absent (at most the occasional phrase repeated like a mantra), replaced by synthetic and/or orchestral sonic beds for mini-soundtracks often leaning toward ambient-drone, woven by Warren Ellis, over which Cave stands out with powerful, indelible images and stories. And then there's that voice, still able to split your soul in two.

Yes, because Ghosteen is another concept album about loss, grief, and the one way to fight them: Love. The lesson/mission is the same: it runs from the bond between man and woman in "Into My Arms" ("And I believe in Love, And I know that you do too, And I believe in some kind of path") all the way up to the father-son relationship in "I Need You" ("When you're feeling like a lover, Nothing really matters anymore"), and in "Ghosteen" it permeates the particles of every single track, as confirmed by the certainty placed at the close of "Leviathan". A trinity fuels the album: a man, a woman and a child. At first their incarnation takes the form of Elvis in his Las Vegas period, Priscilla and a little bird with just one wing ("Spinning Song"), eventually taking the shape of three bears in front of the TV in "Ghosteen", and embodying the Holy Trinity in "Fireflies": "Jesus lying in his mother's arms". Forms and names change, but the three figures are the variants and branches of Cave, his wife Susie and Arthur, with the latter drifting far away: "And baby bear, he has gone to the moon in a boat, on a boat". The image of ascension to the sky becomes dominant in "Sun Forest", echoing the biblical visions of the prophet Ezekiel: "As a spiral of children climb up to the sun/ Waving goodbye to you and goodbye to me".

And yet – and here lies the purest meaning of the work – counterbalancing the pain is hope, the sense and necessity of peace. The songwriter states it right away, at the end of "Spinning Song": "Peace will come, a peace will come, a peace will come in time. A time will come, a time will come, a time will come for us". A harmony indissolubly tied to the love binding the three people involved, a love that the singer's delivery fills with his usual vigor in many passages of "Ghosteen". Around all this, glimpses of sacredness, dreamlike and maternal visions ("Night Road"), the occasional urban tear, and a poetic density that leaves you stunned. It's hard not to be moved once you reach the ending of the following track, "Bright Horses":

Oh the train is coming, and I’m standing here to see

And it’s bringing my baby right back to me

Well there are some things that are hard to explain

But my baby’s coming home now, on the 5:30 train

The hope of a father still waiting for the return of a son who is no longer there comes back with devastating intensity shortly after, in the superb "Waiting For You", where Cave's performance nearly collapses as he declares himself accompanied "only" by a piano.

If with Skeleton Tree we were deep in the gut of the immediate darkness enveloping someone trying to survive the most terrible grief, Ghosteen is about coming to terms with the life that follows and the desire to find a lost balance again: "It's a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind" ("Hollywood"). Nick Cave's journey is perhaps not yet over, but never before has it pointed so directly toward the light.

Nick Cave appears very distant on the cover of Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace (2020). And he is just as isolated during the filming of the companion concert film, almost as if he himself were the "girl in amber" described in Skeleton Tree. After cancelling and rescheduling, due to Covid-19, the live dates announced following the release of Ghosteen, on June 19th 2020, in the West Hall of London's Alexandra Palace, Cave recorded the performance under the direction of Robbie Ryan. The show was first streamed on July 23rd, then shown in cinemas, and finally released on record in November. In 2019 the former The Birthday Party member had laid the groundwork for such performances with the "Conversations With..." tour, in which he interspersed dialogue with the audience with piano-only versions of his songs. Cave had considered recording the new versions in the studio: then the arrival of lockdown changed that plan too.

One factor gives the record new meaning: that word, "alone". The absence of an audience. Setting aside, of course, the direct experience of seeing him live, when Distant Sky: Live in Copenhagen came out in 2018, followed by its cinematic counterpart, one could appreciate a Cave in his ideal setting: surrounded by his trusted Bad Seeds, immersed in the crowd's affection, ready to throw every last molecule of himself into the songs. And as rock history teaches us, much of the success of many live albums lies precisely in the interaction between musicians and audience, united in giving the songs new shape. The first impact is disorienting. The release is an artistic testimony born in a time when musicians keep questioning their own role and how to make a living from their music and get it out into the world during such a delicate period; and, following from that, a reminder of just how vital the relationship with the audience is for him. Listening to/watching it won't make up for the lack of a live Nick Cave show, but Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone At Alexandra Palace is a good way to reflect and ease the wait.

Stripped of the flowing garments stitched by Warren Ellis, "Spinning Song" becomes a spoken introduction, a fitting link to the spoken section "Parents" on Ghosteen. By the end the lyrics change, but the one they're addressed to does not:

Well, this prayer is for you my love

Sent on the wings of a dove

Upward and upward

The image of the dove, the prayer, follow right after in the title track taken from The Boatman's Call from 1997. The tale of the condemned man's final moments, wondering whether he'll ever see his beloved again (all told in true Nick Cave fashion, since it may well have been him who killed her), allows lines like "Will I bid you, adieu?" and "Or will I be seeing you soon?" to connect with the drama of Covid-19, where Hell is the global pandemic. Voice and piano alone, these songs are children of one and the same record: the anguish of The Boatman's Call is the same anguish found in the Grief Diptych Skeleton Tree–Ghosteen, every declaration of love comes from a single heart. The Ink King doesn't just fill the setlist with ballads or the repertoire's most melodic moments: he also brings out blazing numbers like "The Mercy Seat" or "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry". This musical choice lets us focus once again on the beauty of the lyrics and on how every word is the distillation of his soul.

The laughter at the end of "(Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For" leads into one of the most harrowing moments of "Ghosteen", here made even more wrenching: "Waiting for You". The tracklist ranges across welcome rediscoveries like "Sad Waters" (Your Funeral… My Trial, 1986), "He Wants You" from Nocturama, "Palaces Of Montezuma" from the side-project Grinderman, whose return Cave has announced, the intense unreleased "Euthanasia" and the inevitable classics.

Nick Cave looks distant and isolated on the cover of Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace, and yet all it takes is listening to realize he has never felt so close.

The latest carnage

“Everybody's losing someone

It’s a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind”

So sang Nick Cave on "Hollywood", the long closing track of Ghosteen. Listening to it again now, amid the barrage of tragic images tied to the Covid-19 crisis, is chilling, and it reminds us of the prophetic power of his most intense and inspired lyrics. The peace so hoped for and sought by the musician ("Spinning Song") had to reckon with an ordeal faced by the entire world. The words of "Hollywood" slowly bleed into Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone At Alexandra Palace and flow into the new Carnage. Much has been written about how, on these latest works, the sound is no longer that of the Bad Seeds but "just" Warren Ellis: this latest release is co-credited to Cave's loyal multi-instrumentalist right-hand man, founder of Dirty Three, whose name entirely replaces that of the band alongside the Ink King. As usual, the first hints of the release came from the blog The Red Hand Files: "Carnage is a brutal but very beautiful record embedded in a communal catastrophe". A shared carnage, a virus that has changed millions of lives and that now - with Cave painfully far from the stage and that vital bond with his audience - must be turned into songs, perhaps even into beauty.

Songs written in a rush, over a couple of days, forged out of countless images. Some tied to recent current events, others drawn from the many worlds the writer has shaped over the years. “A protester kneels on the neck of a statue/ The statue says ‘I can’t breathe’/ The protester says ‘Now you know how it feels’/ And he kicks it into the sea” from "White Elephant" recalls the death of George Floyd, while the closing "Balcony Man" is set on that part of the home immortalized in so many lockdown moments. For Cave, the balcony becomes a pulpit from which to confess that "what doesn't kill you just makes you crazier". Symbolic figures close to those of the predecessor return, interspersed with "on the road" scenes out of a dusty, tormented noir. In "Old Time" the story of a couple intertwines with that of a bird, set within an unsettling natural landscape. The trees are black and the two protagonists have lost their way, while the lonely road running alongside the lavender fields ("Lavender Fields") becomes a way of taking stock of all that's been lost.

A minimal cover, unlike the lush exuberance of its predecessor, where the album's title reigns supreme. And while Ghosteen often conjured celestial scenes, now the sky and the hand of God come crashing down on us. The opener "Hand Of God" begins with a brief spoken passage, then the tearing open of the strings, the fall from the sky and the start of the synthetic pulse. Ellis's hand is unmistakable, in continuity with Ghosteen. Carnage offers a bit more variation in movement: the grim stride and Eastern-tinged strings of "Old Time", the gospel swell and crescendo of "White Elephant".

Despite its menacing title, the title track actually turns out to be a gentle ballad. The album's most beautiful and moving moment is "Albuquerque", its very heart. A tender piano, a faint backdrop with the names of destinations fading away. In the closing diptych "Shattered Ground"-"Balcony Man", the figure of a companion stands out. But while loss and farewell dominate the first, in the ethereal finale a ray of sunlight filters down from the sky and from the beauty of the one beside him: "This morning is amazing and so are you". It's striking how, after such a romantic declaration, a very different line follows: "You are languid and lovely and lazy/ And what doesn't kill you just makes you crazier". Thanks to yet another superb piece of lyric-writing, Carnage tells of the massacre wrought by the pandemic, but through poetry and the power of the scenes it conjures, it takes on a universal dimension.

Also in 2021 comes B-Sides And Rarities Part II, the second instalment of the collection whose first chapter dates back to 2005. From the treasure chest of a release built on outtakes, alternate versions, rarities and lesser tracks that only ever appeared on singles, it's not always possible to offer an overall assessment that captures the purely musical worth of the material, nor the historical background behind the artist's decision not to deem these songs worthy of a spot on an official album. Nick Cave is an exception here too.

From B-Sides And Rarities Part II, a companion piece to the first volume released in 2005, every facet of the musician emerges - not mapped out through a conventional and often incomplete "Best Of" (as was the case with Lovely Creatures in 2017), but borne witness to through episodes virtually unknown to most listeners, or even discarded at the time, right in keeping with the philosophy of the seminal Australian songwriter. And so, all at once, in a single emotional flow, the states Cave has lived through come bubbling up: anguish, despair, redemption, the rebirth of a man - more than an artist - who has lived through every kind of experience life has to offer.

The first section of the project is, in effect, a genuine collection of B-sides, documenting the period running from 2008 up to, marginally, 2015. The painful, disorienting diptych "Needle Boy"/"Lightning Bolts", both built on jagged, inhospitable shards of electronics, would not have looked at all out of place on the official tracklist of that art-rock fresco that is Push The Sky Away, instead of being offered at the time only as a 7" or a bonus DVD to buyers of the deluxe edition. But the real focus undoubtedly belongs to the raw, poisoned ambiguity of "Vortex", a genuine outtake dating back to 2006 and recorded with Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey, before being inexplicably shelved because no one could decide whether to release it as Grinderman or as Bad Seeds.

The cover of Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche", recorded by Cave for the second season of the TV series "Black Sails", retains all its wrenching intensity thanks to the way the original's intricate acoustic-guitar score is translated into evocative piano lines, occasionally streaked with spare flourishes of strings. If "Hey Little Firing Squad" is a B-side from the Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! era with echoes of Springsteen's "The River", "Free To Walk" is an illuminating acoustic duet the Australian artist recorded with Debbie Harry, included on "We Are Only Riders", a tribute compilation dedicated to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the Gun Club frontman who died in 1996, whose song Cave picked up - and in this case completed - after the American artist had recorded it only in embryonic form before his death.

Another sensational moment is the previously unreleased orchestral version of "Push The Sky Away", a cathartic track for Cave that, stripped of the superb yet dark electronic textures of the album version, now becomes a celestial piano symphony, sung in a higher key and perfectly framed by the choir and by the sweeping openness shaped by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Push The Sky Away closes Disc 1, but the album of the same name opens a new chapter in Cave's career. A brand-new approach to writing ("Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues?") and to song composition, guided by Warren Ellis. A sharp break between Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and the 2013 record, but nothing compared to the chasm opened up by Skeleton Tree (2016). A dark, synthetic magma shaped by tragic personal events, mirrored by the documentary "One More Time With Feeling". Skeleton Tree is darkness and loss, just as the following, even more ethereal Ghosteen is the search for light and peace, as both covers make plain: "It's a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind…" The collection's timeline stops at this record, at 2019, leaving out 2021's Carnage, credited to "just" Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: the third chapter of this trilogy, excluded from the collection since it wasn't written together with the Bad Seeds.

Cave's recent career phase naturally also marks the side tracks and outtakes not included on the albums from that period. Piano dominates, along with lyrics repeated like a mantra and Ellis's synthesizers. The shades sketched out by the lyrics are at times dark, at times hallucinated, at times both, as in the throbbing anguish of "Opium Eyes" and "Hell Villanelle". Between ambient instrumentals ("Glacier", "Instrumental #33") and fragments ("Sudden Song"), what stands out is the "alpha" reserved for "King Sized Nick Cave Blues" and the "omega" of "Earthlings", complete with choir and an aching synth sound. "Heart That Kills You", on the other hand, is entirely devoted to Arthur, Cave's son who died prematurely, and is inspired (as the singer himself explained on The Red Hand Files) by his and his wife Susie Bick's attempts to come to terms with the loss.

The best material, though, we'd already had a taste of: the spoken part of "Steve McQueen" and the previously unreleased track from Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone At Alexandra Palace, the beautiful "Euthanasia". Without taking anything away from these outtakes, which show the consistently high artistic level of the names involved even when it comes to compositions left on the cutting room floor, on the level of philological curiosity applied to music the most interesting passages are the "First" testimonies - that is, the demos of the early forms of the songs that later ended up on Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. For the former we get "First Skeleton Tree" and "First Girl In Amber", for the latter "First Bright Horses" and "First Waiting for You", later cleaned up of its background noise. We'll close by citing an excerpt from "Steve McQueen", since Nick Cave manages to sing all this, and much more, like no one else.

Because someone’s gotta sing the stars

And someone’s gotta sing the rain

And someone’s gotta sing the blood

And someone’s gotta sing the pain

Taking the opportunity offered by the announcement of "This Much I Know to Be True" and the release of the soundtrack La Panthère Des Neiges, we retrace the path of the tight-knit and by now inseparable duo Nick Cave-Warren Ellis, whose creative endeavours, regardless of context, seem to flow into a single, multifaceted and intense artistic journey. The aforementioned documentary will once again be directed by Andrew Dominik: the Wellington-born filmmaker had already made One More Time With Feeling, while our duo had scored his splendid The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, which we'll talk about shortly.

Going back to the dawn of the Cave-Ellis collaboration, it all begins in 1994, when the Dirty Three musician adds his touch to "Ain't Gonna Rain Anymore" and "Do You Love Me? (Part 2)" on Let Love In. From respected, illustrious session player, Ellis's role grows ever more significant within the Bad Seeds, especially in light of the band's internal changes. With the departures of mainstays Blixa Bargeld (present up to Nocturama) and longtime member Mick Harvey (absent from Push The Sky Away onward), Ellis becomes the Maestro to whom Cave entrusts increasingly poetic, evocative lyrics. On this point, we can cite our own interview from 2008 with the Bard of Melbourne himself, timed with the release of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!:

How has Warren's position within the Bad Seeds evolved?

When Blixa decided to leave us (he raises his glasses and pretends to wipe away a tear) he left a huge void. Blixa always took care of the noise, that was his role within the group, and I think that over the years his interest in noise diminished. The moment Blixa left, space opened up for Warren, and he's filled it well. Now it's Warren who takes care of the noise. Both in the studio and during live shows.

A contribution destined to grow exponentially over the years...

Ellis's hand has left an indelible mark on the Bad Seeds' recent discography. The signs of the shift appear in the more dreamlike shades of Push The Sky Away and the following Skeleton Tree, co-produced by the two of them (the previous album's credits read: "Nick Launay with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds"), where an impenetrable, synthesized dark cloak wraps around the funereal themes.

In 2014 the two had already shared some iconic scenes in the documentary film 20,000 Days on Earth, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard: twenty-four intense hours in Cave's life, right during the making of Push The Sky Away. With Ghosteen, the sound would abandon Cave's usual traits more than ever before, venturing into uncharted territory. The genesis of these songs is documented in the demos released on B-Sides & Rarities Part II.

Although it's practically impossible to hear their contribution (in fact, in an interview with Uncut given in February 2020, Cave would recount the painful decision to strip Thomas Wydler's rhythm tracks from the songs), Ghosteen is still credited to the Bad Seeds; Carnage, on the other hand, bears the signature of Cave & Ellis alone.

The elective affinity between the two is also cemented in the theatrical realm (scoring the plays Woyzeck, Metamorphosis and Faust for the Icelandic theatre company Vesturport), in the releases under the Grinderman name, and is constantly rekindled in the world of soundtracks. The Australians launch this path in 2005 with The Proposition. Year after year the score is updated at a steady pace and with a consistently high level of quality.

White Lunar is the collection of their themes up to 2009: standing out within it are the compositions written for Dominik's The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007) and John Hillcoat's The Road. Cave's bond with the latter Australian director is a strong one. After collaborating on the aforementioned Ghosts... Of The Civil Dead and The Proposition, Cave would go on to write the screenplay and the score (with Ellis, of course) for Lawless, while Hillcoat would contribute the music videos for "Babe, I'm on Fire" (Nocturama) and "Jubilee Street" (Push The Sky Away).

The first disc of White Lunar opens with that very "Jesse James" score, built on the ecstatic music-box of "Song For Jesse" and the Cave (piano)-Ellis (violin) duet, backed by low strings, of "Song For Bob" - a true paradigm of the two authors' aesthetic and of the anti-western mood that pervades Dominik's film. The second disc clearly leans into the collection's unreleased tracks, as foreshadowed by the first disc's closing section centred on The Road.

The mysterious "The Vaults" includes the curious harmony for voices and organ of "Magma" and the hushed, macabre march of "Halo", over which Ellis's nocturnal violin phrasing unfurls. White Lunar is well put together, with an eye for the harmonious unfolding of atmospheres - especially on the second disc - rather than for jarring plot twists, and it stands as a showcase for the two authors' artisanal, antique-dealer's craft, capable of expanding into a spectrum even wider than their own abilities as passionate composers might suggest. There's a ghost track, 9 minutes after the close of "Sorya Market", and it's the classic kind of surprise.

As for their work on The Road (2010), alongside mostly generic film-score music (though also thoughtful, as with "Water And Ash"), there also emerge multi-part chamber orchestrations, especially on "Home" (winds and keyboards), as well as a few abrasive numbers, "The Cannibals" and "The Cellar", and above all the dissonances tuned like a philharmonic orchestra warming up on "The House", a demonic galop (and, in part, also the austere "The Journey" and "The Family", a showcase of Ellis's skill). Also somewhat adventurous is the silent, muted suspension of "The Boy". Alternating mawkishness with moments that are vacuous yet dark, generic longueurs with stylistic insistence, the score becomes elusive here and there, while still remaining stranded on a precarious bridge between two worlds: irrelevance and disorientation.

This activity also extends into the world of documentaries, through the scores for The English Surgeon (2007), West Of Memphis (2013) and Prophet's Prey (2015). Returning to the world of cinema, after Loin des Hommes, presented at Venice in 2014, Cave & Ellis made the soundtrack for Hell Or High Water, a work that doesn't stray far from their previous film productions. "Comancheria" opens with a classic piano sonata born out of a violin drone; "Mama's Room", while similar to the previous track, is the most inspired piece; "Texas Midlands" starts to take on a more unsettled character, as does the obsessive rhythm of "Robbery". Where in the former it was Cave's piano that dispersed the tension, in the latter it's Ellis's violin that dominates. The tension reaches its peak in the distortions and choral parts of "Mountain Lion Mean".

Hell Or High Water is rounded out by a series of classic American and Canadian country and blues tracks, by artists such as Townes Van Zandt, Waylon Jennings, Colter Wall, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Chris Stapleton and Scott H. Biram.

After composing for the National Geographic docu-series Mars (2016) and the Brad Pitt-starring Netflix production War Machine (2017), in 2018 the pair released the soundtrack for Kings, a film by Deniz Gamze Ergüven starring Halle Berry and Daniel Craig, which tells the story of a multi-racial family during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of the four police officers who beat African-American taxi driver Rodney King for failing to stop at a checkpoint. Cave and Ellis's narrative style doesn't deviate much from their previous soundtracks; in this case, though, the electronic textures that had been kept to a minimum on earlier records (with the exception of the score for the National Geographic Channel documentary/TV series on space exploration, "Mars") come through more clearly. While violin and piano remain the foundation of most of the sixteen tracks, the synths tend to play a key role in building tension ("CCTV Montage", "Arrested").

But it's in the rare piano melodies (the harrowing "Death Of William" or the delicate touches of "School Argument") that the emotional peak is truly reached – one that, despite always using the same basic ingredients (brief piano patterns with string textures), never fails to move the listener. Elsewhere it's obvious the formula is repeated a bit too often ("Bake" is practically a clone of The Road), but there's no shortage of forays into new territory, such as the noisy finale of "Earthquake".

There are no surprises across these sixteen tracks, but plenty of moments of great intensity, tangible proof of an immense passion – the defining trait of a duo that has for years been an absolute certainty, not only with the legendary Bad Seeds, but also in the field of film music.

With La Panthère Des Neiges (the debut documentary by Marie Amiguet, presented at Cannes), Cave & Ellis return to ice and snow, but in atmospheres and themes that are the complete opposite of those in Wind River (2017). The atmosphere hovering over every track is fascinating and at times unsettling, evoking something almost alchemical that perhaps only nature can inspire, with the duo aiming to explore the palpable tension running through the endless conflict between the human and natural worlds. "L'Attaque Des Loups" perfectly frames this scenario, with Ellis's violin so emblematic, in a constant motion that dives and falls before soaring skyward. The same feeling resurfaces in the minimalist glitches of "Les Cerfs", amid elegant piano notes and gentle flute lines, or in the meditative whispers of "Where are you? Where are you?" that Cave uses almost as a liturgy in "Antilope".

Wrapped in an almost mystical atmosphere, there's room for playful moments ("La Bête") and tender delicacy ("Des Affûts Elliptiques" and "Les Nomades"), with organ, strings and winds let loose to lay down a patina of refined sensitivity. The measured piano melody of "La Grotte" pairs perfectly with that of the ever-present violin, rounding out the minimalist, gracefully cadenced digressions sketched out in "Les Princes". The plucked strings in "Les Yaks" sound menacing, and all the more captivating for it, while "La Neige Tombe" shines with an unnatural beauty, thanks to the contrast between the strings and Cave's piercing voice, used here as a tool for exploring nature at its wildest. The Australian artist's singing is deliberately subdued in "Les Ours", almost suggesting uncertainty, a reluctance to change what has remained unaltered for so long. It's an approach found throughout the whole soundtrack, a kind of deliberate sonic restraint and a humble acknowledgment that human beings risk being nothing more than perfect intruders on this planet.

The interplay between permanence and precariousness is skillfully sketched out in "Un Être Vous Obsède" and above all in "L'Apparition/We Are Not Alone", where Cave's baritone voice coils around the exalted lines: "I Was Observed And Unaware", perhaps so as to settle in alongside some of the wild animals that Munier is trying to catch sight of.

With Seven Psalms (2022) we're in the realm of the spoken word. A 10" EP with an intimate, private tone, credited "solely" to his own name, released on the tellingly titled label Cave Things, where you'll find the most unimaginable products. It follows Idiot Prayer, a psalm a day written during lockdown, presented graphically like a small prayer book, set to music for a brief two-minute listen on Side A, with Side B taken up by the long instrumental piece "Psalm Instrumental".

Seven Psalms can be seen as a satellite of Ghosteen: lyrics steeped in God, grief, death and family scenes (the image of birds as a metaphor for human family, already present in "Spinning Song", returns in "Such Things Should Never Happen"), while Ellis underpins the recitations with his light synthesized washes, flecked with distant, celestial voices. Almost certainly already sitting on the shelves of the Australian bard's most devoted fans, Seven Psalms is nonetheless a different kind of Cave release, and one well worth a listen.

Returning to the Cave-Ellis duo's film score work, 2022 saw the release of the wonderful soundtrack composed for Andrew Dominik's Blonde. The work is dominated by floating strings, synths that are at times celestial and at times dark and menacing, and light textures culminating in rarefied choral parts. All of it devoted to telling the troubled story of the quintessential American diva, played by Ana de Armas. From the harshest scenes (the abortion sequences, the abuse) to the most hallucinatory and the most idyllic moments (Monroe's time spent with Arthur Miller), every note follows the images step by step, merging with them.

Across this hour of music we find splendid tracks such as "Gemini" or "Goddess Of Love On A Subway". Standing out above all is the poignant "Nembutal", which recurs several times throughout the film and was chosen, as its title suggests, to accompany the actress's final rest as she heads toward "A World Of Light". And to close things out, an instrumental version of one of the most moving moments from "Ghosteen": "Bright Horses".

The duo then repeated the feat with the score for the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. While the Blonde soundtrack, buoyed by Dominik's visual style, often rises to rarefied, dreamlike atmospheres, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is instead earthbound and visceral. Cave, always a superb narrator of the darkest, most violent recesses of the human soul, continues that mission here, with Warren Ellis's slow, dark violin standing out as the main recurring motif ("Body Disposal", "Death And Baptism", "Lionel Blames Himself"). "He's Going To See Me" descends into the abyss, its vocal parts evoking the screams of the victims, while spectral piano sounds ("No More Free Rides", "Oily Tadpoles") alternate with the jolts and convulsive rhythms of "Tourniquet Knot". Right up to "End Credits", a slow, nocturnal dance of ghosts amid sordid neon lights and decay, which brings the curtain down.

2022 was also the year of the Carnage promotional tour, a run of live dates that Cave and Ellis developed especially on Australian soil, culminating in three shows held in December 2022 at the Sydney Opera House and immortalized on the album Australian Carnage – Live At The Sydney Opera House.

An intense, moving, at times ironic document, thanks to the songwriter's unrivalled skill at interacting with his audience and making them part of his reflections and emotions.

the tracks selected come mainly from Ghosteen (featured almost in full) and from Carnage, with a brief detour into the grieving Skeleton Tree ("I Need You") and a digression a few steps further back in time, retrieving those luminous nature references the Australian artist used to paraphrase an overwhelming love ("Breathless" from Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre Of Orpheus).

A surprise, but not too much of one, is the intense cover of "Cosmic Dancer" by Marc Bolan's T-Rex, a song Cave had already performed for the tribute album released in 2020, dedicated entirely to the legendary English singer-songwriter who died in 1977.

The Cave-Ellis soundtrack front was updated in April 2024. For “Back To Black”, the biopic about Amy Winehouse directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, two soundtracks were released. Back To Black (Songs From The Original Motion Picture, made up of the protagonist's songs along with tracks by the other musicians featured in the film, and Back To Black (Original Motion Picture Score), with the original compositions by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The result of the duo's work is minimal, in several respects: twenty-four minutes of listening, made up of short fragments. Produced together with Giles Martin, the chapters of the most significant moments of the singer's brief and troubled existence follow one another. More floating moments sustained by flute are concentrated in the opening part of the work, along with dark passages ("Sort Yourselves Out") and more abstract, whispered ones ("At the Taxi", "Snooker Hall", the strings of "The End").

Among them all, the most elaborate is "Soho To Glastonbury", poised between Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. A work that fails to stand out even in the film itself, "overshadowed" by Winehouse's own artistic achievements and by the other compositions on the "Songs from the Original Motion Picture". What saves the operation — in which, honestly, Cave and Ellis seem wasted — is the splendid composition "Song For Amy", where the heartfelt vocal performance of the Ink King is grafted onto the instrumental layers already heard.

Wild God: another face of God

Like Plato in "The School of Athens", Nick Cave's music points upward. Skeleton Tree confronted the impenetrable darkness of grief, with Ghosteen as its worthy celestial counterpart. Not that such themes and biblical references were absent from his earlier work — quite the opposite — but Cave has shown himself to be completely absorbed by this dimension, as demonstrated by the Seven Psalms and the confessional interview "Faith, Hope and Carnage". Not to mention the "Conversations" and that pandemic-era Carnage, which nonetheless opened with "Hand Of God". With the new release under the Bad Seeds name, the title track is a ritual of liberation. A rainfall after drought, ready to pour down as soon as the gospel-tinged surge of "Bring your spirit down" kicks in. We are shown a new God, wild, animalistic. He is searching for lost memories and girls from Jubilee Street, as the author himself explains on The Red Hand Files. The choir that propels the song skyward is a compositional trait characteristic of Cave's past work. I'm thinking of "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow" (No More Shall We Part, 2001) or "White Elephant" on Carnage. It's a device that will mark many songs on the new album Wild God (2024), making the listening experience predictable at times.

Although for "Wild God" the song it's most fitting to compare it to is "Jubilee Street", the street mentioned in the track. Having just met the Wild God, it's time for the Sunday ritual. In "Frogs", carried by Thomas Wydler's rhythm and Ellis's jagged strings, references range from Cain and Abel to Kris Kristofferson. The animal world has by now become a hallmark of the Australian's writing. Once the horses were bright: now they're cinnamon-colored ("Cinnamon Horses"). Despite the liberation of the Wild God, is death still present? Yes. Filtered through love. Hence "O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)", where in the closing moments we can hear the voice of Anita Lane.

Joyful. Nick Cave uses this word — more than once — in a recent interview on Stephen Colbert's Late Show to describe Wild God. A term that sounds like a sharp break, a caesura, after works marked by grief and pain. A lighter atmosphere foreshadowed by the behind-the-scenes glimpses shared, with the band recording in France at Miraval Studios and at Soundtree Studios in London. Statements and signs that found real confirmation in the songs, such as the sprawling "Song of the Lake", which opens the proceedings.

In Wild God the Bad Seeds make themselves heard again, with a contribution from Colin Greenwood of Radiohead, with whom Cave has shared the stage on recent tours. But the "conductor" remains the ever-present right-hand man Warren Ellis (here also producer). The return of the Bad Seeds — considering that Carnage was credited to Cave-Ellis alone, they were completely absent on Ghosteen, and their contributions were minimal on Skeleton Tree — doesn't mark any compositional changes. The guitars are barely audible (those who want them will have to wait for the announced "Grinderman 3") and the compositions still float, wrapped in Ellis's strings and interwoven choirs. The songs on Wild God can be seen as the missing link between Push The Sky Away and Skeleton Tree/Ghosteen. Among them, "Joy" is a crucial track both for the album and for Cave's recent output. While piano notes rise above synthetic rustlings worthy of "Skeleton Tree", a ghosteen — whether Arthur's or Jethro's doesn't matter — appears before Cave. And tells him that the time of grief is over (a message repeated in "Final Rescue Attempt"):

A ghost in giant sneakers, laughing stars around his head

Who sat down on the narrow bed, this flaming boy

Who sat down on the narrow bed, this flaming boy

Said, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy

When Cave sits down at the piano, we get one of the emotional peaks of the record. "Long Dark Night", in its beauty, seems to tell us that perhaps the worst is behind us. Lesser in emotional intensity than the two chapters that preceded it, and more conventional in compositional terms, Wild God still boasts excellent compositions: beyond the three advance singles, there's "Joy" and "Song Of The Lake". The weak point of the record, however, lies not in Cave's lyrics — always inspired and powerful — but in the overall construction of the songs, which makes them feel similar and many passages feel already heard.

From the European dates of the accompanying Wild God tour, the tracks for Live God (2025) were extracted. The choice of songs is the most interesting aspect of the release. The sequencing of the tracks — different from the live setlists — offers the perfect coexistence of Cave's different sides. Priority obviously goes to "Wild God" — enhanced by the presence of the four female voices — as made clear from the title itself and the opening one-two punch: "Frogs" and "Wild God". From here on, the journey weaves together the sublime passages — even more poignant live — of "Ghosteen", great classics — from "Tupelo" to "Papa Won't Leave You Henry" by way of "Into My Arms" — to the works written "solely" with Warren Ellis for "Carnage". Sealing the balance is "I Need You", stripped of the synthetic layers of "Skeleton Tree". Rediscovering one of the most intense and touching moments in Cave's output, we see how the artist continues "to make peace" with a record that — according to his own statements in "Faith, Hope and Carnage" — represents a complicated period, both artistically and personally. The result is a fully realized narrative, in which the various phases that have marked the musician's recent career and life (grief, pain, faith, isolation, return to life) interlock thanks to "I Need You", "Bright Horses" and "Joy". The listen contains the whole of Cave's soul: the wilder, more visceral side in direct contact with the audience, as in "Red Right Hand", as well as the side that, seated at the piano, touches the deepest chords. "Live God" not only makes you want to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds again as soon as possible, but I believe it also leaves a touch of bitterness for anyone who missed these performances.

(Contributions by Mauro Roma, Cristian Degano, Luca Fusari, Magda Di Genova, Michele Saran, Cristiano Orlando)

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