Nick Cave

It's easy to build a cursed aura through punk aesthetics, steeped in violence and rage, or by playing the part of a demonic gothic bluesman. Far harder, however, is to pull it off by letting love in. Let Love In. This is the bold new gamble that Nick Cave takes on in the mid-1990s. A gamble won hands down, it must be said straight away, so much so that it's from this point on that the Australian songwriter earns the untouchable status he still holds today, managing to turn every one of his works into a triumph, sometimes almost regardless of quality. This, then, is the decisive turning point that transforms the former basement demon of The Birthday Party into King Ink, the monarch of an ever-growing cult following that has remained steadfast and loyal to this day.

But in truth, the impossible mission of "Let Love In" is nothing more than evolution through continuity. Because even love, in Nick Cave's turbulent universe, turns into apocalypse. Or rather, into a hurricane: "On a gathering storm comes a tall, handsome man/ In a dusty black coat with a red right hand", he sings on one of the album's key tracks, that "Red Right Hand" which later became famous as the theme tune of the TV series "Peaky Blinders". And again: “Once there came a storm in the form of a girl/ It blew to pieces my snug little world/ And sometimes I swear I can still hear her howl/ Down through the wreckage and the ruins”, he shouts on "Ain't Gonna Rain Anymore". Could he be referring to Viviane Carneiro, the alluring model/journalist who had bewitched him in Brazil and with whom he'd just had a son (Luke)? Establishing that only matters up to a point. What's certain is that it's precisely through the restless ballads of "Let Love In" that Nick Cave perfects a new kind of "love song". Songs that don't describe everyday situations or ordinary feelings in a realistic way, but instead elevate love to a mystical, supernatural dimension, often filtering it through religious or symbolic imagery, in the tradition of classical or Romantic poetry, with language that's always solemn and inspired, yet without abandoning that dark streak that has always run through his work. "Let Love In" is therefore an album about love, as its title suggests: the magic word is even repeated in the titles of four out of ten songs. But it's a toxic love, terribly treacherous, dancing on the edge of the abyss and often plunging straight into it.

Do you love me? Like I love you

The eighth album credited to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "Let Love In" was recorded at the Harrow Road studios in London, produced by Tony Cohen. Backing the Bard of Melbourne was an all-star line-up: Mick Harvey, Martyn P. Casey, Blixa Bargeld, Conway Savage and Thomas Wydler, plus Mick Geyer on backing vocals. "Bad seeds" now flourishing in full bloom, in service of a frontman on dazzling form. And that a new masterpiece was on the way, after the high point of "The Good Son" four years earlier, was already signaled by the (killer) single that preceded the album. A singular single in its own way too, since the unsettling piano ballad "Do You Love Me?" runs to almost six minutes. All of it played out on a nervous tension wound to breaking point, at times almost unbearable. It kicks off with the sinister rumble of Casey's bass rattling the subwoofer, then Wydler's snare hit landing like a gunshot, opening the curtain onto a bed of synths from which Cave's gorgeous piano riff takes flight – a film-noir or horror-movie music box, take your pick. King Ink's delivery is a slow descent into hell that detonates – in chorus – into the obsessive, deeply menacing refrain: “Do you love me?/ Do you love me?/ Do you love me?/ Do you love me?/ Like I love you”. An offer that cannot be refused, for a sick and wicked love. The song's lyrics, in fact, alternate between an almost schizophrenic portrait of a relationship – with the beloved capable of offering both liberation and torment ("I found God and all his devils inside her… She had a heartful of love and devotion/ She had a mindful of tyranny and terror") – and the first-person account of a boy's violent sexual initiation in a cinema. Cave sings in a voice pierced by despair, expressing the mistrust that corrodes a relationship, while the pulsing organ, the magnetic piano melody and the driving bass brush up against 1960s Memphis soul. It's a feat the songwriter would follow up on the very last track of the album, "Do You Love Me? (Part 2)", sparer and slower than the first part, as if finally trying to defuse a tension that had remained sky-high throughout all ten tracks of the record. But there is nothing reassuring about this Lynchian nightmare of a nightclub cabaret dissolving into ruin.
"There was a vague idea that one's first experience of love determines the capacity you'll have in later years to express your emotions," Cave would later reveal. "So the song was about a lot of things: creative impotence, the inability to write, the inability to relate to a woman in the right way… I worked enormously on this piece. I went through hundreds of different transformations, and I hoped I'd kept an air of mystery around the song, while at the same time giving it an unsettling quality."

By the end of summer 1993, Cave had written most of the material for the album, and in early September the band gathered for two weeks at Townhouse III Studios. Both versions of "Do You Love Me?" were recorded during those sessions: Rowland Howard and Tex Perkins of The Cruel Sea contribute backing vocals on the chorus of Part 1, while Katherine Blake and Donna McEvitt of Miranda Sex Garden add ethereal harmonies to Part 2. Work on the album then came to a long halt when the Bad Seeds set off on a twelve-date European tour, beginning in Prague on 21 September, to promote the "Live Seeds" CD.
The second single, released shortly after the album, "Loverman" is even more disturbing. It recounts, in fact, a case of sexual violence from the rapist's point of view: "Take off that dress I'm coming down, I'm your loverman". Here too, the piano builds the song's backbone, but the chorus detonates with a raw energy reminiscent of one of The Birthday Party's early punk numbers, while an impassive Casey relentlessly repeats his bluesy bass line. An animalistic blues in the style of Robert Johnson, in which everything grows ever more unsettling, from the devilish whispered voices in the background to the moment Cave even uses the song's title as an acronym to describe the character's wicked desires, who, in a perverse role reversal, invites his victim to rape him:

L is for love, baby
O is for only you that I do
V is for loving virtually all that you are
E is for loving almost everything that you do
R is for rape me and
M is for murder me and
A is for answering all of my prayers
N is for knowing your loverman’s going to

The tone of the delivery, aptly described by Chris Bohn as "somewhere between Barry White and one of Dennis Hopper's more unhinged creations", pairs the visceral explosions of the chorus with the menacing soul openings of the verses. Passages written by Cave directly in the studio. "Nick felt the song lacked drive," Mick Geyer would recall. "When it came time to record the vocal, he kept repeating it over and over until the voice itself developed patterns and rhythms like a real instrument. Then he doubled the vocal track, added grunts and shouts for emphasis, and all of that lifted the track." An abyss of horror for one of the album's most incendiary episodes, which would in time receive two illustrious covers, courtesy of Metallica (on "Garage Inc.", 1998) and Martin Gore of Depeche Mode on his 2003 solo album "Counterfeit²".

Bloodstained hands

The third single – and the definitive knockout blow for the few listeners still standing – is the aforementioned "Red Right Hand", introduced by its famous tolling bells, for another dark, anthology-worthy parable. This time the target is the selfishness of a greedy, devious society, embodied by those TV talk-show hosts capable of wringing morbid confessions out of guests to boost ratings: "You'll see him in your head, on the Tv screen/ And hey buddy, I'm warning you to turn it off". The literary reference in the title – from John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" (1667), where the phrase alludes to God's avenging hand – also seems to fuse with the symbol of a Northern Irish unionist paramilitary organization, which, with the necessary historical liberties, appears precisely in that "Peaky Blinders" series that would make the song famous. So much so that the tall, handsome man who arrives amid stormy clouds in a long, dusty black coat with a right hand red with blood seems to be none other than Thomas Shelby/Cillian Murphy. A full-blown invective, then, driven by a taut, tightly wound funk riff and punctuated by drum hits that crash like thunder, while Blixa Bargeld's rhythm guitar cuts through, sharp and drenched in echo as ever, setting up a tense, bluesy atmosphere into which the organ creeps with a horror-movie melody. "During the recording sessions Blixa told me it was the best guitar sound he'd ever gotten," Tony Cohen would later reveal. In a hypothetical sequel, titled "Red Right Hand II", the song took the form of a first-person narrative by a schizophrenic serial killer who murders his wife and three children, only to change identity again and ensnare another family doomed to tragedy. But this track, together with the equally bloody "O'Malley's Bar" (recorded a year earlier), would lay the groundwork for Cave's next, equally successful project, dedicated to the "Murder Ballads".

A terrain of tales of love and death that already took solid root in “Let Love In”, populated by macabre, bloodthirsty figures. Like “the cruel man” who punished “Nobody's Baby” for things that “even love won't allow”. Originally written for Johnny Cash, before Cave decided to record it himself, it's an aching ballad with a guitar melody that recalls Van Morrison's “Here Comes The Night” (Van Morrison), the Australian's grief-stricken crooning propped up by piano and drums for a soft, southern gothic-flavoured flow, not too far from the acoustic-ballad template Cave would go on to establish with “The Boatman's Call” (1997). No less bleak is the story of “Jangling Jack”, a naive Englishman visiting New York who's overwhelmed by the violence of the New World: he walks into a bar, toasts to the United States and its “losers and winners”, and is immediately killed, finding clarity only in his death throes to understand the reality he's in: “He sees the city gone crazy, sees the dead stacked up in piles”. Cave would later call it “a piece of junk about the senseless, irrational and repellent violence of America”: a pretext to vent his disgust at a country he'd come to loathe. Musically, though, the Australian songwriter goes back to his roots, with a frenzied piece of punk-rock that burns itself out in under three minutes amid whip-crack guitars and demonic howls.

My funeral, my trial

But Cave's dark side always comes paired with a scorching self-irony. Here he is, then, staging his own obituary in the melodramatic “Lay Me Low”, a grotesque funeral march describing King Ink's coffin borne by a procession stretching “ten miles” (“The motorcade will be ten miles long/ The world will join together for a farewell song/ When they put me down below”) and interviews with his old teachers revealing he was “one of God's sorrier creatures”, though not without room for more serious, thoughtful observations such as: “My friends will give up the fight, they'll see my work in a different light, when I'm gone”.
And the self-pity takes hold in the 2/4 rockabilly of “Thirsty Dog”, presented as a disposable “trashcan song”, but actually one of the most clear-eyed personal reflections Cave has ever written. With echoes of Leonard Cohen's framing of love as open hostility in “There Is A War”, Nick rattles off an unrelenting litany of apologies to his lover, reflecting on his own self-destructive existence: “I was not equipped to know how to care, and on the occasions I came up for air, I saw my life and wondered what the hell I had been living”. The devastating final verse closes with prophetic lines: “I'm sorry that I'm always pissed, I'm sorry that I exist, And when I look into your eyes, I can see you're sorry too”. The chorus has an overwhelming immediacy, while the backing vocals (“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'M SORRY”) swell progressively until they interlace with Cave's own refrain.

Songs of lost love

But “Let Love In” is also an album about lost love, framed by two aching ballads recounting two separate defeats. The near-title track “I Let Love In”, reportedly written in just fifteen minutes, sinks into blues-country languor, its wrenching guitar melody underpinning a chord progression as simple and hymn-like as a traditional passed down through generations. Its lyrics spell out what can happen if you heed the title's exhortation, offering a merciless portrait of the trials and rewards inherent in a relationship: “Tesoro, tu sei la punizione/ Per tutti i miei precedenti peccati/ Ho lasciato entrare l’amore/ Nella porta si aprì solo uno spiraglio/ Ma l’amore era scaltro e audace/ La mia vita mi è scorsa davanti agli occhi/ Un orrore da ammirare”. It closes with chilling lines: “Far worse to be Love's lover than the lover that Love has scorned”.
Another testament to a stormy love that leaves nothing but devastation and rubble in its wake is what remains perhaps the album's most beautiful ballad, “Ain't Gonna Rain Anymore”. “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”, weeps the repentant Bard, over soft piano chimes, with Warren Ellis's violin creeping into the band's sound for the first time to underline the protagonist's quiet desperation: “E non pioverà più/ Ora la mia bambina è andata/ Ora non ho nessuno da abbracciare/ Ora sono solo di nuovo”, he sings, subdued. And again: “Quando me ne andrò/ Informeranno il capo della polizia/ Che farà un sospiro di sollievo/ Dirà che ero un delinquente, un bandito, un ladro”. All the while, a hook that's both elegant and utterly irresistible captivates whatever is left of the listener. “While writing the song I was looking for an apt metaphor for a certain woman, and after much thought I concluded that rain was perfect,” Cave would recall.

A perfect synthesis of the Birthday Party's feverish post-punk, the murky gothic-blues of his early solo years, and the majestic singer-songwriter ballads of “The Good Son”, “Let Love In” is, in this writer's judgment, one of the absolute high points of Cave's songbook. A Dantean circle in which demons, criminals and murderers, reunited with their victims, atone for their sins, united by a desperate — and irredeemable — need to be loved. It's the album that would bring the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds name full, lasting success: their first silver disc, a place in the UK Top 20 and the Australian Top 10, markets in which their presence has only grown stronger since 1994.
Since then, the Australian songwriter's path has been strewn with triumphs, adoring crowds and critical acclaim, as well as the well-known, terrible family losses. But to seek out the pure essence of the Cave sound, the bad seeds of a style that remains unique and unmatched to this day, one must always let love in, through these ten desperate, unforgettable songs.

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24/05/2026