Nick Cave is an Australian rock musician, composer, author, screenwriter, and actor. He is best known for being the frontman of The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. He has released 14 studio albums and has contributed to numerous soundtracks. He has also published two volumes of text and plays and a Southern Gothic novel.
Nick Cave is an Australian rock musician, composer, author, screenwriter and actor. He is best known for being the frontman of the bands The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
Born September 22, 1957 in Victoria, Australia, Nick Cave was introduced to literature and music at a young age. His father was an English teacher and his mother a librarian. Raised Anglican, he sang in the boys’ choir at Wangaratta Cathedral as a child and later joined the choir at his boarding school, Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne. In 1973, he formed a cover band with classmates Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew and Phill Calvert.
After secondary school, Nick Cave went on to study painting at Caulfield Institute of Technology in 1976. The following year, his life would change dramatically following his father’s death in a car accident. Cave began using heroin, a habit he would continue until 1999, and dropped out of school, focusing his attention on his band.
The group was called Boys Next Door and began playing mostly original music. Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978 and they released their first album in 1979. In 1980, the group moved to London and renamed themselves The Birthday Party. Nick Cave’s early music was frightening and challenging, both in his aggressive vocal style and his cryptically nihilistic and blasphemous lyrics.
The Birthday Party disbanded in 1984 due to personality conflicts between Howard and Cave, both heavy drug users. Nick Cave and Mick Harvey soon formed a new band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. They have released 14 successful studio albums, all but one of which have made the UK top 100. Their latest album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, was released on April 8, 2008.
Nick Cave’s style has become increasingly subdued over the years and he has experimented with an ever wider range of musical styles. His songwriting, while impressionistic in his Birthday Party songs, leaned more towards ballads and detailed storytelling in the Bad Seeds. In 2006, Cave started a new project with fellow Bad Seeds members Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos called Grinderman. The band features Cave on electric guitar and has a more garage sound than his previous work.
In addition to his rock albums, Nick Cave has contributed to a number of soundtracks, including Shrek, Shrek 2, Dumb and Dumber and the Scream trilogy. His music has appeared in many of director Wim Wender’s films, such as Wings of Desire, in which Cave also performs live. Nick Cave wrote or co-wrote the film score Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (1988), To Have and to Hold (1996), The Proposition (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James the Coward Robert Ford (2007) . ), and The Road (for release in 2008).
Nick Cave has published two volumes of text and plays, titled King Ink (1988) and King Ink II (1987), as well as a Southern Gothic novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), which shares many themes and linguistic devices with the lyrics of his songs. He also wrote the screenplay for director John Hillcoat’s 2005 film The Proposition. He appeared as an actor in Hillcoat’s Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and opposite Johnny Depp in Johnny Suede (1991).
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