Nicholas Edward Cave is an Australian singer-songwriter, poet, writer and actor. He lives and works in Brighton, England. He is mainly known as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Nick Cave was born on 22 September 1957 in Warracknabeal, Australia. In 1973 he met Mick Harvey, Phil Calvert, John Cochivera, Brett Purcell, and Chris Coyne at high school in Caulfield near Melbourne. They formed a punk band with Cave as singer and played punk covers of, among others, Lou Reed, David Bowie and Alice Cooper. The band was named The Boys Next Door in 1977 and began to play more and more original songs. The band members at that time were Cave, Harvey, Calvert and Tracy Pew. In 1980, after moving to London and then West Berlin, the band changed its name to The Birthday Party. After achieving cult status in Australia and Europe, the band was disbanded at the end of 1983. In 1984, Nick Cave and Mick Harvey formed Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds with guitarist Blixa Bargeld.
Cave co-wrote the screenplay for the independently produced drama film Ghosts…of the Civil Dead from 1988. Together with Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey, he provided the soundtrack.
In 2014, the opera Shell Shock premiered at the Royal Theatre of La Monnaie in Brussels. This work was composed by Nicholas Lens to a libretto by Nick Cave.
On 14 July 2015, his son Arthur died after falling from a cliff. This happened during the recording of the album Skeleton Tree. The tragic consequences for Cave, his family and his work are documented in the documentary One More Time with Feeling. The album Ghosteen from 2019 was written and recorded after the events and deals with the themes and the process of coping.
Cave has an ambiguous relationship with the Christian faith. On his blog Red Hand Files, he concluded on a question about this: "So, do I believe in God? Well, I act like I do, for my own greater good. Does God exist? Maybe, I don’t know. Right now, God is a work in progress."
Top 2000
In the Top 2000 of 2020, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds appear with the following tracks:
source Wikipedia photo: public domain and Mika V
