Last LP : Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus, 2004
Classic Line-Up
Nick Cave - Vocals, Guitar, Organ
Mick Harvey - Guitar, Bass, Drums, Organ
Blixa Bargeld - Guitar
Sound And Vision
1983 through to 1988 : Cocaine thinned hollow cheeks. Eyes that burrow into you and the air of someone who you really wouldn't introduce your daughter to. Music continuing from the punk fury of The Birthday Party, but varying it with softer, albeit just as dark, ballads.
1990 through to 1997 : A loved up Nick Cave writing genuinely romantic songs of the kind that tickle your soul. Image-wise, the look of an uneasy child-minder looking after his best friends kids when he'd rather be eating them than looking after them, but you know, he tries. His heart, still full of darkness, is in the right place. Geniune and beautiful.
1997 through to 2005 : An ageing Nick starting to lose the richness of his former vocal quality. The hairstyle has remained the same throughout his twenty odd years solo career, and indeed, was the same even before then! The music is still well worth listening to.
A Common Misconception
That Nick Cave is a goth. I know it may seem shocking to hear this for many, but Nick Cave was never a goth, even if he did inadvertently give birth to it via The Birthday Party taking the piss with 'Release With Bats'. Nick Cave actually covers a lot of lighter areas with his songs as well as the darker narratives. Nobody ever called Tom Waits a goth, for example. But then, nobody in England the home of the goths, even knew who Tom Waits was back in the 80s. Goth was about cliches within the music and a strict visual style that invariably involved looking pale, about to die and that your appearence gave your audience the belief you lived and dreamed in a graveyard every night. Nick Cave not a goth? Well, no. He's an Australian. He drinks beer, for godsakes! He drinks whisky. Is the devil a goth? No. The devil is red.
How To Buy
Nick Cave's catalogue is a funny little dark place to inhabit. On the one hand, several of his albums offer almost nothing but brilliance, and this brilliance arrives through a varied set of songs. A couple of his albums manage such brilliance without even being varied, they produce such a cohesive, captivating mood that the lack of variety isn't a problem, rather the total contrary. A few albums, particularly in the last ten years or so, see Nick trying a little too hard to be epic. Having said that, his latest Abbatoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus is just so packed full of great songs that these songs easily outweight the lesser ones to produce a genuine modern day Cave classic. That isn't one of the three albums i've picked however to introduce a beginner into the marvellous world of Mr Nick Cave.
His first four or five solo albums each seemed a little more advanced than the previous one, if that's the correct word to use. Each seemed to move a little further away from the stylistic dead end that the mighty Birthday Party had become by the time they imploded. As such, and as it can easily be described as drawing a line under the early Nick Cave era, the marvellously brilliant ( and varied ) Tender Prey shouldn't disappoint anybody looking for a place to start with Nick Cave. Well, let's face it. You're not going to buy his albums chronologically. At least, I hope you're not. There are people that do such things with various different kinds of artists, and it's a bloody stupid thing to do. Anyhow, moving onwards, Henrys Dream saw Nick produce a mixture of the gorgeous romantic ballad types of songs that he did on The Good Son and the more aggressive moments from Tender Prey. There was various disparaging comments from the Cave camp at the time about ( Neil Young producer ) David Briggs mixing and production, but Henry's Dream remains one of the most magnificently varied and powerful sets of songs Mr Cave has ever put down to tape.
Lastly, i'll tip The Boatmans Call as the third of the first three Nick Cave albums you should buy. This one is utterly cohesive, entirely in the same kind of mood, but anyone slagging it off for not being musically varied is entirely missing the point. This is an album that takes you to other places, nearly all of them dark. However, each dark place The Boatmans Call takes you to contains a nuggett of light and love within it. As such, The Boatmans Call is an album of immensely powerful emotional pull. Not every Nick Cave fan will recommend this record to you, a good percentage of Nick fans will only listen to the more agressive stuff. Those kind of Nick Cave fans remain, as far as this writer is concerned, outside of the loop. Going back to the common misconception, Nick is more than burning eyes and lyrics about murdering whores. He's also a man that's written some of the most beautiful love songs of recent decades.
Download Nick Cave
A selection of Nick Cave songs to download from the web, also forming a nifty 79 minute CD compilation.
1) Into My Arms
2) Lime Tree Arbour
3) People Ain't No Good
4) Tupelo
5) In The Ghetto
6) From Her To Eternity
7) The Good Son
8) The Ship Song
9) I Had A Dream Joe
10) Straight To You
11) Loverman
12) Breathless
13) The Mercy Seat
14) New Morning
15) You're Funeral My Trial
16) Bring It On
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