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Nick Cave

Nick Cave

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Rage Has Not Withered Him

Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 18 March 2001

Nick Cave never thought he'd get past 40, but heroin and self-hate are behind him now. Married and "reborn", he writes nine to five in ...

Audio interviews

Nick Cave (1986)

Interview by Mat Snow, Rock's Backpages audio, August 1986

The interview was meant to be about The Bad Seeds' Kicking Against The Pricks, but swiftly degenerates into an attack on music journalism in general, and interviewer Mat Snow in particular

File format: mp3; file size: 43.9meg, interview length: 45' 44" sound quality: ***

Nick Cave (1988)

Interview by Kris Needs, Rock's Backpages audio, December 1988

The Head Seed talks about his writing (the collection King Ink and new novel And The Ass Saw The Angel); his work on the movie Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and his latest album Tender Prey.

File format: mp3; file size: 44.4mb, interview length: 48' 27" sound quality: ***

Nick Cave (1995)

Interview by Andy Gill, Rock's Backpages audio, Winter 1995

The head Bad Seed talks about his Murder Ballads album: the starting point, 'O'Malley's Bar; the attraction of the murder ballads narrative; the swift recording process; his own anger never tempting him to murder; his relationship with crime fiction; the pleasure of writing about violence; his take on the 'Stagger Lee' story, and his duet with Kylie Minogue.

File format: mp3; file size: 32.4mb, interview length: 33' 46" sound quality: *****

Nick Cave (2004)

Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages audio, 11 August 2004

The Bad Seeds frontman talks in depth about, among many things, his art; the departure of Blixa Bargeld; his relationship with Mick Harvey; the degree of biography in his songs; heroin and God, and the Australian-ness of himself and his work.

File format: mp3; file size: 61.5mb, interview length: 1h 07' 12" sound quality: ****

List of articles in the library

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Sometimes Pleasure Heads Must Burn - A Manhattan Melodrama starring the Birthday Party

Profile and Interview by Barney Hoskyns, New Musical Express, 17 October 1981

IT'S A CHILL, exposed night in New York City. The East Coast has only just recovered from a week of torrential rains, and winds sweeping ...

Primal Pain at the Psychos' Party: The Birthday Party at the Venue, London

Live Review by Barney Hoskyns, New Musical Express, 13 March 1982

WHEN The Birthday Party last desecrated this tabernacle of modern nightlife, a generally sloppy show produced the intemperate engorgement of Drunk On The Pope's Blood, ...

Lydia Lunch: Listen with Lydia

Interview by Chris Bohn, New Musical Express, 18 June 1983

Settle back in your couch and listen to Lydia Lunch — former New York No Wave sewer queen, would-be agony aunt, chanteuse, the Bette Midler ...

Nick Cave: Sad Nick

Profile and Interview by Clinton Walker, Stiletto, February 1984

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY are probably the most important rock band Australia has ever produced. They made music that was blatantly rock at a time when ...

Nick Cave: If This Is Heaven I'm Bailing Out

Interview by Don Watson, New Musical Express, 12 May 1984

THE ENIGMA of The Birthday Party, like that of Kaspar Hauser, begins with grunts in the darkness and ends in murder. ...

Nick Cave: From Her To Eternity (Mute)

Review by Mat Snow, New Musical Express, 19 May 1984

NICK CAVE'S From Her To Eternity is one of the greatest rock albums ever made. Now read on... ...

Screamin' Jay Hawkins: The Man Who Ate Nick Cave

Interview by Lynden Barber, New Musical Express, 19 July 1986

The bats screech, and inside a rockin' coffin, something stirs...up fly the nails and out pops SCREAMIN' JAY HAWKINS, longtime voodoo swamp beast back to ...

Nick Cave: Prick Me Do I Not Bleed?

Interview by Mat Snow, New Musical Express, 23 August 1986

AMONG NICK Cave's most prized possessions is a hardcover green book stuffed with press cuttings and private observations written in his painstakingly spidery hand. ...

Nick Cave: Your Funeral…My Trial

Review by Lucy O'Brien, New Musical Express, 8 November 1986

MANSON KILLED a woman. Burroughs killed a woman. Nicholas Cave, performance artist, amoral Baal-like poet and tortured balladeer, sings of killing a woman. ...

Of Misogyny, Murder and Melancholy: Meeting Nick Cave

Interview by Simon Reynolds, National Student , 1987

TALKING TO NICK CAVE is a bit of a trial. He’s not really a proper person. Like many artists, what makes him a genius also ...

Nick Cave: Lizard of Oz

Interview by Chris Roberts, Melody Maker, 23 January 1988

AFTER A YEAR AWAY, NICK CAVE RETURNS FROM THE WILDERNESS WITH ANOTHER LADELFUL OF PEARLS AND PESSIMISM. CHRIS ROBERTS MEETS THE MAN WHO SEES EVERYTHING ...

Nick Cave: The Needle And The Damage Done

Report and Interview by Jack Barron, New Musical Express, 13 August 1988

NICK CAVE – the voice of desperation; singer, writer, actor, junkie! JACK BARRON, branded by the Bad Seed a "filthy little prick", gets to grips ...

Mark E Smith, Nick Cave & Shane MacGowan: The Three Horsemen Of The Apocalypse

Interview by James Brown, Sean O'Hagan, New Musical Express, 25 February 1989

For its second pop summit of the year, NME lent SEAN O'HAGAN and JAMES BROWN £10 each to buy SHANE MACGOWAN, MARK E SMITH and ...

Nick Cave: Scala Cinema, London

Live Review by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 16 September 1989

THIS IS a remarkable, grandiose conceit. The idea of Nick Cave reading from his first novel, The Ass Saw The Angel, is initially as antiquated ...

Exit The '80s — Goth: Bats Out Of Hell

Overview by Cathi Unsworth, Sounds, 23 September 1989

It's been the decade of the goth — but, somewhere along the line, the innovation of the Birthday Party, the Banshees and the Sisters gave ...

Nick Cave: The Return of the Prodigal Son

Interview by John Robb, Sounds, 14 April 1990

Throughout the turmoil of the ‘80s, Nick Cave was on some sort of slow development course. From the pithy pop blunders of Boys Next Door ...

Nick Cave: Worshipping The Son

Interview by Cathi Unsworth, Sounds, 24 November 1990

For the second of our special Fan Files, we look at Nick Cave, the singer who's so damn slinky and shaggable that even women want ...

A Lighter Shade of Cave

Interview by Jon Savage, The Observer, 15 March 1992

JON SAVAGE MEETS THE SINGER KNOWN AS THE PUNK MESSIAH ...

Nick Cave: Titter Ye Not

Interview by Andy Gill, Q, May 1992

NICK CAVE SIGHS. He sighs a lot, as if weary of the world and all that's in it. ...

Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue: The Devil and Miss Bones

Interview by Johnny Cigarettes, New Musical Express, 7 October 1995

Together at last — two great antipodean, pop phenomena who have, in their individual ways, made a unique contribution to the business called show. NICK ...

Nick Cave

Interview by Dave Thompson, Alternative Press, 1996

MIDWAY THROUGH Neglected Murderesses, artist Edward Gorey's gallery of feasibly fictional ghoulesses, we meet Sarah Jane "Batears" Olafsen, a cold-hearted killer who "hacked to collops" ...

Kylie Minogue: "I'm a drag queen trapped in a woman's body"

Interview by Sylvia Patterson, New Musical Express, 6 September 1997

Crikey! Has KYLIE gone mad? Has working with Nick Cave, the Manics and associating with Shaun Ryder finally pushed her over the edge? And has ...

Hal Willner's Harry Smith Project at Nick Cave's Meltdown

Live Review by John L. Walters, Frieze, 9 September 1999

HAL WILLNER has been described as an "auteur" producer, but he doesn't have a trademark sound, like Trevor Horn or Quincy Jones, and he's not ...

Sweet Misery: The Mellowing of Nick Cave

Review by Nick Hornby, The New Yorker, 28 May 2001

IT'S THE SHEER UBIQUITY of pop music that presents such an obstacle to older fans. When I was fifteen, it was satisfyingly hard to hear ...

Co-Dependent: A Potted History of Drugs and Australian Music

Essay by Clinton Walker, Meanjin, 1 June 2002

I CAN STILL remember my first joint. All the usual jibes notwithstanding (memory loss, not inhaling, whatever), I remember it vividly: It was at the ...

Nick Cave: A Boy Next Door

Retrospective and Interview by Michel Faber, Rock's Backpages, August 2002

Novelist Michel Faber remembers the Young Nick Cave. ...

Nick Cave: Makes Darkly Melodic Records of Rare Beauty

Interview by Robert Sandall, The Word, March 2003

He gets up at five a.m. and works. He leads an ordered domestic life. Bob Dylan likes him. He is clean and sober. ...

Nick Cave: Hammersmith Apollo, London

Live Review by Ian Watson, Yahoo! Music, June 2003

AT EXACTLY twenty seven minutes past eight, the polite but firm announcement is made. "Nick Cave will take the stage in three minutes." ...

Nick Cave: Out of the Shadows

Interview by James Medd, The Word, December 2003

After years on the dark side of the street, Nick Cave lightens up. ...

"I Wasn't Sid Vicious": Nick Cave

Interview by Stephen Dalton, The Times, September 2004

FOR A HIGH-MINDED musical elder statesman like Nick Cave, cultural credibility comes in many forms. The 47-year-old Australian export has hosted London's Meltdown festival, been ...

The Lyre of Cave: An Interview

Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages, September 2004

RBP: Could you have imagined, all those years ago, that you’d have this amazingly even and consistent career? ...

Old Saint Nick: Nick Cave

Profile and Interview by Barney Hoskyns, Dazed & Confused, October 2004

ON ABATTOIR BLUES, the cheerily-titled first half of the new double album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, there is a song called ‘There ...

Nick Cave: The MOJO Interview

Interview by Phil Sutcliffe, MOJO, January 2005

It's been a 25-year trip from hard drugs and punch-ups in the Birthday Party to life as a 9-to-5 songwriter/genius. So, in a world of ...

Nick Cave: The Songwriter Speaks

Interview by Debbie Kruger, Weekend Australian, 30 July 2005

Writer Debbie Kruger spoke to the biggest names in Australian music for her new book Songwriters Speak. In this exclusive extract, Nick Cave explains why ...

Utah Saints: Sundance Music Festival

Interview by Steven R Rosen, Harp, May 2006

...

Nick Cave and Australia's Bad Deeds

Report and Interview by Jason Cohen, Rolling Stone, 8 May 2006

Rocker's screenplay for The Proposition considers Australia's "open wounds" ...

Nick Cave: The Proposition, Pop Music and Leonard Cohen

Report and Interview by Steven R Rosen, Cincinnati CityBeat, 7 June 2006

THE PROPOSITION, director John Hillcoat's solemn and violently unsentimental Australian western, has its fair share of stars in the cast. ...

Grinderman: Grinderman

Review by Barney Hoskyns, Uncut, April 2007

THE NEW NAME – the alter ego, the Bad Seeds doppelganger – sounds like some hideous Saw-style horror flick: Nick Cave recasts The Hitcher in ...

Nick Cave: Back to the Ballroom

Book Excerpt by Clinton Walker, 'Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave', 2009

I FIRST MET Nick Cave in Melbourne in early 1978 when we were both, I daresay, players in a new music underground that was still ...

Nick Cave: King of Pain

Profile and Interview by Phil Sutcliffe, MOJO, March 2009

"TEA? PIECE OF CAKE?" says Nick Cave civilly. After an earlier on-tour interview at the Malmaison Hotel, Manchester, he's invited MOJO to his office, a ...

A Rake's Progress: Nick Cave's Death of Bunny Munro

Book Review by Mark Mordue, The Australian Literary Review, August 2009

IS BUNNY MUNRO Nick Cave's version of Willy Loman with a hard on? In The Death of Bunny Munro the Australian rock 'n' roll singer ...

Nick Cave: The Death of Bunny Munro (Canongate Books)

Book Review by Leyla Sanai, Rock's Backpages, September 2009

NICK CAVE was never going to settle for "just" being a rock star. Right back from when I was first aware of him, in the ...

Nick Cave: Original Sin

Interview by James Medd, The Word, October 2009

Nick Cave's new fiction hero is a monstrous expression of the male psyche grotesquely obsessed with sex, he tells James Medd. Did he evolve from ...

Marianne Faithfull: Give My Love To London

Review and Interview by Terry Staunton, Uncut, October 2014

Recuperating from serious injury, the veteran chanteuse puts her back into one of her most personal records... ...

Nick Cave: The SICK BAG Song (Canongate)

Book Review by Barney Hoskyns, The Guardian, 28 March 2015

WHEN YOU'VE personally witnessed Nick Cave nodding out on heroin and slowly lowering his head into a candle flame – his mass of dyed black ...

Nick Cave: One More Time With Feeling, Skeleton Tree and the power and language of grief

Interview by Mark Mordue, The Guardian, 19 September 2016

The subject matter is heavy – the death of a child – but the results are divine in an album that emerges from struggle to ...

One More Time with Nick Cave

Report and Interview by Toby Creswell, Rock's Backpages, January 2017

"NICK IS NAVIGATING a completely new world," says Andrew Dominik of his friend Nick Cave. That world began eighteen months ago when Cave's teenage son ...

The Love and Terror of Nick Cave

Profile and Interview by Chris Heath, GQ, 27 April 2017

For four decades, Nick Cave has been at the edge of music, putting his spin on everything from punk rock to lovesick ballads – much ...

Ratso Has A Record (and a duet with Nick Cave)

Comment by Michael Simmons, Dangerous Minds, 25 April 2019

WHAT MOST PEOPLE dream about, Larry "Ratso" Sloman makes happen. Anyone who's read Ratso's first book, 1978's On The Road With Bob Dylan, has witnessed ...

Nick Cave: The Journalist and the Singer

Book Excerpt by Mark Mordue, 'Boy On Fire' (Allen & Unwin), February 2021

THE FIRST TIME I ever spoke to Nick Cave was in a phone interview to promote his second solo album, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), ...

Nick Cave: "I don't think art should be in the hands of the virtuous"

Interview by Kate Mossman, New Statesman, 24 November 2022

The musician on why Morrissey matters, his deepening faith and grieving for his sons. ...

see also Birthday Party, The

see also Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

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