To be honest, I could happily include the whole album here but I have managed to whittle it down to three: ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ the spectacular and aching ‘When I First Came To Town’ and ‘Brother, My Cup Is Empty’. My partner gave me Henry’s Dream as a birthday present and it would have been churlish to say “No thanks, he’s not my cup of tea” so I played it in the car and over a matter of weeks I fell deeply and, it transpired, irrevocably in love with it. It is from here that we proceed to what is and has always been my favourite Nick Cave album, possibly because it was the first album I owned by him. I always loved this when it was played live, delivered poker-faced but with clear affection between the two men. I’ve twinned this with ‘The Weeping Song’ from the same album, a dark yet tongue-in-cheek duet between Nick and his foil – and, I think, artistic muse – Blixa Bargeld. It’s a love song, of course, with a twist of violence that is often overlooked by the would-be paramours perhaps seeking to seduce through the medium of song, with a lyric that ranges from “Come sail your ships around me/And burn your bridges down/We make a little history, baby/Every time you come around” to “Your face has fallen sad now/For you know the time is nigh/When I must remove your wings/And you, you must try to fly”. (Fear not, in just a few paragraphs time we will dabble with some earlier tracks, as you’ll see).Īnd so we begin with what would become one of Cave’s most enduring and popular songs, ‘The Ship Song’. Cave had been putting out pretty much an album a year since leaving The Birthday Party but it was on this album that everything gelled for the first time: the song-writing, the performance, and, crucially, The Bad Seeds, now including Mick Harvey, Thomas Wydler, and Blixa Bargeld who would be stalwarts of the band for years to come. It’s for this reason that we will start with his sixth album, The Good Son. We shall trip lightly together through the more immediate songs of his back catalogue, to introduce the newcomer and interested listener to the works of this most extraordinary artist. So while I could write you an essay and compile you a playlist based on any one of those themes, what I’m attempting here is a taster menu that will leave you hungry for more and ready to explore some of his richer dishes and those that are a little more of an acquired taste. There are songs of murder and violence many surprising and multi-faceted paeans to love insightful studies of humanity and the humour, grace, and inventiveness of Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds.
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(Nick never needed to take himself too seriously we could – and would – do that for him). One could write playlists based around the recurring themes in his writing, of love, loss, violence, and horror, all of which are consistently underpinned by both intelligence and dark humour. It’s an immense, dense, and richly rewarding body of work. The first Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds album was released to little fanfare on the 18th of June 1984, to be followed over the next thirty-five years by a further sixteen studio albums.
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Words & curation by Fenner Pearson, cover art by Lina Moon UP JUMPED THE DEVIL: LOVE LETTERS FROM NICK CAVE