Sweet Misery: The Mellowing of Nick Cave

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 the music I loved. It wasn't played in supermarkets or on airplanes; it wasn't blasted out of passing cars; there wasn't a TV station devoted to it. In the U.K., in those pre-promo days, the one rock-oriented BBC program was so short of visuals that it had to be content with playing album tracks over vintage cartoons.