Nick Cave
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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
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: *****
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: ****
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: ***
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: ***
List of articles in the library
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. ...
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? ...
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 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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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: 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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: 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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" ...
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 ...
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 ...
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: 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: 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 ...
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 ...
Interview by James Medd, The Word, December 2003
After years on the dark side of the street, Nick Cave lightens up. ...
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" ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
Interview by Jon Savage, The Observer, 15 March 1992
JON SAVAGE MEETS THE SINGER KNOWN AS THE PUNK MESSIAH ...
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. ...
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: 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. ...
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: 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 ...
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), ...
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: 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... ...
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. ...
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 ...
Retrospective and Interview by Michel Faber, Rock's Backpages, August 2002
Novelist Michel Faber remembers the Young Nick Cave. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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: 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. ...
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 ...
"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 ...
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. ...
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... ...
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 ...
see also Birthday Party, The
see also Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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