Korowa Girls’ School

Influenced by David Bowie and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Nick Cave in costume and make-up, prancing on stage, was joined by his more subdued friends Phill Calvert, Chris Coyne, John Cocivera, Howard (last name unknown), Mick Harvey, and Brett Purcell in a group established while students at Caulfield Grammar. Performing at school socials such as those hosted by Korowa Girls’ School, along with church halls, the band – then unnamed and driven to gigs by members’ parents – performed covers and some original material.

After completing their Higher School Certificates and launching themselves into art school, hairdressing and the public service, Cave, Calvert, and Harvey came back together and were joined by Tracy Pew, and later Rowland S. Howard, to form the Boys Next Door in 1977.

Anita

Anita Lane and Cave wrote “From Her to Eternity” together. “Ah wanna tell you about a girl,” Cave begins. A girl who haunts the song’s speaker. “The desire to possess her is a wound.” Cave met Lane in 1977, when they were both at art school in Melbourne and Lane lived with her progressive parents and older brother. Besides “Stranger Than Kindness” and “From Her to Eternity,” Lane also contributed lyrics to “A Dead Song,” “Dead Joe,” and “Kiss Me Black,” using the exquisite corpse method, by passing a piece of paper back and forth, trading lines. The couple split in 1983 but they continue to keep in touch.

Things I’m Not Happy With

Asked to comment on the list, Nick Cave has said, “I wrote that when I was very young … and confused. I’m very glad I didn’t implement some of those changes. Mick, for example, became my chief collaborator, completely indispensable, for twenty years, and Phill, well, I always had a real soft spot for Phill, he was a lovely guy, but his drumming was ultimately at odds with what the band wanted to do, I think.”

Blood Drawing

In the mid-Eighties Nick Cave sometimes drew with his own blood. “When you’re an intravenous drug user,” Cave said, “blood plays a big part of your life.” This particular drawing was done after a long day in the studio recording the Birthday Party’s last album. The Bad Seeds had the music for a song called “Mutiny,” but Cave had yet to write lyrics. Cave stayed up all night shooting up amphetamines and heroin, writing the words. “What can I say,” Cave said, “it was fucked-up.”

Tupelo

“Tupelo” is a song that draws together two of Nick Cave’s heroes, Elvis Presley and John Lee Hooker. It tells the story of the storm of Tupelo, [Mississippi], which is the theme of the John Lee Hooker song of the same name and conflates it with the story of Elvis Presley and his dead twin, born in Tupelo. It also steeps the whole song in dark religion.

Cave has said about John Lee Hooker: “I first heard John Lee Hooker on a cassette I had bought at the Camden Market. I had an old beat-up car and I slipped in the tape not knowing what to expect. The first song that came on was ‘It Serves You Right to Suffer.’ When John Lee begins the song with that beautifully phrased and liquid first couplet I was entranced. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road. I have never heard a voice like it, with such a powerful, misanthropic, and brooding lyric, and that raw, expressive, improvised guitar. My heart just melted. It changed my life: how I sang, how I wrote lyrics, how I phrased songs. It was like hearing Elvis for the first time. A sublime beauty, impossible to endure.”

Saint Jude Collage

Nick Cave wrote in 2007: “I’d bought a complete version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints in the mid-Eighties and so I was pretty clued up with the saints and the various things they endured. St. Jude was beaten to death with a club and then beheaded in Persia in the first century. He is the patron saint of desperate situations and lost causes and is ‘the Daddy of the Blues.’ I found the prayer card, or whatever it is, most probably in the flea market in West Berlin, where I found much of my stuff. I’ve stuck some hair onto it because, well, I have a thing about hair and stamped it with the date 1985, because I have a thing about date stamps. So it is, in the end, a rather pleasing conjunction of things I like – decapitated saints, hair and date stamps.”

The Mercy Seat (Photo One)

In 2000, Johnny Cash covered “The Mercy Seat.” For Nick Cave this was momentous, Johnny Cash being a fundamental component of Cave’s development as a performer and a songwriter.

 Cave said of “The Mercy Seat”: “Songs are ingenious devices that have their own demands. They find their way, whether you like it or not. In the early Eighties, I was fully engaged in the writing of my novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. I sat in a small room in Berlin, typing away, day and night, sleeping little. When I reached an impasse with the novel, I would scrawl the odd lyric line on a scrap of paper beside me, ostensibly a song about a man going to the electric chair. The song was at best a distraction, a doodle, a song I never looked fully in the eye, or thought much about. But songs have their own yearnings and in time assert their sovereignty. ‘The Mercy Seat’ was such a song. Even when I was singing it I had no idea that the song was important or that I would play it at every gig for the next thirty-five years, or that my hero Johnny Cash would one day record it. It was, as far as I was concerned, an afterthought. I often find that when it comes to songwriting, I am the last to know. The songs hold within them a far greater understanding of their potential than I do.”

The Mercy Seat (Photo Two)

Red Right Hand

Many artists, chiefly due to it being the theme of the hugely popular TV series Peaky Blinders, have covered “Red Right Hand” including PJ Harvey, Jarvis Cocker, Laura Marling, and Iggy Pop. At an “In Conversation” event, Nick Cave said, “‘Red Right Hand’ follows me around like a stray dog. For many casual listeners, ‘Red Right Hand’ has come to define the Bad Seeds. However, it may be the one of my songs I am least attached to. To my great delight, however, Snoop Dogg recently covered it. He did it playfully and irreverently and with a lot of humor. I was very pleased. Finally, hip-hop has embraced the Bad Seeds!”

Jesus Bust

Nick Cave found this marble bust of Jesus at a flea market in Buenos Aires while on tour and carried it all over Europe under his arm. “Christ,” Cave has written, “spoke to me through his isolation, through the burden of his death, through his rage at the mundane, through his sorrow.”

Grinderman

Grinderman is Nick Cave’s creative reset button. Born out of the behemoth that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds had become around the time of recording the complex double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Grinderman was the antithesis of the Bad Seeds. The band was small with a shared organic and collaborative approach to producing music. Working with Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos, and with the pressure of being the primary songwriter gone, Cave and his Grinderman colleagues were free to set out in new directions performing pure, raucous, and untamed garage rock.

So far, Grinderman have recorded two albums, Grinderman (2007) and Grinderman 2 (2010), and left fans wondering and speculating when, or if, Grinderman will return.

Doodles (Photo One)

When asked about his compulsive habit of doodling naked women, Nick Cave said, “Well, Queen Victoria doodled horses, Mark Twain doodled whales, Claude Monet doodled paintbrushes, I doodle naked women. Mostly, I draw them sitting at a desk in hotel rooms on hotel stationery. They are a compulsive habit I have had since my school days and I have thousands of them floating around. They have no artistic merit: rather they are evidence of a kind of ritualistic and habitual thinking, not dissimilar to the act of writing itself, actually; I simply sit down each day and write. I have conditioned my brain to behave in this way. It is the applied mind that simply does its work regardless of inspiration. So it is with the doodles of naked women. I am compelled to draw them.”

Doodles (Photo Two)

Ghosteen Notebook (Photo One)

Nick Cave has used the same bespoke notebooks to write his lyrics in since 2012, beginning with the Push the Sky Away album. He has called them “objects of devotion.” Recently he lost his Ghosteen notebook. He said this: “My notebooks, which are predominately a collection of failed ideas, nevertheless hold great value to me. They are proof of life, and I am never far from one. My notebook for Ghosteen was full of songs and it disappeared. I have looked everywhere for it. I sometimes think maybe someone stole it, or destroyed it, or there was some kind of cosmic erasure of it, I don’t know, but in the end I probably just left it in a hotel room somewhere, or on a train, or in the back of a car or something. It wouldn’t be the first time. Mostly I remain composed and think that it will come back, these things have a way of turning up. I hope so.”

Ghosteen Notebook (Photo Two)

Stranger Than Kindness