Nick Cave
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Caveis an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor. He is best known as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its diverse output and ever-evolving line-up. Prior to this, he fronted the Birthday Party, one of the most extreme and confrontational post-punk bands of the early 1980s. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman, releasing its debut album the following year...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth22 September 1957
CountryAustralia
Our Easters were elaborate productions with these big Easter Egg hunts out in the woods, and it was always, like, major . There was a golden egg and these crazy Easter baskets. My mother had seven sisters, and they all had children, so we'd have like 40 kids doing stuff together. It was a very celebrated time, one of many, and I realize now how it affected me as a kid.
They all have their share of thoughts about what needs to be done. So we just ignored them.
I've always been interested in both areas. For a long time, they were on a parallel plane, and I didn't dedicate myself to one or the other any less or any more. And then I just reached a revelation that it wasn't just about dance, it wasn't about fine art. It was about these two forces that were important to me, finding a medium that would allow me to investigate both.
This one's got a story rather than being a series of cool vignettes.
Oh, I don't know about that. I make the suits, so I don't know.
Aw, look, I don't know. I think I'd rather him do that than me.
I was making them do things and make the decisions that I always wanted them to do in movies. I mean, we had no story, we only had the proposition, so I was just writing 10 pages a day and handing them over and seeing what happens.
I just sat down and banged it out in the spirit of those old Hollywood guys.
It was a good script and it was a great story. It was just that it was basically an American western dumped in Australia. When I read it, I thought everyone's been behaving properly. Where's the incompetence, where's the failure?
It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.
Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.
Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.
Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that.