Nick Cave
By All Music Guide
By All Music Guide
Cave released his first album with the Bad Seeds, From Her to Eternity, in 1984, which contained a noteworthy cover of Elvis Presleys In the Ghetto, foreshadowing much of Caves style and subject matter on the follow-up The Firstborn Is Dead. Kicking Against the Pricks, an all-covers album, broke the band in England with the help of The Singer, which hit number one on the U.K. independent charts. The album also strengthened Caves reputation as an original interpreter and a vocal stylist of note.
Following 1986s Your Funeral...My Trial, Cave took a two-year hiatus from recording, partially to appear in Wim Wenders 1987 film #Wings of Desire, and then returned with Tender Prey, which featured Cramps guitarist Kid Congo Powers and Caves strongest vocal performance up to that point. Caves productivity picked up immensely over the next two years after he kicked a heroin habit. He had two books (1988s -King Ink, a collection of lyrics, plays, and prose, and 1989s -And the Ass Saw the Angel, a novel) published; appeared in the 1989 Australian film #Ghosts...of the Civil Dead as a prisoner; recorded a soundtrack to the film with Harvey and Bargeld; and released 1990s The Good Son, his most relaxed, quiet album. Cave received his due as one of the leading figures in alternative rock when he was invited to perform on the 1994 edition of the ~Lollapalooza tour to promote his Let Love In album. Early in 1996, he released Murder Ballads, a collection of songs about murder. Murder Ballads became Caves most commercially successful album to date, and, with typical perversity, he followed it with the introspective and personal The Boatmans Call in early 1997. A spoken word release, Secret Life of the Love Song, followed in 1999. Two years later, a rejuvenated Cave teamed up with the Bad Seeds once again for the piano-laden No More Shall We Part. Nocturama was released in 2003, and the double-album Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus followed by the end of 2004. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine & Steve Huey,
