Hop inside my coat…
As you’ll read in this new magazine, the last 30 years have seen an incredible transformation in the career and public persona of Nick Cave. If it was Russia we were talking about in the same period, then we’d be speaking of glasnost, openness. Weirdly, it’s a quality we can see registered through the medium of another Australian performer: Kylie Minogue.
We find the pair of them (she the girl next door pop star; he the gothic scarecrow junkie) at the start of this magazine, appearing on “Where The Wild Roses Grow”, Kylie’s contribution to Murder Ballads, an R-rated Bad Seeds album of violent death and profanity, which bizarrely gave Cave and the band their highest chart placing ever. But what at first seemed like a rather ironic 90s pairing developed into something more touching and supportive.
On the recent Kylie documentary on Netflix we get a lovely insight into how it worked. We see Cave interacting with Kylie’s mum in an airport. Encouraging Kylie to perform at a poetry event at the Albert Hall. Most amusingly, present-day Cave recalls with warm professionalism the reaction of Kylie fans to their 90s appearance on Top Of The Pops. They were not, he insisted, beamingly, very impressed.
What has happened? Where is the glowering and disdainful artist with his macabre interests and hanks of scalped hair? As you progress through this second part of our definitive timeline, you might conclude that at some point around the turn of the new century – coincidentally, around the time of meeting his wife and changing his lifestyle – Cave started saying “yes” to everything. True, there had always been a vaguely demonic energy to his creativity. But now, the walls seemed to have come down.
As you’ll see in the mag: so much work, so many records! The Bad Seeds were still the Bad Seeds – but working with Warren Ellis offered more flexibility and possibility. Whether in the savage and amusing Grinderman, or in soundtracks for theatre and film, or in a reconfigured, freely associating Bad Seeds which emerged round 2012, Cave was showing more of a different side of himself. He wrote films, appeared in them, soundtracked them. He formed an opinion about Hollywood.
After the tragic death of his son Arthur in 2015, the process continued, as Cave moved through his grief with dignity. The work evolved, through stark horror to the magical projections of Ghosteen. He auctioned his socks for a charity during the Covid lockdown. He made pottery and wrote a children’s book. Onstage and online, he opened himself up to direct questions – and answered them. It was gradual, but it felt surprisingly new.
Having previously inspired shock, awe and morbid curiosity, now he enjoys something we might have previously though impossible. What the people clawing at his legs at the Wild God shows are getting is a different kind of connection: empathy.
According to, Cave in fact, it’s only the Kylie fans who remain unconvinced.
Enjoy the magazine! You can get yours here.
John Robinson, Editor