Nick Cave
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are one of the world’s most exciting, influential, innovative and compelling bands. Driven by a continuous creative evolution, their music displays a diverse, often contradictory, range of styles with Cave considering it as their “solemn duty to turn against what has gone before”. Across 18 studio albums from From Her to Eternity (1984) and through titles including Your Funeral… My Trial (1986), The Boatman’s Call (1997), Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004), Push The Sky Away (2013) and Ghosteen (2019) they have consistently reinvented their sound, and their latest, Wild God (2024), is no exception. Moving away from the more interior quality of recent output, Wild God bursts with life as it embraces the warmth of the full Bad Seeds reconnected Across ten tracks, the band dance between convention and experimentation, taking left-turns and detours that heighten the rich imagery and emotion in Cave’s soul-stirring narratives.
As a live band Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are one of most thrilling acts to ever take to the stage. With powerful live performances that resonate more deeply than any other show you will see, they are continually called upon to headline major European festivals, and tour extensively in Australia and North and South America.
Cave has been writing and making music, and performing live, since the 1980s, originally with post-punk band The Boys Next Door, later The Birthday Party, then with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Grinderman. His songwriting frequently draws on the poetic imagery of the Holy Bible, the drama of Greek mythology, and references to contemporary literature and culture. His lyrics are suffused with themes of love, loss, death, and dark irreverent humour. 2019’s Ghosteen typified the shift in Cave’s songwriting from narrative storytelling towards a more fragmented, elliptical style that had been evolving over the recent years. In Wild God, Cave lyrically orbits faith, exploring the liminal spaces and moments; be it between belief and disbelief, or this world and the next. His characters, and they include Cave himself, forage for meaning. They seek answers. On occasion, they find them.
Nick Cave’s artistic output, however, extends far beyond The Bad Seeds. His prolific and ever-evolving career spans nearly 50 years, during which he has worked across a diverse number of disciplines. His work explores the dark and light of existence – raising questions about the nature of faith, the human condition, and the act of creation itself; often with shades of melancholy and his signature caustic humour.