Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Melbourne, London, Berlin

Nick Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria, in 1957, grew up in rural Victoria, sang as a choirboy, and studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology. A band he formed with Caulfield Grammar classmates became The Boys Next Door in 1977 and then The Birthday Party, which moved to London in 1980 and to West Berlin in 1982. It split in August 1983; Cave put the break down to his songwriting clashing with Rowland S. Howard's.

The Bad Seeds were assembled in London in September 1983 as a backing band for a planned Cave solo project, and played their first show in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the last night of that year. Billed at first as the Cavemen, they took their name in April 1984, when Cave introduced Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Barry Adamson and Hugo Race as the Bad Seeds at the Electric Ballroom. Their only John Peel session came that spring, and the debut, From Her to Eternity, followed on Mute in 1984.

The Mute years

The band moved to West Berlin, and The Firstborn Is Dead (1985) was followed by Kicking Against the Pricks and Your Funeral... My Trial, both in 1986. In 1987 they appeared in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. Tender Prey (1988) holds The Mercy Seat, the song they have played live more than any other. Cave published King Ink and the novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, then moved to São Paulo, where he married Viviane Carneiro and the band made The Good Son (1990). Conway Savage and Martyn P. Casey joined that year, and Warren Ellis and Jim Sclavunos in 1994, the year of Let Love In.

Murder Ballads (1996) reached eight in Britain and three in Australia, and its duet with Kylie Minogue, Where the Wild Roses Grow, won three ARIA Awards. Within months Cave was recording something entirely different. The Boatman's Call (1997) is a spare piano record of love songs and spiritual longing, plainly about his own life, and it opens with Into My Arms, which he wrote in rehab. Mick Harvey said later it should probably have been a solo album. In November 1997 Cave sang Into My Arms alone at the funeral of Michael Hutchence in Sydney.

Grinderman and the Bad Seed years

Cave married Susie Bick in 1999. No More Shall We Part (2001) and Nocturama (2003) followed, and Bargeld left in 2003 to concentrate on Einstürzende Neubauten. The double album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus (2004) and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008) were both Mojo's album of the year, and in between Cave, Ellis, Sclavunos and Casey made two records as Grinderman. Cave and Ellis also began a long run of film scores with The Proposition (2005). Harvey left in January 2009 after about 25 years.

Push the Sky Away (2013), the first album on the band's own Bad Seed Ltd, went to number one in Australia and won the Ivor Novello award for best album.

Skeleton Tree

Sessions for the next album began in late 2014, in Brighton and in France, paid for by Cave himself. In July 2015 his fifteen-year-old son Arthur died after a fall near Brighton; the coroner ruled it an accident. Most songs were written and many vocals recorded by then. Cave and Ellis went back into the studio about two weeks later, and Cave rewrote or half-improvised some lyrics, wanting to move away from story songs.

Skeleton Tree came out on 9 September 2016, the day after Andrew Dominik's film One More Time with Feeling opened in cinemas. Cave paid for the film so that it could explain the record without his giving interviews. The album went to number one in Australia and six other countries and two in Britain, drew a Metacritic score of 95, and closes with Skeleton Tree, the first song Cave says he wrote after Arthur died. The tour that followed opened in Hobart in January 2017, his first show since.

The Red Hand Files and Wild God

Since September 2018 Cave has answered fans' letters himself in The Red Hand Files, which has become a primary source on what his songs mean. Savage died that year. Ghosteen (2019) continued the turn to fully autobiographical writing, and in 2022 Cave's son Jethro died. Wild God (2024), with Colin Greenwood of Radiohead on bass, reached five in Britain, and its tour brought the band back to North America for the first time since 2018. The live album Live God followed in December 2025.