Nick Cave

Born in rural Victoria, Cave’s first foray into musical notoriety came when he became frontman of the post-punk band The Birthday Party in the late 1970s. When the goth rockers split in 1982, he formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, whose dark and intense music led to a strong cult following and signature songs such as The Mercy Seat and Where the Wild Roses Grow (a murder ballad duet with Kylie Minogue). Cave has also fronted the garage rock act Grinderman.

A gifted songwriter with a pronounced literary bent, Cave produced his debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel – a gothic melodrama rich in biblical imagery – in 1989. Twenty years later, Cave’s second novel The Death of Bunny Munro appeared; a black comedy about a door-to-door salesman and his son on a road trip around Brighton in the shadow of a serial killer. In addition to his two works of long fiction, he has penned The Sick Bag Song (2016), a genre-defying mixture of memoir, poetry and song lyrics detailing his travels around North America in 2014, and collected his interviews with journalist and friend Sean O’Hagan in the volume Faith, Hope and Carnage (2022). His complete song lyrics spanning the years 1978 to 2013 are also available in book form.