I had written long-form before but it is pure story-telling in script writing and that goes back as far as I can remember for me, not just with my father but with myself. I slept in the same bedroom as my sister for many years, until it became indecent to do so and I would tell her stories every night—that is how she would get to sleep. She would say "tell me a story" so I would tell her a story. So that ability, I very much had that from the start and I used to enjoy that at school so actually to write a script—it suddenly felt like I was just making up a big story.
Cave was born on 22 September 1957 in Warracknabeal, a small country town in the state of Victoria, Australia, to Dawn Cave (née Treadwell) and Colin Frank Cave. As a child, he lived in Warracknabeal and then Wangaratta in rural Victoria. His father taught English and mathematics at the local technical school; his mother was a librarian at the high school that Nick attended. Cave's father introduced him to literary classics from an early age, such as Crime and Punishment and Lolita, and also organised the first symposium on the Australian bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly, with whom Nick was enamoured as a child.
Cave dated Anita Lane from the late 1970s to mid-1980s. Cave and Lane recorded together on a few occasions. Their most notable collaborations include Lane's 'cameo' verse on Cave's Bob Dylan cover "Death Is Not The End" from the album Murder Ballads, and a cover of the Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin song "Je t'aime... moi non plus/ I love you ... me neither". Lane co-wrote the lyrics to the title track for Cave's 1984 LP, From Her to Eternity, as well as the lyrics of the song "Stranger Than Kindness" from Your Funeral, My Trial. Cave, Lydia Lunch and Lane wrote a comic book together, entitled AS-FIX-E-8, in the style of the old "Pussy Galore"/Russ Meyer movies.
In 1973, Cave met Mick Harvey (guitar), Phill Calvert (drums), John Cochivera (guitar), Brett Purcell (bass), and Chris Coyne (saxophone); fellow students at Caulfield Grammar. They founded a band with Cave as singer. Their repertoire consisted of proto-punk cover versions of songs by Lou Reed, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music and Alex Harvey, among others. Later, the line-up slimmed down to four members including Cave's friend Tracy Pew on bass. In 1977, after leaving school, they adopted the name The Boys Next Door and began playing predominantly original material. Guitarist and Songwriter Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978.
After his secondary schooling, Cave studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology in 1976, but dropped out the following year to pursue music. He also began using heroin around the time that he left art school.
After the break-up of the Birthday Party in 1983, Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Much of the band's early material was set in a mythic American Deep South, drawing on spirituals and Delta blues, while Cave's preoccupation with Old Testament notions of good versus evil culminated in what has been called his signature song, "The Mercy Seat" (1988). The 1996 album Murder Ballads features "Where the Wild Roses Grow", a duet with Kylie Minogue, Cave's most commercially successful single to date. The band has released 16 studio albums, the most recent being 2016's Skeleton Tree. Cave formed the garage rock group Grinderman in 2006, which has since released two albums.
After establishing a cult following in Europe and Australia, the Birthday Party disbanded in 1984. Howard and Cave found it difficult to continue working together and both were rather worn down from alcohol and drug use.
Cave's work was featured in a scene in the 1986 film, Dogs in Space by Richard Lowenstein. Cave performed parts of the Boys Next Door song "Shivers" twice during the film, once on video and once live.
Cave's first film appearance was in Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire, in which he and the Bad Seeds are shown performing at a concert in Berlin.
Cave has made occasional appearances as an actor. He appears alongside Blixa Bargeld in the 1988 Peter Sempel film Dandy, playing dice, singing and speaking from his Berlin apartment. He is most prominently featured in the 1989 film Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, written and directed by John Hillcoat, and in the 1991 film Johnny Suede with Brad Pitt.
Cave then moved to São Paulo, Brazil in 1990, where he met and married his first wife, Brazilian Journalist Viviane Carneiro. She gave birth to their son Luke in 1991. Luke shares a flat with Sports Journalist Amitai Winehouse. Nick and Viviane were married for 6 years and divorced in 1996.
Cave has had four sons. by three different partners: Luke, born in 1991, Jethro, also born in 1991, and twins Arthur and Earl, born in 2000.
Cave's songs have also appeared in a number of Hollywood blockbusters - "There is a Light" appears on the 1995 Soundtrack for Batman Forever, and "Red Right Hand" appeared in a number of films including The X-Files, Dumb & Dumber; Scream, its sequels Scream 2 and 3, and Hellboy (performed by Pete Yorn). In Scream 3, the song was given a reworking with Cave writing new lyrics and adding an orchestra to the arrangement of the track. "People Ain't No Good" was featured in the animated movie Shrek 2 and the song "O Children" was featured in the 2010 movie of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1.
Cave collaborated with the band Current 93 on their album All the Pretty Little Horses, where he sings the title track, a lullaby. For his 1996 album Murder Ballads, Cave recorded "Where the Wild Roses Grow" with Kylie Minogue, and "Henry Lee" with PJ Harvey.
In 1997, Cave met British model Susie Bick. Bick was the cover model on the Damned's 1985 album Phantasmagoria and a Vivienne Westwood model. Bick is also the model on the cover of the album Push the Sky Away. She gave up her job when they married in 1999. Bick's and Cave's twin sons, Arthur and Earl, were born in Brighton in 2000. Arthur died in 2015, after falling from a cliff.
As proof of his interest in scripture, so evident in his lyrics and his prose writing, Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel according to Mark, published in the UK in 1998. The American edition of the same book (published by Grove Press) contains a foreword by the noted American Writer Barry Hannah.
In 2000, one of Cave's heroes, Johnny Cash, covered Cave's "The Mercy Seat" on the album American III: Solitary Man, seemingly repaying Cave for the compliment he paid by covering Cash's "The Singer" (originally "The Folk Singer") on his Kicking Against the Pricks album. Cave was then invited to be one of many rock and country artists to contribute to the liner notes of the retrospective The Essential Johnny Cash CD, released to coincide with Cash's 70th birthday. Subsequently, Cave recorded a duet with Cash on a version of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" for Cash's American IV: The Man Comes Around album (2002). A similar duet, the American folk song "Cindy", was released posthumously on the "Johnny Cash: Unearthed" boxset. Cave's song "Let the Bells Ring" is a posthumous tribute to Cash. Cave has also covered the song "Wanted Man" which is best known as performed by Johnny Cash but is a Bob Dylan composition.
In 2001, Cave recorded a cover of the Beatles' "Let It Be" for the film I Am Sam, and co-wrote and recorded the song "To Be By Your Side," for the Soundtrack of the 2001 French documentary Le Peuple Migrateur (called Winged Migration in the US).
Cave also took part in the "X-Files" compilation CD with some other artists, where he reads parts from the Bible combined with own texts, like "Time Jesum ...", he outed himself as a fan of the series some years ago, but since he does not watch much TV, it was one of the only things he watched. He collaborated on the 2003 single "Bring It On", with Chris Bailey, formerly of the Australian punk group, The Saints. Cave contributed vocals to the song "Sweet Rosyanne", on the 2006 album Catch That Train! from Dan Zanes & Friends, a children's music group.
Cave wrote the screenplay for The Proposition, a film about bushrangers in the Australian outback during the late 19th century. Directed by John Hillcoat and filmed in Queensland in 2004, it premiered in October 2005 and was later released worldwide to critical acclaim. Cave explained his personal background in relation to writing the film's screenplay in a 2013 interview:
Cave appeared in the 2005 homage to Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, in which he performed "I'm Your Man" solo, and "Suzanne" with Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla. He also appeared in the 2007 film adaptation of Ron Hansen's novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where he sings the ballad "Jesse James". Cave and Warren Ellis are credited for the film's Soundtrack. Nick Cave and his son Luke performed one of the songs on the Soundtrack together. Luke played the triangle.
In 2006 it was revealed that, at the request of his friend Russell Crowe, Cave wrote a script for a proposed sequel to Gladiator which was rejected by the studio.
Cave and Ellis also have documentary-score composition experience. In 2007, the pair composed the score for Geoffrey Smith's film, The English Surgeon, which traces Dr. Henry Marsh's struggle to bring modern neurosurgery to the confusion of post-Soviet Ukraine. They also wrote the score for The Girls of Phnom Penh, Matthew Watson's 2009 film exploring Cambodia's "virginity trade".
While he was based in West Berlin, Cave started working on what was to become his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career. "Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution). On 21 January 2008, a special edition of Cave's novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was released. Cave's second novel The Death of Bunny Munro was published on 8 September 2009 by Harper Collins books. Telling the story of a sex-addicted salesman, it was also released as a binaural audio-book produced by British Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and an iPhone app. The book originally started as a screenplay Cave was going to write for John Hillcoat.
In 2009, Cave joked about plans to erect a gold statue of himself in his hometown of Warracknabeal, based on a foot-high scale model which, according to Cave, features him "naked on a rearing horse. I have a modest loincloth on. It's this rather wonderful homoerotic work of art." Yarriambiack Council acknowledged the humour and tourist appeal behind Cave's proposal, daring him to "build a 50m-high Nick Cave with a viewing platform." A film about Cave's life, titled 20,000 Days on Earth and directed by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, was released in mid-2014, shortly before his 57th birthday.
In the past, Cave identified as a Christian. In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, he has claimed that any true love song is a song for God and has ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old to the New Testaments. He does not belong to a particular denomination and has distanced himself from "religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked". He said in a Los Angeles Times article: "I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god. It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an Artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some Divine element going on within my songs." When asked in 2009 about whether he believed in a personal God, Cave's reply was: "No". When interviewed by Jarvis Cocker on 12 September 2010, for his BBC Radio 6 show "Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service", Cave stated: "I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it."
In early 2011, Cave and Ellis composed the music for the Mexican film Dias de Gracias. Later in 2011, they reunited with Hillcoat to score his latest picture, Lawless. Cave also authored this screenplay based on the novel by Matt Bondurant. Set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, the film was released in August 2012 (US) and September 2012 (UK).
Cave wrote a screenplay titled The Wettest County in the World, which was used for the 2012 film Lawless, directed again by John Hillcoat, starring Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf. The film opened in theaters on 29 August 2012.
In September 2013 interview, Cave explained that he returned to using a typewriter for songwriting after his experience with the Nocturama album, as he "could walk in on a bad day and hit 'delete' and that was the end of it". Cave believes that he lost valuable work due to a "bad day".
Cave creates original film scores with fellow Bad Seeds band member Warren Ellis—they first teamed up in 2005 to work on The Proposition, for which Cave also wrote the screenplay.
Cave's son Arthur, 15, fell from a cliff at Ovingdean, near Brighton, England, and died from his injuries on 14 July 2015. Cave's family released a statement on the death, saying, "Our son Arthur died on Tuesday evening. He was our beautiful, happy loving boy. We ask that we be given the privacy our family needs to grieve at this difficult time." The effect of Arthur's death on Cave and his family was explored in the 2016 documentary film One More Time with Feeling and on the 2016 album Skeleton Tree.
When Cave was 9 he joined the choir of Wangaratta’s Holy Trinity Cathedral. At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School. In 1970, having moved with his family to the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena, he became a boarder and later day student at Caulfield Grammar School. He was 19 when his father was killed in a car accident; his mother told him of his father's death while she was Bai Ling him out of a St Kilda police station where he was being held on a charge of burglary. He would later recall that his father "died at a point in my life when I was most confused" and that "the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose".
