“Songs are not arguments. They’re acts of attention.”
by Nick Cave
Nick Cave end-to-end. Particulars, Faith Hope and Carnage interview pull-quotes, the three records he is best known for (Tender Prey 1988, The Good Son 1990, Let Love In 1994), the Boatman's Call hinge, the after-Arthur records (Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen, Carnage, Wild God), the Bad Seeds line-up across forty-one years, the seven cities, the discography shelf, and the Red Hand Files. Plus two easter eggs: the pulpit and the Olivetti.
tags: nick cave, bad seeds, tender prey, good son, let love in, boatman's call, ghosteen, red hand files, warren ellis, berlin, brighton
The Red Hand Files
Issue #374 / August 2026
AGUSTINA, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
How do I make my partner not the centre of my world? I love him so much now I depend on his presence because everything is just better by his side.
PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY VIRGINIA BATES IN HER GARDEN, 27 YEARS AGO
Dear Agustina,
I have chosen this question not because I have something particularly helpful to say, but because it marks a milestone – the 150,000th letter to The Red Hand Files, all of which, dear people, I have read. I take some pride in being able to say this, and I am grateful for your continued involvement. It is a strange, lovely thing we are doing together, wringing out our hearts.
I am not the one to advise on how to keep love at a sensible distance, Agustina. Against the advice of an army of therapists, analysts, 12—step sponsors, life—coaches, hypnotists and TED Talkers, my wife and I remain committed to full—on emotional enmeshment, a massive dose of co—dependency, some good old maladaptive caretaking, and a fair amount of enslavement. I am a happy planet helplessly orbiting my wife, the sun; I am her vassal, her monkey on a chain, in her thrall, drunk on her, lost to her. I suspect if you asked her, she’d say she’s the planet, and I’m the sun, but that would be her being modest. Whatever the case, we are better together and a mess apart, fully entangled, all in, happily doomed. By the way, there was an eclipse last night, marking, amongst other things, twenty—seven years of our marriage. How thoughtful of the cosmos to have remembered.
I loved your letter, Agustina, the 150,000th, and I think your partner is fortunate to have someone who seems willing to submit to love’s snares and entanglements. To me, the measure of a relationship is not in the distance maintained between the two of you, but whether you want the best for your partner, and your partner wants the best for you. If you have that and can maintain it, you are pretty much there and can let love have its way.
Love, Nick
a fistful of broadsides about
& the Bad Seeds
Wangaratta · Melbourne · London · Berlin · São Paulo · Brighton
“I’ve always been suspicious of the idea of inspiration, but on the other hand I’ve seen it walk into the room.”
The wheat-belt boy who became a Berlin novelist who became a piano player in Brighton. Forty-one years of Bad Seeds, eighteen studio records, two novels, four book-length interviews, four hundred-plus issues of The Red Hand Files (above). Three sons, two of whom are gone. A long sobriety. A voice that has changed at least three times. This is the broadside.
15 brief facts about the man - the wheat-belt boy, the Berlin years, Anita and Susie, the long sobriety, and the work he keeps doing in spite.
Forty hours of telephone interviews with Seán O’Hagan, 2020–21. Canongate, 2022. 30 short extracts · filter by topic.
“Songs are not arguments. They’re acts of attention.”
1990 · BAD SEEDS · MASTER ROCK · LONDON · ESTUDIO ELDORADO · SÃO PAULO
The sixth Bad Seeds record. Cave had moved to São Paulo with Viviane Carneiro and their son Luke. Half the record is recorded there, on an out-of-tune grand piano that Cave loved, and half in London, with strings. After the gallows record this is something else: slower, kinder, sadder, a lot of love songs and a lot of piano. The Berlin walls are gone, and so is most of the frenzy.
“The Ship Song” and “The Weeping Song” are the two everyone knows. Both are, in different ways, the same song: a parent and a child trying to talk to each other across a distance neither one can name. “Foi Na Cruz” opens the record in Portuguese, a hymn translated badly on purpose. “The Hammer Song” is the most furious thing on the album and reads, with forty years of distance, as a kind of pre-emptive lament.
Producer: the Bad Seeds & Tony Cohen. Cover: a Polaroid of Cave standing in a São Paulo window, light through gauze, looking out. Side note:Cave once said in an interview that The Good Son was the first record he wrote in something approaching a major key. The piano on it is the same out-of-tune Estudio Eldorado upright.
1988 · BAD SEEDS · STUDIO V · BERLIN
The fifth Bad Seeds record. Recorded at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin in a long winter. Cave was deep in heroin and at the height of his mid-period preacher voice, and the record commits to it: the songs are mostly first-person, mostly mortal, mostly people standing before a judgement they will not survive. The opener - six minutes thirteen seconds of a man strapped to an electric chair repeating that he is not afraid - is the record in miniature.
What makes Tender Prey hold up is not its theatre. It is that the theatre points somewhere. Cave is, at twenty-nine, working out his theology of mercy - what it means to want it, what it means to refuse it, what it means to mistake it for something else. The closing track, “New Morning,” is a hymn of gratitude played on a piano that sounds rented. The same record.
Producer: Tony Cohen & the Bad Seeds. Cover: a photo by Bleddyn Butcher of Cave at the piano in a black suit, head bowed, lit from above. Side note:Johnny Cash heard “The Mercy Seat” on the radio in Tennessee and asked for a chord chart so he could record it himself. He did, in 2000, on American III: Solitary Man, on what turned out to be the best version of either man’s singing.
1994 · BAD SEEDS · TOWNHOUSE STUDIOS · LONDON
The eighth Bad Seeds record. Recorded mostly at Townhouse Studios in West London. The line-up is Cave, Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Conway Savage, Martyn Casey, Thomas Wydler, with Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis arriving for the first time on the periphery. After the patience of The Good Son and Henry’s Dream, this record is louder, darker, more frontal. It is also Cave’s first record to enter the UK top thirty.
Three things on it everyone knows: “Do You Love Me?” is the opener, all stomp and chorus and a borrowed Hammond organ; “Loverman” is the longest, most theatrical, most alphabetical thing Cave has ever sung; and “Red Right Hand,” three-plus minutes of low loops and bell, has become so widely licensed (Scream, X-Files, Peaky Blinders) that it is now the song of his anyone hears first. The phrase is from Milton, of course - Paradise Lost, II - and it is doing its proper work.
Producer: Tony Cohen & the Bad Seeds. Cover: a black-and-white photograph by Anton Corbijn of Susie Bick (whom Cave would meet in person three years later) in white veil and crown of thorns, eyes lowered. The bell you hear at the start of “Red Right Hand” was a real bell hung in the studio. Cave conducted it with one finger.
1997 · WESTSIDE · LONDON · CAVE AT A PIANO
The tenth Bad Seeds record. Recorded fast, almost nothing on it but Cave at the piano with a small set of accompanists in the room. After ten albums of biblical noise, this is a record of plain English, mostly love songs, mostly in the first person. “Into My Arms,” “People Ain’t No Good,” “Are You the One That I’ve Been Waiting For?,” “Far From Me,” “West Country Girl.”
It is the hinge of his career. The moment he stops singing as a character and starts singing as a person. Twelve years deep into the Bad Seeds, three years before sobriety, two years before meeting Susie. Half the record is about the relationship he was in (Viviane Carneiro), half about the one he was about to be in (PJ Harvey). When he was asked how he wrote so many love songs at once he said that one is always either falling in love or falling out of it, and that the writing keeps up either way.
On the 3rd of March 1997, the day the album was released, Cave saw the model Susie Bick across the room at a Victoria & Albert opening. He has called it the day his life was saved. They married in 1999. Earl and Arthur arrived in 2000. The piano playing on the record never stopped; he plays one most days at his Brighton studio, and most of what comes out of him now starts there.
2015 - present · BRIGHTON · LA FABRIQUE · MALIBU
Arthur Cave fell from a cliff at Ovingdean Gap, near Brighton, on the 14th of July 2015. He was fifteen. Skeleton Tree, recorded mostly in the months before, was finished and released in 2016 alongside Andrew Dominik’s film One More Time with Feeling. The album is the most uncomfortable and the most necessary record in Cave’s catalogue. He has said he does not believe he could have made it without the band around him.
Ghosteen followed three years later, in October 2019. Two LPs, mostly synthesizer and choral, almost no percussion, almost no Cave-the-character. It is the most patient record he has made. Carnage, with Warren Ellis only, came out of the first lockdown, in 2021. Wild God is the eighteenth Bad Seeds record (August 2024); a higher mood, choirs, big drums, a kind of stubborn gladness. He has called it a happy record. He has also said that happiness, after enough sorrow, becomes a kind of duty.
Outside the records: The Red Hand Files begins in September 2018. The Bad Seeds tour through it all. Susie’s label, The Vampire’s Wife, opens its first London shop. A second loss arrives in May 2022, when Cave’s eldest son Jethro dies in Melbourne, age 31. Cave goes back, then comes home.
13 principal members across forty-one years. Click any silhouette · filter by era.
voice · piano · guitar
Frontman, lyricist, the figure at the piano. Forty-plus years and seventeen records on. The voice changes - high preacher rasp in the Birthday Party years, a bell-clear baritone after sobriety - but the centre holds.
19 records, 1984 - 2024. Click a spine to pull a record off the shelf.The three with gold borders are the favourites; the one with a ★ above it - The Good Son - is the favourite of favourites.
Cave’s life as a side-altar in seven cities. Each panel a saint, each saint a year, each year a song. Click a panel to open the icon.
dedicated to St. Colin of the Library
Wheat-belt towns, country-Catholic. Father Colin reads Lolita aloud to a thirteen-year-old in the front room. Mother Dawn keeps the school library. The boy is altar-trained, choir-trained, beaten for cheek. He leaves for art school in 1976. Colin dies in a car crash two years later, while the son is being booked at a Melbourne police station.
Cave in his preacher register, brief. Click the open Bible on top of the pulpit to turn the page. Seven readings, each one paraphrased from the published prose - The Red Hand Files, Faith Hope & Carnage, the King James liner note.
Prologue
Begin in silence. The pulpit is small. The book is heavy.
- Click the open Bible to begin.
Two novels, half a dozen screenplays and films, a dozen film scores with Warren Ellis, two famous lectures, a Royal Library archive show, and a small Brighton shop where he sells the ceramic devils he makes by hand. 23 entries; click any card to read.
The way we treat each other, ultimately, is our most enduring creative act.
The page opens with The Red Hand Files for a reason. It is, at this late date, the most consistent prose Cave is producing - long-form, unedited, addressed to one stranger at a time. The full ongoing archive lives at theredhandfiles.com.
The typewriter he used in Berlin to write And the Ass Saw the Angel. Three opening lines, thirty-three years apart. Click the carriage return.
1989
And the Ass Saw the Angel - opening
“”
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI