Nick Cave
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Caveis an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor. He is best known as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its diverse output and ever-evolving line-up. Prior to this, he fronted the Birthday Party, one of the most extreme and confrontational post-punk bands of the early 1980s. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman, releasing its debut album the following year...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth22 September 1957
CountryAustralia
People are always surprised to see clues to my being a normal kind of guy. As if I'm somehow letting the team down.
When you're making a film, there are so many people involved that you get opinions and notes from people and you don't even know who they are. I find that quite difficult and it wears you down.
The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood. The way it works is that people get an idea you could possibly do something, but there's a one-in-a-hundred chance that it could get made.
You were the local joke, really, ... It kept sliding further into summer, and the locals were thinking it was going to be really funny watching these people try to make a movie under those conditions. Nobody could even open their mouth without a fly crawling into it.
It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.
As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it.
I'm always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.
The secret to longevity in the music business is to change, and to be able to change. An actor has to assume other people's identities. A rock star doesn't need to do that. But change is important.
Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I'm in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant.
People often can't separate, or can't understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it's a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there's a deep anxiety going on.
Musicians are at the bottom of the creative pyramid and authors are at the top, and many people think it's unacceptable for someone to attempt to jump from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.