67 Facts About Nick Cave

The 1990s saw Nick Cave move between Sao Paulo and England, and find inspiration in the New Testament.

Nick Cave went on to achieve mainstream success with quieter, piano-driven ballads, notably the Kylie Minogue duet "Where the Wild Roses Grow", and "Into My Arms".

Since 2018, Nick Cave has maintained The Red Hand Files, a newsletter he uses to respond to questions from fans.

Nick Cave has collaborated with the likes of Johnny Cash, Shane MacGowan and ex-partner PJ Harvey.

Nick Cave's songs have been covered by a wide range of artists, including Cash, Metallica and Snoop Dogg.

Nick Cave was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2007, and he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017.

Nick Cave's father taught English and mathematics at the local technical school; his mother was a librarian at the high school that Cave attended.

From an early age, Nick Cave's father read him literary classics, such as Crime and Punishment and Lolita, and organised the first symposium on the Australian bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly, with whom Nick Cave was enamoured as a child.

When Nick Cave was nine he joined the choir of Wangaratta's Holy Trinity Cathedral.

Nick Cave's family moved to Melbourne the following year, settling in the suburb of Murrumbeena.

Nick Cave began using heroin around the time that he left art school.

Nick Cave attended his first music concert at Melbourne's Festival Hall.

Nick Cave was 19 when his father was killed in a car collision; his mother told him of his father's death while she was bailing him out of a St Kilda police station where he was being held on a charge of burglary.

In 1973, Nick Cave founded a band with fellow students at Caulfield Grammar.

Nick Cave did however greatly admire the Pop Group, and the Birthday Party shared a mutual affinity with the Fall.

Nick Cave believes that he lost valuable work due to a "bad day".

In 2006, Cave formed Grinderman with himself on vocals, guitar, organ and piano, Warren Ellis, Martyn P Casey and Jim Sclavunos.

The band's name was inspired by a Memphis Slim song, "Grinder Man Blues", which Nick Cave is noted to have started singing during one of the band's early rehearsal sessions.

In December 2011, after performing at the Meredith Music Festival, Nick Cave announced that Grinderman was over.

Nick Cave's music was featured in a scene of the 1986 film, Dogs in Space by Richard Lowenstein.

Nick Cave performed parts of the Boys Next Door song "Shivers" twice during the film, once on video and once live.

In Scream 3, the song was given a reworking with Nick Cave writing new lyrics and adding an orchestra to the arrangement of the track.

Later that year, Nick Cave contributed to the concept album Honeymoon in Red.

Nick Cave was then invited to contribute to the liner notes of the double-compact disc compilation album The Essential Johnny Cash, released to coincide with Cash's 70th birthday.

Subsequently, Nick Cave recorded a duet with Cash, a cover version of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", for what would be Cash's final studio album, American IV: The Man Comes Around.

Nick Cave played with Shane MacGowan on cover versions of Bob Dylan's "Death is Not the End" and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World".

Nick Cave recorded a cover version of the Pogues' song "Rainy Night in Soho", written by MacGowan.

Nick Cave provided guest vocals on the title track of Current 93's studio album All the Pretty Little Horses, as well as the closer "Patripassian".

In 2004, Nick Cave gave a hand to Marianne Faithfull on her sixteenth studio album, Before the Poison.

Nick Cave co-wrote and produced three songs, and the Bad Seeds are featured on all of them.

Nick Cave is featured on "The Crane Wife 3", on Faithfull's seventeenth studio album, Easy Come, Easy Go.

Nick Cave collaborated on the 2003 single "Bring It On", with Chris Bailey, formerly of the Australian punk group, the Saints.

In 2010, Nick Cave began a series of duets with Debbie Harry of Blondie for The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project.

In 2011, Nick Cave recorded a cover version of the Zombies' "She's Not There" with Neko Case, which was used at the end of the first episode of the fourth season of True Blood.

In 2014, Nick Cave wrote the libretto for the opera Shell Shock by the Belgian composer Nicholas Lens.

In 2025, Nick Cave wrote an apology on his website, saying it was "an offhand and somewhat uncharitable remark" with "no malice intended", and announced that he had recently contributed to a record by Flea.

Nick Cave authored this screenplay based on Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest County in the World.

Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Nick Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career.

The book originally started as a screenplay Nick Cave was going to write for John Hillcoat.

Nick Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel According to Mark, published in the UK in 1998.

Nick Cave was a contributor to a biography of the alternative rock and pop band the Triffids, Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Australian academics Niall Lucy and Chris Coughran.

Nick Cave appears alongside Blixa Bargeld in the 1988 Peter Sempel film Dandy, playing dice, singing and speaking from his Berlin apartment.

Nick 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.

Nick Cave 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 of Jesse James".

Nick Cave lent his voice in narrating the animated film The Cat Piano.

Nick Cave provided the voice of the character Bill Clarke in the stop-motion film Memoir of a Snail by Adam Elliot.

Nick Cave wrote the screenplay for The Proposition, a film about bushrangers in the Australian outback during the late 19th century.

Nick Cave explained his personal background in relation to writing the film's screenplay in a 2013 interview:.

At the request of his friend Russell Crowe, Nick Cave wrote a script for a proposed sequel to Gladiator which was rejected by the studio.

An announcement in February 2010 stated that Andy Serkis and Nick Cave would collaborate on a motion-capture movie of the Brecht and Weill musical The Threepenny Opera.

Nick 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.

Nick Cave currently maintains a personal blog and an online correspondence page with his fans called The Red Hand Files which is seen as a continuation of In Conversation, a series of live personal talks Nick Cave had held in which the audience were free to ask questions.

In 2010, Nick Cave was ranked the 19th greatest living lyricist in NME.

The film 20,000 Days on Earth, about Nick Cave's life, is set around Brighton.

Nick Cave was a guest at the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla in May 2023.

In June 2023, in The Archbishop Interview with Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, on BBC Radio 4, Nick Cave spoke about being a heroin addict for 20 years.

Nick Cave then moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1990, where he met and married his first wife, Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro.

Nick Cave's son Jethro was born in 1991, just 10 days before Luke, and grew up with his mother, Beau Lazenby, in Melbourne, Australia.

In 1997, Nick Cave met English model Susie Bick; they married in 1999.

Nick Cave is the godfather to Michael Hutchence's daughter Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof; he performed "Into My Arms" at the televised funeral of Hutchence, but insisted that the cameras cease rolling during his performance.

In 2019, Nick Cave expressed his personal disagreement with both organised religion and atheism when questioned about his beliefs by a fan during a question and answer session on his Red Hand Files blog.

In 2023, Nick Cave wrote on his blog that he had sympathised with feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion from Islam to atheism after reading her book Infidel: My Life, and had considered himself an atheist.

In 2019, Nick Cave wrote in defence of singer Morrissey of the Smiths after the latter expressed a series of controversial political statements, leading to some record stores refusing to stock his upcoming album California Son.

Nick Cave has previously described himself as a supporter of freedom of speech in both his live In Conversation events and on his blog.

In October 2022, Nick Cave expressed support for the participants of the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran on his correspondence blog after being asked by a fan on the matter.

Nick Cave has expressed support for trans people, stating on his personal blog that he "[loves] my trans fans fully" and "[wishes] for them to receive every right inherent to them and for them to lead lives of dignity and freedom, devoid of violence and prejudice".

In November 2017, Nick Cave was urged by British musicians Brian Eno and Roger Waters to cancel two concerts in Tel Aviv, Israel, while "apartheid remains" but he declined.