69 Facts About Nick Cave

1.

Nicholas Edward Cave was born on 22 September 1957 and is an Australian singer, songwriter, poet, lyricist, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional actor.

2.

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

3.

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".

4.

Nick Cave maintains The Red Hand Files, a newsletter he uses to respond to questions from fans.

5.

Nick Cave has collaborated with the likes of Shane MacGowan and ex-partner PJ Harvey, and his songs have been covered by a wide range of artists, including Johnny Cash, Metallica and Snoop Dogg.

6.

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

7.

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.

8.

Nick Cave's father introduced him to literary classics from an early age, 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.

9.

When Nick Cave was 9 he joined the choir of Wangaratta's Holy Trinity Cathedral.

10.

Nick Cave was 21 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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Nick Cave was particularly inspired by the latter band's show, saying that he left the venue "a different person"; a photograph by Rennie Ellis shows Nick Cave in the front row, appearing awestruck by the Saints' frontman Chris Bailey.

14.

In 1973, Nick Cave met Mick Harvey, Phill Calvert, John Cochivera, Brett Purcell, and Chris Coyne ; fellow students at Caulfield Grammar.

15.

Nick Cave used Old Testament imagery with lyrics about sin, debauchery and damnation.

16.

In mid-August 2013, Nick Cave was a 'First Longlist' finalist for the 9th Coopers AMP, alongside artists such as Kevin Mitchell and the Drones.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Nick Cave was then invited to contribute to the liner notes of the retrospective The Essential Johnny Cash CD, released to coincide with Cash's 70th birthday.

25.

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

26.

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".

27.

Nick Cave performed "What a Wonderful World" live with the Flaming Lips.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Nick Cave is featured on "The Crane Wife", on Faithfull's 2008 album, Easy Come, Easy Go.

32.

Nick Cave provided guest vocals on the title track of Current 93's 1996 album All the Pretty Little Horses, as well as the closer "Patripassian".

33.

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

34.

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

35.

In 2011, Nick Cave recorded a cover 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.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Nick Cave is a contributor to a 2009 rock biography of the Triffids, Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Australian academics Niall Lucy and Chris Coughran.

42.

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

43.

Nick Cave is most prominently featured in the 1989 film Ghosts.

44.

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.

45.

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".

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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.

51.

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.

52.

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.

53.

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

54.

The 2014 film 20,000 Days on Earth, about Nick Cave's life, is set around Brighton.

55.

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

56.

Nick Cave dated Anita Lane from the late 1970s to mid-1980s.

57.

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

58.

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

59.

Jethro Lazenby, known as Jethro Nick Cave, died in May 2022, aged 31.

60.

Nick Cave briefly dated PJ Harvey during the mid-1990s, with whom he recorded the duet "Henry Lee".

61.

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

62.

Bick is the model on the cover of Nick Cave's album Push the Sky Away.

63.

Nick Cave is the godfather to Michael Hutchence's daughter Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily.

64.

Nick Cave performed "Into My Arms" at the televised funeral of Hutchence, but insisted that the cameras cease rolling during his performance.

65.

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.

66.

In November 2017, Nick Cave resisted demands from musicians Brian Eno and Roger Waters to cancel two concerts in Tel Aviv.

67.

In 2019, Nick Cave wrote in defence of singer Morrissey after the latter expressed a series of controversial political statements during the release of his California Son album which led to some record stores refusing to stock it.

68.

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

69.

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.