Age, Biography, and Wiki
Nick Cave was born on September 22, 1957, in Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia. He is known for his work as the frontman of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Cave's music career began with the post-punk band The Birthday Party, which he led in the late 1970s before forming The Bad Seeds in 1983. His Wikipedia page provides a comprehensive overview of his life and career.
| Occupation | Rock Singer |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 22 September 1957 |
| Age | 67 Years |
| Birth Place | Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia |
| Horoscope | Virgo |
| Country | Australia |
Height, Weight & Measurements
While specific details about Nick Cave's height and weight are not widely documented, his distinctive appearance, characterized by his tall stature and signature black hair, has been a part of his iconic stage presence.
In 2006, Cave formed Grinderman with himself on vocals, guitar, organ and piano, Warren Ellis (tenor guitar, electric mandolin, violin, viola, guitar, backing vocals), Martyn P. Casey (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Jim Sclavunos (drums, percussion, backing vocals). The alternative rock outfit was formed as "a way to escape the weight of the Bad Seeds". The band's name was inspired by a Memphis Slim song, "Grinder Man Blues", which Cave is noted to have started singing during one of the band's early rehearsal sessions. The band's debut studio album, Grinderman, was released in 2007 to positive reviews and the band's second and final studio album, Grinderman 2, was released in 2010 to a similar reception.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Nick Cave has been married to British model Susie Bick since 1999. They have twin sons, Arthur and Earl, born in 2000. The family faced a tragic loss when Arthur died in 2015 after falling from a cliff in Brighton. Before marrying Susie, Cave dated singer-songwriter PJ Harvey in the mid-1990s.
His 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, Cave's father read him literary classics, such as Crime and Punishment (1866) and Lolita (1955), and also organised the first symposium on the Australian bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly, with whom Cave was enamoured as a child. Through his older brother, Cave became a fan of British progressive rock bands such as King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, while a childhood girlfriend introduced him to the Canadian folk artist Leonard Cohen, who he later described as "the greatest songwriter of them all".
When Cave was nine he joined the choir of Wangaratta's Holy Trinity Cathedral. At 13 he was expelled from Wangaratta High School, and sent by his parents to Melbourne to become a boarder and later day student at Caulfield Grammar School. His family moved to Melbourne the following year, settling in the suburb of Murrumbeena. 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.
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. 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".
The Boys Next Door emerged as the linchpin of the Melbourne post-punk scene in the late 1970s, securing a residency at St Kilda's Crystal Ballroom venue, where they attracted a cult following. They played hundreds of live shows in Australia and toured interstate before changing their name to the Birthday Party in 1980 and moving to London, England. Cave's girlfriend and muse Anita Lane accompanied the band. They struggled initially with financial instability and limited connections, and grew to detest London and much of its music scene, which Cave later described as "dead, ... we felt really ripped off, robbed". He did however greatly admire the Pop Group, and the Birthday Party shared a mutual affinity with the Fall.
In 2004, Cave gave a hand to Marianne Faithfull on her sixteenth studio album, Before the Poison. He co-wrote and produced three songs ("Crazy Love", "There Is a Ghost" and "Desperanto"), and the Bad Seeds are featured on all of them. He is also featured on "The Crane Wife 3" (originally by the Decemberists), on Faithfull's seventeenth studio album, Easy Come, Easy Go (2008).
In 2007, Cave and Ellis composed the music for Andrew Dominik's adaptation of Ron Hansen's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. By the time Dominik's film was released, Hillcoat was preparing his next project, The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Cave and Ellis wrote and recorded the score for the film, which was released in 2009. In 2011, Cave and Ellis reunited with Hillcoat to score his latest picture, Lawless. Cave also authored this screenplay based on Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest County in the World (2008). Set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, the film was released in 2012.
Cave released his first book, King Ink, in 1988. It is a collection of lyrics and plays, including collaborations with Lydia Lunch. This was followed up with King Ink II in 1997, containing lyrics, poems, and the transcript of a radio essay he wrote for the BBC in July 1996, "The Flesh Made Word", discussing in biographical format his relationship with Christianity. 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).
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 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. Cave and Carneiro were married for six years and divorced in 1996.
Cave's son Jethro was also born in 1991, just 10 days before Luke, and grew up with his mother, Beau Lazenby, in Melbourne, Australia. Cave and Jethro never met until Jethro was about seven or eight. He died at age 31 in May 2022.
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| Husband | Viviane Carneiro (m. 1990-1996) Susie Bick (m. 1999) |
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Net Worth and Salary
As of recent estimates, Nick Cave's net worth is approximately $8 million to $10 million, reflecting his diverse career in music, film, and literature. His earnings come from album sales, concert tours, film scores, and literary works.
Music Career
- The Birthday Party: Cave's early career was marked by his leadership of the post-punk band The Birthday Party.
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Formed in 1983, this band is known for its emotional intensity and a wide range of influences, including rock, blues, and gospel.
- Film and Literature: Cave has composed scores for films like "The Proposition," "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," and "Blonde." He is also a published author, with works like his debut novel "And the Ass Saw the Angel."
Cave's droll sense of humour and penchant for parody is evident in many of the band's songs, including "Nick the Stripper" and "King Ink". "Release the Bats", one of the band's most famous songs and John Peel's single of the year in 1981, was intended as an over-the-top "piss-take" on gothic rock, and a "direct attack" on the "stock gothic associations that less informed critics were wont to make". Ironically, it became highly influential on the genre, giving rise to a new generation of bands in England.
In 2019, 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. Cave argued that Morrissey should have the right to freedom of speech to state his opinions while everyone should be able to "challenge them when and wherever possible, but allow his music to live on, bearing in mind we are all conflicted individuals." He also added it would be "dangerous" to censor Morrissey from expressing his beliefs.
In November 2017, 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. Cave went on to describe the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as "cowardly and shameful", and that calls to boycott the country are "partly the reason I am playing Israel – not as support for any particular political entity but as a principled stand against those who wish to bully, shame and silence musicians." He wrote an open letter to Eno to defend his position.
The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by The Recording Academy to honor outstanding achievements in the music industry, and are considered the music industry's highest honor.
The J Awards are an annual series of Australian music awards that were established by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's youth-focused radio station Triple J. They commenced in 2005.
Social Network
Nick Cave is active in engaging with his fans through his website and social media platforms, including The Red Hand Files, where he answers fan questions and shares insights into his creative process.
Born and raised in rural Victoria, Cave studied art in Melbourne before fronting the Birthday Party, one of the city's leading post-punk bands, in the late 1970s. In 1980, the band moved to London, England. Disillusioned by their stay there, they evolved towards a darker and more challenging sound that helped inspire gothic rock, and they acquired a reputation as "the most violent live band in the world". Cave became recognised for his confrontational performances, his shock of black hair and pale, emaciated look. The band broke up soon after relocating to West Berlin in 1982. The following year, Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, later described as one of rock's "most redoubtable, enduring" bands. Much of their early material is 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), and in his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). In 1988, he appeared in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, an Australian prison film which he both co-wrote and scored.
The band with Cave as their lead vocalist has released eighteen studio albums. Pitchfork calls the group one of rock's "most enduring, redoubtable" bands, with an accomplished discography. Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequent histrionics. Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey wrote: "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk." Reviewing the band's fourteenth studio album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008), NME used the phrase "gothic psycho-sexual apocalypse" to describe the "menace" present in the lyrics of the title track. Their most recent work, Wild God, was released in August 2024.
During the Birthday Party's Berlin period, Cave collaborated with local post-punk and post-rock band Die Haut on their studio album Burnin' the Ice, released in 1983. In the immediate aftermath of the Birthday Party's break-up, Cave performed several shows in the United States as part of the Immaculate Consumptive, a short-lived "super-group" with Lunch, Marc Almond and Clint Ruin. Cave sang on an Annie Hogan song called "Vixo" which was recorded in October 1983: the track was released in 1985 on the 12" inch vinyl "Annie Hogan – Plays Kickabye".
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.
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 HarperCollins. 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 January 2023, after being sent a song written by ChatGPT "in the style of Nick Cave", he responded on The Red Hand Files (and was later quoted in The Guardian) saying that act of song writing "is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite, it is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past." He went on to say "It's a blood and guts business [that] requires my humanness", concluding that "this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don't much like it."
A number of prominent noise rock vocalists have cited Cave's Birthday Party-era work as their primary influence, including the U-Men's John Bigley, and David Yow, frontman of Scratch Acid and the Jesus Lizard. Yow stated: "For a long time, particularly with Scratch Acid, I was so taken with the Birthday Party that I would deny it", and that "it sounded like I was trying to be Birthday Party Nick Cave—which I was." Often compared to Cave in his vocal delivery, Alexis Marshall of Daughters said that he admires the personality and energy within Cave's voice, and that his early studio albums "exposed [him] to lyrical content as literature".
In 2019, Cave expressed his personal disagreement with both organised religion and atheism (in particular New Atheism) when questioned about his beliefs by a fan during a question and answer session on his Red Hand Files blog. On the same blog, Cave confirmed he believed in God in June 2021. By 2023, Cave characterised himself as not being a Christian but 'act[ing] like one' and detailed in his 2022 book Faith, Hope, and Carnage that he regularly attends church.
In 2023, Cave disputed a characterisation of him as right-wing or conservative by the New Statesman magazine but added "I have these days what I would call a conservative temperament" and described himself as "conservative with a small c." He also clarified he was "not against progress" but "I just see things moving very rapidly and a whole lot of different things worry me a lot, like AI" and expressed criticism of the idea "that everything is systemically fucked". He also stated that his small-c conservative views had formed following the deaths of two of his sons, explaining "I think that I have an understanding of loss and what it is to lose something and how difficult it is to get that back" and argued that the demise of religion and spirituality "which may or may not be a good thing" had led to a "vacuum that we created that we don't really know what to do with".
Education
Cave studied art in Melbourne before pursuing music full-time. His early education laid the foundation for his eclectic artistic style, which blends visual and musical elements.
In 1973, Cave founded a band with fellow students at Caulfield Grammar. With Cave as lead vocalist, the band included Mick Harvey (guitar), Phill Calvert (drums), John Cochivera (guitar), Brett Purcell (bass guitar), and Chris Coyne (saxophone). Their repertoire consisted of 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 guitar. In 1977, after leaving school, they adopted the name the Boys Next Door and began playing predominantly original punk rock material. Guitarist, songwriter and ex-Young Charlatans member Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978.
In 2010, Cave was ranked the 19th greatest living lyricist in NME. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers called him the greatest living songwriter in 2011. Rob O'Connor of Yahoo Music listed him as the 23rd best lyricist in rock history. The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays was edited by academic John H. Baker and published in 2013. In an essay on the studio album The Boatman's Call (1997), Peter Billingham praised Cave's love songs as characterised by a "deep, poetic, melancholic introspection". Carl Lavery, another academic featured in the collection, argued that there was a "burgeoning field of Cave studies". Dan Rose argued that Cave "is a master of the disturbing narrative and chronicler of the extreme, though he is also certainly capable of a subtle romantic vision. He does much to the listener who enters his world."
Cave has previously described himself as a supporter of freedom of speech in both his live In Conversation events and on his blog. He has also argued against boycotting musicians for controversial actions or political opinions while giving a lecture at the Hay Festival in 2023, saying that audiences should not "eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them."
Conclusion
Nick Cave's enduring career spans multiple creative fields, with a net worth reflecting his success in music, film, literature, and real estate investments. His personal life has been marked by both professional achievements and personal challenges, but his artistic output continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
